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Salman Rushdie – A Permeable Frontier – Think Again – a Big Think Podcast #115

Spontaneous talk on surprise topics. Author Salman Rushdie on the secret life of cities and so much more. 


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Since 2008, Big Think has been sharing big ideas from creative and curious minds. Since 2015, the Think Again podcast has been taking us out of our comfort zone, surprising our guests and Jason Gots, your host, with unexpected conversation starters from Big Think’s interview archives.

Today’s guest is Salman Rushdie. He’s the author of twelve previous novels and four books of nonfiction, including Joseph Anton, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights which we discussed two years ago on this show.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

His kaleidoscopic, funny, philosophical new novel The Golden House has been called a “return to realism” but maybe only because the present-day American realities it draws upon and reimagines are so indistinguishable from fantasy.

In this episode, the first one with a repeat guest since the show was launched (Henry Rollins was one taping split into two episodes) Rushdie and Jason discuss New York City, the surrealism of everyday life, comic books, and much, much, more. 


Surprise conversation starter interview clips in this episode:

Richard Dawkins on religion and anti-science

Ariel Levy on “having it all” 

About Think Again – A Big Think Podcast: 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? Some of the best conversations happen when we’re pushed outside of our comfort zones. Each week on Think Again, we surprise smart people you may have heard of with short clips from Big Think’s interview archives on every imaginable subject. These conversations could, and do, go anywhere.



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