Free Library Podcast

Walk this way for an evening with Joseph ''Rev Run'' Simmons, frontman for the mega-influential hip-hop trio Run-DMC. Regarded as the driving force behind ushering rap into the mainstream, the group was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Joining Rev Run is his wife, Justine Simmons, his costar on the popular reality show Run's House and his coauthor of Take Back Your Family: A Challenge to America's Parents. The long-married couple knows one thing about love-it's tricky! In Old School Love, they share the secrets and principles that have kept them together for a quarter century.

(recorded 2/12/2020)

A curator with more than 30 years' experience, Dr. Gretchen Sorin has consulted for more than 250 institutions, including the Smithsonian, the Jewish Museum, and the New York State Historical Association. She is the director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program of the State University of New York, the author of In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art, and coauthor of Touring Historic Harlem: Four Walks in Northern Manhattan. In Driving While Black, Sorin tells the true story of the famous Green Book, which reshaped the notion of travel for African Americans and helped drive the nascent civil rights movement.

(recorded 2/11/2020)

Referred to by Roger Ebert as ''the conscience of American independent filmmaking,'' John Sayles is the writer/director of 18 movies, including Matewan, Lone Star, Eight Men Out, and Passion Fish. In addition to writing more than 100 screenplays, he is the author of four novels and two short story collections, including Pride of the Bimbos, Union Dues, and Dillinger in Hollywood. His work has earned two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the Golden Globe, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Yellow Earth, Sayles spins a parable about Native American resistance to corporate and governmental forces.

(recorded 2/10/2020)

In conversation with Dick Polman

 ''Substantial'' and ''notably fair minded'' (New York Times Book Review), E.J. Dionne Jr. is a syndicated columnist who appears twice weekly in the Washington Post and nearly 100 other newspapers, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a visiting professor at Harvard University, and a professor at Georgetown University. A regular commentator on National Public Radio and on other radio and television programs, his New York Times bestselling books include Why the Right Went Wrong, the National Book Award–nominated Why Americans Hate Politics, and One Nation After Trump. In his latest book, Dionne advocates an alliance between progressives and moderates in order to reestablish America's prospects for a healthy future.

Dick Polman, Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes national political columns at dickpolman.net

(recorded 2/6/2020)

In conversation with Mark Bowden, most recently author of The Last Stone: A Masterpiece of Criminal Interrogation

David Zucchino is a contributing writer for The New York Times. He has covered wars and civil conflicts in more than three dozen countries. Zucchino was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from apartheid South Africa and is a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for his reporting from Iraq, Lebanon, Africa, and inner-city Philadelphia. He is the author of Thunder Run and Myth of the Welfare Queen. In his new book, Zucchino tells the story of the 19th-century North Carolina port city that, while once a burgeoning example of a mixed-race community, exploded into racial violence that erased the progress made by formerly enslaved people and their children.

(recorded 2/4/2020)

In conversation with Jon McGoran, author of Splintered

Eoin Colfer is the internationally acclaimed author of the Artemis Fowl series, which chronicles the ''magical'' (Washington Post) adventures of a young antihero criminal mastermind. The novels and their companion books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been adapted into a forthcoming film. Also the author of the sixth installment of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, several Marvel comics, a cyberpunk novel, and two children's books, Colfer was Ireland's Children's Laureate from 2014 to 2016. Telling the story of a high-flying vodka-swilling Louisiana dragon who happens across a teen on the run from a corrupt lawman, Highfire is a genre-warping adventure fantasy for adults. 

(recorded 2/3/2020)

In conversation with Mark Zandi, Chief Economist, Moody's Analytics

''The most celebrated economist of his generation'' (Economist), Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in 2008 for his work in international trade and monetary geography. A New York Times op-ed columnist since 1999, he is the author or editor of more than two dozen books, including The Age of Diminished Expectations, The Conscience of a Liberal, and End This Depression Now!, as well as the former monthly columns ''No Free Lunch'' in Fortune and ''The Dismal Science'' in Slate. In his latest book, Krugman tackles common fiscal misunderstandings and offers a guide to the most vital economic policy issues of our time.

Sandra Shaber Memorial Lecture

(recorded 1/30/2020)

In conversation with Dr. Jen Ashton, Chief Medical Correspondent for ABC News and author of The Self-Care Solution: A Year of Becoming Happier, Healthier, and Fitter--One Month at a Time

A professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University, Jennifer S. Hirsch also codirects the school's Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT), a research project that explored sexual health and sexual assault among undergraduates. Shamus Khan chairs Columbia's sociology department and codirects SHIFT's ethnographic team. Hirsch's books include A Courtship After Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families and The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV. Currently the editor of the academic journal Public Culture and a former Time magazine columnist, Khan is the author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School. Built upon years of research, interviews, and observation, Sexual Citizens delves into the question of why sexual assault is so ubiquitous on college campuses.

(recorded 1/28/2020)

In conversation with Sarah Marshall, journalist, writer, and co-host of the podcast You're Wrong About.

In June 1980, two young middle-class women who had been hitchhiking to a nature festival called the Rainbow Gathering were found murdered in a remote clearing in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Though no one was prosecuted for these crimes, suspicions turned on one local family, then on a convicted serial killer, and then seemed to melt away into time. Emma Copley Eisenberg moved to Pocahontas County for two years, combing through the hills for clues to the murders, discovering along the way how this violent act traumatized those affected and helped shape a complex narrative about the self-perceptions of Appalachians. Eisenberg's writing has appeared in such publications as Granta, McSweeney's, Tin House, Salon, and Slate.

(recorded 1/23/2020)

In conversation with Carmen Maria Machado, most recently author of In the Dream House

''A subtle observer of human interactions'' with ''an inborn ability to cast a spell'' (New York Times), Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, a novel that follows a gay man seeking to know his own heart. Winner of the British Book Award for Debut of the Year and a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by more than 50 publications. His stories and criticism have appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including the Paris Review, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic. Cleanness revisits the characters and Bulgarian setting of What Belongs to You.

Watch the video here.

(recorded 1/16/2020)