The Drama of Creation: Writers on Writing
How can a handful of words, scribbled on a napkin or a train schedule, grow into a timeless play? How does a storyteller create characters with lives and intentions of their own? Is writing a miraculous act, impossible t..
The Ethics of Biotechnology
The Nuclear Age—sprung upon the world with the atomic bomb—remains a bitter memory. How biotechnology, with its power to change life on Earth at the most fundamental level, will be viewed in the decades to come depen..
The Executive Branch
Many equate it with the Presidency, but the Executive branch of our government is far more complex than that. Containing departments and agencies that directly affect the health, safety, security, and prosperity of the A..
The Experiment: Conflict
Five guards, nine prisoners...until one changes sides. In this study in elemental power politics, the prisoners work to undermine the guards' authority; the most powerful prisoner is sentenced to solitary confinement, bu..
The Experiment: Tyranny
In this episode, the primal exercise of negotiation and opportunism is explicated as 12 prisoners and guards band together to form a new and balanced society. Mere hours later, faced with an inability to enforce the comm..
The Glass Menagerie: Character Studies Conversations
Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece The Glass Menagerie is a prime example of the memory play in modern literature. In this program hosted by Eli Wallach, former cast members and directors of Menagerie discuss plot and the..
The Good Soldier
This title begins with a quote from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity". This film portrays five combat veteran..
The Guantanamo Trap
At Guantanamo Bay detention camp, history has proved that concepts of right and wrong can all too easily become distorted by expediency and ambiguity. This program examines the lives of high-profile individuals from both..
The Hidden Order: Chemistry and the Elements, from John Dalton to Henry Moseley
At the beginning of the 19th century, 55 elements had been discovered, and although scientists had no idea how many more they might yet find, they already had a suspicion that there was some sort of unifying pattern behi..
The Human Face of Big Data
With the rapid emergence of digital devices, an unstoppable, invisible force is changing human lives in ways from the microscopic to the gargantuan: Big Data, a word that was barely used a few years ago but now governs t..