The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is used to writing about politics and ideas at play in the broader world, but with his new book, The Deep Places, he has written a memoir about his own harrowing experience with Lyme disease. Given the mysteries surrounding the disease, Douthats story is also very much about his interactions with and outside of the medical establishment. I was relatively open-minded at an intellectual level to the possibility that there are diseases that existing medical...
Nov 19, 2021•56 min•Ep 374•Transcript available on Metacast The actor and author Alan Cumming was happily surprised that his best-selling first memoir, Not My Fathers Son, inspired many readers who had suffered their own childhood traumas. But he was disappointed, he says on this weeks podcast, when people characterized him as having triumphed or overcome his adversity. I havent, I havent, I absolutely havent, he says. And he stresses that point in his new memoir, Baggage. We all have baggage, we all have trauma, we all have something, he says. But the w...
Nov 12, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Ep 373•Transcript available on Metacast In her new memoir, Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, Huma Abedin writes about her Muslim faith, her years working alongside Hillary Clinton and, of course, her relationship with her estranged husband, the former Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner. On this weeks podcast, Abedin says that writing the book was the most therapeutic thing I could have possibly done, and that writing about her marriage and its time in the tabloids gave her perspective. Now that I am on the other side, I can say w...
Nov 05, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Ep 372•Transcript available on Metacast In her new memoir, Going There, Katie Couric writes about her career as a host of Today and the first woman to anchor the CBS Evening News solo. She also, as the title suggests, writes about difficult personal subjects, including the deaths of her father and of her first husband. On this weeks podcast, she says the most difficult part of the book to write was about her former Today colleague Matt Lauer and his downfall over allegations of sexual misconduct. My feelings were so complicated, and t...
Oct 29, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep 371•Transcript available on Metacast In American Made, Farah Stockman writes about the downfall of manufacturing employment in the United States by focusing on the lives of workers at one Indianapolis factory that was relocated to Mexico. Stockman, a member of The New York Times editorial board, talks about the book on this weeks podcast. I really think weve seen unions in a death spiral, she says. And part of the reason is globalization. You had so many people who fought for these manufacturing jobs to be good-paying jobs, and dec...
Oct 22, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep 370•Transcript available on Metacast Jonathan Franzens new novel, Crossroads, has generated a lot of discussion, as his work tends to do. The novelist and critic Thomas Mallon, who reviewed Crossroads for us, is on the podcast this week to talk about the book and to place it in the context of Franzens entire career. He is fundamentally a social novelist, and his basic unit of society is the family, Mallon says. Always families are important in Franzen, and we move outward from the family into the business, into the town, into whate...
Oct 15, 2021•1 hr•Ep 369•Transcript available on Metacast In 2013, the front page of The New York Times devoted five straight days to the story of Dasani , an 11-year-old Black girl who lived in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. Now, Andrea Elliott, the reporter of that series, has published her first book, Invisible Child, which tells the full story of Dasani and her family up to the present day. On this weeks podcast, Elliott discusses how she came to focus her reporting on Dasani. Ive always believed as a journalist that the story shows itself to you,...
Oct 08, 2021•58 min•Ep 368•Transcript available on Metacast In Bewilderment, Richard Powerss first novel since he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Overstory, an astrobiologist named Theo Byrne looks for life on other planets while struggling to raise his highly sensitive 9-year-old son, Robin. On this weeks podcast, Powers compares Theos work in the galaxy with his relationship on the ground. If there are all of these millions of exoplanets out there are and they are all subject to radically different conditions, what would life look like in these conditions...
Oct 01, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep 367•Transcript available on Metacast The Harvard law professor Randall Kennedys new book, Say It Loud!, collects 29 of his essays. Kennedys opinions about the subjects listed in the books subtitle race, law, history and culture tend to be complex, and hes not afraid to change his mind. He says on the podcast that theres no shame in admitting youre wrong, and that he does just that in the book when he finds it appropriate. I thought that the United States was much further down the road to racial decency than it is, Kennedy says. Don...
Sep 24, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep 366•Transcript available on Metacast Colson Whiteheads new novel, Harlem Shuffle, revolves around Ray Carney, a furniture retailer in Harlem in the 1960s with a sideline in crime. Its a relatively lighthearted novel, certainly compared to The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, Whiteheads two previous novels, each of which won the Pulitzer Prize. I usually do a lighter book, then a heavier book, but I felt compelled to write The Nickel Boys at the time that I did, Whitehead says on this weeks podcast. I knew that in the crime...
Sep 17, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep 365•Transcript available on Metacast The novelist Brandon Taylor, who has generated his own buzz with his debut novel, Real Life, and a collection of stories, Filthy Animals, visits the podcast to discuss the much-discussed work of Sally Rooney. Taylor recently reviewed her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You. On the podcast, he describes Rooneys writing as an intense, melancholic tractor beam. She has this really great, tactile metaphorical sense, but its never overworked, he says. Her style is so clean. That is the word I...
Sep 10, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep 364•Transcript available on Metacast Out on a Limb is a selection of Andrew Sullivans essays from the past 32 years of American history. On this weeks podcast, Sullivan talks about the book and his feelings about some of the very contentious public arguments in which hes been involved. Youre never at a moment of finality in politics or intellectual life. Youre always just about to be proven wrong again, Sullivan says. I have developed a very thick skin. You have to. I was very controversial in the gay rights movement very early on....
Sep 03, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep 363•Transcript available on Metacast A.O. Scott, The Timess co-chief film critic, returns to the Book Reviews podcast this week to discuss the work of William Maxwell, the latest subject in Scotts essay series The Americans , about writers who give a sense of the countrys complex identity. In his novels and stories, Maxwell frequently returned to small-town Illinois, and to, as Scott describes it, the particular civilization and culture and society that he knew growing up. In so many of these books, Scott says, he was trying in a s...
Aug 27, 2021•1 hr•Ep 362•Transcript available on Metacast In her new book, The Brilliant Abyss, Helen Scales writes about the largely unseen realm of the deepest parts of the ocean. On this weeks podcast, she talks about the life down there and how long it took us to realize there was any at all. It wasnt so long ago, maybe 200 years ago, that most people scientists, the brightest minds we had assumed that life only went down as far as sunlight reaches, so the first 600 feet or so, Scales says. But whats so fascinating is that life does go all the way ...
Aug 20, 2021•55 min•Ep 361•Transcript available on Metacast In Dana Spiottas new novel, Wayward, a woman named Sam buys a dilapidated house in a neglected neighborhood in Syracuse, leaving her husband and her daughter in order to face down big midlife questions. She is what we used to call a housewife, a stay-at-home mom, Spiotta says on this weeks podcast, describing her protagonist. She has one daughter, shes married to a lawyer. Its not an unhappy marriage. I wanted to avoid a lot of clichs with her. I didnt want it to be an unhappy marriage that was ...
Aug 13, 2021•56 min•Ep 360•Transcript available on Metacast The slightly directionless, unnamed narrator of Katie Kitamuras fourth novel, Intimacies, takes a job as a translator at an international criminal court. On this weeks podcast, Kitamura talks about the novel, including her realization about the books title. Intimacy as a word is something that we think of as desirable, and something that we seek out, in our relationships in particular, but also in our friendships and in all the people that we care about, Kitamura says. But I think its a plural f...
Aug 06, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep 359•Transcript available on Metacast Omar El Akkads new novel, What Strange Paradise, uses some fablelike techniques to comment on the migrant crisis caused by war in the Middle East. El Akkad explains that he thinks of the novel as a reinterpretation of the story of Peter Pan, told as the story of a contemporary child refugee. Theres this thing Borges once said about how all literature is tricks, and no matter how clever your tricks are, they eventually get discovered, El Akkad says. My tricks are not particularly clever. I lean v...
Jul 30, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep 358•Transcript available on Metacast The latest pick for Group Text, our monthly column for readers and book clubs, is Esther Freud's I Couldnt Love You More, a novel about three generations of women grappling with secrets, shame and an inexorable bond. Elisabeth Egan, an editor at the Book Review and the brains behind Group Text, talks about the novel on this weeks podcast. Its this incredibly powerful story about mothers and daughters, Egan says, and also an interesting and really heartbreaking look at what was happening in Irela...
Jul 23, 2021•57 min•Ep 357•Transcript available on Metacast On this weeks podcast, S.A. Cosby says that a writer friend once told him: I think youre like the bard of broken men. In Cosbys new novel, Razorblade Tears, the fathers of two married gay men who have just been murdered team up to track down the killers. Cosby says that the fathers Ike, whos Black, and Buddy Lee, whos white are familiar to him. I grew up with men like Ike and Buddy Lee, he says. Maybe not necessarily violent men, but men who were emotionally closed off, who were unable to articu...
Jul 16, 2021•59 min•Ep 356•Transcript available on Metacast The subtitle of Jonathan Balcombes new book, Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the Worlds Most Successful Insects leads to the first question on this weeks podcast. Why successful? Their diversity, for one, Balcombe says. Theres over 160,000 described species and its important to add that qualifier, described, because its estimated there may be about five times that many that are undescribed. Insects make up 80 percent of all animal species on the planet, so that says something right there abou...
Jul 09, 2021•45 min•Ep 355•Transcript available on Metacast The actress and thriller writer Catherine Steadman visits the podcast this week to talk about The Disappearing Act, her new suspense novel about the absurdities of Hollywood. Steadman was drawn to the idea of setting a story during pilot season, when actors from all over the world descend on Los Angeles once a year and compete for lead roles in new TV series. Its a sort of competitive world where friendships are made really quickly, and people will find their nemesis someone who looks just like ...
Jul 02, 2021•59 min•Ep 354•Transcript available on Metacast Clint Smiths How the Word Is Passed is about how places in the United States reckon with or fail to reckon with their relationship to the history of slavery. On this weeks podcast, Smith says that one thing that inspired the book was his realization that there were more homages to enslavers than to enslaved people in New Orleans, where he grew up. Symbols and names and iconography arent just symbols, theyre reflective of stories that people tell, and those stories shape the narratives that socie...
Jun 25, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep 353•Transcript available on Metacast In his new book, Last Best Hope, George Packer describes Four Americas, and the tensions that exist between these different visions of the country. He calls them Free America (essentially libertarian), Real America (personified by Sarah Palin), Smart America (the professional class) and Just America (identity politics). On this weeks podcast, Packer says that though he was raised and lives in Smart America, he thinks no one of the four paints the whole picture. I see the appeal and the persuasiv...
Jun 18, 2021•59 min•Ep 352•Transcript available on Metacast The Engagement, by Sasha Issenberg, recounts the complex and chaotic chain reaction that thrust same-sex marriage from the realm of conservative conjecture to the top of the gay political agenda and, eventually, to the halls of the Supreme Court. On this weeks podcast, Issenberg talks about the deeply researched book , which covers 25 years of legal and cultural history. What they have done, ultimately, he says of those who won the victory, is helped to enshrine, both in the legal process and in...
Jun 11, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep 351•Transcript available on Metacast Francis Spuffords new novel, Light Perpetual, is rooted in a real event: the rocket attack on a Woolworths in London, killing 168 people, toward the end of World War II. Spufford fictionalizes the tragedy and invents five children who survive it, trailing them through the ensuing decades to discover all they might have done and seen if they had lived. On this weeks podcast, Spufford says that he settled on this real-life incident for intentionally arbitrary reasons. The ordinariness is kind of t...
Jun 04, 2021•49 min•Ep 350•Transcript available on Metacast Jake Bonner, the protagonist of Jean Hanff Korelitzs The Plot, writes a novel based on someone elses idea. The book becomes a big hit, but Jake has a hard time enjoying it because hes worried about getting caught. On this weeks podcast, Korelitz says that Jakes more general anxieties about his career as a writer are relatable, despite her own success (this is her seventh novel). Jake is all of us, Korelitz says. I used to regard other peoples literary careers with great curiosity. I used to have...
May 28, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep 349•Transcript available on Metacast Maggie OFarrells Hamnet, one of last years most widely acclaimed novels, imagines the life of William Shakespeare, his wife, Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway, and the couples son Hamnet, who died at 11 years old in 1596. On this weeks podcast, OFarrell says she always planned for the novel to have the ensemble cast it does, but that her deepest motivation was the desire to capture a sense of the young boy at its center. The engine behind the book for me was always the fact that I think Hamnet has been o...
May 21, 2021•57 min•Ep 348•Transcript available on Metacast Louis Menands new book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, covers the interchange of arts and ideas between the United States and Europe in the decades following World War II. On this weeks podcast, Menand talks about the book, including why he chose to frame his telling from the end of the war until 1965. What I didnt get right away was the extent to which, what happened in American culture, both at the level of avant-garde art, like John Cages music, and at the level of Hollywood...
May 14, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep 347•Transcript available on Metacast In 2018, Michael Lewis published The Fifth Risk, which argued, in short, that the federal government was underprepared for a variety of disaster scenarios. Guess what his new book is about? Lewis visits the podcast this week to discuss The Premonition, which recounts the initial response to the coronavirus pandemic. It wasnt just Trump, Lewis says. Trump made everything worse. But there had ben changes in the American government, and changes in particular at the C.D.C., that made them less and l...
May 07, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep 346•Transcript available on Metacast In her new book, Antitrust, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota explores the history of fighting monopoly power in this country, and argues that the digital age calls for a renewed effort. I think the best way to do this right now is to have our laws be as sophisticated as the companies that were dealing with, Klobuchar says on this weeks podcast. To her, that means switching the burden for the big, big mergers or for the big exclusionary conducts of the companies that are the largest, and say, I...
Apr 30, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep 345•Transcript available on Metacast 
