We decided to trace Western culture's fixation on guilt back to one of its earliest origins — the story of Adam and Eve. It's only a page and a half in the Bible, but literary historian Stephen Greenblatt told Steve Paulson why it has been so influential.More
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Interviews By Topic
Classicist Emily Wilson is the first woman ever to publish an English translation of Homer’s epic. "In some ways, it should be a story that's less about me than about why it has taken the English speaking world so long before there's been a complete published translation of "The Odyssey" by a woman."More
In Homer's "The Odyssey," Circe was a Greek goddess who turned Odysseus’ men into pigs. Today, Circe finally gets to tell her side of the story, thanks to novelist Madeline Miller.More
Religion scholar Serinity Young noticed the famous Greek statue "The Victory of Samothrace" in the Louvre Museum and couldn’t stop thinking about it. She spent more than 20 years investigating winged women and found them everywhere.More
For centuries, even the memory of Hatshepsut was erased. By the men who followed her. Now, Egyptologist Kara Cooney has written about the great Egyptian queen — a woman who should have become legend — as well as the many other women who ruled ancient Egypt.More
Do you dread going to work because your office is filled with people who are rude and treat you badly? Christine Porath is trying to do something about it with her book, “Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace.”More
Writer Leslie Parry describes what Coney Island would have sounded like during its heyday 100 years ago.More
Sabrina Frey has metastatic ocular cancer, but she's already lived longer than her doctors expected. What can we learn from how she looks at life? For one, she lives in the moment.More
The future feels unpredictable in so many places today. If you look around the world right now, seems like everyone wants their own independent nation. Are the old nation-states...toast? That’s what John Feffer worries about.More
The spiritual component of water is hard to ignore. That's part of why Venice Williams refers to Alice's Garden as her parish.More
Beer has gone back from macro to micro. Russ Klisch (Lakefront Brewery) and David Dupee (Good City Brewing) talk with Charles Monroe-Kane about how returning to smaller scale has opened up new creative and business possibilities for beer makers.More
Journalist Dan Egan and political economist Jenny Kehl talk Steve Paulson through the finer points of the politics of water - from debates over water diversion to the struggle to keep the Great Lakes uncontaminated.More
Acclaimed novelist Colson Whitehead got the magazine assignment of a lifetime: a week in Vegas, playing in the World Series of Poker. He tells Doug Gordon about high stakes poker and his own "anhedonia," his difficulty experiencing pleasure.More
What if Karl Marx were alive today and came back for a visit? That's the premise of the one-man show "Marx in Soho," starring Brian Jones and written by the late historian Howard Zinn.More
For all that's been written about Karl Marx, there's been no book about his marriage to Jenny Marx - until now. Biographer Mary Gabriel explains why Marx's family life had a profound influence on his thinking.More
Benjamin Kunkel is not only a bestselling novelist and co-founder of the literary magazine n+1. He tells Steve Paulson why he's also a become Marxist public intellectual. More
Betsan Corkhill founded Britain's therapeutic knitting movement — the clinical application of knitting to treat a variety of mental and physical ailments. More
"Religion always starts with mysticism," says David Steindl-Rast. Now 89, he's been a Benedictine monk since 1953. More