7th Ave. Project
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Jill Wolfson: On Getting Even, High School and Writing...
Jill Wolfson was last on the show discussing the Beat Within writing program for incarcerated teens. Jill has also written extensively on juvenile justice, crime and retribution as a journalist and non-fiction author, and those themes figure prominently in her latest young adult novel, "Furious." Inspired by Greek myth and the tragedies of Aeschylus, it's about three high school girls who become modern incarnations of the avenging Furies. We talked about the challenges of writing for the...
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Leonard Susskind: A Life in Physics
Last time I spoke to the theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind, it was about his long-running debate with Stephen Hawking on the nature of information and black holes, as retold in the book "The Black Hole War." This time, we talked about Lenny himself: his humble beginnings as a plumber's son in the Bronx, becoming a physicist, his thought process, his best ideas and some of his duds. Also, why he loves to explain physics to non-experts – a talent he put to good use in this interview,...
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Robert Burton: The Limits of Neuroscience
The neurologist Robert Burton has spent years exploring our shaky reliance on what he calls "involuntary mental sensations": the internal perceptions by which we come to "know" our own minds. He says these inner representations, offered up by the brain itself, are partial at best, delusory at worst. And that's a problem not only for ordinary seekers of self-knowledge but also for an ambitious group of neuroscientists attempting to explain consciousness and the human psyche, while beholden to...
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Neurologist Robert Burton: On Being Certain
As a preamble to next week's interview with neurologist and neuroskeptic Robert Burton, I re-aired this earlier conversation with Bob from 2008. In it, we discussed his book "On Being Certain: Believing You're Right Even When You’re Wrong," about our brain's often unreliable sense of self-certainty. Bob says our inner sensation of knowing or not knowing something, of familiarity or unfamiliarity – so critical to perception, judgment and decisionmaking – is based on neural mechanisms that can...
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Journalist and Ocean Activist David Helvarg
This radio program mostly ignores the large body of water that sits only a short block from our studio. Inexcusable, I know, but it's not too late to make amends. For a start, I spoke to David Helvarg, marine conservationist, head of the Blue Frontier Campaign and author of "The Golden Shore: California’s Love Affair with the Sea." We talked about David's own love affair with the sea as well as his earlier career as a war correspondent in Central America. Also, a history of beachgoing, the...
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Gretel Ehrlich: Facing the Wave
As the second anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami nears, the writer Gretel Ehrlich considers what nature wrought and how humans responded. She made three trips to Japan’s ravaged northeast coast in the months following the quake, trying to fathom the magnitude of what happened. Her new book Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami is part post-disaster travelogue, part meditation on death, life and impermanence.
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Auditory Neuroscientist and Sonic Savant Seth Horowitz
Sound as vibration, sound as sensation, sound as means of manipulation. Sound as a state of mind and as a weapon. Seth Horowitz considers sonic phenomena from these and other angles in his new book The Universal Sense. And he's a good one to do it: as a neuroscientist specializing in auditory phenomena, sound recordist, musician and aural explorer, not to mention the guy who proved that tadpoles can hear, Seth is an expert guide to the sonic world. He and I listened to a sampling of audio...
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Civil Rights Leader and Educator Bob Moses
In the early 1960’s Bob Moses risked life and limb as a civil rights organizer in the deep south. In recent decades he’s taken up a new cause, promoting math instruction for educationally disadvantaged kids. Bob believes quality education is a fundamental right, and math skills are a key to economic opportunity. Bob is soft-spoken and not one to play up his accomplishments, but his story is extraordinary, as you’ll hear in this conversation.
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George Dyson and the Birth of the Digital Universe...
Historian George Dyson on his new book "Turing's Cathedral," which tells the story of the Electronic Computer Project. Led by the brilliant polymath John Von Neumann in 1940s and 1950’s, the project laid the groundwork for much of modern computing. In doing so, Dyson says, it birthed a new, digital ecosystem, a world of self-reproducing, ever-evolving numbers that may be said to have a life of their own. Dyson is the son of famed physicist Freeman Dyson and grew up at the Institute for...
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Life and Death in Angola Penitentiary
Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, is in many ways a world apart: a former slave plantation bigger in area than Manhattan, nestled in a crook of the Mississippi, where prisoners still work the fields overseen by guards on horseback. Many live out their days there and are buried on the grounds. It's a world Marianne Fisher-Giorlando counts herself lucky to be a part of. She's a criminologist who's spent a good share of her life studying and volunteering in Angola. She's...
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David Thomson--Falling In and Out of Love with the Movies
The critic David Thomson is so alert to the seductions and subterfuges of film it's hard to imagine he was ever a sucker for cinema. Of course, we were all young and innocent once. Now he's uneasily aware of what movie-watching entails: the voyeurism, the passivity, and the ideologies concealed in images, characters and plots . He charts his – and our – increasingly distanced relationship with film in his latest book, "The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies." David and I talked about how...
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Ben Harbert: Filming musicians in prison.
In 1933, folklorists John and Alan Lomax went inside Louisiana's Angola prison and made a series of celebrated recordings and musical discoveries. Eighty years later, filmmaker and musicologist Ben Harbert followed in the Lomax's footsteps, visiting Angola and other Louisiana penitentiaries to document the state of prison music today. Ben and I discussed his new film Follow Me Down: Portraits of Louisiana Prison Musicians. As we listened to performances from the film, Ben talked about the...
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Sebastian Seung: Mapping the Brain's Connectome (Rerun)
And you thought sequencing the human genome was a big job. MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung is proposing something even more Herculean: tracing the trillions of neuronal connections in the human brain, collectively known as the "connectome." He believes the connectome may hold the key to understanding the brain and the self. That follows from connectionism—the notion that learning, memory and personality are embedded in the brain’s wiring. Like so much else in neuroscience, that’s still...
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The Living Music of Elena Kats-Chernin (Rerun)
Despite an old-school classical education in the Soviet Union, where she grew up before emigrating to Australia as a teen, composer Elena Kats-Chernin is anything but tradition-bound. Her influences run the gamut from ragtime to nuevo tango to minimalism and pop. Her work is powerfully evocative and unabashedly listenable. Elena says for her, “music is a living thing.” She writes daily, and a lot of her own life inevitably makes its way into her compositions. In this interview, we listened...
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In Pursuit of Happiness: Filmmaker Roko Belic (Rerun)
Thirty years ago, human happiness seemed like a pretty unserious subject for scientific study. These days positive psychology, as happiness research is known, is de rigeur. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Roko Belic ("Genghis Blues") explores the science of contentment in his latest doc, "Happy." Belic traveled to five continents, talking to researchers, comparing the state of satisfaction in various countries and finding some very jolly people. Does happiness depend on our material conditions?...
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Yael Kohen: The Rise of Women in Comedy
Of the many fields in which gender equality has been a long time coming, comedy might not seem as important as, say, high political office or corporate captaincy or astronaut-hood. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the power and centrality of humor in modern-day America. The fact that comedy – especially stand-up – was until recently considered mostly a guy's game, and the speed with which funny women have closed the gap in the last couple of decades is worth pondering. Why the...
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The Musical Brain: Neuroscientist Dan Levitin (Rerun)
A tune-filled celebration and cerebration with neuroscientist, musician and record producer Daniel Levitin, author of "This is Your Brain on Music." Originally broadcast in 2007.
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Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg: Ascent of the A-Word.
Geoff Nunberg says that when he told people he was writing an entire book about "asshole," both the word and the cultural condition, they laughed. But he soldiered on and produced a revelatory work in the tradition of the great exploratory essayists. Tracing the history of one of our favorite put-downs, "Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism--the First Sixty Years" maps some of the most important currents in American society over the last century.
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How to Predict an Election: Polling Aggregators Sam Wang...
Nate Silver isn’t the only forecaster to project the results of last Tuesday’s presidential election with preternatural accuracy. Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium and Drew Linzer of Votamatic both hit the bullseye, too, and they explained to me why it’s not really so preternatural after all (hint: statistical science works). We talked about their methods, why so many pundits and political partisans missed the boat, and whether it’s bedtime for bloviators.
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Divinity, Psychedelia, Addiction and Recovery: Don...
The last time I had journalist and author Don Lattin on the show, we discussed his book "The Harvard Psychedelic Club," about Timothy Leary and Co. This time, we talked about a previous generation of consciousness raisers. Don’s new book, "Distilled Spirits: Getting Drunk, Then Sober with a Famous Writer, A Forgotten Philosopher and a Hopeless Drunk," tells the intersecting stories of Aldous Huxley, spiritual voyager and author of "The Doors of Perception"; his compatriate Gerald Heard,...
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A Pox on Both Our Houses: David Quammen on Zoonotic...
Science writer David Quammen explores one result of our "infernal, aboriginal connectedness" to the animal world: a lot of diseases spilling over from other species to us. Examples include SARS, HIV, avian flu, Lyme disease and Ebola. Quammen says the phenomenon is on the increase, thanks to human actions. We discussed the science behind these "zoonotic" diseases and David's globe-trotting research for his new book "Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic."
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Ukulele Hero; Mariachi Magic
Two new movies pay tribute to musical instruments and/or traditions that haven't always gotten their due in mainstream USA. In part one, Tad Nakamura, director of "Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings." It's a moving portrait of the musician who's taken the ukulele—-sometimes wrongly dissed as a novelty instrument—-to virtuosic heights. In part two, Tom Gunderson director of "Mariachi Gringo," the tale of a young man from the midwest who falls in love with Mexico and devotes himself to...
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Astrophysicist Martin Rees
Martin Rees isn't just one of the world’s most respected cosmologists (and Britain’s Astronomer Royal), who’s contributed to some of the field’s biggest advances over the last four decades. He's also an ecumenical thinker with a broad view of the sciences and their limits, our historical moment and the long-range prospects for earth and its inhabitants. We talked about cosmology past and present, the politics of science in the US and Europe, science vs. religion, climate change and the human...
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Global Comedian Shazia Mirza
British comic Shazia Mirza has been taking her act to places where stand-up comedy is virtually unknown, and the spectacle of a woman cracking jokes on stage is almost revolutionary. Some audiences are ready for it, and some aren’t. We talked about the sometimes surprising reactions she’s gotten in Pakistan, India and back home in England.
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Soul Man: Singer-Songwriter Gregory Porter
Do I have to write a description of this interview? Can I simply say, “just listen”? Since his debut album came out in 2010, jazz/soul singer Gregory Porter has quickly won a passionate following around the world. It’s easy to see why: there’s so much depth and warmth and poetry in his vocals and compositions. And as our conversation made clear, those qualities come straight from the man himself. So just listen, and don’t miss the end.
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Errol Morris in the Wilderness
We’ve talked to Errol Morris about his investigative ardor in our previous conversations, and we’ve mentioned his decades-long delvings into the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor serving life in prison for murdering his wife and children. This time we get into the details, working our way through the evidence and Morris’s contention that MacDonald was railroaded. Morris says the investigation was bungled from the beginning (one forensic expert called it a "colossal...
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Our Man in Hanoi: Mike Vann, Colonial Historian
Down the mean streets of old Hanoi goes Mike Vann, a historian specializing in Vietnam during its nearly 70 years under French rule. Mike has uncovered some wonderfully tawdry tales that reveal a lot about the whole strange business of colonialism, when much of the globe was claimed by a handful of European countries. We discuss sex in the colonial city, the great rat massacre, murder on the Rue Hue, Hanoi in the time of cholera, and some charming French postcards.
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The Mystery of Existence: Jim Holt
Jim Holt is a rarity: a writer who throws light on some of the most daunting problems in physics, philosophy and math in ways that are impressively knowledgeable, artful and entertaining. He’s outdone himself in his latest book, "Why Does the World Exist: An Existential Detective Story," which confronts the enigma of existence itself, considered from the perspectives of physics, metaphysics and theology. As Kathryn Schulz wrote in the New York Times, "the book is deep, absorbing,...
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The Universe Gets Weirder: Cosmologist Anthony Aguirre
Originally broadcast in Feb 2011, my conversation with theoretical physicist Anthony Aguirre on the new, more complex picture of the universe that cosmologists have been sketching out in recent years. Anthony gave some of the clearest explanations I’ve heard of eternal inflation, the multiverse and why the Big Bang might not have been the beginning of everything.
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Errol Morris Confidential Pt 2 of 2
I continue interrogating the interrogator in this second of two wide-ranging conversations with filmmaker/detective/truth-seeker Errol Morris. Among the many subjects discoursed on: Whether and how much the past can be recaptured through the art of investigation; Errol’s latest book "A Wilderness of Error," about the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case; how he gets people to spill the beans on camera; Errol’s beef with his former PhD adviser, historian of science Thomas Kuhn; and his next movie...
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Errol Morris Confidential Pt 1 of 2
Errol Morris’s relentless search for answers – philosophical, psychological, forensic – has led to a vast and ever-growing body of work that includes his celebrated documentaries, dozens of short films, weighty essays (and cognitive experiments) in the NY Times, books, actual criminal investigations and some pretty fetching commercials (example below). The backstories are as interesting in some ways as the finished products,and Errol shared some of them with me in a very illuminating look at...
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Lou Harrison's Musical World
An hour-long interview wasn’t enough to cover but a fraction of Lou Harrison’s many accomplishments, but Eva Soltes and I did our best to hit some of the high points. Her new documentary, "Lou Harrison: A World of Music," uses footage she shot during her decades-long friendship with the eminent American composer, musical innovator and political activist, who died in 1982. The film was recently screened as part of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, which Harrison helped found and...
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Composer and Musician John Wineglass
As an Emmy-winning soundtrack composer for TV and film and as a session/backing musician (piano, violin, viola), John Wineglass can write or play just about anything. Gospel, classical, R<B, country, folk, Latin – he can swing it. But it’s his serious concert works he’s most proud of, like his new orchestral piece Someone Else’s Child, premiering at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music on August 4. We discussed the new composition, John’s dual-track musical education – playing...
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Kitchen Sister Nikki Silva: From Radio to the Concert...
Like so many other radiophiles, I was inspired to get into the medium by the work of great independent producers like the Kitchen Sisters—Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson. So it was really nice to finally sit down with Nikki and learn about her own radio beginnings. We listened to some of the earliest and still-cool Kitchen Sisters recordings ("Rattlesnakes," "The Road Ranger" and "Ernie Morgan, World Champion One-Handed Pool Player") and discussed the latest evolution of their work: "The Hidden...
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Physics on the Fringe
When it comes to science, we at the 7th Avenue Project usually stick to the professional, institutionally sanctioned variety, even when discussing unorthodox notions and minority opinions. In this episode, though, we ventured further afield, into the alternate reality that Margaret Wertheim calls "outsider physics" and that some people less generously dub "crackpot science." Margaret says the sheer number of folks who reject much or all of modern physics and persist in spinning out their own...
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Does Culture Drive Language?
It’s been about 50 years since Noam Chomsky conclusively established that the basic structures of human language are pre-wired in our brains, not gleaned from experience. Or… maybe he didn’t. While several generations of theoretical linguists have been diligently expanding the Chomskian program, another faction says there’s little or no evidence for his "universal grammar" and it’s time to scale back or even scrap the theory. Former innatist Daniel Everett is in now part of the opposition....
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Daniel Everett, Linguist and Iconoclast
Dan Everett is twice a heretic, having strayed from the path of Christian missionary work to become a linguist, and then breaking with the dominant branch of theoretical linguistics led by Noam Chomsky. I did a report on Dan for NPR in 2007, but I never broadcast this longer interview, from which that piece was taken. I decided to air it now because Dan will be on the show next week, talking about his new book on the origins of language. The earlier interview provides the fascinating...
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Paul Bendix: Wheelchair Odyssey
I've never much liked the phrase "confined to a wheelchair," and it certainly doesn’t apply to Paul Bendix in anything more than a physical sense. In his new book of essays, "Dance Without Steps," Paul writes about aging, travel, gardening, love, loss and disability with a breadth and clarity that feels liberating. Paul is an old friend, but we’d lost touch, so the release of his book gave us a chance to get reacquainted. We talked about his writing, his life, the random act of violence that...
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Jonathan Gottschall: How Stories Make Us Human
I've been nipping at the edges of this subject for a while on previous shows, and now I've found someone to tackle it head-on: Jonathan Gottschall, author of "The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human." Jonathan and I discussed the central place of narrative not only in art and entertainment, but in our deep understanding of the world and ourselves. With us humans, it's storytime all the time, or at least much of the time. We talked about storytelling's pervasive influence, possible...
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Meghan McCain and Michael Ian Black: America You Sexy...
She's an avowed red-till-dead Republican (though an iconoclastic one) and daughter of John McCain. He's a comedian and self-described East-Coast liberal. Though hardly on the same ideological team, both decry the hyper-partisan bloodsport that passes for political discourse these days in America. So they conducted a little experiment in political fence-mending, crossing the country together in an RV in search of common ground. I talked to Meghan and Michael about their travels, as retold in...
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Filmmaker Joshua Dylan Mellars
Joshua Mellars has a thing for world travel and world music, and he combines both passions in his latest pair of films. Play Like a Lion: The Legacy of Maestro Ali Akbar Khan is a portrait of the late Indian classical virtuoso and his son Alam Khan, who’s carrying on the family musical tradition. Heaven’s Mirror: A Portuguese Voyage is about Portuguese Fado music, and features some of the top contemporary fadistas (fado singers), including Katia Guerreiro, Ana Moura, Caman, and Carlos do...
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Facts and the Finicky Folks Who Check Them
When monologist Mike Daisey was caught fibbing on This American Life, it got me thinking about competing definitions of truth—artistic and journalistic—and the way they get blurred by storytelling. In part 1 of today's show, I spoke to Craig Silverman, who’s written about fact-checking and who monitors journalistic accuracy in his blog Regret the Error. In part 2, erstwhile fact-checker Jim Fingal, co-author with John D’Agata of the book "The Lifespan of a Fact."
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Comedian and Actor Michael Ian Black
Michael Ian Black doesn't usually reveal a lot about himself in his comedy. He's generally more comfortable playing characters who at most manifest fragments of his personality, like the hilarious solipsism of "Michael Ian Black" in "Michael and Michael Have Issues." His new memoir, "You’re Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations," is different. It’s bracingly candid, full of unromanticized and unflattering real-life detail. It never seems self-indulgent or...
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Astrophysicist Michael Turner
Michael Turner, of the University of Chicago and Kavli Institute, has had his hands in some of the biggest cosmological advances of recent years. He's also contributed to the scientific lexicon, coining the term “dark matter” and presaging its discovery. We talked about that and some of the universe's other big head scratchers.
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The Life and Music of Edith Piaf (Rebroadcast)
It was Easter Sunday, so I resurrected my 2011 interview with Carolyn Burke, discussing her book No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf. Carolyn is equally strong on the biographical details and the musical oeuvre of France's great songstress, and provided astute commentary on some of Piaf's signature songs.
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The Authoritative John Hodgman
I thought this might turn into an entirely satirical April Fool’s interview with John Hodgman’s mock-pundit character, but after some japery, the conversation got sorta serious. John may lampoon the whole notion of expertise and authority in his TV appearances and books, but his thoughts on the subject run deep. We talked about his days studying literary theory at Yale, the real-life model for his professorial persona, truth vs. artistic license, and John’s up close and personal view of the...
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Colin McGinn: Philosophy Fights Back
In the age of science, what’s a philosopher to do? As physics, biology and other hard sciences advance, is philosophy left with only a few increasingly recherch questions? Nope, says philosopher Colin McGinn. McGinn argues that philosophy is a kind of science (though it could use some rebranding to that effect), and those other sciences would do well to pay it some mind. A dose of philosophy could help clear up many scientific confusions and save theorists from a mess of conceptual errors...
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Christopher Bram on the Gay Writers Who Changed America
In his new book, "Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America," Christopher Bram says it was literature more than any other art form that opened America’s eyes to same-sex relationships and paved the way for gay rights. In the years following World War II, when homosexuality was taboo territory for movies, TV and other mass media, it was writers who broke the silence. Chris and I discussed the impact of writers such as Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, James Baldwin and...
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Ancient Stories, New Technology: The Thinning Veil
Everybody loves a good dysfunctional family drama, which is one reason the Oresteia and other Greek tales of the strife-torn House of Atreus have never gone out of fashion. Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra and the gang are at it again in a new play premiering this week at UC Santa Cruz. The production draws freely on classical sources including the Illiad and the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and adds a high-tech twist: the performance is split between two stages representing...
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The Post-Valentine's Day Massacre
This episode originally aired on Feb. 15, 2009. Seeing as it was the morning after, I took a few swipes at love and romance with the help of some great guests and lots of music. This year, my broadcast slot fell on Feb 19, close enough to Valentine’s Day to revive the show. Segments include: Science writer Hannah Holmes on the biology of hooking up and dogging around; critic Laura Kipnis on monogamy and marriage as social engineering; writer Jonathan Ames on love and its disappointments; and...
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Tapped Out: Matthew Polly on the Rise of Mixed Martial...
Matt Polly was 36 and overweight, his days as a student of Chinese kickboxing long past. On the precipice of middle age, he took one last shot at glory. He plunged into the bruising sport of mixed martial arts, trained with the pros and eventually tested his skills in an amateur bout, as detailed in his book Tapped Out: An Odyssey in Mixed Martial Arts. Matt and I had a very entertaining conversation about his experiences and about the world of MMA. Matt explains that contrary to its...
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Biologist Robert Trivers on Evolution and Self-Deception
Robert Trivers is a widely influential evolutionary thinker whose is theories on the genetic trade-offs of altruism, parent-child relationships and other social interactions are a cornerstone of behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology. His new book, "The Folly of Fools," applies an evolutionary framework to another set of behaviors: deception and especially self-deception. Subjects discussed in our interview include: self-deception in nature, our capacity to simultaneously know and...
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They Might Be Giants at 30
The last time I spoke to John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, it was about the group’s science album for kids. This time we talked about the whole TMBG phenomenon: their beginnings and ultimate success, aesthetic aims, being taken seriously while also goofing around, and Sleestaks. TMBG turns 30 this year and is about to launch a national tour with some retrospective elements. So this seemed like a good time to look back on their singular career.
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General Relativity for Beginners with Anthony Aguirre....
Cosmologist Anthony Aguirre and I continue our jaunt through General Relativity. Last week we presented some of the basics. This week, we talk about the evidence, the impacts and implications, including the cosmological constant, the expanding universe, gravity waves, time dilation, black holes, and spacetime singularities.
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General Relativity for Beginners with Anthony Aguirre....
It was Einstein’s greatest idea, and one of the most audacious leaps of scientific imagination ever. Much of what physicists know or think they know about space, time and the cosmos depends on it. But General Relativity is usually brushed over in pop sci accounts, because GR is considered too GD difficult for ordinary brains. Even on this scientifically-minded program, we’ve given it pretty cursory treatment. But not this time. I’m devoting two whole shows to the subject with physicist...
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The Real Vocal String Quartet (Rebroadcast)
From Jan. 2010: They play, they sing and make lovely, original and uncategorizable music. The four women of the Real Vocal String Quartet combine classical backgrounds with influences from across the musical spectrum: pop, folk, jazz and international… In the first part of the program, RVSQ founder and violinist Irene Sazer and violist Dina Maccabee discuss the ensemble’s distinctive sound and special chemistry as we listen to tracks from their recent CD. Then, Irene and Dina are joined by...
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Language Ain't What It Used to Be (Rebroadcast)
From Nov. 2010: Linguist Guy Deutscher discusses the restless, ever-shifting nature of human languages. Have languages gotten more complex or simpler over the centuries? Does improper usage threaten the integrity of language? How do grammatical systems arise? How much of our linguistic mastery is innate, and how much is acquired through experience?
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Race Against the Machine: Erik Brynjolfsson
Yes, people have been fretting that mechanization would render them redundant ever since the early industrial revolution. And though predictions of deep and persistent "technological unemployment" have failed to come true in the past, MIT researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee say this time it’s for real. In their new book, Race Against the Machine, they argue that the current "jobless recovery" is in large part due to advances in machine intelligence and other technologies. I spoke...
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Hany Farid: Digital Image Detective
Hany Farid is an expert on photo fakery and develops tools for detecting whether and how much pictures have been ginned up by, say, advertisers hawking beauty products. He’s testified about the veracity of photos in court cases, uncovered audacious forgeries, and helped authenticate some iconic images. We had a fascinating conversation about truth and deception in the age of Photoshop: the ways digital retouching has altered our relation to photography, sowed confusion in the legal system,...
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Physicist Brian Greene on Black Holes (from 2009)
First broadcast in Jan. 2009: physicist and master explainer Brian Greene on the space-, time-, and mind-bending properties of black holes. This originally aired as part 1 of a black hole double-header. Part 2 was with the physicist Leonard Susskind, also available as a podcast.
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John Brown Reconsidered
The Pulitzer-winning writer Tony Horwitz has a new book out about anti-slavery crusader John Brown (Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War), and we consider the challenge that Brown still poses for American history. Was Brown right to spill blood fighting slavery? When is violent resistance to manifest inhumanity justified? I talk history and morality with Tony Horwitz, with my friend and John Brown buff Andrea Monroe, and with ethicist Peter Singer.
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Philosopher Peter Singer on Ethics in Theory and Practice
Peter Singer may be the world’s best-known ethicist. He’s regarded as the intellectual father of the animal liberation movement and has staked out prominent positions on euthanasia, abortion, the use of military force and economic inequality. We talked about those and other sticky moral questions, as well as Peter’s brand of utilitarianism, which aims to provide a single logical framework for all ethical decision making. Originally broadcast in 2006.
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Psychologist Steven Pinker on the Decline of Violence
Steven Pinker, celebrated for his books on language and the workings of the mind, ventures into big history with his latest volume, "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined." He unloads a truckload of evidence to argue that humans have been getting more peaceful, more cooperative and less murderous, on scales large and small, for quite some time. Among the reasons: civilization really has made us more civil. That might seem a surprising conclusion for a card-carrying...
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Errol Morris on Photography and Truth
Errol Morris’s passion for sleuthing dates back at least to his days as a private detective and runs through his work as a documentary filmmaker in movies like "The Thin Blue Line" and his most recent, "Tabloid." In his new book, "Believing is Seeing," he turns his magnifying glass on photography. He and I discussed (and occasionally debated) the veridical nature of photography, the impact of digital retouching and the truth value of his own films. Then, in the second half of the show, an...
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Remembering Gay Rights Leader Frank Kameny
I was saddened to learn this past week that gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny had died. For today’s show I replayed my 2010 interview with Frank, in which he looked back on his life as an activist. This is a somewhat longer cut of the original 2010 broadcast. In part 2 of the show, more on the subject of political activism and the sacrifices it sometimes calls for: an excerpt from a 2009 interview with former track star John Carlos, who talks about the famous black power salute he and fellow...
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Evolutionary Biologist Marlene Zuk on Bugs and Us
Last time we had Marlene Zuk on the show, the subject was parasites. This time, it’s insects, what they do or don’t have in common with human beings, and how we go wrong when we anthropomorphize too much.
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The Life Unconscious: Psychologist Brian Nosek
For the last 15 years, Brian Nosek has been studying the hidden biases, preferences and thought patterns that lurk just below the threshold of self-awareness. Those unconscious attitudes are often at odds with our conscious account of ourselves, yet they may influence our outlook, our choices and even our actions. One of the tools Nosek and colleagues have used to expose latent racial preferences and other forms of bias is a simple online test, the Implicit Association Test, or IAT. In this...
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Down and Out in Dogpatch, Pt2
In part 1 of this two-part series, I talked to sociologist and writer Teresa Gowan about her years among the homeless recyclers of San Francisco's Dogpatch district. As we walked through the neighborhood, Teresa described how much it's changed. Most of the homeless have been pushed out, and therein hangs a tale of societal attitudes—-toward poverty, property and rootlessness—-going back hundreds of years. In this second and final part of the series, we found out where some of Dogpatch's...
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Donny McCaslin: Becoming a Jazzman
Donny McCaslin grew up in Santa Cruz, where this program is based, and got his musical start here. Today he’s a widely-known, much-admired tenor sax player based in New York. Donny returned to our area recently to play at the 2011 Monterey Jazz Festival. We talked about his formative years (playing with his dad's band on the streets of Santa Cruz) and rapid success (he joined Gary Burton's quintet right out of college). Donny's a very thoughtful and knowledgeable musician, and I took...
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Down and Out in Dogpatch, Pt1
The sociologist Teresa Gowan spent years getting to know a community of homeless recyclers in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, which she describes in her book "Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco." Now the neighborhood is gentrifying, and many of the homeless have been driven out. Teresa and I revisited Dogpatch to talk about her work there, to see how things have changed and to find out what's happened to the homeless. As we walked, we talked: not just about...
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After Recession, What?
What happens when America recovers from the current economic crisis? Do things go back to normal? Not necessarily, and certainly not for everybody, says Don Peck, features editor of The Atlantic. In his new book, "Pinched," he cites voluminous evidence that deep recessions leave lasting scars, and we may never be quite the same again. He says we need to take immediate action to limit the damage, and that the current narrow focus on government debt is wrongheaded. Economist Stephen Rose is...
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The Harvard Psychedelic Club
From 2010: Fifty years ago, a group of Harvard faculty began experimenting with psychoactive drugs and helped turn on a generation. Robert looks back on a defining cultural moment with Don Lattin, author of "The Harvard Psychedelic Club," and with Harvard alumnus Paul Lee, who took part in the experiments.
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Guitarist/Composer D.J. Sparr
“Classically trained to rock your *#!@ socks off,” to quote Tenacious D. The very tenacious guitarist D.J. Sparr was in town to perform at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, and he swung by our studio with instrument (Taylor T5 hollowbody) in hand. We talked about his many musical loves (country, rock, classical), his career from toddlerhood on, the folly of aesthetic snobbery and the moment he realized it’s OK to play a G major chord. We also listened to a selection of his...
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Paul Bloom: "How Pleasure Works"
Re-broadcast from 2011. Developmental psychologist Paul Bloom explores the nature of human pleasures, from sex and food to art, music and fantasies. He says that what we like depends on what we think, and there may be no such thing as purely physical pleasure. He discusses his new book, "How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like."
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John Waters and Philip Glass
Filmmaker John Waters and composer Philip Glass are both performing (separately) in our area this summer, which gave me an opportunity to talk to them about their lives and work. John discussed his journey from troublemaker to beloved elder, his own role models and his fascination with cults and brainwashing. Philip talked about the new Days and Nights performing arts festival he's launching in Big Sur and vicinity, about writing music for film and the dialogue between modernity and...
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The Machinery of Life
Harry Noller has been doing molecular biology since before it was even called that, and he's been doing it very well. His work has helped illumine some of the fundamental processes on which all life (at least all earthly life) depends. He speaks about his fascinating career and research on today's show. We'll hear about his meetings with remarkable scientists, his own brush with Nobel laureate-hood and the dizzying intricacies of his pet research subject, the microscopic machines known as...
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All About Fado
From 2009: The soul-stirring Portuguese music known as Fado. We discusses and listen to the art of Fado with Donald Cohen, author of "Fado Portuges." Featuring music by Mariza, Camin, Amalia Rodrigues and more.
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In(ter)dependence Day
Stories about becoming American: where we come from, how we got here, the connections we make and the connections we keep, at home and abroad. In part 1, KUSP’s Sean Rameswaram joins Team America and swears some oaths. In part 2, filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi attends naturalization ceremonies in all 50 states, meeting new US citizens. In part 3, Mwende Hahesy, also of KUSP, pays a visit to her mother’s homeland and reflects on the relationship of family and nationality.
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Jennifer Ouellette and The Calculus Diaries
How one mathophobe conquered her fears, and others can, too. For years, science journalist Jennifer Ouellette made a living writing about subjects like physics, while avoiding the mathematics. Finally, she resolved to shed the dread and confront calculus, as she relates in her recent book "The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse." We talked about her reconciliation with math, the history and uses of calculus (e.g., predicting...
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Peter Kenez: Growing up under Nazism and Communism
Historian Peter Kenez has wrtten about some of the pivotal events of the the 20th century, and he's lived some of those events, too. We talk about his very interesting life: growing up Jewish in Nazi- and Soviet-controlled Hungary, fleeing the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and coming to America. We also discussed his new book on the Holocaust.
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Viruses and Us
Viruses have had a huge impact on human history, the evolution of life on Earth, even global climate. Science writer Carl Zimmer discusses his new book "A Planet of Viruses."
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Brooke Gladstone and "The Influencing Machine"
Brooke Gladstone has been keeping tabs on the news media for the past decade and a half, first as NPR's media correspondent and then with On the Media, the nationally distrubuted radio show she co-hosts with the redoubtable Bob Garfield. Her new illustrated history, The Influencing Machine, traces the rise (and failings) of modern journalism.
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North African Music with Fattah Abbou and Mohamed Aoualou
A musical journey to North Africa with Fattah Abbou and Mohamed Aoualou of the band Aza. The versatile singer/instrumentalists are from Morocco and play a variety of styles, with special emphasis on their own Imazighen (Berber) roots. They visited our studio to perform some lovely tunes and talk about their music and culture.
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Trimpin and Unfinished History
The celebrated "sound sculptor" Trimpin has long been haunted by the story of the Gurs prison camp in southern France, where thousands of Jews were held during World War II. Now he's commemorating this little-known chapter of the Holocaust with a major new multimedia performance. We discussed the Gurs Cycle with Trimpin, director Rinde Eckert, Gurs survivor Manfred Wildman, and Victor Rosenberg, whose family letters are used in the performance.
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Bateson on Bateson
The late philosopher, anthropologist and environmentalist Gregory Bateson wanted to change the way we think, attending less to things in themselves and more to the connections between them. We hear from his daughter Nora Bateson, whose new documentary "An Ecology of Mind" offers her perspective on her father’s work. Then, how stories and characters get in the heads of authors and actors. We're joined by Rivera Sun Cook, who plays all 30 roles in her new dramatic trilogy, "A Star Called Love."
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Everything Which is…Yes: David Hoffman and John Barrett
Documentary filmmaker David Hoffman lost nearly everything he owned—-including his huge film and art archive—-in the fire that destroyed his home in 2008. But he was determined to salvage something from the ashes. A new documentary, Everything Which is… Yes, shows what he lost and what he found. I spoke to David Hoffman and the film’s director, John Vincent Barrett.
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The Dark Universe
Ordinary matter is so 20th century. In recent decades, scientists have found that the vast bulk of the universe (95-96 percent) consists of some as-yet-unidentified thingums known as "dark matter" and "dark energy." Astrophysicist Rocky Kolb explains what we know and don't know about these mystery ingredients. Then science writer Richard Panek describes the sometimes bumpy road to their discovery.
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Unlearning Violence
While criminal rehabilitation seems to have fallen out of favor in much of America’s penal system, San Francisco’s Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP) is bucking the trend. RSVP aims to reform violent felons in SF’s county jails, and the program appears to be working. In this broadcast, originally from 2009, we spoke to RSVP founder Sunny Schwartz (author of "Dreams from the Monster Factory") and to Ramon Garcia, who participated in the program, first as an inmate and later as a...
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Reflections of a Combat Pilot
Lieutenant Colonel Jason Armagost of the US Air Force fired some of the opening shots of the Iraq War as he piloted a B2 bomber over Baghdad. He's also a writer and serious reader, who carried a small library of classic fiction, essays and poetry with him on that flight. He talks with us about his experiences, about his role in the war and how literature helps him make sense of it all.
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Recreating the Creation
How life may have begun on Earth, with a little help from outer space. I talk to biochemist and astrobiologist Dave Deamer about the hypothetical origins of life. Also, attempts to conjure life in the lab, and music from DNA.
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Jasmin Darznik: The Good Daughter
Jasmin Darznik emigrated to the US from Iran when she was three and grew up knowing little about her Iranian family history. After her father's death, her mother began to tell her story. She dictated a series of cassette tapes for Jasmin, illuminating her own extraordinary life and the lives of many Iranian women over the last half-century. We discuss Jasmin's book "The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life."
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The Past Isn't Past: Kinan and Luis Valdez
Luis Valdez--famed playwright and founder of El Teatro Campesino--and his son Kinan discuss Luis's play Mummifed Deer, being directed by Kinan at UC Santa Cruz. We talk about family secrets, forgotten wars, the perils of identity and the theater of "rascuachismo."
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Radio Gets Real(istic): John Biewen
We explore the changing sound of radio documentaries (and changing ideas of realism)--from the work of Norman Corwin in the 1940s to This American Life and Radiolab today--with John Biewen of Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies. He's the editor of "Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound," a book of essays by great radio producers.
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Comedian and storyteller Kumail Nanjiani
Kumail Nanjiani’s stand-up performances and one-man show (“Unpronounceable”) have earned him great reviews and a growing fan base. Pretty impressive, considering he took up comedy fairly recently, after immigrating to the US from Pakistan at 18. We talk about life and laughs in Pakistan and America, pushing back against South Asian stereotypes,learning American English from the movies, his creative work ethic (he tries to write new material every day) and more.
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Comedian and "WTF" Podcaster Marc Maron
Marc Maron's hilarious, raw and often revelatory heart-to-hearts with fellow comedians such as Louie C.K., Carlos Mencia, Robin Williams, Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman and many others have made WTF one of the most listened-to podcasts on the web. In this interview Marc talks about the impact of WTF on his life, his sometimes uneasy relationships with other comics, his on-mic persona and the differences between conventional radio and the faster, looser world of podcasting.
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Paul Provenza: Comedy from the Inside
Comedian and humor honcho Paul Provenza returns to the 7th Avenue Project to discuss the state of his art and his new Showtime series "The Green Room." It's a comedy round table in which comics mix it up in no-holds-barred conversation (and occasional head-butting).
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The Beat Within--Voices from Juvenile Hall
A rebroadcast of a show we recorded at Christmastime a year ago, about a writing program for incarcerated youths called "The Beat Within." We talked to kids in Santa Cruz Juvenile Hall who participate in the program, and to Beat Within workshop leaders Jill Wolfson and Dennis Morton.
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Crafting with Amy Sedaris
Comedian and author Amy Sedaris stopped by to show off her latest book of demented domesticity, "Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People." Plus an excerpt from our Christmas 2005 interview with filmmaker John Waters.
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A Physicist Tells The Time
Cal Tech theoretical physicist and Cosmic Variance blogger Sean Carroll considers various ideas of time, including Newton’s, Einstein’s and Sean’s own pet theory (think bubbles and baby universes). We also talk a lot about entropy—the basis of time’s arrow, Sean explains—and perforce about eggs.
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Saving Animals, Cell by Cell
San Diego’s “Frozen Zoo” is one of the world’s largest collections of living animal tissue, collected from hundreds of species for research, conservation and even cloning. We talked to geneticist Oliver Ryder, one of the scientists who manage the Frozen Zoo. Also, a conversation with David Haussler, coordinator of the Genome 10K Project, which is using samples from the Frozen Zoo and other sources to map the genomes of 10,000 species.
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America and Israel: Two Nations Under God?
Historian and cultural critic Todd Gitlin examines the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel and says it’s not just political; it’s providential. The two countries have been shaped by a shared sense of heavenly purpose, a belief that God is on their side. We discuss his new book "The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel and the Ordeals of Divine Election," co-written by Liel Leibovitz.
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Particle Physics Primer, Pt. 2
Our adventures in subatomic wonderland with particle physicist Bruce Schumm continue. We’ll pick up where we left off last week, searching for underlying order—maybe even simplicity—amidst all the quantum complexity. We’ll learn about the Feynman rules, symmetry and gauge theory, as well as gaps in the Standard Model of particle physics, the search for missing pieces (like the Higgs field) and the possibility of grand unification (a “theory of everything”).
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Particle Physics Primer, Pt. 1
We get a tour of the subatomic realm from particle physicist Bruce Schumm, the author of "Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics." We’ll focus on the Standard Model of particle physics, which encompasses most of what scientists know about the universe at small scales. In this first of a two-part series, we’ll learn about some of the basic ingredients of the model, including particles, fields and forces. Coming up in part two, the deeper organizing principles (gauge...
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Journalistic Ethics in Focus
NPR recently fired news analyst Juan Williams after his controversial comments about Muslims on Fox News’ O’ Reilly Factor. We examine journalistic ethics in light of the Williams affair, asking whether news organizations need to better enforce the traditional separation of reporting and opinionating, or if it’s time to lighten up. Guests include Alicia Shepard, NPR ombudsman; Kevin Smith, ethics chair of the Society of Professional Journalists; Tom Goldstein, professor of journalism at U.C....
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Dan Levitin: The Evolution of Musicality
The best-selling author of "This is Your Brain on Music" returns to our show. Neuroscientist, musician and record producer Dan Levitin discusses his most recent book, "The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature." Levitin contends that music played a key role in human evolution. (Interview originally broadcast in 2008.)
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From Prison to the Stage: The Poetic Justice Project
The Poetic Justice Project is a theater company for the formerly incarcerated, presenting stories of prison and jail by people who’ve been there. Members of the project discuss their lives behind bars and after parole, the impact of prison art programs and their performances in a new musical drama, "Off the Hook," that’s been touring California.
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Scandals and Why We Love Them
The ever-trenchant social critic Laura Kipnis schools us on scandal and explains what public humiliations, meltdowns and flameouts tell us about their participants and the rest of us. Laura's new book is "How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior."
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Michele Norris: The Grace of Silence
Co-host of NPR’s "All Things Considered" Michele Norris contemplates America’s racial past by way of family history in her new memoir "The Grace of Silence." In this interview she reflects on the things her parents did and didn’t tell her about their lives as African Americans, the importance of oral history and her feelings about her own work as a radio journalist.
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Firesign Forever: Phil Proctor and Phil Austin
As the legendary Firesign Theatre comedy troupe prepared for a reunion tour, two of its members, Phil Austin and Phil Proctor, talked about their upcoming performances, their classic recordings, their methods and madness.
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Felix Warneken and Robert Sapolsky on the Softer Side of...
Scientific studies that highlight the nicer side of humans and our primate relatives: In part one of the show, developmental psychologist Felix Warneken looks for and finds evidence of instinctive altruism in young humans and chimps. In part two, neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky discovers that even baboons--long believed to be incorrigibly violent--can change their ways and get along.
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Mark Levine and The Art of Latin Jazz
Pianist Mark Levine jumped into Latin Jazz almost by accident 40 years ago. It became a lifelong pursuit, and Mark became a leading proponent of the music. He talks about his beginnings in the genre, his continued apprenticeship, his Latin Grammy-nominated tribute to Brazilian composer Moacir Santos and his performance at the 2010 Monterey Jazz Festival.
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Rudresh Mahanthappa: Trans-Oceanic Jazz
Saxophonist/composer Rudresh Mahanthappa has been lighting up the jazz scene with his blend of western and Indian musical influences. Mahanthappa aims for, and achieves, a sound that's both seriously cerebral and seriously swinging, both technical and tuneful. He talks about the identity crisis that led to his discovery of Indian music, his musical self-education and his upcoming performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
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Thinking Outside the Brain
It's not all in your head. Philosopher Alva Noe says neuroscientists are looking for consciousness in all the wrong places: it's not in our brains after all.
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What's In A Face
Three people whose faces were altered by illness or injury talk about self-image, the meaning of beauty, and the realities of reconstructive surgery. David Roche is an inspirational speaker and humorist. Gina Butchin works to raise awareness of facial difference. Louise Ashby is an actress and writer. Originally broadcast Oct. 2009
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Planetwalker--The Pilgrimage of John Francis
For two decades, environmental activist John Francis travelled America on foot while keeping a vow of silence. Along the way, he got to know a side of himself and this country that few experience. Originally broadcast Aug 2009.
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Science And Space in Song: They Might Be Giants and One...
John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants discusses the delights and challenges of writing science songs for kids, as we listen to TMBG's new CD/DVD "Here Comes Science. And Michael Hearst of the band One Ring Zero talks about their new CD "Planets," which offers a fanciful tour of the solar system.
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Post-Classical: David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet;...
We talk to members of two ensembles who’ve helped change the sound of classical music. Violinist David Harrington is the founder of the Kronos Quartet, which has revolutionized the string quartet repertoire. Matt Albert is violinist and violist with Eighth Blackbird, a talented and inventive sextet who’ve further extended the range of classical expression. Both Kronos and eighth blackbird are performing at this year’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. David and Matt joined us to share...
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Cabrillo Festival 2010: Composer/pianist Kevin Puts and...
As the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music begins its 2010 season, we speak to two of this year's featured artists about their upcoming performances. Kevin Puts, best known for his composing, talks about the challenges of performing his own piano concerto "Night" for the first time. In part 2, percussion virtuoso Colin Currie describes his rendition of Jennifer Higdon's "Percussion Concerto." We listened to Colin's Grammy-winning performance of the concerto with the London Philharmonic...
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No One Dies in Lily Dale
A new HBO documentary film depicts life--and afterlife--in Lily Dale, New York. Founded in 1879, Lily Dale is the "world's largest spiritualist community," home to dozens of mediums and a destination for bereaved people hoping to contact deceased loved ones. "No One Dies in Lily Dale" is a fascinating and poignant look at love, loss and belief. We talk to the director, Steven Cantor, and three people depicted in the film.
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Lives in Art: Harvey Pekar and Jonathan Ames
In part 1, a 2006 interview with Harvey Pekar, who died this past week on July 12. We talked about his brawling youth, his autobiographical comics American Splendor and The Quitter, the impact of fame, his run-ins with David Letterman and other topics. In part 2, a 2009 interview with Jonathan Ames, discussing his own semi-autobiographical graphic novel The Alcoholic, the movie adaptation of his novel The Extra Man and his HBO comedy series Bored to Death.
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Suffering for Science
Historian Rebecca Herzig describes a time in turn-of-the-century America when scientists were expected to lay down life and limb for their profession. Many did, but was it necessary? Then, writer and comedian Sandra Tsing Loh plays up the fun of science, but knows a thing or two about suffering for it, too.
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Stories for Independence Day: Lift Every Voice and Sing;...
Two stories for the 4th of July: In part 1, "Lift Every voice and Sing," also known as the black national anthem. We'll hear performances of the song as historian Imani Perry discusses its meaning and importance to the civil rights struggle. In part 2, Frank Kameny recalls the early days of the gay rights movement. Kameny, now 85, led some of the first public demonstrations for gay equality, picketing the White House and staging 4th of July protests in the mid-1960s.
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Kathryn Schulz: On Being Wrong
Writer Kathryn Schulz considers what it means to be wrong, how we feel about it and how we deal with it. In her new book “On Being Wrong,” Schulz examines the sources of human error, and says that rather than try to perfect ourselves, we need to embrace our fallibility.
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David Cope: The Computer as Creator
Composer David Cope discusses his 30-year investigation into the nature of musical creativity. Cope's computer programs generate new musical works in the style of historical composers, as well as original modernist compositions, delighting and/or enraging lovers of classical music. We listen to some of his old and new compositions, and consider what they reveal about art, originality and human intelligence.
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Wes Moore: "The Other Wes Moore"
Wes Moore was a Rhodes Scholar on his way to a successful career when he learned of another Wes Moore, wanted by police for murder. He discovered surprising parallels in their two lives, despite their divergent paths. Wes Moore discusses his book "The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates"
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Satiristas: Paul Provenza and Dan Dion
Comic and actor Paul Provenza (director of "The Aristocrats") and photographer Dan Dion take a searching look at contemporary comedy in their book "Satiristas," featuring conversations with and photos of many of today's leading satirical artists. Paul and Dan discuss the craft of comedy and the issues confronting contemporary comics.
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The Moral Life of Babies; Aging and Happiness
Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom discusses recent research on infant morality. He says babies may not be saints, but they’ve got a much more developed sense of right and wrong than previously thought. Then, is youth wasted on the young? A large-scale study indicates that people get happier as they age, especially after 50. Psychologist Arthur Stone of Stoney Brook U. describes the findings.
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Witness to Extinction
A major new study led by UC Santa Cruz biologist Barry Sinervo has discovered that lizards around the world are dying off, and the culprit appears to be global warming. The finding suggests that an era of climate-driven mass extinctions may already have begun, sooner than scientists anticipated. Barry Sinervo and fellow biologists Donald Miles and Raymond Huey discuss the implications for reptiles and the rest of us.
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Philosophical Babies
For Mother's Day, we rebroadcast a 2009 interview with developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik. She's spent decades studying the minds of infants and young children. Her conclusion: babies are smarter, more aware and more caring than scientists previously realized. Also, inventor Joshua Klein on the surprising intelligence of crows.
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Reality Doesn't Bite; The New Wealth Gap
Political scientist Brendan Nyhan studies the impact of facts on political views, and finds that often, reality doesn't matter. Journalist Robert Frank reports on the rich for the Wall Street Journal. He says that despite fears that they'd lose their fortunes during the financial crisis, many of the highly affluent are doing better than ever, and the gap between rich and poor has only grown.
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By Heart: Poetry. Prison. Two Lives.
Judith Tannenbaum was a teacher working in San Quentin. Spoon Jackson was an inmate serving a life sentence. We'll hear how they met, discovered a mutual love of poetry and forged a 25-year friendship. That friendship is the subject of their memoir, "By Heart."
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Leonard Susskind: The Black Hole War
Theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind on his long-running disagreement with Stephen Hawking about the nature of black holes, with the very foundations of physics at stake.
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Hugh Raffles: Insectopedia
Anthropologist Hugh Raffles ruminates on human-insect relationships around the world in his new book Insectopedia. Japanese insect boys, Chinese fighting crickets, insect minds, insect music...
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What's So Special About Tango?
We consider the music and dance that captured the hearts of millions. Guests include tango historians Donald Cohen and Christine Denniston, and members of the Santa Cruz tango community. Show originally broadcast April, 2009.
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Gabriel Thompson: Working in the Shadows
Writer Gabriel Thompson went undercover to learn first-hand about the tough low-wage jobs done mostly by immigrants in America. He harvested lettuce in Arizona, toiled in a slaughterhouse in Alabama and did low-end restaurant jobs in Manhattan. He describes his year of working strenuously, and what he learned about immigrant labor.
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The Edge of Physics: Anil Ananthaswamy
In recent years, physics theory has gotten way ahead of the evidence. Now, researchers are going to extremes to figure out what’s true and what isn’t. They’ve launched a set of hugely ambitious experiments in some of the most forbidding places on Earth, from the South Pole to Himalayan mountaintops. Physics writer Anil Ananthaswamy travelled to these remote laboratories, and he tells us what he saw.
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Adventures in Lizardland: Evolutionary Biologist Barry...
What Jane Goodall was to chimps, biologist Barry Sinervo is to lizards. He's spent the last 20 years studying lizards in the wild, gaining remarkable insights into the workings of evolution, social behavior and cooperation. He shares his discoveries, along with some very funny lizard stories.
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Painter Richard Mayhew--A Life in Art
Noted landscape painter Richard Mayhew discusses his life and work, including his childhood in a mixed African American and Native American community, joining the New York art scene at the height of the abstract expressionist movement, his second career as a jazz singer and helping to organize African-American artists in the 1960s.
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Essayist Terry Castle
Terry Castle takes on her own and others' self-deceptions in her latest collection of hilarious, brutally honest essays, "The Professor and Other Writings." Targets include sex, romance and youthful infatuations. She and Robert do their best to burst as many bubbles as possible.
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Rebecca Goldstein V. God
Philosopher/Novelist Rebecca Goldstein discusses her latest book, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction." She and Robert consider the case for and against religion.
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Partners In Health Brings Medical Care to Haiti
In the aftermath of the Port-Au-Prince earthquake, the medical organization Partners in Health has played a key role bringing emergency aid to Haiti. On this edition of the 7th Avenue Project, Robert's 2003 interview with writer Tracy Kidder, discussing Partners in Health, its work in Haiti and its founder, Dr. Paul Farmer. Farmer was the subject of Kidder's best-selling book "Mountains Beyond Mountains."
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Cartoon Journalist Joe Sacco
Over the last two decades, Joe Sacco has helped invent a new genre: comic-book journalism. He's reported from Sarajevo during the Bosnian War and from the Palestinian Territories during the two Intifadas. His latest book is "Footnotes in Gaza." In today's show, he talks about his career, his experiences in the Palestinian Territories and the roots of conflict in Gaza.
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The Real Mark Twain
What Mark Twain's writing tells us about him and about America. Twain scholar Forrest Robinson looks behind the mask of America's favorite humorist and finds a troubled conscience, haunted by history.
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Armenian Lullabies and Songs of Longing
In this end-of-the-year musical special, we put 2009 to bed with some exquisite, ethereal lullabies and other songs from the famed Armenian singer Hasmik Harutyunyan and the Kitka women's vocal ensemble. Along with the music, Hasmik and Shira Cion of Kitka discuss the tragic history and haunting music of Armenia with host Robert Pollie.
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After Exoneration: The Rick Walker Story, Pt 2 of 2
Rick Walker spent 12 years in California prisons for a murder he didn't commit. In part 2 of this 2-part series, Walker talks about his life after prison, and film makers Gwen Essegian and Mark Ligon discuss their new documentary about Walker's fight to get restitution for the years he lost. Also, Lola Vollen, director of the Life After Exoneration project, on the plight of exonerees nationwide.
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When Justice Fails: The Rick Walker Story, Pt 1 of 2
Rick Walker spent 12 years in California prisons for a murder he didn't commit. In part I of this multipart series he talks about his conviction, his years behind bars and his release.
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Private Wars: Tracy Kidder and Andrew Sean Greer
Two interviews from the archives: Tracy Kidder discusses his 2006 memoir, "My Detachment," about the year he spent as a young army lieutenant in Vietnam. Novelist Andrew Sean Greer from 2008, on his most recent work: "The Story of A Marriage."
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The Bottom of Things
The stuff the universe is made of. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek talks to Robert about the fundamental ingredients of physical reality. Where mass comes from, why empty space isn't, and other marvels of modern physics explained.
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Building The Genome Zoo
Building the genome zoo. In the most ambitious effort of its type ever attempted, scientists are hoping to map the genes of 10,000 different animals. Proponents say the "Genome 10K project" will provide vast new insights into the biology, evolution and preservation of species. Robert talks to project coordinator David Haussler of UC Santa Cruz.
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Medicine at the Extremes
Physician and human rights activist Ashis Brahma of the Phoenix Global Health Foundation talks about practicing medicine in conflict zones and refugee camps.
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Life by the Numbers
A theoretical physicist searches for the universal laws of life. Geoffrey West explains some simple mathematical rules that he says may explain everything from the length of our lives to the health of our cities.
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A Mirror Held Up to Spiegelman
Comics artist Art Spiegelman discusses "Breakdowns," the recent book collecting his work from the 1970's, and looks back on his life in cartooning and comics, from skin mags and Garbage Pail Kids to Maus and the New Yorker.
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After Disaster
How people cope with calamity. Pulitzer prizewinner Tracy Kidder discusses his new book, "Strength in What Remains," about an African refugee fleeing ethnic violence. And social critic Rebecca Solnit talks about the response of ordinary people to the Loma Prieta earthquake, hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters.
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The Music of "Stew"
Art, authenticity, race and identity mix it up in the music of the acclaimed singer-songwriter known as Stew. He discusses his musical "Passing Strange," now out in a screen version from Spike Lee.
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One Fast Move or I'm Gone
Film maker Curt Worden discusses his documentary about Jack Kerouac's novel"Big Sur." Also, writer Robert Sullivan reflects on cross-country car trips.
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Born Rich, Wondering Why
Two American heirs who grew up wealthy question their good fortune and now advocate greater economic equality. They discuss their own experiences of wealth and the distribution of wealth in the country.
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Wealth and the Limits of Materialism
In his ongoing look at wealth in America, host Robert Pollie gets an alternative view from Zen abbot Steve Stckey and humanitarian doctor/clown Patch Adams.
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Percussion Takes Center Stage
Orchestral percussionist Galen Lemmon shares some of the sounds of this year's Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. Featuring marimba, vibes, steel drums, timpani, even a tuned anvil. Then, sacred drums: a visit with Afro-Cuban Bat drummer Michael Spiro.
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Against Reductionism
More than the sum of the parts. Nobel prizewinning physicist Robert Laughlin says nature can't always be reduced to its individual components. Plus, Maestra Marin Alsop of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music
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Wealth and How to Destroy It
Economist Russ Roberts about the nature of wealth, how it's created and destroyed, and whether economics really is a science.
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The Other Rumble in The Jungle
A new film commemorates a legendary 1974 concert that brought together many of the greats of African, Latin and African-American music in Kinshasa, Zaire. Robert talks to filmmaker Geoffrey Levy-Hinte about the concert and the film, called "Soul Power." Plus, "Masanga": the story of a classic African song.
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Neil Shubin on Fish, Evolution and Us
Paleontologist Neil Shubin describes how scientists are reconstructing the history of life from fossils and DNA, how genes shape bodies and what we have in common with fruit flies.
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Iran, Then and Now
Iranian film maker Nahid Sarvestani describes her involvement in the Iranian revolution 30 years ago and discusses her latest documentary, "The Queen and I." Then, Iranian-American student Naveed Mansouri talks about Iran's "Green Revolution" and the role of social networking technologies.
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Going Incognegro; Yiddishkeit 2.0
Writer Mat Johnson talks about growing up as a black boy who looked white. Then, Yiddish makes a comeback in the punk klezmer songs of Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird.
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The Double Life is Twice As Good
Writer Jonathan Ames talks about his graphic novel, "The Alcoholic," his upcoming HBO comedy series and his double life as public and private figure. Plus: Short and Sweet: the Big Sur International Short Film Series.
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Wealth Ain't What it Used to Be
Robert Frank of the Wall Street Journal on the impact of the economic crisis on the upper upper crust. Also: where to stash your gold bullion: Lynel Berryhill of Brown Safe Manufacturing, purveyor of luxury vaults and safes.
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Ask a Linguist
Geoffrey Pullum, linguist and author of "The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language," discusses the grammar wars, common misconceptions about English and whether we really can talk to the animals.
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Mother's Day Confidential
What it means to have a mom, what it means to be one and the unspoken truths of motherhood.
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Portraits in Conviction
New films on Youssou N'Dour and Australian sprinter Peter Norman, who supported the raised fist protest at the 1968 Olympics. Interviewees include 1968 Olympic bronze medalist John Carlos
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Mathematics in Music and in Motion
Mathematician Keith Devlin discusses his collaboration with choral group Zambra. Plus dancer/mathematician Karl Schaffer, and the most important math discovery you've never heard of.
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Our Parasites, Ourselves
Evolutionary biologist and parasite maven Marlene Zuk. Plus, parasite music with singer Daniel Kahn.
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Ry Cooder's California
A 2008 interview with Ry Cooder, discussing his 'California Trilogy' and its latest installment, 'I, Flathead.'
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PROGRAM INFORMATION
- Santa Cruz, CA
- Ideas, Interviews, Documentary
- English
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203 8th Avenue
Santa Cruz, CA 95062831-476-2800 -
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