Princeton professor Eddie Glaude, Jr. joins us to talk about looking at today’s racism through the eyes of one of the great thinkers of the 20th Century.
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Colson Whitehead Visits The Jim Crow South
Colson Whitehead’s latest novel is based on a real juvenile detention reformatory in 1960s Florida. He joins us to talk about his story of two boys, bound by the trauma around them as they swing between hope and cynicism.
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How Shakespeare Spun Tragedy And Comedy From An Epidemic
Stephen Greenblatt, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, joins us to talk about how an epidemic influenced Shakespeare.
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Lessons On Kindness From NPR’s Scott Simon
The Weekend Edition host talks about his new YA novel about accepting others when, sometimes, their gifts are hidden.
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Susan Choi On Her Nation Book Award Winner
Susan Choi joins us to talk about her book, “Trust Exercise: A Novel,” which was a runaway hit last year, delighting readers and critics all the way to a National Book Award.
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Lawrence Wright Predicted This Would Happen
Lawrence Wright joins us to talk about his fiction focused on a pandemic upending the world, written months and months before our current crisis.
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When Science Misses The Forest For The Trees
Lulu Miller, co-founder of NPR’s “Invisibilia,” joins us to talk about her study of the first president of Stanford University, a taxonomist obsessed with fish, and how his discoveries — and ultimately his intellectual myopia — helped her to make sense of her own world.
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Ireland Split In Two: A History Of The Troubles
New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe talks to us about assessing this recent dark period of Irish history through the lens of this mysterious disappearance.
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When Bombs Tried to Kill Them, Books Kept Their Souls Alive
Journalist Mike Thompson joins us to talk about one bright spot in the Syrian Civil War: a secret world of books that offered normality and refuge.
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‘Undone’: The Story Behind Amazon’s Coolest Series
Kate Purdy, co-creator, producer and writer of “Undone,” joins us to talk about her drama, which uses Rotoscope animation to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead.
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When Lincoln Died, The Drama Began
The co-creators of a dramatic podcast about the days following Lincoln’s assassination join us to talk about crafting a compelling modern drama from the annals of history.
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Margaret Atwood Tells The Rest Of The Story
Novelist Margaret Atwood joins us to talk about her new book,“The Testaments.”
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