Ben Marcus talks about another one of the stories he chose for the "New American Stories" anthology — "Going for a Beer" by Robert Coover.More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Interviews By Topic
In the pantheon of contemporary jazz pianists — from Keith Jarrett to Herbie Hancock — Craig Taborn is not widely known. But among fellow jazz musicians, he’s revered. Vijay Iyer calls him “one of the greatest living pianists.More
Maybe you're familiar with art therapy — making art to cope with pain. Philosopher Alain de Botton has a different idea. He thinks just looking at great art can be therapeutic.More
Philosopher Alva Noe has a theory about art. He says art is like philosophy, and the best art is disorienting and uncomfortable. It...More
How do you join a revolution? Egyptian artist Bahia Shehab says she was too quiet to shout in the streets during the uprising in Cairo, so she started spraying graffiti with the word "no" in Arabic.More
Nate Staniforth spent thousands of hours learning the craft of stage magic. But he was really looking for wonder. And he says real magic is not smoke machines or stage tricks; it's creating a moment of genuine astonishment.More
Religious scholar Michael Muhammad Knight thinks that most religions, including his own Islamic faith, have a secret history of magical practice.More
Alyson Richman is the author of six historical novels. Her latest is called "The Velvet Hours" and it was inspired by a recent newspaper story in the Paris press.More
We all think about time but probably not as deeply as the groundbreaking theoretical physicist Lee Smolin. Smolin has created a radical new view of the nature of time and the cosmos. He lays it out in a book called "Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe."More
A couple of years ago, journalist Gay Talese published “The Voyeur’s Motel,” the true story of a motel owner who spent more than 30 years spying on his guests while they had sex. The case is now the subject of a Netflix documentary called “Voyeur.”More
Do you ever get the feeling that your digital devices are eavesdropping on you?
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In a world filled with devices that could be used to listen in on our daily lives, how do you take back control of your privacy? Steve Paulson asked security reporter Lily Hay Newman.More
TTBOOK producer Doug Gordon wonders if he's surrounded by a**holes.More
Kurt Vonnegut joined his brother, Bernard, at General Electric in the late 1940s. Ginger Strand explains how Kurt's time at G.E. influenced his fiction.More
Canadian cultural critic Hal Niedzviecki makes the case that as a culture, we may for the first time in history be more focused on what is going to happen in the future than on what is happening right now.More
There's no shortage of forecasts about the future these days. But did you know that ordinary people can out-predict the pros? More
Shulem Deen was a Skverer— a member of one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the U.S. Then he got curious about secular life and the world outside his small village in Rockland County, NY. The community branded him a heretic and expelled him.More
Hemingway rewrote the ending to his classic novel dozens of times. After he died, his grandson Sean Hemingway collected those other endings and published them in a new edition of the literary classic.More