If you’ve spent time this week doomscrolling on your phone — even though you know it’s not good for you , that it ramps up anxiety and you’d be better off taking a walk or just going to bed — Emily Falk’s new book is for you. “ What We Value ” is a peek behind the mental curtain. Why do our brains intend one thing and do another? Why is lasting change, even desired change, so hard? Neuroscientist Falk says it’s because our gray matter is silently making value calculations, which don’t always ben...
Jun 13, 2025•52 min
Amanda Nguyen was aiming for the stars when she was accepted as a student at Harvard. She dreamed of becoming an astronaut. But in her senior year of college, she was raped. That propelled her into a public role as activist to change an infuriating gap in the law when it comes to rape survivors. “When I found out that my rape kit could be destroyed, untested, in six months — even if the statue of limitations was 15 years — I felt like that was against everything I was taught about the criminal j...
Jun 06, 2025•51 min
A neighborhood bar is a peculiar thing. The people who frequent it develop a rapport, a kind of familiarity that makes them feel ownership. But time rolls on, and no place is untouched by the changes it brings — not the bar nor the people in it. Texas native Callie Collins knows a thing or two about bars. That’s why she set her newest novel, “ Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine ,” in an Austin saloon, circa 1970s Texas. The story unfolds from three different viewpoints: the lead guitarist of the ...
May 30, 2025•52 min
How do you carry someone else’s memory — both in body and in mind? The prairie witch in Karen Russell’s fantastical new novel, “ The Antidote ,” describes it as a pressure and a weight. She has the ability to receive the memories of her fellow citizens in a small failing town in Nebraska, which offers relief to anyone who feels like their pasts are too heavy to bear. “Whatever they can’t stand to know,” she says, “the memories that make them chase impossible dreams, that make them sick with regr...
May 22, 2025•55 min
For many people, a good life is a stable life — a life that’s predictable and filled with purpose. For others, happiness the point. They embrace moments of bliss and satisfaction. But what about a life that’s focused on curiosity, exploration and a variety of experiences that broaden our world? University of Chicago psychology professor Shigehiro Oishi says that’s a psychologically rich life — and in his new book, “ Life in Three Dimensions ,” he argues that a psychological rich life is just as ...
May 16, 2025•37 min
“ A Lesser Light ” is Minnesota writer Peter Geye ’s sixth novel, and he says he couldn’t have written it earlier in life. The story revolves around a cold and often hostile marriage. It’s 1910, and husband Theodulf is the newly commissioned caretaker of a grand lighthouse situated on the treacherous shore of Lake Superior. His new bride, Willa, has been forced into the marriage by her scheming mother after a family tragedy. The terrain is brooding, the climate unforgiving. Maybe no surprise, th...
May 08, 2025•1 hr 29 min
We could learn a lot from the good boys (and girls) in our life. That’s the main thesis of philosopher Mark Rowlands new book, “ The Word of Dog .” He says out loud what many dog owners secretly wonder: Is my dog a better person than me? And while Rowlands certainly agrees that humans remain top of the intellectual pyramid, he does theorize that our canine companions inhabit the world in a uniquely uncomplicated way. “Although dogs have no idea what philosophy is,” he writes, “they live the big ...
May 02, 2025•53 min
Rules are good. Discretion is better. So argues philosophy professor Barry Lam in his new book, “ Fewer Rules, Better People .” While Lam acknowledges law as the backbone of society, he says America has forgotten the good of discretion. Be it a sports referee, a parent, a police officer or a prosecutor, decision makers need the freedom to exercise discernment about how the rules get applied. Lam joins Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas for a philosophical and practical discussi...
Apr 25, 2025•52 min
“The story of America in the 21st century is the story of chosen scarcities.” So begins “ Abundance ,” the new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has politicos abuzz . In it, they argue that progressives have created a culture of scarcity the last few decades, especially when it comes to solving America’s thorniest problem, like homelessness, housing affordability and green energy. The solution, they say, is to face up to the failures of liberal policies, no matter how well intended, and...
Apr 18, 2025•54 min
Can one decision be the fulcrum of a life? Or is destiny really millions of tiny choices swirled with events out of our control? That’s one of the many questions at the heart of Eric Puchner’s gorgeous new novel, “Dream State.” It’s received a dizzying amount of praise since it was released in February — making the New York Times best seller list, becoming an Oprah Book Club pick. But despite the buzz, the novel is deceptively hard to pin down. Set in rural Montana, the book begins with two coll...
Apr 11, 2025•51 min
For more than 20 years, author Chris Bohjalian carried the seed of a Civil War story in his imagination. It was inspired by the true story of a Southern woman who nursed a Union soldier back to health after he was injured on the battlefield. But the idea didn’t grow roots until the racial uprisings after the murder of George Floyd, when Confederate statues came tumbling down. “Years ago, Tony Horowitz wrote a remarkable book called ‘ Confederates in the Attic ,’ wondering why so much of the Sout...
Apr 04, 2025•52 min
When superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on Eiren Caffall’s childhood home of New York City, her first thought was: What about the museums? That distressing question provoked her first novel, “ All the Water in the World .” In this futuristic dystopia, climate change is unchecked. Cities are drowned, people are adrift. But already, some are thinking of the after by looking to the past. The former curators and researchers at the American Natural History Museum have taken up residence on the museum’s r...
Mar 28, 2025•58 min
Lauren Francis-Sharma was a young law student interning in Johannesburg in 1996 when she was given the opportunity to observe portions of the Truth and Reconciliation Amnesty Hearings, which were set up to expose the horrors of apartheid in South Africa. Listening to testimony of atrocities and knowing that these public confessions came with exoneration changed her. She filled legal pad after legal pad with stories and kept them for decades. “I think it’s brilliant, in some respects — how a coun...
Mar 21, 2025•1 hr 1 min
When historian Martha Jones began excavating the history of her own family, she found a remarkable story of what she calls the trouble with color. But that might not mean what you think. “In this book, the term trouble has two meanings,” Jones tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. ”I open the book with the lyrics of a spiritual, ‘ Wade in the Water .’ You know, ‘God’s gonna trouble the water.’ And that comes from the book of John. In the book of John, we learn that when God...
Mar 14, 2025•51 min
Why do some people view winter as a magical season when others see it as something to dread? The secret is in the mindset, according to health psychologist Kari Leibowitz. She spent a year doing research in Tromsø, Norway studying how the people who live above the Arctic Circle celebrate deepest winter. What she discovered is that it goes beyond hygge. It depends on where your brain settles its focus. “Winter is many things. It’s paradoxical,” says Leibowitz. “Yes, it’s cold and dark, and it can...
Mar 07, 2025•54 min
Grief didn’t come easily to novelist Geraldine Brooks. When her husband, journalist and author Tony Horowitz, died of a cardiac event on a Washington, D.C., sidewalk, she was stunned. He was only 60. What happened? But she didn’t have time to mourn, seeing as her boys needed support, her books needed writing, the world needed answers. As she describes in her new book, “Memorial Days,” it took her three years to recognize she was operating on autopilot, disassociated from her life and her body du...
Feb 28, 2025•51 min
Lindsay Chervinsky knew other historians had written extensively about America’s second president, John Adams. But none of those books were written before January 6, 2021, when an insurrection at the nation’s capitol ended the tradition of peacefully transferring power in the U.S. — a tradition that started with Adams himself. In her new book, “Making the Presidency,” Chervinsky looks back at Adams life and focuses on how George Washington’s successor shaped the presidency in the final years of ...
Feb 21, 2025•53 min
It’s Valentine’s Day! To mark the occasion, Big Books and Bold Ideas is dipping into the archives to focus on love — and not just romantic love. This show highlights love of all kinds: familial love, love between friends, even the love of books. We start with Leif Enger, who joined host Kerri Miller in Red Wing last June to talk about his novel, “I Cheerfully Refuse.” Enger’s latest book is dystopian in nature, but at its heart, it’s a love story. We then dip into Miller’s conversation with Brit...
Feb 14, 2025•54 min
At what cost revolution? In Fabienne Josaphat’s new novel, “ Kingdom of No Tomorrow ,” 20-year-old Nettie Boileau trades the turmoil of Duvalier’s Haiti for the tumult of 1960s America. Settling with her aunt in Oakland, she is drawn to the social programs spearheaded by the burgeoning Black Panther Party. But her focus on healing and public health is soon subsumed by the revolution and her passionate relationship with Black Panther leader Melvin Mosley. Josaphat drew on her own family’s history...
Feb 07, 2025•54 min
Sarah Hoover knows her new memoir, “ The Motherload ,” isn’t flattering. She’s made peace with the fact that “people will judge me on the internet,” as she says on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. She’s telling her story anyway because she believes an honest rendering of modern motherhood is necessary. “In my defense, birth and motherhood did not match up to the narrative I’d been fed, and it felt like a nasty trick,” she writes. “And while my mental breakdown was embarrassing at times, esp...
Jan 31, 2025•53 min
David Wright Faladé didn’t learn the truth about his lineage until he was 16. That’s when his mother told him that his biological father was a West African student she initially met in post-war Paris, as she grappled with the trauma of her Jewish family surviving the Holocaust. It was a shock to a mixed-race boy growing up in the panhandle of Texas, playing football and drinking Slurpee’s in 1970s America. But the surprises didn’t stop there. When Wright Faladé eventually moved to France and met...
Jan 24, 2025•58 min
President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated for a second term on Monday, Jan. 20. So this week, Big Books and Bold Ideas asked two historians who’ve written about America’s past to reflect on America’s future and give us a broader view of where we are. They point to eras in our past that predict our present. They also discuss what they’ll be watching for as Trump returns to the Oval Office. Guests: Carol Anderson a historian and professor of African-American studies at Emory University. She...
Jan 17, 2025•52 min
Robin Wall Kimmerer embodies an abundance mindset. The naturalist and author sees the world through the lens of her Anishinaabe ancestors, where interdependence is reality, and humans are neither above nor below the natural world. We are just one part, kin to every animal and plant and stream. Her beloved book, “ Braiding Sweetgrass ,” laid out this philosophy. Published in 2013, it enjoyed a gentle rise to public consciousness, not jumping onto the bestseller list until six years after publicat...
Jan 10, 2025•58 min
In Nov. 2024, The Atlantic’s cover article rang alarm bells among readers, writers, college professors and parents alike. The article was headlined: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books . The premise is that many students admitted to elite colleges arrive having read very few books all the way through. “It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading,” says the article. “It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.” This week on Big Books and Bol...
Jan 03, 2025•52 min
Maggie Burkhardt is 81, a deceptively sweet former Wisconsinite who now resides in Egypt at a once-fashionable hotel. She’s landed there somewhat mysteriously, but hotel staff and guests alike are charmed by her eccentric wit — until they find themselves on the receiving end of her “help.” Widowed Maggie believes it is her life’s mission to fix what she perceives as broken. Or as puts it: “I liberate people who don’t know they’re stuck. … I change people’s lives for the better whether they see i...
Dec 27, 2024•56 min
Charles Bock is honest from the beginning of his new memoir, “ I Will Do Better ”: He never wanted to be a dad. He was much more interested in pursuing his literary dreams than shepherding a child to adulthood. But his wife really wanted a baby. And he didn’t think it would be right to tell her no. “In the book, I say: She wants to be a mom? OK. Let her. I’ll continue with my ambitions. On weekends, I’ll put on the Baby Bjorn, tell friends ‘we’re parenting,’ using that plural. That’s what I thou...
Dec 20, 2024•51 min
The pandemic shook up the way many of us work. It accelerated change in a system often slow to adapt. But more change is needed, argues journalist Brigid Schulte. Her new book, “ Over Work ,” is centered on the idea that work has not really worked for “far too may people for far too long.” Americans increasingly say they are dissatisfied with their jobs and burned out . It’s a bleak setting for employees — and employers. So how do we make work work? Can the daily grind be transformed? Schulte jo...
Dec 13, 2024•52 min
The gut is all the rage these days. Many an influencer has built a platform on how to keep our digestive systems happy, healthy and moving. But humans have long fetishized the gut. Doctors and philosophers have deliberated its influence on our emotional stability. Theologians declared it wicked. Disposing of bodily waste in both sanitary and silent ways is a mark of modernity. Historian Elsa Richardson found it all utterly fascinating. So she wrote a book to probe the organ’s colorful and often ...
Dec 06, 2024•54 min
If you stopped eating eggs for fear it could raise your cholesterol, or you avoided giving peanuts to your toddler to prevent allergies, or you stayed away from hormone replacement therapy because you were told it could cause breast cancer — you are a victim of what Dr. Marty Makary calls “medical dogma.” Long known as an iconoclast in the medical community, Dr. Makary’s latest book, “ Blind Spots, ” examines how health care can go so wrong. He chalks much of it to groupthink and a growing inabi...
Nov 22, 2024•48 min
When faced with the realities of climate change, marine biologists must hold two competing thoughts simultaneously: The seas are warming, the fish are waning, the corals are bleaching. But that doesn’t mean the global ocean is doomed. After all, this is the planet’s largest ecosystem. It knows how to adapt. The question is really: Will we enable it or hinder it? Helen Scales lives at the balance of those two intersecting points. A marine biologist, writer and broadcaster, Scales is honest about ...
Nov 15, 2024•59 min
