74 | Stephen Greenblatt on Stories, History, ...

The cosmological constant, as discussed last episode, provides a perfectly good (thus far) explanation for why we observe the universe to be accelerating. But it might not be the right explanation, and demonstrating that would be yet another foundational discovery. In this episod ...  Show more

The most surprising discovery in fundamental physics during my career as a scientist was undoubtedly the acceleration of the universe, announced in 1998. The most straightforward explanation for these observations is a positive cosmological constant, or vacuum energy. I talk abou ...  Show more

Today’s guest is Jessica Brantley, Professor of English at Yale University. Professor Rosenberg is the author of the previous monograph, Reading in the Wilderness, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Her articles have appeared in PMLA, Exemplaria, and the Journa ...  Show more

Ryan speaks with Philipp Meyer about his novels American Rust and The Son, processing the morally questionable history of the American west through literature, how he battled through ten years of failure before his first success, the challenge of balancing ego with ambition, the ...  Show more

The German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe considered his monumental book known in English as The Theory of Colours to be his greatest achievement. The book is a record of hundreds of Goethe's observations about the way colour affects our mood, as well as a long and heated po ...  Show more

In this conversation, we talked to Naomi Shihab Nye about her career in prose and poetry writing. Nye is the recipient of numerous honors and awards for her work, including the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, ...