Part 1: Literary and cultural critic, Camille Paglia is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson and, most recently, Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems. She is University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. In this segment, Paglia speaks about what it means to be a public intellectual, offers her takes on Angelina Jolie, Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton, and Condoleezza Rice, and discusses her love of popular culture. She also criticizes traditional feminism for its devalorization of the stay-at-home mom.

Part 2: In this segment, Camille Paglia, University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, discusses her best-selling 2005 book, Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems. Paglia explains how she wrote her lucid and passionate explications of these short and accessible English-language poems for a general audience. She discusses the book's title poem, John Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV," and she explains her strategy for including religious, bohemian, pastoral, urban, gay, and other types of poems from Shakespeare to current times. She also talks about who is not in anthology and why.