Secular Sunday

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The New Book Network program summary: You won’t be surprised to learn that the best way to move papers was to give the people what they wanted–scandal, outrage, marvels, miracles and outright inventions. In The Sun and the Moon. The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (Basic Books, 2008) shows how the early masters of the trade invented the modern paper by telling the public that the moon was inhabited by the recognizable ancestors of “Bat Boy.” Goodman marches a gallery of rogues across the book’s pages–an astronomer with an over-active imagination, an editor with an invented past, a horde of street urchins hawking papers and eating oysters. P.T. Barnum and Edger Allan Poe make appearances! 

Paul Krugman on Point of Inquiry: The occasion for our interview is the release of his latest book, End this Depression Now, in paperback. It is just out and, besides being a very lucid explanation of our current economic predicament, it is also a work that goes straight at the heart of a central concern of this show—what is science, and what isn't, in a field that is perhaps even more political than other aspects of science... economics.