The 7th Avenue Project

Following in the path of groups like the Dirty Dozen and the Rebirth Brass Band, the Stooges have have helped revitalize New Orleans brass band music with a sound that layers generous helpings of hip-hop, funk, modern jazz and pop over a body-shaking beat and a propulsive intensity stoked by countless hours of second-lining on the Nola streets. After seeing them perform, I got founder and trombonist Walter Ramsay, saxman Virgil Tiller and drummer/trombonist Garfield Bogan into the studio for some talk and tunes, including a sneak peek at their forthcoming EP, their first CD since 2003's "It's About Time."

The latest edition of the DSM – the diagnostic manual of psychiatry – is hot off the presses, and it once again redraws the map of mental malfunction. Hoarding disorder and caffeine withdrawal are in, Asperger's is out. Critics like psychotherapist Gary Greenberg say there's a reason the DSM is a palimpsest: despite its quasi-scientific airs, it has little to do with any clear understanding of mental illness and a lot to do with changing societal attitudes, politics and money. Gary and I discussed his new book, "The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry."

New York Times contributor Jon Mooallem says our efforts to save endangered species depend in large part on the tales we tell about them. Jon traces the history of wildlife in the American imagination and offers his own stories of three imperiled species (bear, butterfly and bird) and the people who defend them in his new book "Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America." Among the many topics we discussed: Tom Jefferson and the woolly mammoth, Teddy Bear vs. Billy Possum, conservationists and nature fakers, teaching whooping cranes to migrate, and fighting for beauty. Also, music from Black Prairie's new album "Wild Ones," inspired by Jon's book.

When not laboring at his his day job or raising a family – and sometimes even when so engaged – Ian Bell is likely to be summoning forth a new song or three. "When ideas come, they come," he says of himself, "and you don't question how or why, you just scramble to get it down on something quick." He may not question how or why, but I did. Joining Ian in his studio for conversation and music, I asked about his passion for rendering real-life stories in song and about his own story: growing up on the working-class fringes of London dreaming of America, then chasing his own version of the American dream in California.

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 "YA" audience, the wages of revenge, the indelible impress of high school and Jill's own teen years.

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, describing some of the initial insights that led to string theory and shedding light on the mind-stretching holographic principle. Overall, a very interesting glimpse into a highly original mind.

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 many of the same, suspect intuitions that bamboozle the rest of us. Bob raises these and other problems in his latest book, "A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell us About Ourselves." We had a long and wide-ranging tête-à-tête on the difficulties that loom when science shifts from studying the brain to mapping the mind, and the deep and dubious assumptions built into categories such as conscious and unconscious, self and other, choice and non-choice.

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 go badly awry and, even when things are working OK, is hardly a dependable arbiter of truth.

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 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 popularization of surfing, the future of the California coastline and a defense of the SpongeBob lifestyle.

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.