Read Learn Live Podcast
98 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 2 years ago - ★★★★★ - 27 ratingsRead Learn Live Podcast - Improve Yourself Through Literature
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Episodes
Learning America – Ep 96 with Luma Mufleh
March 31, 2022 00:07 - 46 minutes - 64.4 MBIt was a wrong turn that changed everything. When Luma Mufleh—a Muslim, gay, refugee woman from hyper-conservative Jordan—stumbled upon a pick-up game of soccer in Clarkston, Georgia, something compelled her to join. The players, 11- and 12-year-olds from Liberia, Afghanistan, and Sudan, soon welcomed her as coach of their ragtag but fiercely competitive group. Drawn into their lives, Mufleh learned that few of her players, all local public school students, could read a single word. She ask...
The Kaiju Preservation Society – Ep 95 with John Scalzi
February 27, 2022 07:12 - 52 minutes - 72.6 MBWhen COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls “an animal rights organization”. Tom’s team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on. What Tom doesn’t tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here on Earth. Not our Earth, at at least. In an alt...
The Sleep Fix – Ep 94 with Diane Macedo
January 23, 2022 22:52 - 54 minutes - 74.4 MBRoughly thirty percent of the population is estimated to be living with insomnia, while many more suffer from other sleep disorders. ABC anchor/correspondent Diane Macedo—a former insomniac herself—understands the struggle. Now, in The Sleep Fix, Macedo presents perspective-shifting research and easy-to-implement solutions to help millions of people finally get the shut-eye they need. Macedo’s mission is crucial to our health and well-being. Everything from our heart health to our mental ac...
Read Until You Understand – Ep 93 with Farah Jasmine Griffin
December 14, 2021 09:33 - 53 minutes - 74.4 MBFarah Jasmine Griffin is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University where she also served as the inaugural Chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department. She is the author of five books including Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative (1995), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (2001), Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the Greatest Jazz Co...
The Power of Nothing to Lose – Ep 92 with William L. Silber
September 07, 2021 05:57 - 51 minutes - 71.3 MBFollowing books by Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Ariely, noted economics professor William L. Silber explores the Hail Mary effect, from its origins in sports to its applications to history, nature, politics, and business. A quarterback like Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers gambles with a Hail Mary pass at the end of a football game when he has nothing to lose – the risky throw might turn defeat into victory, or end in a meaningless interception. Rodgers may not realize it, but he has much in common wi...
Catch the Rabbit – Ep 91 with Lana Bastašić
August 07, 2021 23:46 - 52 minutes - 73.2 MBWinner of the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature, Lana Bastašić’s powerful debut novel Catch the Rabbit is a modern-day Alice in Wonderland set in post-war Bosnia, in which two young women plunge into the illusive landscape of their shared history. It’s been twelve years since inseparable childhood friends Lejla and Sara have spoken, but an unexpected phone call thrusts Sara back into a world she left behind, a language she’s buried, and painful memories that rise unbidden to the surf...
Ridgeline – Ep 90 with Michael Punke
July 06, 2021 13:38 - 54 minutes - 75.1 MBRidgeline is the thrilling, long-awaited return of the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Revenant In 1866, with the country barely recovered from the Civil War, new war breaks out on the western frontier—a clash of cultures between the Native tribes who have lived on the land for centuries and a young, ambitious nation. Colonel Henry Carrington arrives in Wyoming’s Powder River Valley to lead the US Army in defending the opening of a new road for gold miners and settlers. Carringt...
A Master of Djinn – Ep 89 with P. Djèlí Clark
June 16, 2021 05:09 - 43 minutes - 59.9 MBForty years ago in Egypt, the mystic and inventor Al-Jahiz pierced the veil between realms, sending magic into the world before vanishing into the unknown. Think steampunk meets history meets detective novel meets magic! Now in 1912 Cairo, humans brush elbows with djinn in crowded tramcars and airships sail the skies. In this new world the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities maintains an uneasy peace. When someone claiming to be Al-Jahiz “returned” murders a...
From PA to LA – Ep 88 with Yogi Roth
May 19, 2021 03:21 - 45 minutes - 62.3 MBFrom PA to LA isn’t like anything you’ve read before. Expect this book to cut deeper than your traditional tell-all. Built around a detailed, inside look at the Pitt and USC football programs, it is at heart a story about a small town kid from Pennsylvania who uses sports, travel and adventure as a way to develop his own winning philosophy of life. The underlying themes reveal a different, yet exhilarating path to getting the most out of each day in both our personal and professional lives. ...
Beloved Beasts – Ep 87 with Michelle Nijhuis
April 04, 2021 02:42 - 56 minutes - 78.5 MBA vibrant history of the modern conservation movement―told through the lives and ideas of the people who built it. In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species to extinction, a movement to protect and conserve them was born. In Beloved Beasts, acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the movement’s history: from early battles to save charismatic species such as the American...
A Beginner’s Guide to America – Ep 86 with Roya Hakakian
March 12, 2021 02:57 - 49 minutes - 68.9 MBA stirring, witty, and poignant glimpse into the bewildering American immigrant experience from someone who has lived it. Also, a mirror held up to America. Into the maelstrom of unprecedented contemporary debates about immigrants in the United States, this perfectly timed book gives us a portrait of what the new immigrant experience in America is really like. Written as a “guide” for the newly arrived, and providing “practical information and advice,” Roya Hakakian, an immigrant herself, r...
The Women’s History of the Modern World – Ep 85 with Rosalind Miles
February 06, 2021 23:54 - 1 hour - 83.9 MBThe internationally bestselling author of Who Cooked the Last Supper? presents a wickedly witty and very current history of the extraordinary female rebels, reactionaries, and trailblazers who left their mark on history from the French Revolution up to the present day. Now is the time for a new women’s history — for the famous, infamous, and unsung women to get their due — from the Enlightenment to the #MeToo movement. Recording the important milestones in the birth of the modern feminist ...
Mental Illness and Graphic Novel as Memoir – Ep 84 with Joshua Kemble
January 05, 2021 02:51 - 1 hour - 59.5 MBJosh thought he was living the artist’s dream. The young, ambitious comic book creator had a hip Portland apartment, an affectionate fiancé, and his whole life ahead of him. Until the night he finds himself on Burnside Bridge, willing himself to jump. How did he get here? Two Stories is a confessional graphic memoir that grapples with questions of faith, mental illness, depravity, and, ultimately, redemption in a fallen world. Here’s a great trailer for the book: Joshua Kemble is a full-ti...
Don’t Judge a College Athlete by Their Cover – Ep 83 with Corey Sobel
December 02, 2020 03:13 - 1 hour - 64.1 MBThe Redshirt challenges tenacious stereotypes, shedding new light on the hypermasculine world of American football. Over the course of their first year playing for a Division One college football program that is willing to win at all costs, roommates Miles Furling and Reshawn McCoy are forced to choose between their true selves and the selves that have been imposed on them by the game. Corey Sobel’s debut novel, The Redshirt, was published by the New Poetry & Prose Series at the University ...
A Mayan Creation Story – Ep 82 with Ilan Stavans
November 01, 2020 18:03 - 49 minutes - 46.1 MBPopul Vuh: A Retelling is an inspired and urgent prose retelling of the Mayan myth of creation by acclaimed Latin American author and scholar Ilan Stavans, gorgeously illustrated by Salvadoran folk artist Gabriela Larios and introduced by renowned author, diplomat, and environmental activist Homero Aridjis. The archetypal creation story of Latin America, the Popul Vuh began as a Maya oral tradition millennia ago. In the mid-sixteenth century, as indigenous cultures across the continent were...
Stories From a Syrian Refugee – Ep 81 with Perween Richards
October 15, 2020 18:25 - 45 minutes - 42.5 MBDrawn from her experiences of growing up as a young woman in the ‘world’s largest prison’—Gaza—Nayrouz Qarmout’s stories in The Sea Cloak (translated by Perween Richards) stitch together a stirring patchwork of perspectives exploring what it means to be a Palestinian today. Whether following the daily struggles of orphaned children fighting to survive in the rubble of recent bombardments, or mapping the complex tensions between political forces vying to control Palestinian lives, these stori...
You Ought To Do A Story About Me – Ep 80 with Ted Jackson
August 22, 2020 23:40 - 52 minutes - 48.8 MBYou Ought To Do A Story About Me: Addiction, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Endless Quest for Redemption is the heartbreaking, timeless, and redemptive story of the transformative friendship binding a fallen-from-grace NFL player and a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who meet on the streets of New Orleans, offering a rare glimpse into the precarious world of homelessness and the lingering impact of systemic racism and poverty on the lives of NOLA’s citizens. Author Ted Jackson is a...
E.E. Cummings And The Great War – Ep 79 with Alison Rosenblitt
August 01, 2020 01:42 - 54 minutes - 50.2 MBAn incisive biography of E. E. Cummings’s early life, including his World War I ambulance service and subsequent imprisonment, inspirations for his inventive poetry. E. E. Cummings is one of our most popular and enduring poets, one whose name extends beyond the boundaries of the literary world. Renowned for his formally fractured, gleefully alive poetry, Cummings is not often thought of as a war poet. But his experience in France and as a prisoner during World War I (the basis for his first...
Our Moral Character – Ep 78 with Christian B. Miller
July 16, 2020 15:49 - 56 minutes - 52.1 MBWe like to think of ourselves, our friends, and our families as decent people. We may not be saints, but we are still honest, relatively kind, and mostly trustworthy. Author and philosopher Christian B. Miller argues in his new book, “The Character Gap: How Good Are We?” that we are badly mistaken in thinking this. Hundreds of recent studies in psychology tell a different story: that we all have serious character flaws that prevent us from being as good as we think we are – and that we do no...
In Praise of Walking – Ep 77 with Shane O’Mara
June 27, 2020 21:04 - 51 minutes - 47.8 MBIn this captivating book, neuroscientist Shane O’Mara invites us to marvel at the benefits walking confers on our bodies and brains, and to appreciate the advantages of this uniquely human skill. From walking’s evolutionary origins, traced back millions of years to life forms on the ocean floor, to new findings from cutting-edge research, he reveals how the brain and nervous system give us the ability to balance, weave through a crowded city, and run our “inner GPS” system. Walking is good f...
How To Get things DONE – Ep 76 with Ellen Goodwin
June 14, 2020 04:07 - 57 minutes - 52.9 MBDONE: How To Work When No One is Watching is a hands-on guidebook that teaches, through stories, examples, and activities how working with (and around) your brain, can make all the difference in what can be accomplished every day; the importance of being in action (and not motion); the best way to prevent obstacles from stopping you; how to easily build stronger and better habits; why it’s more important to manage you energy instead of your time, and why one-size does not fit all when it co...
Baseball’s Swing Kings – Ep 75 with Jared Diamond
May 25, 2020 18:09 - 1 hour - 56.3 MBFrom the Wall Street Journal’s national baseball writer, the captivating story of the home run boom, following a group of players who rose from obscurity to stardom and the rogue swing coaches who helped them usher the game into a new age. Swing Kings is both a rollicking history of baseball’s recent past and a deeply reported, character-driven account of a battle between opponents as old as time: old and new, change and stasis, the establishment and those who break from it. Jared Diamo...
Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space – Ep 74 with Amanda Leduc
May 08, 2020 03:56 - 53 minutes - 49.3 MBIf every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how does the Beast ever imagine a happily-ever-after? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference. Amanda Leduc is a disabled writer and author of the non-fiction book DISFIGURED: ON FAIRY TALES, DISABILITY, AND MAKING SPACE (Coach House Books, 2020) and the n...
Jimmy and the Kid – Ep 73 with Lee Silber
April 22, 2020 21:49 - 46 minutes - 43.1 MBWhen a twelve year-old girl wants to play baseball with the boys, she’s lucky to have the help of Jimmy Parks, a former Major Leaguer and someone with the power to change her life forever. Escaping to the empty baseball fields across the street from the military housing in which she lives, Billie is content to throw a ball against the wall, pitching imaginary games with no one around—until she meets Jimmy Parks, the man who maintains the fields. Not only does the long-retired Major Leag...
The Amateurs – Ep 72 with Liz Harmer
March 14, 2020 23:05 - 48 minutes - 44.6 MB“The Amateurs” is a speculative novel of rapture and romance in the vein of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and Tom Perotta’s The Leftovers. In the near future, the world’s largest tech company unveils the “Port”, a personal time travel device. It becomes a phenomenon. But soon it is clear that those who pass through its portal won’t be coming back–either unwilling to return or, more ominously, unable to do so. After a few short years, the population plummets. A small group of th...
A Flag of No Nation – Ep 71 with Tom Haviv
February 27, 2020 15:27 - 58 minutes - 53.8 MBA meditation on world invention and collapse, A Flag of No Nation traces the stories of Turkish Jews in the 20th century, blind colonists in a white ocean, and performers enacting new rituals around a nationless flag. Through forms of storytelling that range from allegory to oral history, Tom Haviv investigates the history of Israel/Palestine and the mythologies of nationalism. A warning against imperfect dreams, and invitation to imagine something new, A Flag of No Nation reminds us how the...
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau – Ep 70 with Michael Zapata
February 13, 2020 05:37 - 51 minutes - 47.9 MBThe Lost Book of Adana Moreau is the mesmerizing story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New Orleans. In 1929 in New Orleans, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau writes a science fiction novel. The novel earns rave reviews, and Adana begins a sequel. Then she falls gravely ill. Just before she dies, she destroys the only copy of the manuscript. Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead...
Even That Wildest Hope – Ep 69 with Seyward Goodhand
January 09, 2020 04:16 - 47 minutes - 43.8 MBEven That Wildest Hope bursts with vibrant, otherworldly characters—wax girls and gods-among-men, artists on opposite sides of a war, aimless plutocrats and anarchist urchins—who are sometimes wondrous, often grotesque, and always driven by passions and yearnings common to us all. Each story is an untamed territory unto itself: where characters are both victims and predators, the settings are antique and futuristic, and where our intimacies—with friends, lovers, enemies, and even our food—re...
Always Blue – Ep 68 with John Dermot Woods
December 19, 2019 02:20 - 47 minutes - 43.9 MBAlways Blue is a work of literary science fiction that explores how our day-to-day struggles and inconveniences—irritating colleagues, entitled students, aloof administrators, uninspired lunch choices—can make it impossible to see the real threats to our world. John Dermot Woods writes stories and draws comics in Brooklyn, NY. His books include the novel, The Baltimore Atrocities, published by Coffee House Press, and a collection of comics with the title Activities (published by Publishing ...
Always Blue – Ep 68 with John Dermit Woods
December 19, 2019 02:20 - 47 minutes - 43.9 MBAlways Blue is a work of literary science fiction that explores how our day-to-day struggles and inconveniences—irritating colleagues, entitled students, aloof administrators, uninspired lunch choices—can make it impossible to see the real threats to our world. John Dermit Woods writes stories and draws comics in Brooklyn, NY. His books include the novel, The Baltimore Atrocities, published by Coffee House Press, and a collection of comics with the title Activities (published by Publishing ...
The Friar’s Lantern – Ep 67 with Greg Hickey
December 06, 2019 01:14 - 5 MBYou may win $1,000,000. You will judge a man of murder. An eccentric scientist tells you he can read your mind and offers to prove it in a high-stakes wager. A respected college professor exacts impassioned, heat-of-the-moment revenge on his wife’s killer—a week after her death—and you’re on the jury. Take a Turing test with a twist, discover how your future choices might influence the past, and try your luck at Three Card Monte. And while you weigh chance, superstition, destiny, intuition a...
My Penguin Year – Ep 66 with Lindsay McCrae
November 21, 2019 04:01 - 56 minutes - 52.6 MBFor 337 days, award-winning wildlife cameraman Lindsay McCrae intimately followed 11,000 emperor penguins amid the singular beauty of Antarctica. This is his masterful chronicle of one penguin colony’s astonishing journey of life, death, and rebirth―and of the extraordinary human experience of living amongst them in the planet’s harshest environment. My Penguin Year recounts McCrae’s remarkable adventure to the end of the Earth. He observed every aspect of a breeding emperor’s life, facing ...
Caregiving and Caretaking – Ep 65 with Germ Lynn
October 16, 2019 22:00 - 52 minutes - 47.7 MBWhat You Call is a glimpse into the future and part of the Radix Media science fiction chapbook series, Futures. It’s the story of a rogue “support unit” that is desperate for a charge and along the way they try to cobble together a sense of purpose in a crumbling world. Germ Lynn is a writer and cellist living in Brooklyn. As a journalist, they have been published by Playboy, Broadly, and Slate. Their short fiction has been published by Hypergraphic Press in the queer literature anthology ...
Landscape Architecture, California Style – Ep 64 with Kelly Comras
September 25, 2019 21:20 - 54 minutes - 49.5 MBLandscape architect Ruth Shellhorn helped define the distinctive mid-century regional aesthetic of Southern California. Most well known for her work with Walt Disney on the original design of Disneyland, she also designed original landscape plans for the Bullock’s department stores and Fashion Square shopping centers, a landscape master plan for the University of California at Riverside, and a number of private gardens and estates for post-war movie stars, and the business and financial lead...
French Youth Resistance in World War II – Ep 63 with Ronald Rosbottom
September 18, 2019 19:58 - 1 hour - 55.7 MBThe author of the acclaimed When Paris Went Dark, longlisted for the National Book Award, returns to World War II once again to tell the incredible story of the youngest members of the French Resistance—many only teenagers—who waged a hidden war against the Nazi occupiers and their collaborators in Paris and across France. Sudden Courage: Youth in France Confront the Germans, 1940-1945 is available now. Ronald Rosbottom is the Winifred L. Arms Professor in the Arts and Humanities and a prof...
Unlonely Planet – Ep 62 with Jillian Richardson
September 05, 2019 01:31 - 1 hour - 56.6 MBYou can live the loneliest life while being surrounded by people. You can be the busiest person and still feel unfulfilled. In an age when individualism and self-reliance are prized above all other traits, how can we feel connected? Where are our healthy congregations? Do we even know what those are anymore? Enter, Unlonely Planet. This book is your roadmap to defining joy in your life and reconnecting with the community around you — whether that’s through traditional events and gatherings ...
Family and Identity – Ep 61 with Hal Y. Zhang
August 21, 2019 20:38 - 41 minutes - 38.3 MBIn this episode Jon speaks with Hal Y. Zhang, author of Hard Mother, Spider Mother, Soft Mother. Hard Mother, Spider Mother, Soft Mother is a story about the imprecise nature of memories and how they affect our relationships. You can read an excerpt here. The story follows Ellery Lang, whose mother Valerie has abruptly left their home after several days of spouting increasingly strange conspiracy theories. In a near future world where citizens are always watched and where “personalizati...
The Cape Cod National Seashore – Ep 60 with Ethan Carr
July 03, 2019 17:31 - 59 minutes - 54.2 MBIn the mid-nineteenth century, Thoreau recognized the importance of preserving the complex and fragile landscape of Cape Cod, with its weathered windmills, expansive beaches, dunes, wetlands, harbors, and the lives that flourished here, supported by the maritime industries and saltworks. One hundred years later, the National Park Service―working with a group of concerned locals, then-senator John F. Kennedy, and other supporters―took on the challenge of meeting the needs of a burgeon...
Dauntless Women – Ep 59 with Caitlin Grace McDonnell
June 19, 2019 22:46 - 34 minutes - 31.8 MBIntroducing “Fierce”, thirteen powerful, entwined biographies and memoirs that describe a staunchly Feminist approach: “To thine own self be true.” Historical documentation of human affairs informs the past, but what of the understated and overlooked herstories of half of the world’s population? Fierce explores the lives of “masterless women” in education, entrepreneurship, religion, the armed forces, the arts, adventuring, and activism, celebrating their strengths and achievements while que...
Aloha Rodeo – Ep 58 with David Wolman
June 05, 2019 20:31 - 59 minutes - 54.9 MBIn the spirit of The Boys in the Boat comes the captivating true story of the native Hawaiian cowboys who traveled to Wyoming in 1908 to compete at the “world championships” of rodeo, overcoming prejudice to beat the greatest white cowboys at their own game and return home American legends. David Wolman is a Contributing Editor at Outside and a longtime contributor at Wired. He has written for the New York Times, New Yorker, Nature, BusinessWeek, and many other publications, and his work h...
The Casket of Time – Ep 57 with Andri Magnason
May 22, 2019 21:37 - 1 hour - 56.4 MBThe world, according to Grace, is under an ancient curse. There once was a princess named Obsidiana, who was trapped in time by the greedy king of Pangea. To protect Obsidiana from dark and gloomy days, the king put her in a crystal casket made of spider silk woven so tightly that time itself couldn’t penetrate. The king’s greed for power doomed his kingdom and the trapped princess. Sigrun sees eerie parallels between the tale of Obsidiana and the present-day crisis, and realizes it’s up to ...
Waking Up To The Dark, Part 2 – Ep 56 with Clark Strand
May 08, 2019 16:58 - 36 minutes - 33 MBWaking Up to the Dark is a book for those of us who awaken in the night and don’t know why we can’t get back to sleep, and a book for those of us who have grown uncomfortable in real darkness—which we so rarely experience these days, since our first impulse is always to turn on the light. Most of all, it is a book for those of us who wonder about our souls: When the lights are always on, when there is always noise around us, do our souls have the nourishment they need in which ...
Waking Up To The Dark, Part 1 – Ep 55 with Clark Strand
April 24, 2019 19:30 - 47 minutes - 43.8 MBWaking Up to the Dark is a book for those of us who awaken in the night and don’t know why we can’t get back to sleep, and a book for those of us who have grown uncomfortable in real darkness—which we so rarely experience these days, since our first impulse is always to turn on the light. Most of all, it is a book for those of us who wonder about our souls: When the lights are always on, when there is always noise around us, do our souls have the nourishment they need in which to grow?...
Leading Imperfectly – Ep 54 with James T. Robilotta
April 10, 2019 18:00 - 1 hour - 61.3 MBIn today’s episode, Jon interviews author James T. Robilotta about his book Leading Imperfectly: The value of being authentic for leaders, professionals and human beings. There is a problem in today’s developing leaders-they think they need to be someone they are not to get what they want. In short, none of us is perfect, and when we pretend to be, people quit listening to us. Instead, we need to focus on trying to connect with others. Leading Imperfectly is full of examples for how to make...
The Body Papers (Part 2) – Ep 53 with Grace Talusan
March 28, 2019 22:17 - 42 minutes - 39.3 MBJon speaks with author Grace Talusan about her book The Body Papers. Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan l...
The Body Papers (Part 1) – Ep 52 with Grace Talusan
March 13, 2019 20:55 - 38 minutes - 44.4 MBJon speaks with author Grace Talusan about her book The Body Papers. Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan l...
The Stories of Their Lives – Ep 51 with Lisa Gornick
February 28, 2019 00:12 - 49 minutes - 54.3 MBJon interviews author Lisa Gornick about her newest novel, The Peacock Feast. Spanning the twentieth century and three continents, The Peacock Feast ricochets from Manhattan to San Francisco, from the decadent mansions of the Tiffany family to the death row of a Texas prison, and from the London consultation room of Anna Freud to a Mendocino commune. With psychological acuity and aching eloquence, Lisa Gornick has written a sweeping family drama, an exploration of the meaning of art and ...
Why Biodiversity is Good – Ep 50 with Rob Dunn
January 31, 2019 17:26 - 57 minutes - 61.9 MBEven when the floors are sparkling clean and the house seems silent, our domestic domain is wild beyond imagination. In Never Home Alone, biologist Rob Dunn introduces us to the nearly 200,000 species living with us in our own homes, from the Egyptian meal moths in our cupboards and camel crickets in our basements to the lactobacillus lounging on our kitchen counters. You are not alone. Yet, as we obsess over sterilizing our homes and separating our spaces from nature, we are unwittin...
Robert Murray Sculpture – Ep 49 with Jonathan Lippincott
January 17, 2019 00:05 - 50 minutes - 55.3 MBSpanning six decades, Robert Murray: Sculpture includes photographs of nearly two hundred works, seen in galleries, museums, and private collections, at public outdoor exhibitions, in his studios, and in the workshops of his fabricators. Jonathan D. Lippincott’s introduction and interview with Murray cover the sculptor’s process of working with fabricators and foundries, issues of public art and the siting of sculpture, Murray’s early years, his close friendship with Barnett Newman and relat...
How Hormones Control Just About Everything – Ep 48 with Randi Hutter Epstein
December 01, 2018 19:07 - 1 hour - 65.9 MBA guided tour through the strange science of hormones and the age-old quest to control them. Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of wit and curiosity, medical journalist Randi Hutter Epstein takes us on a journey through the unusual history of these potent chemicals from a basement filled with jarred nineteenth-century brains to a twenty...