Interviews By Topic

Thing 1 and Thing 2 mural

Brian Boyd talks with Anne Strainchamps about how our love of storytelling helped us evolve.More

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David Abrams tells Steve Paulson about his animistic beliefs and recounts a remarkable story about a shaman who could turn himself into a raven.More

Journalist DT Max tells Steve Paulson about David Foster Wallace's creative struggles with the novel he left unfinished when he committed suicide in September of 2008. It's called "The Pale King" and explores Wallace's longtime preoccupation with boredom.More

Joey Skaggs is a master of the hoax. His elaborate pranks have been fooling media outlets since the 1960s.More

abstract swirls

Renowned biologist E.O. Wilson talks with Steve Paulson about the difficulty of reconciling science and religion.More

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Writer Karen Armstrong's dangerous idea is to love your enemies.More

David Byrne

David Byrne is one of those artists who just keeps reinventing himself -- first as frontman of Talking Heads. Then by making films and writing books. Lately, he's been making historical musicals -- one about Joan of Arc and one about Imelda Marcos.  He's just released an updated version of his book, "How Music Works," which includes a new chapter called "Infinite Choice: The Power of Curation."More

A moonlit arch over Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah.

Where do you go if you want to see dinosaur footprints, ancient rock art and remote desert wilderness? There's no better place than the Grand Staircase-Escalanate National Monument in southern Utah. Steve and Anne spent an afternoon exploring this area with nature guide Nate Waggoner.More

Bart Ehrman talks about the complex set of beliefs that existed in the early days of Christianity and says it was several hundred years before a single version of the truth was negotiated.More

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Are we witnessing the birth of a new "dark green religion"?More

Stephen Burn recommends David Foster Wallace's critically-acclaimed novel, "Infinite Jest." The book was published 20 years ago, on February 1st, 1996.More

Eugene Thacker talks to Anne Strainchamps about his book, "In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Volume 1."More

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Lauret Savoy believes too many nature writers focus on pristine wilderness and neglect the gritty reality of the places where people actually live - in cities, for instance, maybe even near toxic waste sites.  And writing about these places means grappling with difficult questions about race and poverty. More

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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

mellotron

Dianna Dilworth is a filmmaker and journalist. Her latest documentary is called "Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie."More

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Edward Wohl tells us about the death of his father in 1999.More

ghosts

Deborah Blum talks about the serious scientific effort undertaken by an elite group of scientists and scholars a hundred years ago to investigate the supernatural.More

poisoner with needle

Deborah Blum tells the remarkable story of the scientists who invented forensic medicine and figured out how to catch murderers using poison.More

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