StudioTulsa

On this edition of ST, a nuts-and-bolts discussion of a topic that few of us actually want to talk about. Nevertheless, our program covers some important ground today; our guest is Scott Taylor Smith, a venture capitalist and lawyer in California, who talks about his new book, "When Someone Dies: The Practical Guide to the Logistics of Death." This is a useful and readable guidebook that is --- as was noted in the Library Home Journal --- "well-organized, succinct, and detailed without being overwhelming....

Food, glorious food --- it's so much more, of course, than what we eat. Food is memory, food is family, food is love, food is culture, and food is community.

Everyone knows the Internet is affecting if not entirely changing just about every facet of life today, and one area where this is particularly apparent is that of health and medicine. (Have you ever googled your doctor? Or do you know someone who's done so?

(Please note: This interview originally aired in January of this year.) Our guest on ST is Alexandra Horowitz, author of the bestselling "Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know." Horowitz, who teaches psychology, animal behavior, and canine cognition at Barnard College, Columbia University, joins us by phone to talk about her fascinating new volume, which is a collection of essays on how we perceive, discover, and experience the world around us.

Our guest on ST is Tony Knowles, the president of the National Energy Policy Institute (or NEPI) and former governor of Alaska. Based here at the University of Tulsa, and created in 2008 with a donation from the George Kaiser Family Foundation (which also donates funds to Public Radio Tulsa), NEPI is a think-tank aiming to provide policymakers with better research and scholarship with which to design and implement energy policy.

On this installment of ST, we're joined by our old friend and colleague, Jeff Martin, a local writer who's also the coordinator and creator of the popular Book Smart Tulsa reading series, the fiction editor at This Land, and an occasional commentator for this program. Jeff's newest book, just out, is an fun-to-read trade-paperback collection that brings together many works of short (make that "very short") fiction exploring "an Oklahoma of the mind," so to speak.

Today our guest on ST is the accomplished Polish musician Agnieszka Przemyk-Bryła, who's won several prestigious piano competitions over the years and who's also an assistant professor in the Piano Department at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw. She'll be giving a free-to-the-public piano recital here on the TU campus tomorrow night (Wednesday the 24th) at 7:30pm; the recital, presented by the TU School of Music, will take place in the Gussman Concert Hall of the Lorton Performance Center. On the program will be music by Szymanowski, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff.

On this edition of StudioTulsa, we welcome back Kostis Protopapas, who's been the Artistic Director of Tulsa Opera since May of 2008. He previously served as the company's Associate Conductor and Chorusmaster, and he joins us today to talk about Tulsa Opera's latest production --- the final show if its current season, for which Protopapas himself is the conductor --- "Aida" by Giuseppe Verdi. This production opened on Saturday the 20th at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center's Chapman Music Hall; it will continue with two more curtains, on Friday the 26th and Sunday the 28th.