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Art & Science with Alan Lightman

Note: This program was broadcast on WCAI, the Cape and Islands affiliate of WGBH.
Alan Lightman, the MIT physicist and best-selling author of Einstein’s Dreams, is a man of unusual ability. Talented in both the sciences and the arts, he’s both left- and right-brained, a condition that confers challenges as well as benefits.
Lightman has recently come out with a new book which explores these two realms – and it’s called Ghost! It deals with the permeable boundary between hard science and the paranormal — and asks, where does science fail us, and what, if anything, can take its place? Does mystery take over? And can it step in where science falls short?
Click here: to listen (28:30 minutes) on ThoughtCast!

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Jack Beatty, Public Intellectual

Note: this interview was reviewed on PRX and earned 4 stars! And it was broadcast on WRNC-LP, and the public radio stations WCAI/WNAN, the Cape and Islands affiliates of WGBH.
Who are our public intellectuals today? What purpose are they meant to serve, and are they in fact serving it — or us? How public are they, and how accountable? Is there a venue for such people to even be heard — and if so, who would bother to listen? Are they no better than the talking heads we see endlessly on TV, or are they some newfangled model of the Renaissance Man?
Well, ThoughtCast has tracked down one bona fide public intellectual. His name is Jack Beatty, and he’s not only a “thinker”, he’s also a writer. His most recent book is Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865 – 1900. He’s also a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, and a regular contributor to the NPR program On Point. Let’s see if he has some answers…

Click here: to listen. (28 minutes)

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Faith and Philosophy with Harvey Cox and Simon Blackburn

Note: this program was broadcast on the WGBH public radio sister stations WCAI/WNAN, on the Cape and Islands, and on WRNC-LP!
In this half-hour, ThoughtCast talks with two very different men, with one thing in common — a belief in humanism. Harvey Cox, the renowned Harvard Divinity School Professor and author of The Secular City and When Jesus Came to Harvard, talks with ThoughtCast about his faith, and the religious resurgence taking place here in America and abroad. Cox has a unique take on Christianity — while he doubts the Resurrection, he celebrates the life of Jesus, and urges us all to follow in his footsteps, and take his teachings to the streets, to enact them in our flawed, real, and secular world.
Simon Blackburn on the other hand rejects religion but embraces the wisdom of philosophy. He too is an author — of Truth: A Guide, Think and Being Good, among others — and he teaches philosophy at the University of Cambridge, in England. What he offers is a philosophy that’s not just for the educated elite, but for the rest of us!

Click here: to listen (29 minutes)

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Public Media Maverick Jay Allison

Note: this program was broadcast on WGBH‘s sister station WCAI and on KUT News, in Austin, Texas!

Jay Allison has egalitarian instincts. He’s a maverick, who’s made it his mission to put the “public” back into public media. As an independent producer of stellar public radio – and television – Jay’s been able to work outside the system, and then change the system. Take This I Believe for example. Jay’s the man behind this series of audio essays, written and performed by a wide variety of Americans, ranging from the well-known to the unknown. As Jay says in this ThoughtCast interview, their sincerity and lack of skepticism make them almost the antithesis of “journalism” — and yet there they are, on NPR.

Click here: to listen. (28 minutes)

Jay Allison is also a contributor to Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide, a selection of essays from Harvard’s Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, and edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call. At the Harvard Book Store recently, Allison and Kramer banded together to tell a few stories of their own about authenticity, the narrative voice and the grueling process of authorship.
Click here: to listen. (55 minutes)

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Astrophysics in Cambridge — at the Planetarium!

As part of the Cambridge Science Festival, Noreen Grice, the operations coordinator of the Charles Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science in Boston, hosted a series of presentations that feature new research in astrophysics taking place in Cambridge. Specifically, she highlighted the work of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, in Kendall Square, as well as scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and MIT.

Click here: for Noreen Grice’s presentation at the planetarium (30 minutes)
Click here: for an interview with Noreen Grice (15 minutes)

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Marc Hauser on “Moral Minds”

Note: This interview was broadcast on WCAI/WNAN, and is also featured on WGBH’s Science Luminaries series, as part of WGBH Science City.
The provocative Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser recently spoke about “The Evolution of Our Moral Intuitions” at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, as part of the Cambridge Science Festival. This ThoughtCast interview with Hauser serves as a good “first course” — but to get to the meat and potatoes, check out his book Moral Minds.
Click here: to listen. (17:40 minutes)

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