Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, "Kubrick:...

Betty Boyd Caroli's biography of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch is the first full-length work on a seminal figure in the settlement house movement, which spearheaded efforts to improve the life of immigrants and to counter urban squalor in cities around America in the early 19th cent ...  Show more

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, who tragically died at 48 years old in 1940 as he fled the advance of the Third Reich on the French-Spanish border. Most writers and critics see Benjamin’s work as fragmented, d ...  Show more

Einstein’s Dreams (Vintage, 1992) by Alan Lightman, set in Albert Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, is a novel about the cultural interconnection of time, relativity and life. As the young genius creates his theory of relativity, in a series of dreams, he imagines other worlds, ...  Show more

In today's world of specialization, Alan Lightman is that rare individual who has accomplished remarkable things in two very different realms. As a physicist with a Ph.D. from Cal Tech, he's taught at Harvard and MIT and advised the United Nations. As a novelist, he's written awa ...  Show more

In 1948, the foundation was laid for a “utopian” community of houses designed by a man described as America’s greatest ever architect.Frank Lloyd Wright had been approached by a group who wanted to create a social collective of affordable homes, on land an hour north of New York ...  Show more

In this episode of the Think Tank Podcast, Robert sits down with Matias De Stefano, a well-known Argentine philosopher and spiritual teacher who focuses on consciousness, ancient wisdom, and the universe's energy systems. The conversation explores Matias' recent travels to Mex ...