Podcasts

Showing 1361 to 1380 of 2289
  • This podcast contains explicit content. Called "an astute and compassionate observer, a meticulous historian and a gifted stylist" by Adam Langer in the New York Times , David Bezmozgis emigrated from Riga, Latvia to Toronto in 1980. His debut… more

  • The author of more than 25 books, including two Pulitzer Prize-winning works of nonfiction, E.O. Wilson has won a raft of scientific and conservation prizes, including the prestigious National Medal of Science. Wilson’s writing explores the world… more

  • 2012 Philadelphia Book Festival Award-winning science writer Dava Sobel’s bestselling books include Longitude , Galileo’s Daughter , and The Planets . In the elegant Longitude , Sobel relayed the dramatic human story behind the invention of the… more

  • 2012 Philadelphia Book Festival In what Psychology Today called the “remedy for the modern glut of frivolous self-help literature,” award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis was a widely praised demystification of life.… more

  • 2012 Philadelphia Book Festival In The Sounding of the Whale , D. Graham Burnett provides a comprehensive study of cetacean science, history, and policy. Called “the definitive account of whalekind’s transformation from cipher to signifier” in… more

  • 2012 Philadelphia Book Festival An editor, poet, and critic, Robert Polito is Director of Writing Programs at The New School and the author of National Book Critics Circle Award winner Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which untangled… more

  • 2012 Philadelphia Book Festival “Sanchez has long been regarded as the city's unofficial poet laureate. But now the job is truly hers,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer after acclaimed activist Sonia Sanchez’s appointment, at the end of 2011, as… more

  • 2012 Philadelphia Book Festival Known for his "big-hearted, Whitmanesque poems about working-class Detroit" (New York Times), Philip Levine was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2011. Levine’s early poems, often written in narrow,… more

  • For his two tours of duty in Iraq, writer and former U.S. Army Captain Luis Carlos Montalván earned the Combat Action Badge, two Bronze stars and the Purple Heart.  After returning home, the pressures of physical wounds, traumatic brain injury,… more

  • Born in Philadelphia, 95-year-old Rosamond Bernier has tamed wild animals, flown her own plane, and befriended the likes of Henri Matisse, Leonard Bernstein, and Frida Kahlo. The first-ever European features editor for  Vogue  in post-war Paris,… more

  • The longest-serving senator in Pennsylvania history, Senator Arlen Specter began his goodbye speech after 30 years in office by declaring: "This is not a farewell address but rather a closing argument." Referring to the internal ideological… more

  • Lionel Shriver is the author of 10 novels and the recipient of the 2005 Orange Prize for her acclaimed book  We Need to Talk About Kevin, recently adapted into a major motion picture. With her gift for psychological portraiture and a knack for… more

  • Cultural critic and public radio giant Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor for National Public Radio's  This American Life  and the author of  The Partly Cloudy Patriot , Take the Cannoli , and Assassination Vacation . Known for her witty and… more

  • One Book, One Philadelphia Grand Finale Featured author Edwidge Danticat will discuss the themes in the 2012 One Book, One Philadelphia selection, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. The evening will also feature an exciting musical… more

  • Elaine Pagels burst the myth of the early Christian Church as a unified movement in her 1979 book  The Gnostic Gospels,  which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and was chosen by the Modern Library as… more

  • In the 1940s and 1950s, a group of brilliant engineers led by John von Neumann gathered in Princeton, New Jersey with the joint goal of realizing Alan Turing's theoretical universal machine—a thought experiment that scientists use to understand… more

  • Alain de Botton's aphoristic first novel, On Love, was a winking dissertation on romantic love, published when he was just 23. It was followed by several books that explored a philosophy of everyday life, including The Architecture of Happiness… more

  • Jonathan Safran Foer became a certified literary wunderkind at the age of 25 with his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated , which told the story of a young man's search across the obliterated Ukrainian landscape for the woman who saved his… more

  • The queen of the book club, Jodi Picoult is known for her fictional page-turners that feature nuanced characters, pitch-perfect descriptions of suburbia—and the darkness it often conceals—and unfettered insight into the shape-shifting terrain of… more

  • After publishing several stories in  The New Yorker , Ann Beattie burst on the literary scene in 1976 with Chilly Scenes of Winter and promptly became the unofficial diarist of a generation, delivering "irony-laced reports from the front line of… more