The 7th Avenue Project

150 years after its creation, Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt remains sui generis and uncategorizable: folktale and fever dream, existential inquiry and social satire, straddling romanticism and modernism. Its locales include Norwegian mountain villages, a troll castle, the Moroccan coast and a Cairo lunatic asylum. A new adaptation mounted by Kimberly Jannarone at UC Santa Cruz turns Gynt into a kind of living gallery, with different scenes staged simultaneously in multiple venues and the audience wandering among them. Kimberly spoke to me about the history of the play, her own Gynt-mania (including a trip to Gynt's Norwegian stomping grounds) and the play's enduring popularity. Joining us was actor Nancy Carlin, who plays Peer Gynt's mother Åse in the production.

Sound as vibration, sound as sensation, sound as means of manipulation. Sound as a state of mind and as a weapon. Seth Horowitz considers sonic phenomena from these and other angles in his new book The Universal Sense. And he's a good one to do it: as a neuroscientist specializing in auditory phenomena, sound recordist, musician and aural explorer, not to mention the guy who proved that tadpoles can hear, Seth is an expert guide to the sonic world. He and I listened to a sampling of audio curiosities while contemplating questions such as:

-What's faster, our ears or our eyes?

-What's it like to be a bat?

-What's it like to be Evelyn Glennie?

-How do we build a picture of the world from sonic data?

-Why are low sounds ominous?

-Can sounds kill?

In the early 1960's Bob Moses risked life and limb as a civil rights organizer in the deep south. In recent decades he's taken up a new cause, promoting math instruction for educationally disadvantaged kids. Bob believes quality education is a fundamental right, and math skills are a key to economic opportunity. Bob is soft-spoken and not one to play up his accomplishments, but his story is extraordinary, as you'll hear in this conversation.

Historian George Dyson on his new book "Turing's Cathedral," which tells the story of the Electronic Computer Project. Led by the brilliant polymath John Von Neumann in 1940s and 50s, the project laid the groundwork for much of modern computing. In doing so, Dyson says, it birthed a new, digital ecosystem, a world of self-reproducing, ever-evolving numbers that may be said to have a life of their own. Dyson is the son of famed physicist Freeman Dyson and grew up at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Von Neumann and crew did their pioneering work.

Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, is in many ways a world apart: a former slave plantation bigger in area than Manhattan, nestled in a crook of the Mississippi, where prisoners still work the fields overseen by guards on horseback. Many live out their days there and are buried on the grounds. It's a world Marianne Fisher-Giorlando counts herself lucky to be a part of. She's a criminologist who's spent a good share of her life studying and volunteering in Angola. She's become an authority on its workings, culture and history, and despite the fear and loathing the place may conjure, her experiences there have been surprisingly upbeat.

The critic David Thomson is so alert to the seductions and subterfuges of film it's hard to imagine he was ever a sucker for cinema. Of course, we were all young and innocent once. Now he's uneasily aware of what movie-watching entails: the voyeurism, the passivity, and the ideologies concealed in images, characters and plots . He charts his – and our – increasingly distanced relationship with film in his latest book, "The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies." David and I talked about how moviegoing has changed over the decades, what the medium has done to us, and our new infatuation with other, smaller screens. Along the way we discussed immigrant filmmakers and American mythmaking, Citizen Kane, California light and Germanic shadow, film noir, masculinity and movies, Hitchcock and Tarantino.

People love to trip out on the future of homo sapiens, usually conjuring some kind of twinkly transcendence (a seraphic super-race) or dystopian degeneracy (machine-dependent dullards enfeebled by our own technology). But those stories owe more to wishful thinking or baseless anxiety than to actual evolutionary theory. I decided to forgo the fantasizing and explore the science itself: the forces that shaped our species and that are still at work, however subtly, today. Evolutionary biologist Barry Sinervo joined me to explain the scientific fundamentals and offer some educated guesses on what comes next.

In 1933, folklorists John and Alan Lomax went inside Louisiana's Angola prison and made a series of celebrated recordings and musical discoveries. Eighty years later, filmmaker and musicologist Ben Harbert followed in the Lomax's footsteps, visiting Angola and other Louisiana penitentiaries to document the state of prison music today. Ben and I discussed his new film Follow Me Down: Portraits of Louisiana Prison Musicians. As we listened to performances from the film, Ben talked about the place of music in inmates' lives and the ethics and challenges of shooting a doc in the joint. Also featured: Tony Seeger, musicologist (and nephew of Pete, Mike and Peggy Seeger), who advised Ben on the film.

And you thought sequencing the human genome was a big job. MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung is proposing something even more Herculean: tracing the trillions of neuronal connections in the human brain, collectively known as the "connectome." He believes the connectome may hold the key to understanding the brain and the self. That follows from connectionism—the notion that learning, memory and personality are embedded in the brain's wiring. Like so much else in neuroscience, that's still hypothetical, and Sebastian is refreshingly candid about the limits of current understanding. We discussed what is and isn't known about the workings of neurons, how the brain's circuitry might encode information, the relevance of computer models, and artificial intelligence techniques that may help map the connectome. Also: the "Jennifer Aniston neuron," whether or not to freeze your posthumous head, and the cautionary tale of the South Park underpants gnomes.

Despite an old-school classical education in the Soviet Union, where she grew up before emigrating to Australia as a teen, composer Elena Kats-Chernin is anything but tradition-bound. Her influences run the gamut from ragtime to nuevo tango to minimalism and pop. Her work is powerfully evocative and unabashedly listenable. Elena says for her, “music is a living thing.” She writes daily, and a lot of her own life inevitably makes its way into her compositions. In this interview, we listened to some exquisite tunes and dug deep into the sources of her music, including the very personal story behind some of her most affecting works.