With Good Reason

An entire generation of Americans grew up knowing no other president than Franklin Roosevelt, who served four terms and led them through the Depression and World War II. Pulitzer Prize winning FDR biographer David Kennedy (Stanford University) gives a spellbinding account of this ebullient man of constant cheer who crafted the New Deal and the [...]

  John Aler made his operatic debut in 1977 as Ernesto in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. Since then, he’s performed in some of the greatest opera houses in the world and has won four Grammys for his classical recordings. Aler shares his thoughts on voice and the future of singing. Also featured: It’s Mozart meets the [...]

A Confederacy of Dunces, by New Orleans-born John Kennedy Toole, is one of the great stories of American literature. Published almost 12 years after his tragic suicide, the book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and became a modern classic. Cory MacLauchlin’s (Germanna Community College) new biography of Toole, Butterfly in the Typewriter, tells [...]

Michael Jones McKean (Virginia Commonwealth University) is an artist whose work is a simple, but phenomenal visual event: he creates rainbows that can arc up to 400 feet in height. For over two weeks last summer, his rainbows in downtown Omaha, Nebraska could be seen from a thousand feet away. Also featured: If you’ve ever [...]

Horses and humans have long interacted, but now therapeutic horse riding is helping children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in some life-changing ways. Kim Wendell (Cori Sikich Therapeutic Riding Center) and Sandra Ward (College of William Mary) were part of a study that found the benefits of riding carried over to more positive behaviors in the [...]

You can’t see them on the surface. But at the bottom of some of the world’s largest bodies of water are areas called dead zones where fish and other life can’t survive. Robert Diaz (College of William & Mary) tracks the development of these dead zones, which are rapidly increasing. He says agricultural runoff and [...]

Civil rights activist Bob Moses (The Algebra Project) famously helped organize a voter registration drive in Mississippi that changed the political landscape for the black community. He also believed that something else was necessary for full citizenship in society: math literacy. Oliver Hill (Virginia State University) agrees that learning algebra is a civil right. Also [...]

Shop class 20 years ago meant hacksaws and hammers, but the shop class of 2013 is about teaching innovation and creation through computer programming, 3D printers, and maybe even Legos. A leader in this new kind of education, Mano Talaiver (Longwood University) teaches kids how to program LED lights to customize clothing. Also featured: Not [...]

Aniko Bodroghkozy  (University of Virginia) is the author of the new book Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement which explores how the newly created evening news shows shaped attitudes about race relations during the Civil Rights Movement. She investigates the network news treatment of events including the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign, integration [...]

First published in 1947, Goodnight Moon has become one of the most popular books for young children. Yet the book’s author, Margaret Wise Brown, always wanted to write for adults. With Good Reason producer Kelley Libby tells the story of Brown’s life, from Hollins College to her tragic early death. Also featured: Opened after the [...]