Interviews By Topic

Anxious

Patricia Pearson shares her thoughts about procrastination anxiety.More

Columns

Have we lost sight of ancient virtues like courage, compassion and truth?  Mark Edmundson thinks we have, and he says we'd do well to read Homer, Plato and the ancient sages.More

Palestine

Carlos Fraenkel wanted to take philosophy out into the streets, so he met with students at Palestinian and Egyptian universities, and found that Plato, Maimonides and other great philosophers can open up a culture of conversation and debate.More

Students talking

Princeton historian Anthony Grafton explains how learning conversational Latin inspired his students.More

Cross in the sky

Writer Rod Dreher on how his faith compelled him to return home in search of forgiveness.More

Street arrow

Psychologist Robert Enright breaks down cognitive steps to letting go of trauma.More

Not playing

John Cage’s "4’33” was first performed on August 29th, 1952, by pianist David Tudor. He came out on stage, sat at the piano, and did not play. The audience was not impressed. Kyle Gann tells the story in “No Such Thing as Silence."More

Marcel Marceau

For more than 60 years, the great French mime Marcel Marceau dominated stages around the world without ever saying a word. Shawn Wen documents Marceau's story in a book-length essay called “A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause.”More

A whiskey drink

Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert argues that human vices are just as important as human virtues in shaping evolution.More

Tents of scientists during Antarctic summer

When Jane Willenbring was a young scientist working in Antarctica, she was the target of constant hazing by her team leader. Years later, she filed a complaint. David Marchant was recently found guilty of sexual harassment by Boston University.More

Ann Bishop's Wikipedia page

Women are underrepresented on Wikipedia. So Emily Temple-Wood recruited people to write more articles about notable women. In return, she got rape and death threats. Now, every time she's trolled, she writes a new Wikipedia bio of a female scientist.More

Ada and the Memory Engine.

Lauren Gunderson is currently the most produced playwright in America. And she has written at least half a dozen plays about the forgotten women who changed science. She says we're living in a golden age for these remarkable stories.More

Natto

"Natto" is gaining popularity with home fermentation enthusiasts.  Producer Erik Lorenzsonn heads to the Reedsburg Fermentation Fest to ask why, as well as ponder other fermentation mysteries.More

Suzanne Lee of BioCouture explains how to make clothes from bacteria

What if we could harness nature to grow clothing for us?  London-based fashion designer Suzanne Lee explains how.More

Yogurt

The future belongs to a cultured dairy product, in science fiction writer John Scalzi's short story "The Day the Yogurt Took Over."  Read by Adam Hirsch.More

An outhouse. For pooping.

At the University of Colorado, microbiologist Rob Knight is exploring a new frontier — the human microbiome.More

god and man

Yuval Noah Harari's sweeping and provocative "Sapiens" retells the history of our species from an entirely new perspective.More

Kraut

Sauerkraut, kimchee, kefir, kombucha — Sandor Katz calls himself a "fermentation fetishist."More

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