Novelist Amitav Ghosh talks about 19th-century India and the opium trade in his sweeping new epic, “Sea of Poppies.”
Comments [3]Global big thinker Fareed Zakaria is out with his latest big book, and the title almost says it all: It’s “The Post-American World.”
Take a look at the world and it’s not hard to see: the world’s tallest buildings, biggest airplane, biggest investment fund, biggest movie industry, biggest refinery, biggest casino — heck, the world’s biggest [...]
Despite all evidence, for a lot of Americans, the world — or their sense of it — and the American place in it seems frozen in about 1999. The Soviet Union — vanquished. The American economy — number one, of course. American might and influence — unchallenged. The USA — a master superpower.
Scholar Parag Khanna [...]
It’s a globalized world, but that doesn’t mean we all live the same. Take high school students in the U.S., China and India. Different worlds.
A new documentary takes the two million minutes of high school life and compares them — in Indiana, Shanghai and Bangalore.
It’s a little shocking to see. Bright American kids on Xbox [...]
One in five children in America today is a child of immigrants. And those numbers are only rising.
Yet as the immigration debate rages, the real lives of those children are too often invisible. Transplanted to a new country, they struggle to master a new language — and a new culture. Some will thrive in school. [...]
In China, pork has become so expensive they’re stealing pigs by the truckload. In Kansas, it’s wheat. In Mexico, they’ve got tortilla riots over the cost of corn. In American supermarkets, the price of milk and eggs has soared.
All over the world, the price of food is headed up. Sometimes way up. And an era [...]
Behold, the humble banana. It’s not as simple as you think. Its tree is not a tree. Its fruit is a giant berry — in fact, it’s the world’s largest herb.
The banana is the planet’s biggest fruit crop, but most can’t reproduce without human intervention. Until 1876, almost no one in North America had ever [...]
For decades, breast cancer was seen as an affliction of affluent women in the industrialized West. And heaven knows it is that. In the U.S., one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer.
But the world’s most lethal form of cancer for women is not bound by borders these days. From South America to [...]
In an archive edition of On Point, we look at Sacred Harp music, a centuries-old American tradition of shape-note singing and its revival around the country today.
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Photographer Annie Leibovitz talks about the most important public - and personal - images of her celebrated career.
The Christmas Revels invade our studio for old Wessex carols, a Somerset Wassail, and Thomas Hardy’s “Under the Greenwood Tree.”
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Theologian Martin Marty and physician Jerome Groopman join us for a conversation about hope in turbulent times — where we find it, and how we hold on.
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