We learn about mental skills athletes use to compete at the highest levels. Dr. Jennifer Cumming, former competitive athlete and now sports psychologist and professor, describes techniques for building mental skills. She trains professional and recreational athletes,...

Carrie Soto is Back, by best-selling novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid, plunges us into the world of professional tennis. We meet retired phenom, Carrie, who decides to return to the circuit to defend her Grand Slam titles record. Carrie's singular focus on her tennis...

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures, has become a word-of-mouth bestseller. No surprise, since this warm and generous novel introduces three very different characters all facing their own "stuckness": a grieving widow, an aquarium-confined...

Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus, has lived most of his life in the Sowell Bay Aquarium but yearns for the ocean's currents while he watches the humans who pass his tank with disdain. That is, until Tova, the night janitor saves him from dying on one of his...

We delve into the research-based side of talent development with Dr. Kenneth Kiewra, an educational psychology professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who is an expert in talent development. We learn about talent development in children and adults, along with...

In his latest book, The Real Work, Adam Gopnik undertakes a George Plimpton-esque journey to master skills as diverse as boxing and drawing, bread baking and driving, dancing and overcoming a mental health illness. Gopnik, along the way, shares three themes of mastery...

Linny and Nancy look back at 2023 and share some of their favorite books, moments, surprises, and behind-the-scenes mix-ups. Looking forward to 2024, they announce the first three book selections for 2024. --- Support this podcast:...

It's children's book month, and our 2023 is a gem: Marshmallow Clouds, written by Ted Kooser and Connie Wanek and illustrated by Richard Jones. The book features 30 poems that celebrate finding wonder through imagination and are loosely categorized by the four...

James Ker-Lindsay introduces us to the beautiful and complex island of Cyprus, the setting of Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees. Ker-Lindsay is a scholar whose research focuses on conflict, and peace and security in South East Europe. He tells us about the...

In The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak, young lovers Defne and Kostas are torn apart by the Cyprus war in the 1970s. When they meet again, 25 years later, Defne has become part of a team dedicated to finding graves of war victims and Kostas has become a scholar...

Was sexism in the STEM workplace really as bad as that faced by Elizabeth Zott in Bonnie Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry? Cultural historian Julie Des Jardins leads us through the experiences of women in the workforce in the 20th-century. Let’s just say, most women...

In this laugh out loud funny novel, Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist who just wants to do her research, but it's the 1960s and none of the men in her field quite know what to do with this determined woman, so mostly they attempt to ruin her. Except for Calvin...

In Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch, Blandine is obsessed by Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century abbess. We wanted to learn more about this German theologian, composer, and botanist, so asked Dr. Jennifer Bain to join us. She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to...

In the New York Times bestselling novel, The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty introduces us to Vacca Vale, Indiana, a dying city clinging to its past automobile manufacturing glory days. After decades of economic disintegration brought on by the closing of Zorn Automotive...

Intrigue abounds as we learn how 16th century Italian courts schemed and fought to maintain their power, as we read about in Maggie O'Farrell's latest historical novel, The Marriage Portrait. In the swirl of wars and murder, we talk about how women in...

The Marriage Portrait, a riveting historical fiction novel, plunges us into the 16th-century world of Lucrezia de’ Medici whose parents have forced her to wed Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara. He has taken her to his isolated hunting lodge and she becomes aware of the fact...

Today we interview Joe Starita about his book, I Am A Man. The narrative non-fiction book describes the real life story of Ponca Chief Standing Bear. He was a man who just wanted to live peaceably, with his tribe, on their ancestral homeland that was deeded to them by...

I Am a Man by Joe Starita documents the heartbreaking exile of Chief Standing Bear from his homeland to his journey to establishing the personhood of Native Americans in US courts. Chief Standing Bear promised his dying teenage son that he would bury him in the...

Dr. Margaret Jacobs joins us on the front porch to investigate how the US has forcibly removed children from their parents, a policy expanded in Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts. In Our Missing Hearts, a Choctaw grandmother reminds Noah’s mom that taking children away...

To what lengths would you go to protect your child? In Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng introduces us to Bird, a 12-year-old boy whose mother has left him and his father years earlier. His father disavows her and her poetry that is being used by resisters standing up...

It's Mother's Day as we record this episode about Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon. This nonfiction book explores the differences that separate children from their parents, often in damaging ways. Solomon believes that parents have children to perpetuate themselves...