Brushes With Death

Queens College professor Harold Schechter is interested in subjects that simultaneously repel and attract most people. He has written extensively about serial killers, violence and death.

His latest work, THE WHOLE DEATH CATALOG takes at the rituals and ephemera that surround death. Schechter talks about the psychology, history and trends of death amongst the living.

LISTEN: HAROLD SCHECHTER

Rolling Stone journalist Mikal Gilmore has been up close to death in two different ways. In 1996 he was assigned to cover the final days of psychedelic guru Timothy Leary.

Leary, who had terminal cancer, wanted to turn his death into a media event, and had plans to broadcast his final moments live on the internet. Gilmore had been close to a high-profile death before. His brother, Gary Gilmore, was the first person executed after the Supreme Court upheld death penalty statutes in 1976.

LISTEN: MIKAL GILMORE - TWO DIFFERENT DEATHS

The Occult and America

Spiritualism and the occult have often found a place to thrive in the United States.

Mitch Horowitz, author of OCCULT AMERICA: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, says that this "hidden wisdom" didn't get debunked from American life as much as it just got absorbed into more mainstream ideas.

Horowitz talks about the role the Masons played in the founding of the United States, and how Norman Vincent Peale and other popular self-helpers took from the example of a mail order psychic.

LISTEN: MITCH HOROWITZ - OCCULT AMERICA

The Comedy Factory at Second City

For 50 years the Second City comedy theater has been producing top-notch comic talent. Alan Arkin, Fred Willard, John Belushi, George Wendt, Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert are all alums of the "comedy factory" of Second City.

Chicago Sun-Times writer Mike Thomas interviewed over a hundred Second City alums and high-profile fans about the history of the comedy franchise for his new book THE SECOND CITY UNSCRIPTED. Thomas talks about the competition, camaraderie and craft of the famous comedy troupe.

LISTEN: MIKE THOMAS - SECOND CITY

Sex, Violence and Bolsheviks

Dirty letters, icepick wielding assassins and a simmering world war all came into play during the turbulent final days of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

Bertrand Patenaude, a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, details the soap opera final days and turbulent political life of the revolutionary in his book TROTKSKY: DOWNFALL OF A REVOLUTIONARY.

Patenaude discusses the intrigue involved in Trotsky's final days and the battling ideas that splintered the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.


LISTEN: BERTRAND PATENAUDE - TROTSKY

Taking Inventory of Pop Culture

Everyone has their all-time top-1o desert island discs. There is no quicker way to start and angry argument with a STAR WARS fan than to dispute their ranking of the quality of the six Star Wars movies.

List making seems naturally linked to pop culture in a way that it is not with higher culture. Does anyone have an all-time top-10 Renaissance frescoes? The populism of listing, and ranking, comes from the chance for everyone to be an expert.

The Onion AV Club has created INVENTORY, a book of lists ranging from "10 Songs Nearly Ruined By Saxophone" to "6 Keanu Reeves Movies Somehow Not Ruined By Keanu Reeves." Entertainment Editor from The AV Club Tasha Robinson talks about the process of list-making and sifting through pop culture.

LISTEN: TASHA ROBINSON - THE ONION AV CLUB

Pencils to Pixels: Language and the Digital Age

It is obvious that a universe of digital technology is changing the world.

A nearly bottomless amount of information available on the internet. Social networking in cyberspace and the digital soapbox of websites and blogs have opened up new options for human communication.

But are these new tools changing the way we think, talk and write? Is the internet having a negative affect on our brains?

Dennis Baron says no. Baron suggests, the negative ramifications of computers are no more harmful than the invention of the written world.

University of Illinois professor of English and Linguistics examines the impact of the digital revolution on reading, writing and communication in his book A BETTER PENCIL.

LISTEN: DENNIS BARON - A BETTER PENCIL

A Communist Ponzi Scheme

Overreaching military expansion. Sudden bank runs revealing a shaky economic foundation. Rampant cronyism. Sound familiar?

Princeton professor of Contemporary History Stephen Kotkin thinks so. Kotkin has notes all these factors in the not-so-distant history of Easter Germany, Poland and Romania.

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kotkin unpacks the factors that led to what seemed to be an abrupt unraveling of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 80s and early 90s.

LISTEN: STEPHEN KOTKIN - UNCIVIL SOCIETY

The Cable News Audience and Influence

Fox, CNN and MSNBC battle for eyeballs and influence on the political news cycle.

Blogs, opinion columns and even the old-style broadcast networks seem to take their cue from the cable nets. But the cable outlets don't command as many viewers as the bluster of the prime time hosts would seemingly indicate.

Dr. Robert Thompson, Director of the Blier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University watches it all. Who else is watching might be surprising.

LISTEN: ROBERT THOMPSON - CABLE NEWS