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31mins
A conversation with the Harvard physician and social scientist.
4mins
Why has the “Life of Pi” author been sending novels to the Canadian prime minister?
2mins
What can be done to make boys and young men more interested in reading books?
1mins
When your novel gets a negative review, “it’s your entire being that is negated. And that hurts.” But you have to learn to let it go.
5mins
There’s no formula to writing. The key thing is simply to read, says the novelist. “The best teacher is a cheap, little Penguin classic.”
4mins
A tiny germ of an idea leads to research, which leads to further ideas and then more research. Eventually the writer has hundreds of pages of notes to work from.
4mins
Martel never bases his characters on real people—they’re always a vehicle for something he wants to express.
8mins
The major religions have all had their excesses, but there’s something about spiritual thinking that augments a life.
10mins
Allegorical fiction can take very complex realities and convey them in powerful, emotional, psychologically accurate way.
41mins
A conversation with the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist.
3mins
Josh Ritter can’t complain about today’s recording industry: the concerts are improving and some lesser-known artists are doing great work.
6mins
The developer of the first portable cellular telephone discovered that he wanted to be an engineer when he was just four years old. His homemade magnifying glass sparked a career […]
9mins
The pioneering HIV/AIDS researcher used high school math in creating a drug “cocktail” to combat the worldwide epidemic.
7mins
The mathematical physicist reflects upon his untraditional math and science education in Belize, and talks about how Einstein’s theory of relativity is a “profound connection” that can inspire young people.
4mins
The U.S. is now incarcerating on a level so out of sync with it’s own history—and with what other industrial democracies are doing—that the system is bound to change.
6mins
Sexual victimization in prison now has come to constitute a significant portion of that in society as a whole.
4mins
The massive rise in the prison population isn’t one of the primary reasons that crime has decreased.
9mins
We once hoped criminals would come out of prison better than they had entered. Not anymore.
11mins
Looking carefully at the history of Texas makes us rethink the history of crime and punishment and incarceration in the country as a whole.
4mins
Our skyrocketing incarceration rates are less related to crime than to racial politics, tough-on-crime rhetoric and for-profit prisons.