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 joins MPR News host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about why we work the way we do and the changes that could make work more productive, autonomous and joyful.

Guest:

• Brigid Schulte is a journalist and the director of the Better Life Lab. Her new book is “Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life.”

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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 boisterous past.

This week, she joins host Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas to explore the age-old question: Are we really ruled by our stomachs?

Guest:

• Elsa Richardson is a historian at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Her new book is “Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut.”

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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 inability for science to identify its own biases.

His diagnosis? Humility.

“Medical science is about transparency and civil discourse. Great ideas and truths have always emerged from a healthy debate within the scientific community,” he tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “And tragically, what we’ve seen in the modern era is a small group of people making the decisions for everybody — many times with a paternalist and hierarchical philosophy.”

Guest:

• Dr. Marty Makary is a surgeon and public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University. His newest book is “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.”

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 the scale of change. But as she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, she believes it’s not too late. We still have time to figure out how to co-exist sustainably. Her new book, “What the Wild Sea Can Be,” explores practical solutions — like no-fish zones and banning undersea mining — that can give the planet’s oceans time to heal.

Guest:

• Helen Scales is a marine biologist, a writer and a storytelling ambassador for the Save Our Seas Foundation. Her newest book is “What the Wild Sea Can Be.”

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In his 2019 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, “The Overstory,” Richard Powers imagines a world where only a few acres of virgin forest remain on the continent. A group of strangers band together to protect those few remaining trees, and in the process, discover the trees are communicating with each other.

Powers’ new novel, “Playground,” turns the same eye to the planet’s oceans. As he tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, his hope is that the power of storytelling will animate humans to behold the sea with fresh wonder — and act to preserve it before it’s too late.

“These last three novels of mine are attempts to find ways of telling stories that challenge that separateness or sense of entitlement,” he says, “that sense that we are the essential and perhaps the only interesting game in town and that everything else is a resource for our project.”

Guest:

• Richard Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including “The Overstory,” “Bewilderment” and “Orfeo.” His new book is “Playground.”

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Beloved children’s author Kate DiCamillo published three new books this year: “Ferris,” “Orris and Timble: The Beginning,” and “The Hotel Balzaar.” She has two more coming next year — plus 2025 marks the 25th anniversary of the book that started it all, “Because of Winn-Dixie.”

She is a prolific writer, a lifelong reader and a delightful human. Which made her the perfect guest to close out Talking Volumes celebratory 25th season on Tuesday, Oct. 29.

No stranger to the stage at the Fitzgerald Theater, DiCamillo came with stories and quips. She and host Kerri Miller talked about the impact of Winn-Dixie on DiCamillo’s life, what she knows now that she didn’t know then, and how stories can change your life.

It was an evening full of wonder and laughter. Singer-songwriter Humbird was the special musical guest.

You might know Katharine Lee Bates wrote the poem that eventually became the song, “America the Beautiful,” after she visited the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado and was overcome by its beauty.

But did you know she grew up a precocious youngest child in a family that struggled after the death of her father? And that she was a budding feminist who chafed at menial tasks like sewing and wished for nothing more than to be a scholar? And did you know she was only ever paid $5 for the song that would become America’s unofficial national anthem?

It’s another example of an ordinary person whose contributions to our country’s legacy are extraordinary.

That’s a class of people government teacher Sharon McMahon finds especially compelling. In her new book, “The Small and Mighty,” she highlights unsung Americans who changed history but didn’t make it into the textbooks (often, “because they weren’t a white man,” she reminds her readers).

It’s a take fans of her podcast, “Here’s Where It Gets Interesting,” will find familiar. A former government and law teacher, McMahon lives in Duluth. But she burst onto the national stage in 2020 when she took to Instagram to combat misinformation she saw swirling on social media after the election. Her direct yet amiable style garnered her account, @sharonsaysso, more than a million followers, who now look to her for historical and current event facts and context.

This week on Big Books and Bold Ideas, McMahon joins host Kerri Miller to talk about “The Small and the Mighty,” why history matters more than ever, and how her belief in everyday Americans influencing democracy animates all her work.

As we approach Election Day, Big Books and Bold Ideas returns to our Americans and Democracy series. Here are some of the question we’re confronting. How nimble and flexible and resilient is our democracy? What is required of Americans to build and support a healthy democracy? Do we still want it?

Eboo Patel writes in his book, “We Need to Build,” that a fresh manifesto for a new era in America could sound like this: “We, the varied peoples of a nation struggling to be reborn, are defeating the things we don’t like by building the things we do.”

It’s a realistic but hopeful take from a man who is considered by many to be an expert on how to tolerate and even celebrate differences in a pluralistic society. During his conversation with host Kerri Miller, Patel admits he was a fire-breathing activist when he was young, more inclined to burn the whole system down. But after years of working with Americans of different beliefs, he says, he has come to value being more of “an architect than an arsonist.”

“You don’t create societies by burning things down,” he says. “You create societies by building things.”

It’s a provocative, thoughtful and inspiring discussion that will linger long past the results of this election.

Guest:

• Eboo Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith America, an organization that supports religious diversity. His most recent book is “We Need to Build: Field Notes for a Diverse Democracy.”

It’s a winter night when we first meet Tom Rourke. He’s penning love letters, preening in mirrors, pushing dope, partaking of booze, singing and flirting and fighting. It's just another night in Butte, Montana, for the feckless young Irishman. And no one writes the Irish quite like Kevin Barry.

Barry’s new novel, “The Heart in Winter,” is his first set in America. But true to form, it features the Irish. That’s because, in the 1890s, Irish immigrants by the thousands descended upon the tiny frontier town of Butte to work the copper mines — a historical nugget Barry learned in 1999.

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  'The mind of Irish author' Kevin Barry lives in a hilariously malevolent world
  
  

As he told host Kerri Miller, at the time, he thought to himself: “My God, this is a Western but it's a Western with County Cork accents. I’m in. This is my book.”

He immediately hopped on a plane to Montana, where he was welcomed warmly. Butte remains proud of its Irish heritage. And he went back to Ireland and wrote something like 100,000 words.

But, he said, “I knew even as I was writing it, it was all dead on the page. It just wasn't coming to life for me, because I didn't have the characters yet. I didn’t have the people of the novel yet, and those took their sweet time. It took another 22 years and six books later before my characters finally appeared to me.”

What finally appeared on the page was a savagely funny and romantic tale of two young lovers on the run from a cuckolded husband’s goons.

On this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, Barry joins Miller to talk about the entwined histories of America and Ireland and how he deftly uses comedy to combat a sense of fatalism. He also shares his experience narrating his own audiobooks, which he finds crucial for refining his stories.

Guest:

• Kevin Barry is the author of many books, including “Night Boat to Tangier” and “Beatlebone.” His new novel is “The Heart in Winter.”

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

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Louise Erdrich is, without a doubt, a beloved writer. The Minnesota Native American author has won nearly every literary award out there — including a Pulitzer for “The Night Watchman” and a National Book Award for “The Round House” — and her stories captivate, haunt and delight millions of devoted readers.

She can accept the praise. But the title beloved? She’s not into it.

That’s just one of the many stories that unspooled over the course of Erdrich’s conversation Tuesday night on stage with MPR News host Kerri Miller for Talking Volumes.

In front of a sold-out crowd, Erdrich talked about how growing up in the Red River Valley — where her new novel, “The Mighty Red,” is set — shaped her, why writing villains is a particular kind of torture and how the relatable and generous relationship between Crystal and Kismet in “The Mighty Red” was influenced by her own experience raising four daughters.

And oh yes. Why she squirms at “beloved.”

It’s a funny, surprising, candid and warm conversation, the third in the 2024 Talking Volumes season. Powwow singer Joe Rainey was the musical guest.

There’s one Talking Volumes event left: Another Minnesota author, Kate DiCamillo, will join Miller on Oct. 29 for the finale of the 25th anniversary season. Tickets are available here.