Notebook on Cities and Culture

A conversation about what's wrong with literary studies and a possible way forward with Jonathan Gottschall, English instructor at Washington and Jefferson College and author of Science, Literature and a New Humanities.

A conversation with physicist and University of Utah adjunct professor of anthropology Gregory Cochran, co-author with Henry Harpending of The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.

A conversation about the organic basis of decisionmaking with Jonah Lehrer, editor-at-large at Seed magazine and author of How We Decide.

A conversation about what gardens say about human nature, what's missing from mainstream radio and the place of the humanities with Robert Harrison, Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature at Stanford University and host of KZSU's Entitled Opinions. His latest book is Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.

A conversation about the genesis of probability theory with mathematician Keith Devlin, author of The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern.

A conversation about having fun with poetry, providing an alternative to academia and hosting television programs from one's own home with writer and "cultural polymath" Clive James, author of Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958-2008. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about knowledge, commerce and the Western canon with novelist and journalist Alex Beam, author of A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books.

A conversation about the greatest British philosopher of all time with Simon Blackburn, professor of philosophy at Cambridge University and the University of North Carolina and author of How to Read Hume. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about Margaret Thatcher, the most controversial British Prime Minister of the 20th century, with Claire Berlinski, author of There is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]

A conversation about intellectual rigor and intellectual confusion with New York University physicist Alan Sokal, the man behind the "Sokal Hoax" and author of Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture. [download] [MOI home] [MOI archive]