American Icons: Monticello
This is the home of America’s aspirations and its deepest contradictions. Thomas Jefferson was as passionate about building his house as he was about founding the United States. Yet Monticello was a plantation worked ...
Recent Video
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Merrill Garbus Becomes tUnE-yArDs
Merrill Garbus is the performer and multi-instrumentalist behind tUnE-yArDs — a music project that blends African-inspired rhythms and vocals with electric bass and saxophone. But she ...
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Eugene Mirman vs. The Cable Guy
The Brooklyn-based comedian Eugene Mirman is the stand-up king of hipsterville. He was a regular on the HBO series Flight of the Concords and now ...
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Beauty, Truth, Math, Art
Last month, thousands of mathematicians attended the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Boston — the largest annual gathering of its kind. In addition to presentations on phylogenetic ...
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Eve Beglarian's Huck Finn Adventure
In 2009 the composer Eve Beglarian spent four months traveling down the Mississippi River. The sounds and stories she gathered from the trip inspired her ...
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Transmit This
A lot of us learned that Guglielmo Marconi invented radio, but Nikola Tesla transmitted electromagnetic waves before Marconi — the Supreme Court decided the case in ...
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Teacher Redesign Revealed
Last fall, Kate Ahearn from Haverhill, Massachusetts, wrote in begging us to redesign the image of teachers. "I have been teaching for 15-plus years and ...
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Harold O'Neal's Marvelous Fantasy
A few hundred years ago, classical pianists would impress audiences by original cadenzas in the middle of a concerto — riffing, we would say now. Now ...
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Tim Minchin's Christmas Carol
Tim Minchin closes the show with a Christmas song he wrote for his daughter. And although he’s got a bone to pick with the ...
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True Confessions: Taboos Revealed
It’s easy enough to mock fallen taboos — but is nothing sacred? We asked our audience to fill in the blanks: "_______ is a taboo ...





Featured Comments
To anyone who believes that Thomas Jefferson was a person of unimpeachable integrity who could not possibly have fathered a ...
Amazing! Makes me wish they were all live. Tune-Yards is one of my new favorite bands. :)