Free Library Podcast

The Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a Professor of Vaccinology and Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Dr. Paul Offit is the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine and a founding advisory-board member of the Autism Science Foundation. His many honors include election to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of more than 140 papers and six books, including The Cutter Incident, Autism's False Prophets, and Bad Faith. Bad Advice pushes back against the pervasiveness of pseudoscientists, quacks, charlatans, and dangerously misinformed activists.

Watch the video here.

(recorded 6/25/2018)

Please join Randi on the launch date of her latest book, Aroused, which takes us on a guided tour through the intellectually arousing history and science of hormones. Randi's prior book Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank won high praise including being called by NPR a ''delightful-and sometimes disturbing'' romp through the history, fads, and science behind making and having babies. Randi earned her MD from Yale University, and MS and an MPH from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree, focusing in the history and sociology of science, from the University of Pennsylvania. Her articles have been published in the New York Times, among other national publications. She lives in New York City. 

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(recorded 6/26/2018)

The principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto, a planetary scientist, and an aerospace executive and consultant, Dr. Alan Stern has participated in a mind-blowing 29 space missions and has served in the loftiest strata of contemporary American space exploration. The chair of astrobiology at the U.S. Library of Congress, Dr. David Grinspoon studies climate evolution, the conditions for life elsewhere in the cosmos, and space-exploration strategy. He has consulted on interplanetary missions for several international space agencies and is on the team for NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover. He is the author of Earth in Human Hands, a ''remarkable synthesis of natural history, planetary science, extinction histories ... and the human effect on the world'' (Forbes). In Chasing New Horizons, Stern and Grinspoon go inside and then beyond the science, politics, and egos of the 3 billion-mile trip to the edge of our solar system for the once-in-a-lifetime 32,000-miles-per-hour flyby of Pluto.

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(recorded 5/2/2018)

Jake Tapper is anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent for CNN, where he hosts the weekday program The Lead with Jake Tapper and the Sunday morning show State of the Union. He is the former White House correspondent for ABC News and contributor to Good Morning America, Nightline, and World News with Diane Sawyer. His many honors include an unprecedented three Merriman Smith Awards for presidential coverage. Tapper is the author of The Outpost, the tragic but inspiring true story of a small U.S. military besieged by the Taliban. In The Hellfire Club-his debut political thriller-an unlikely 1950s congressman discovers a D.C. conspiracy that could change the course of history.

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(recorded 5/3/2018)

A fellow of the American Meteorological Society and director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, geographer Mark C. Serreze is one of the world's foremost experts on the planet's cryosphere-Earth's snow and ice cover-and its relatively recent changes. Spanning three decades of astonishing and alarming discovery, Brave New Arctic blends Serreze's research and experiences with that of other pioneering geographers and climatologists to explain the extraordinary circumstances of man-made global warming and the consequences to come. 

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(recorded 5/8/2018)

In Conversation with Kalela Williams, Director of Neighborhood Enrichment Programming

A ''hypnotic'' novelist whose ease with vernacular puts her ''in fellowship with such forebears as Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner'' (The New Yorker), Jesmyn Ward won the 2011 National Book Award for Salvage the Bones, the story of a pregnant teenager and her Mississippi family in the days surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Her elegiac 2013 memoir Men We Reaped was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Last year she won a stunning second National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing, a 21st-century road novel about the difficulty of family bonds and the ugly underside of the American story.

*Spoiler alert: the first question during the Q&A (minute 42:00) reveals a critical event in the book.

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(recorded 5/9/2018)

Celebrated by critics and readers alike for ''interweaving history, fascinating trivia and acute observation'' (New York Times Book Review), Simon Winchester is the bestselling author of the nonfiction books The Professor and the Madman, Krakatoa, The Men Who United the States, Atlantic, and Pacific. Formerly an Oxford-trained field geologist in Uganda and a war correspondent for The Guardian and The Sunday Times, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2006. Stretching from the dawn of the Industrial Age to the bleeding edge tech of tomorrow, The Perfectionists tells the story of the engineers and instruments that gave birth to modern manufacturing.

Watch the video here.

(recorded 5/9/2018)

''A marvelous storyteller'' (Chicago Tribune), Mary Morris explores some of her favorite themes-away versus home, childhood memories, and the Midwest-in such works of fiction as A Mother's Love, House Arrest, and The Jazz Palace. The winner of the Rome Prize and the Ainsfield-Wolf Award for Fiction, she is also the author of the travel classic Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. In Gateway to the Moon, Morris interweaves the stories of a secluded New Mexican town's present-day residents with those of its original settlers 500 years earlier. 

Nathaniel Popkin is the author and co-author of five books, including Lion and Leopard, Song of the City, and Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City. He is also co-editor of the literary anthology Who Will Speak for America?, the fiction editor of Cleaver Magazine, and the writer/editor of the Emmy-winning documentary film series Philadelphia: The Great Experiment. In Everything is Borrowed, he ponders regret, history, and the intransigence of the urban landscape through the strangely parallel lives of two men separated by centuries.

Watch the video here.

(recorded 5/10/2018)

In conversation with award winning broadcaster and journalist Tracey Matisak.

Political commentator Alex Wagner is co-host of Showtime's The Circus and a contributor to CBS News and The Atlantic. She previously hosted MSNBC's Emmy-nominated Now with Alex Wagner, among many other credits. From 2007 to 2009 she served as the executive director of Not On Our Watch, an international advocacy nonprofit dedicated to preventing mass human-rights violations and atrocities. In Futureface, she searches the globe for the secrets of her ancestry, along the way confronting foundational questions of immigration and identity.

Watch the video here.

(recorded 5/15/2018)

Please join Randi on the launch date of her latest book, Aroused, which takes us on a guided tour through the intellectually arousing history and science of hormones. Randi's prior book Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank won high praise including being called by NPR a ''delightful-and sometimes disturbing'' romp through the history, fads, and science behind making and having babies. Randi earned her MD from Yale University, and MS and an MPH from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree, focusing in the history and sociology of science, from the University of Pennsylvania. Her articles have been published in the New York Times, among other national publications. She lives in New York City. 

(recorded 6/26/2018)