How relevant are 1001 Nights today? Well, they’re still a powerful influence for some very famous writers. Here' Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk.More
A Kaleidoscope of Ideas
Interviews By Topic
Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk offers his take on why he writes.More
Everyone's afraid of something. Here's a small sampling of fears from Question Bridge: Black Males, a transmedia project that fosters dialogue between African American men of diverse backgrounds.More
Reverend Alex Gee tells Steve Paulson how rappers like Tupac Shakur function as prophets for the hip hop generation, and how he incorporates rap music into his liturgy.More
How do you plan for retirement? Parker Palmer talks with Jim Fleming about the challenges of forging a new identity once you've given up your career.More
Kazuo Ishiguro talks with Steve Paulson about his book about a boarding school full of cloned children bred to donate their organs.More
Kazuo Ishiguro discusses his latest novel, "The Buried Giant." Set in a mythic past with ogres and pixies, it's a dramatic shift from his previous work.More
Tyrone Muhammad is tired of seeing so many young black men die from street violence. So the Newark mortician is using an in-your-face strategy to show people the effects of that violence: taking his work into the streets.More
The poet Nikki Giovanni, reading her poem "One Ounce of Truth Benefits Like a Ripple on a Pond."More
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says most neuroscientists have downplayed the differences between the left and right sides of the brain. He says he thinks the left hemisphere has become so dominant in Western culture that we're losing the sense of what makes us human.More
Biologist David George Haskell spent a year making weekly visits to the same one-square-meter patch of old-growth forest near his home in Tennessee. His writes about his experiment in "contemplative science" in a series of gorgeous essays, called "The Forest Unseen".More
Writer Karen Armstrong's dangerous idea is to love your enemies.More
Are we witnessing the birth of a new "dark green religion"?More
The celebrated cartoonist Chris Ware has a graphic novel called “Building Stories.” It is full of stories. It is an actual building. Steve Paulson says, “it’s like nothing he’s even seen or read before.”More
Why is filmmaker Errol Morris is still outraged by the famous philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn?More
Terese Marie Mailhot's brave and beautiful memoir about life on a Pacific Northwest reservation is making waves. She originally intended to tell her story as fiction, but ultimately made the difficult decision to write the whole, painful truth.
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Author Petina Gappah recommends a book she explains is “The most African of Jane Austen’s novels.” Her reason why is a look at women in African today told through the eyes of two novelists: a Zimbabwean in 2020 and English woman in 1818.More
Laura Ingalls Wilder insisted that every detail in her beloved "Little House" books was true. But Caroline Fraser, her biographer, says Wilder heavily edited the story of her family's life on the Great Plains. And in the process, created an American myth based on a lie or two.
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