You've got 10 minutes with Einstein. What do you talk about? Black holes? Time travel?
Why not gambling? The Art of War? Contemporary parenting?
Each week, host Jason Gots surprises some of the world's brightest minds with ideas they're not at all prepared to discuss. Join us and special guests Neil Gaiman, Alan Alda, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Richard Dawkins, Maria Popova, Mary-Louise Parker, Neil deGrasse Tyson and many more...
Conflict Photographer Lynsey Addario on Art, Love, and War
For two decades she's traveled the world, photographing humans in crisis. Pulitzer and MacArthur winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario on what it's all taught her.
- a story of survival that leaves our host speechless
- and a story of casual cruelty that will leave you shaking your head in disbelief
Think about all the images you see in a day. The advertisements. The photos and videos as you search the web or scroll through social media, if you do that. Now think back a century and a half or so to when photography was new. Imagine the first time a British monarch saw a picture of an Inuit family, or vice versa. What did they make of each other? What did it remake in themselves?
My guest today, photographer Lynsey Addario, has spent over two decades traveling the world taking intimate and dramatic portraits, often of lives in crisis—the perpetrators and victims of tyranny, revolution, famine, and rape. Her work spans over 70 countries and has won her a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize, but has never been gathered into a book until now. Of Love and War gives her most compelling photos the space they deserve, along with essays, interview excerpts, and letters she wrote home to process the things she was witnessing.
Lynsey's pictures offer people like myself, living out our lives in privileged circumstances, a window into the beauty, suffering, and everyday humanity of our contemporaries across the world. And like it or not, ready or not, when you stop scrolling long enough look into one of these images, it looks back into you.
Surprise conversation starter interview clips in this episode:
Will Hunt (explorer) – into the Earth: the mysteries and meanings of underground spaces
The catacombs of Paris. Secret graffiti beneath NYC. The hidden cities of Cappadocia. Writer and explorer Will Hunt is your philosophical tour guide to what lies beneath.
- "The surface of the earth is where we're rational . . . Part of us dreads the chaos, and part of us is always attracted to it."
- "There were these things hanging from the ceiling…long strands of bacteria called "snotsicles"… But at our feet was a natural stream that had been running through Brooklyn forever."
- "It's…about death. Undergoing a death. We're going into the other world and then retreating to the surface… changed in some way."
Ha Jin on the wild and tragic life of China's greatest poet, Li Bai
The 8th century AD was a tough time to be a genius from a poor family in China. Poet and novelist Ha Jin on the tortured life of the legendary drunken poet Li Bai. Also: panpsychism, the value of idleness, and humanities education in America today.
- "I knew in the case of Li Bai, I should follow the poems. Every masterpiece by him would be kind of a small crisis…a center for drama in his life."
- "There are people who want a different kind of fulfillment. Society should be open to that. In the long run, you don't know—maybe those idlers can produce more for the society."
Don’t get too comfortable: Marlon James on his “African 'Game of Thrones'”
Man-Booker prizewinning author Marlon James in a freewheeling game of verbal ping-pong on African mythology, '80's hip hop, heavy metal, tattoos, and billionaire philanthropy.
- "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" has been compared to "Lord of the Rings" and "Game of Thrones", but it's something entirely different.
- Growing up gay in a deeply religious Jamaica and writing his way out of there.
- Trickster narrators, truths you have to sort out for yourself.
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