On this edition of StudioTulsa, an interesting chat with Basil Twist, the New York City-based puppeteer who was a MacArthur genius grant recipient in 2015. He has been universally acclaimed for his puppet-related design, construction, choreography, staging, and other work on productions such as "Symphonie Fantastique," "Dogugaeshi," "Red Beads", "Petrushka," "Hansel and Gretel," "Master Peter's Puppet Show," and so on. Twist is currently in town to work on the upcoming Tulsa Ballet production of

Turkey has been a vital U.S. ally for many years, but is that going to change in the Age of Trump? And for that matter, what do -- or don't -- Presidents Trump and Erdogan have in common? On this edition of ST, we speak with Mahir Zeynalov, a noted Turkish journalist, media analyst, and press-freedom advocate. Zeynalov is now based in Washington, DC, as he was deported from his homeland in 2014 by the Turkish Interior Ministry; he is well-known for his writing, which appears in Al Arabiya, The

Our guest is Edward Baptist, a professor at Cornell University, who will soon give the 2017 Cadenhead-Settle Memorial Lecture here at TU. (This free-to-the-public event happens on Monday the 6th, beginning at 7pm; you'll find more information here .) Prof. Baptist will present a talk entitled, "Creating White Freedom by Hunting Enslaved Africans." It's based on an in-depth, NEH-supported research project that he's involved with, i.e., a crowd-sourced analysis of almost 200,000 runaway-slave ads

We are joined on this edition of StudioTulsa Medical Monday by Dr. Danielle Ofri, an associate professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine who has cared for patients at Bellevue Hospital for more than two decades. Her previous book was "What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine," and she joins us to discuss her new book, which follows up on that one. It's called "What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear." As was noted of this book by Kirkus Reviews, it

On this installment of StudioTulsa, we speak with Bart Ehrman, the Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. Prof. Ehrman is also a bestselling nonfiction author whose many books include "How Jesus Became God," "Jesus Interrupted," and "God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question: Why We Suffer." He'll give a free-to-the-public lecture tonight (the 2nd) on the TU campus; it's the 2017 Phi Beta Kappa Lecture , beginning at 7pm in the Tyrell Hall

On this edition of StudioTulsa, we welcome Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum back to our studios. He was sworn in as Tulsa's newest mayor in December, having previously served as a member of the Tulsa City Council since 2008. (Mayor Bynum's great-great grandfather [1899-1900] and maternal grandfather [1970-1978] also served as mayors of Tulsa.) The Mayor joins us to talk about what he's accomplished in his mayoral tenure thus far as well as what he has planned for the immediate future: As he writes on the

"The Big Trail" -- a classic Western from 1930, and the first film in which John Wayne had a starring role -- was chosen in 2006 by the Library of Congress to be a part of the National Film Registry. And it was shot in a wide-screen format (rare for that time) by the legendary Hollywood director, Raoul Walsh. Just recently, it was announced that someone has donated to Gilcrease Museum a set of rare stereoscopic photographs that were taken on the set of this motion picture, which was actually

On this edition of StudioTulsa Medical Monday, our guest is Dr. Rachel Carlton Abrams, who has been a board member of the American Holistic Medical Association since 2013. Dr. Abrams tells us about her remarkable new book, "BodyWise: Discovering Your Body’s Intelligence for Lifelong Health and Healing." As Tori Hudson, a nurse who's also the author of "The Women's Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine," has noted of this book: "Chronic fatigue, chronic pain, chronic sleep problems, anxiety/depression

Our guest is Helen Czerski, who is a physicist at University College London's Department of Mechanical Engineering as well as science presenter for the BBC. She chats with us about her new book, "Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life." As was noted of this book in a starred review in Publishers Weekly: "In this delightful pop science title, Czerski, a physicist at University College London, shows that understanding how the universe works requires little more than paying attention to

Our guest today is Ken Busby, the CEO and executive director of the non-profit Route 66 Alliance, which is based here in Tulsa, and which is, per its website , "dedicated to the preservation, promotion, and enhancement of historic Route 66 -- past, present, and future." Formerly the director of the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa, Busby was asked to lead the "Mother Road"-focused organization in 2014; today, he brings us up to speed on the Route 66 Experience Museum, a large-scale