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Charlie Trotter is the hottest chef in America right now. Partly due to the way he’s reinvented the art of cooking vegetables/vegetable cuisine. He says he wants a diner to come out of his restaurant in Chicago having had the best meal of his life and only realize after the fact that all he had was vegetables.

Charlie Trotter’s not a vegan, but he is in a perpetual vegetative frame of mind/state. His passionate is vegetables; he loves their textures, their colors, their shapes. He says he wants a diner to come out of his restaurant in Chicago having had the best meal of his life and only realize after the fact that all he had was vegetables. Charlie Trotter’s not a vegan, but he is in a perpetual vegetative frame of mind/state.

His passionate is vegetables; he loves their textures, their colors, their shapes. He scours the country for the farmer who grows the best white alba truffles, searches the world for the best importer of lotus root, and relies on his wife to harvest the best heirloom tomatoes for the restaurant. The results are meals like a collard green tortellini with radish sauce and smoked tofu or potato tuiles with parsley root, pickled golden beets, and opal basil.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Charlie Trotter, chef at Charlie Trotter in Chicago

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If mapping your brain were like mapping, say, Pennsylvania, John Ratey says, it wouldn’t be enough to put in all the byways and backroads; you’d have to render voting belts and ethnic connections, today and in history, also weather patterns and geologic underpinnings.

But the brain, Dr. Ratey adds, with 40 quadrillion synaptic connections, is vastly more complicated than Pennsylvania, and more organic, fluid, interactive and malleable. John Ratey’s a psychiatrist catching up with the cognitive sciences. He says the brain looks less like a machine than an ecosystem: picture a jungle with a known number of beetles, banana trees, monkeys and parrots.
Call them the genetic structures of our consciousness and imagination, but realize they no more fix your thinking or feeling than the jungle today forecasts the jungle 30 years from now. Ratey says: knowing your brain can change your life.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

John Ratey, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of “A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain.”

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“Dying is easy,” Groucho Marx once said. “Comedy is hard.” For more than 40 years The Second City comedy club has made cutting-edge satire and seat-of-the-pants improv look easy. The club is a boot camp, backbone and template for American comedy.

It launched the careers of dozens of top-shelf comedians – from John Belushi to Mike Myers – and continues to spawn endless comic scripts for stage and screen. Second City started as a refuge from the safe and stale humor of TV variety shows, where “mother-in-law” jokes or poking fun at Eisenhower’s golf game were the norm.

Taking cues from the headlines and the audience, nothing was off limits for a Second City skit: sex, politics, drugs, the highbrow, the lowbrow and everything in between. It was interactive improv as the essential comic lubricant that gave Second City a cultural currency and staying power in American entertainment.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Sheldon Patinkin, Artistic Consultant for Second City

Tami Sagher, current Second City member

Richard Kind, actor/comedian and former Second City member

and Shelly Long, actress and former Second City member.