Free Library Podcast

The campaign manager for Barack Obama's 2008 primary and general election victories, David Plouffe later served on the White House staff as a senior advisor and was largely credited with the 44th president's 2012 win. He formerly worked as a leading Democratic Party media consultant and a senior executive at Uber, and he currently heads policy and advocacy at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. His book The Audacity to Win detailed Obama's campaign victory over prominent and powerful conservative forces. In his latest book, Plouffe offers a practical and motivational playbook for defeating Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

Pine Tree Foundation Endowed Lecture

(recorded 3/10/2020)

''One of the best sportswriters alive'' (USA Today), John Feinstein is the author of the bestselling A Good Walk Spoiled, A Season on the Brink, and Where Nobody Knows Your Name, among almost two dozen other books. He has been a staff columnist for the Washington Post, Sporting News, and Golf Digest, and a regular on-air commentator for The Golf Channel, The Jim Rome Show, and the CBS Sports Radio Network. Three decades after changing the complexion of sportswriting with the publication of A Season on the Brink, Feinstein returns to his beloved college basketball to tell the story of the often-anonymous heroes of Division 1 hoops.

(recorded 3/5/2020)

Historian Adam Hochschild's ten ''carefully researched and vigorously told'' (Houston Chronicle) books include King Leopold's Ghost, a haunting portrait of Belgium's 19th-century brutal colonization of the Congo, and To End All Wars, the little-told story of the First World War's moral critics. Both were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. His other books variously address the atrocities of Stalinist Russia, the perspectives of famous and little-known participants in the Spanish Civil War, and the history of the antislavery movement in the British Empire. He is cofounder of Mother Jones magazine, and his many awards include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. Rebel Cinderella details the life of an impoverished immigrant sweatshop worker who married the scion of one of New York's richest families and became one of America's great social justice crusaders.

(recorded 3/4/2020)

The creators of the immensely popular eponymous blog Tom and Lorenzo, Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez entertain millions of readers a month with their singular perspective on fashion and pop culture. They are frequent guests on Sundance Channel's All on the Line with Joe Zee and Sirius XM Radio's show Derek and Romaine, and have been profiled, quoted, or interviewed by dozens of media outlets, including the New York Times, National Public Radio, and Vanity Fair. In Legendary Children, Fitzgerald and Marquez posit that RuPaul's Drag Race is the prism through which queer social history and modern culture can be understood.

(recorded 3/3/2020)

R. Eric Thomas is the creator of Elle's ''Eric Reads the News,'' a daily humor column that lambasts pop culture, celebrity, and politics that has been praised by Lin-Manuel Miranda as ''Sedaris-level laugh-out-loud funny.'' Also a renowned playwright, his work has been staged across America and has garnered a slew of awards, including the Barrymore Award and the Dramatists Guild Lanford Wilson Award. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among other periodicals, and he is the longtime host of The Moth StorySlams in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. In his debut essay collection, Thomas explores just what it means to be an ''other'' in the face of college code-switching, the reconciliation of his sexuality with his Christian identity, and the 2016 election.

(recorded 2/27/2020)

In conversation with Michael A. Smerconish

Editor at large at Wired and a technology writer for more than 30 years, Steven Levy is the author of seven books, including In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives; Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age; and Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, named by PC Magazine as the best sci-tech book of the last 20 years. He has contributed articles to such periodicals as Harper's, the New Yorker, and Rolling Stone, and is a former editor at Backchannel and Newsweek. Levy's latest book charts the juggernaut rise of Mark Zuckerberg's social media platform from the dorms of Harvard to becoming one of the world's most valuable and ubiquitous corporations.

Michael A. Smerconish is the host of The Michael Smerconish Program on SiriusXM POTUS Channel 124, the host of CNN's Smerconish on Saturday mornings, a Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, and a New York Times bestselling author.

(recorded 2/26/2020)

Gish Jen's many novels include Typical American, World and Town, and Mona in the Promised Land. She is also the author of two nonfiction works that explore the differences in East-West notions of art and culture, and her short stories have appeared dozens of publications, including the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Jen has earned a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, and her writing has appeared in four Best American Short Stories anthologies. A dystopian tale of rising sea levels, a segregated populace, and an underground baseball league, The Resisters is a novel set against an increasingly plausible American backdrop.

(recorded 2/25/2020)

In conversation with Alyssa Mastromonaco, author of Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?: And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House and frequent guest on Pod Save America

The White House director of communications in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013, Dan Pfeiffer is the New York Times bestselling author of Yes We (Still) Can, an ''amusing and insightful'' (Esquire) account of the shifting tides of politics of the internet age and a guide to fighting back in the Trump era. He is also the cohost of the popular Pod Save America, a no-nonsense breakdown of the week's news. In UnTrumping America, Pfeiffer returns with a political roadmap for defeating the current president and putting America back on a steady path.

(recorded 2/24/2020)

The food editor at the New York Times and the founding editor of the Times's digital cookbook, NYT Cooking, Sam Sifton is one of America's most popular culinary writers. He formerly worked as the Gray Lady's national news editor, restaurant critic, and culture editor; held numerous positions at the New York Press; and was a founding editor of Talk magazine. He is the author of the cookbook Thanksgiving: How to Cook It Well and A Field Guide to the Yettie, a nonfiction look into the culture of young tech entrepreneurs. In his new cookbook, Sifton offers a salutation to the art of Sunday supper and the pleasures of communal meals.

(recorded 2/20/2020)

Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation, ''an effortless-seeming downhill ride that picks up astonishing narrative speed as it goes'' (New York Review of Books), tells the story of a once heady marriage at its breaking point. It was named to scores of 2014 ''Best of the Year'' lists and was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award and Folio Prize. Offill is also the author of the novel Last Things, a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the L.A. Times First Book Award. A writing teacher at Syracuse University and Queens University, she is also the author of four children's books. Her new novel is the story of a librarian who becomes increasingly obsessed with doomsday preparations.

(recorded 2/13/2020)