Not only is the nation gripped by polarization these days but so are the worlds of science and higher education. Traditional scientists tend to thumb their noses at those who call for scholarly inquiry into subjects such as astral projection, extrasensory perception, hauntings, UFOs, seances and mediumship, and so many more. The two Indiana University professors hope to bridge the gap with a three-evening series of events called Weird Academia later this month. Ford has co-hosted the podcast Weird Science for eight years and Foster co-directs both The Center for Possible Minds and the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute.

Hosts Michael Glab and Tristra Newyear chat with Bloomington’s most fascinating people.

We remember a Bloomington titan.

Hosts Michael Glab and Tristra Newyear chat with Bloomington’s most fascinating people.

It’s a good bet many of the websites you visit know as much or more about you than your friends and family do. Journalist, author, and blogger Doc Searls wants the one-way relationship between sites and users to change as our cyber-lives evolve. We’re still in the nascent stages of the internet, he argues, so change can be implemented before its laws amd mores can be written in stone. Searls and his wife Joyce, both Ostrom Workshop visiting scholars, joined Big Talk host Tristra Newyear in the WFHB studios.

Hosts Michael Glab and Tristra Newyear chat with Bloomington’s most fascinating people.

He didn’t realize it when he was reading Jack London, Jack, Kerouac, John Steinbeck, and Edward Abbey but the authors who waxed literate about the road were preparing him for an odyssey. Last summer, Jon Vickers embarked on a five-week, solo motorcycle trip from Bloomington to Alaska. Along the way, the retired founding director of the IU Cinema viewed some of the Earth’s most beautiful land and North America’s most exotic big creatures.

Hosts Michael Glab and Tristra Newyear chat with Bloomington’s most fascinating people.

She fell into cosplay in 2018 and now has no desire to lift herself out of the pool. Steph Slone, a communications specialist for Indiana University by day, is an imagineer,  designer, seamstress, and mechanic by night. She uses all those skills to fashion fantasy costumes for characters adopted by her and her husband Myles. Slone has won national and international awards for her work and has immersed herself in the cosplay world.

Hosts Michael Glab and Tristra Newyear chat with Bloomington’s most fascinating people.

A true south central Hoosier — he swam in limestone quarry pools as a kid — Dason Anderson now guides this region’s online magazine as its executive editor. Running a news operation is especially challenging as we enter the second half of the decade. With many news outlets suffering due to federal funding and granting cutbacks and social media pressures, Limestone Post has survived through its first ten years of existence. Anderson replaced retired founder and publisher, Ron Eid, as editor, and has pledged to maintain the magazine’s high standards of accuracy and fairness in long-form journalism.

Hosts Michael Glab and Tristra Newyear chat with Bloomington’s most fascinating people.

Steve Higgs has had two overwhelming passions in his adult life: the environment and journalism. He was a reporter for the Herald-Times as far back as when it was known as the Herald-Telephone. He’s also been treading through and savoring the land in every corner of Indiana, photographing and writing about this state’s natural wonders. Fresh out of graduate school, where he earned his journalism master’s degree, Higgs met Andy Mahler. Their lives over the next decades became intertwined as Mahler fought to preserve the beauty and scanctity of the Hoosier National Forest. Higgs has written a new book, Andy Mahler and the Hoosier National: The Folk Hero and the Forest He Loves.

Hosts Michael Glab and Tristra Newyear chat with Bloomington’s most fascinating people.

She grew up in a comfortable Chicago suburb not really knowing what her ethnic heredity entailed. Then Dena El Saffar delved deep into her Iraqi roots. Along the way she became a classically trained musician, specializing in the stringed instruments. Dena now leads the Salaam Band and is part of a number of other performance ensembles. She incorporates a wide variety of musical styles into her work, including influences from West Asia, the Arabian peninsula, North Africa, and even western pop.

Hosts Michael Glab and Tristra Newyear chat with Bloomington’s most fascinating people.

She’s fast becoming Bloomington’s empresario of author events. Molly Gleeson and the Writers Guild at Bloomington staged last year’s successful Local Authors Book Fair. This year she and the Guild are bringing the noted novelist, essayist, and journalist, Aminatta Forna, to town. Born in Scotland and of Sierra Leonean and Scottish ancestry, Forna was a reporter for BBC radio and TV and has penned a half dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction. Much of her fiction centers around Sierra Leone’s rich and complicated history.

Hosts Michael Glab and Tristra Newyear chat with Bloomington’s most fascinating people.

She happened upon a glassblowing exhibit at a Sandusky, Ohio amusement park and was immediately hooked. Abby Gitlitz has been working with glass — she makes it from scratch — her entire adult life. She founded the Bloomington Creative Glass Center and launched the annual Great Glass Pumpkin Patch open-air market for the delicate handblown squashes. The BCGC offers classes, training, an apprentice program, exhibits and special events.

Hosts Michael Glab and Tristra Newyear chat with Bloomington’s most fascinating people.