The Big Idea #3: Gish Jen
“The Big Idea” features interviews with people whose lights stay on—writers, artists, scientists, activists, and others who take a long and broad view of an issue, problem, or concept, and pursue it over many years.
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Posts by: Suzanne Koven
The Big Idea #2: Andrew Solomon
Writer and journalist Andrew Solomon talks about parent-child differences, and the eleven-year process of writing his latest book, which profiles families of deaf, dwarf, autistic, severely disabled, transgendered, schizophrenic, and other marginalized children.
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The Big Idea #1: Dr. Neal Barnard
Dr. Neal Barnard, who has advocated for animal protection and veganism for the past thirty years, discusses what motivates people to adopt veganism, the idea that humans are natural carnivores, and what’s really involved in producing animal-derived food.
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Interpreting My Malady
The unpublished catalogue of fiction inspired by illness is limitless, composed every day, at every hour, in every hospital, clinic, hospice, and bedroom where the ill and injured and even the mildly indisposed attempt to make sense of our altered conditions.
...morePolitics in the Exam Room
In the fall of 2008 I was chatting with a woman I know about the upcoming presidential election. She was in her 60s, single, a funky dresser, world traveler, and amateur artist—what my mom would have called a “free-spirited Auntie Mame type”— so I was surprised by what she had to say: She was voting Republican.