Read Learn Live Podcast

Waking 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? Clark Strand is the author of WAKING UP TO THE DARK: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age and co-author, with his wife Perdita Finn, of THE WAY OF THE ROSE: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. Strand has written for Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, Salon, and numerous other newspaper and online venues. He is the co-founder of Way of the Rose, an international eco-feminist rosary fellowship open to people of any spiritual background. He lives in the Ca

Waking 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? Clark Strand is the author of WAKING UP TO THE DARK: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age and co-author, with his wife Perdita Finn, of THE WAY OF THE ROSE: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. Strand has written for Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, Salon, and numerous other newspaper and online venues. He is the co-founder of Way of the Rose, an international eco-feminist rosary fellowship open to people of any spiritual background. He lives in the Cats

In 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 those connections. The book is divided into a series of short, often humorous, and always-insightful essays filled with real-life stories from James’ own life. The through line for the book is the significance of practicing authentic leadership. James’ humor provides comic relief in the middle of some of the more serious stories, but the humor always makes his examples hit home and keeps his stories memorable. James Robilotta is an author, professional speaker, coach, and entrepreneur. A few years ago James had his first

Jon 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 learns as a teenager that her family’s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were “illegal.” Family, she’s told, must be put first. The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remov

Jon 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 learns as a teenager that her family’s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were “illegal.” Family, she’s told, must be put first. The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remov

Jon 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 the art of dying, and an illuminating portrait of how our decisions reverberate across time and space. Lisa Gornick is the author of Louisa Meets Bear, Tinderbox, and A Private Sorcery. Her stories and essays have appeared widely, including in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, Real Simple, Salon, Slate, and The Sun. She holds a BA from Princeton and a PhD in clinical psychology from Yale, and is on the faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. A long-time New Yorker, she live

Even 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 unwittingly cultivating an entirely new playground for evolution. These changes are reshaping the organisms that live with us–prompting some to become more dangerous, while undermining those species that benefit our bodies or help us keep more threatening organisms at bay. No one who reads this engrossing, revelatory book will look at their homes in the same way again. Rob Dunn is a professor in the department of applied ecology at North Carolina State University and in the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University

Spanning 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 relationships with other artists, his lifelong interest in flying, and more, insightfully illuminating both the work and the life of his remarkable sculptor. Jonathan D. Lippincott is the author of Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s. Design manager at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he also works independently as art director and designer on illustrated books about architecture, landscape, and fine art. He has written about art for The Paris Review Daily, On-Verge, and Tether: A Journal of Art, Literature, an

A 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-first-century hormone clinic in Los Angeles. Brimming with fascinating anecdotes, illuminating new medical research, and humorous details, Aroused introduces the leading scientists who made life-changing discoveries about the hormone imbalances that ail us, as well as the charlatans who used those discoveries to peddle false remedies. Epstein exposes the humanity at the heart of hormone science with her rich cast of characters, including a 1920s doctor promoting vasectomies as a way to boost libido, a female medical stude

Go Tell the Crocodiles explores the efforts of ordinary people to provide for themselves where foreign aid, the formal economy, and the government have fallen short. I tell the story of contemporary Mozambique through the stories of people on the margins, from a street kid who flouts Mozambique’s child labor laws to make his living selling muffins, to a riverside community that has lost dozens of people to crocodile attacks. Amy Wilentz captured it well in a blurb saying Mozambique is “a country that has managed the troubling feat of failing its people while showing signs of stunning economic growth.” Rowan Moore Gerety is a journalist in New York. His writing has appeared in outlets including The Guardian, the Atlantic, and Foreign Policy, and is a longtime contributor to NPR. The author of Go Tell the Crocodiles: Chasing Prosperity in Mozambique, he studied anthropology at Columbia University and was a Fulbright fellow in Mozambique. The post Chasing Prosperity in Mozambique (Part 2) – Ep 47 with Rowan Moor

Go Tell the Crocodiles explores the efforts of ordinary people to provide for themselves where foreign aid, the formal economy, and the government have fallen short. I tell the story of contemporary Mozambique through the stories of people on the margins, from a street kid who flouts Mozambique’s child labor laws to make his living selling muffins, to a riverside community that has lost dozens of people to crocodile attacks. Amy Wilentz captured it well in a blurb saying Mozambique is “a country that has managed the troubling feat of failing its people while showing signs of stunning economic growth.” Rowan Moore Gerety is a journalist in New York. His writing has appeared in outlets including The Guardian, the Atlantic, and Foreign Policy, and is a longtime contributor to NPR. The author of Go Tell the Crocodiles: Chasing Prosperity in Mozambique, he studied anthropology at Columbia University and was a Fulbright fellow in Mozambique. The post Chasing Prosperity in Mozambique (Part 1) – Ep 46 with Rowan Moor

A brilliant, fierce writer makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road—an illuminating and thought-provoking fusion of The Places in Between, Lab Girl, and Wild that dares us to challenge the limits we place on ourselves and the natural world. Buy Lands of Lost Borders on Amazon today. The post Lands of Lost Borders – Ep 45 with Kate Harris appeared first on Read Learn Live Podcast.

After months of disturbing behavior, Gardner Quinn has vanished. Her older sister Fredericka is desperate to find her, but Fred is also pregnant—miraculously so, in a near-future America struggling with infertility. So she entrusts the job to their brother, Carter. In the tradition of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Completionist is speculative fiction at its very best: imaginative and propulsive, revealing our own world in bold and unexpected ways. The post Dangerous Dystopias – Ep 44 with Siobhan Adcock appeared first on Read Learn Live Podcast.

Bina has never forgotten the time she and her mother ran away from home. Her mother promised they would hitchhike to the city to escape Bina’s cruel father and start over. But before they could even leave town, Bina had a new stepfather and two new stepsisters, and a humming sense of betrayal pulling apart the bond with her mother—a bond Bina thought was unbreakable. Eight years later, after too many lies and with trouble on her heels, Bina finds herself on the side of the road again, the city of her dreams calling for her. She has an old suitcase, a fresh black eye, and a room waiting for her at Catherine House, a young women’s residence in Greenwich Village with a tragic history, a vow of confidentiality, and dark, magical secrets. There, Bina is drawn to her enigmatic downstairs neighbor Monet, a girl who is equal parts intriguing and dangerous. As Bina’s lease begins to run out, and nightmare and memory get tangled, she will be forced to face the terrible truth of why she’s come to Catherine House and wha

Meet Rainy Cain, a tough, smart seventeen-year-old whose primary instinct is survival. That instinct is tested when her life is upended by the sudden appearance of her father, Sam, who she thought was long dead, but instead had been in prison for his part in an armored truck robbery gone murderously wrong. Now escaped and on the run, he kidnaps Rainy, who he is convinced knows where the money from the robbery, never recovered, is hidden. — Gina Wohlsdorf was born and raised in Bismarck, North Dakota. She graduated from Tulane University, taught English in the south of France, sold books in four states, and earned an MFA at the University of Virginia. Her debut novel, Security, was chosen as an Amazon best book of 2016. She currently lives in Colorado. The post Mischief and Mayhem On The Open Road – Ep 42 with Gina Wohlsdorf appeared first on Read Learn Live Podcast.

Mike Reiss has won four Emmys and a Peabody Award during his twenty-eight years writing for “The Simpsons”. He ran the show in Season 4, which Entertainment Weekly called “the greatest season of the greatest show in history.” Mike co-created the animated series “The Critic” and created Showtime’s hit cartoon “Queer Duck” (about a gay duck). In 2006, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Animation Writers Caucus. Mike has been a contributing writer to more than two dozen animated films — including four ICE AGEs, two DESPICABLE MEs, THE LORAX, RIO, KUNG FU PANDA 3, and THE SIMPSONS MOVIE – with a worldwide gross of $14 billion. He has been happily married for thirty years. Like most children’s book authors, he has no children. The post The Simpsons and Springfield Confidential – Ep 41 with Mike Reiss appeared first on Read Learn Live Podcast.

After a chance encounter with an obscure Middle Eastern red, journalist Kevin Begos embarks on a ten-year journey to seek the origins of wine. What he unearths is a whole world of forgotten grapes, each with distinctive tastes and aromas, as well as the archaeologists, geneticists, chemists—even a paleobotanist—who are deciphering wine down to molecules of flavor. The post The History and Science of Wine – Ep 40 with Kevin Begos appeared first on Read Learn Live Podcast.

Bill Kelly studied philosophy at NYU and UC Berkeley and then left the U.S. at 26 for travel and adventure. Unexpectedly, Bill ended up living abroad for almost 25 years, five years of which was spent traveling with little money in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Eventually settling in Japan, Bill was active during the 1980s and early 1990s organizing groups, giving talks, writing, and teaching first English and then intercultural communication. When Bill returned to the U.S. in 1996, Bill studied for a doctorate in communication studies at the University of New Mexico and taught for 13 years at UCLA before retiring in 2014. The post A Spiritual Autobiography – Ep 39 with Bill Kelly appeared first on Read Learn Live Podcast.

From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas―and the answers they yield―are more urgent than ever. The post The Nature Fix – Ep 38 with Florence Williams appeared first on Read Learn Live Podcast.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist examines the life and times of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, arguing she left behind the Kennedy family’s most profound political legacy. The post Eunice Kennedy Shriver – Ep 37 with Eileen McNamara appeared first on Read Learn Live Podcast.