Mythili Rao

Former Montana Secretary of State and State Senate president Bob Brown owns 20 guns.  As state legislator, was he was honored with a commendation from the NRA for his support of gun...

Two years ago, on a long car trip, Michael and Elizabeth Singer decided to make resolutions for each other. Mike told Liz to be more bold in her career; Liz told Mike to finally star...

As 2012 comes to a close, there’s still some unfinished business looming over Washington.  President Obama and Congress have yet to come to an agreement on how to avoid triggering t...

Earlier this month, NYU graduate student Josh Begley began tweeting every reported American drone strike — starting in 2002. His feed highlights the growing prevalence of a lethal tac...

On what would have been Frank Zappa's 72nd birthday, his estate, The Zappa Family Trust, will sell copies of the master recordings of "Roxy by Proxy," an unreleased show from 1974. F...

It’s not hard to see why web cartoonist Ryan North’s new choose-your-own adventure version of Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" has quickly gained popularity among the digital set. But what d...

Serial killer Jeffery Dahmer was arrested in 1991 and charged with murdering 17 people. Derf Backderf went to school with Jeffrey Dahmer. After Dahmer's death, he finally sat down t...

Wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. Why has Pope Gregory I's 650 AD list of deadly sins endured all these years later? Alex Clark, co-editor of “The Seven Deadly Sin...

What scares you? No, really scares you? In this age of antibiotics, antiseptics, airbags and anti-virus software, maybe the answer is, not much. But Chris Cerf, co-author of "Encyclo...

There is a middle class emerging in Latin America — far south of the white picket fences and the syndicated episodes of "Leave It To Beaver." But who is this middle class? What do the...

At the Miami Book Fair International, five novelists sat down to talk about love: why it’s so appealing to read about, so hard to write about, and why we can’t get enough of it. It's ...

Between 1939 and 1944, more than 200 Harvard students – all "physically and mentally healthy" men – were recruited to participate in a study. The 200-some odd students had the privile...

At the Miami Book Fair International, five authors of memoirs gathered to discuss their brushes with death. One of them, Benjamin Busch, author of "Dust to Dust," recounted facing dea...

Yesterday's segment about new curriculum guidelines that would replace some beloved novels with non-fiction reading in K-12 classrooms sparked a lot of responses listener responses ...

Sometimes, high school reading assignments make a lasting impression. Listeners from across the country called to describe the books they're still thinking years after high school. At the top of the list were Herman Hesse's "Soddhartha" and the novels of George Orwell and Toni Morrison. But listeners also remembered being inspired and moved by books that opened their eyes to poetry, history, and science.

They’re the forgotten minor characters of history: A Texas slave who kills his master and runs away with the master’s wife. An elephant trainer heartbroken at the sale of his best f...

Haitians are somewhat more practiced in dealing with the calamity of natural disaster. At the Miami Book Fair International, writer Edwidge Danticat, whose work most recently appears ...

After the show reported on some disturbing trends in obesity in the United States, people were quick to respond. Listener John Manrique details his own story about how he lost over se...

In honor of Thanksgiving, Bee Wilson asks us to "Consider the Fork." Wilson is the author of a book by the same title, and she explains how our relationship with food is emotional, pr...

Food is on all of our minds today, but how often do we really think about food? For Adam Gopnik, the answer is always. His latest book is "The Table Comes First: Family, France, and t...