Quntos KunQuest has been incarcerated at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, since 1997. His new novel This Life (Bookshop|Amazon), which draws on his experiences there, has earned acclaim in The New Yorker. KunQuest’s characters are vividly rendered, and voice artist Sean Crisden does a superb job of bringing them to life in the audio version. Before the Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond (Bookshop|Amazon), by cosmologist and theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton, is partly a memoir of her childhood and teenage years living under the totalitarian communist regime in Albania, and partly a discussion of her research into the possibility that our universe is just one of many multiverses. Voice artist Xe Sands brings a warmth and sure-footedness to the audio version, making even the most challenging scientific explanations a pleasure to listen to. This is part of a complete episode.
After our conversation about towns with extremely short names, many listeners wrote to tell us about Why, Arizona. Others pointed out that there are towns called Ely in Iowa, Minnesota, and Nevada. Other super-short appellations include Rye, New...
Debbie from Crawfordsville, Florida, says that when she and her husband reach an impasse while working on something, they’ll say Let’s grok about it, which they use to mean “Let’s think about it.” Grok was coined by...
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