Happy To Be Here

On a scale of 1 to famous, Tom Hanks is off the charts. 

So how did we land this amazing interview? Easy! We put a 1939 Underwood Champion typewriter into a recording studio and lured him in Elmer Fudd style! (Bugs Bunny:Carrots::Tom Hanks:Typewriters)

The reason we're rebroadcasting part of this episode right now is because our little show is celebrating a birthday. We've been around for FIVE YEARS! To celebrate, we're showcasing some of our favorite episodes AND we're asking you to support the future of the show.

These five years of Nerdette have been made possible by you. You're a part of the team. And if you donate today, we're going to thank you with some killer swag. We've got mugs, sweatbands, buttons, and even Lady Nerds of History posters. We really hope you contribute and join in on the magic. 

Here's the place to go: www.wbez.org/nerdalert and seriously, thank you.

(If you want to hear our full interview with Tom Hanks, check it out here.)

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Nerdette has been around for FIVE YEARS! And we're celebrating our birthday by showcasing some of our favorite parts of our favorite episodes. 

Did you know that writer Roxane Gay has a fascination with Channing Tatum's neck? You're about to! Because this special episode is from our 2017 interview with the amazing author of Difficult Women. Roxane Gay also tells us about her love of Thor, her co-authoring of a little Marvel comic called Black Panther, and how she never reads anybody's Goodreads reviews of her work.  

Real talk: these five years of Nerdette have been made possible by you.  You're a part of the team. And we're asking you to support the future of Nerdette. As a thank you for donating, you'll get some fun gifts! Like mugs, sweatbands, buttons, and even Lady Nerds of History posters. Read about what you can get (and donate!) here: www.wbez.org/nerdalert

THANK YOU!

(And if you want to hear our full interview with Roxane Gay, check it out here.)

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In 2016, Grace Bonney spoke with 100 women doing creative work and turned those interviews into a book, In the Company of Women.  It became a New York Times bestseller, and earlier this month, Bonney released a follow up: a biennial business magazine called Good Company. Plus, while she’s out promoting her new publication, she also runs the creativity website Design*Sponge. 

Like so many of us, Bonney is busy. So how does she refuel?

“That’s one of the things I think everyone has a really pithy answer to, like yoga or meditating,” Bonney told Nerdette host Greta Johnsen. “I don’t do any of those things. I think I ask for help.”

Bonney tells us what asking for help looks like.

PLUS: The Nerdette Rummage Sale IS NOW OPEN! Support Nerdette right now and get some sweet, sweet swag — like mugs and buttons and sweatbands for instance: www.wbez.org/nerdalert

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We brought brothers Hari and Ashok Kondabolu on Nerdette to talk about making time for self-care in what can be a grinding, freelance economy. Instead, they unpacked their relationship. 

“Do you look up to me at all?” Hari asks his younger brother, with host Greta Johnsen listening in the wings.

“No, we have completely different lives,” Ashok immediately responds.

“This is not relaxing!” Hari says. 

Well, we tried. 

But Hari and Ashok DID give us some wonderful ideas about how to recharge your batteries by ignoring the phone, taking aimless walks, and selling your clothes. 

About our guests: Hari’s a comedian with a new Netflix special, Warn Your Relatives, and Ashok’s a former member of the rap group Das Racist who’s now producing the show Hey, How Ya Doin? The pair also co-host Earwolf's Kondabolu Brothers podcast, where they debate current events, share odd stories, and further unpack their relationship.

PLUS: The Nerdette Rummage Sale IS NOW OPEN! Support Nerdette right now and get some awesome swag at a special discount!: wbez.org/nerdalert

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Near the end of STS-125, NASA’s final space shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope back in 2009, bad weather in Florida initially stopped the seven-member team from returning to Earth. The two-day delay that followed presented the astronauts with some unusual but much needed downtime. So what did they do with it? 

Looked out the windows.

“I liked to listen to music and watch the world go by,” said Megan McArthur, a mission specialist on the Space Shuttle Atlantis. “It was pretty awesome.”

For our new project, Power Up, we're asking fascinating people to explain how they set themselves up for success while living in (and, in this case, off of) an exhausting world. 

McArthur told us about the seemingly difficult task of relaxing in outer space. She also described her role in helping the American Girl doll company create Luciana, a Chilean-American who is an aspiring astronaut. 

“It helps for people to see a role model who represents them, right?” McArthur said of Luciana. “[Someone] who looks like them, maybe who has a similar experience as they have, in order for them to imagine themselves in that same kind of environment.”

McArthur described her own experience meeting a role model: astronaut Sally Ride, who McArthur says she met when she was 16 years old. She says the 20-minute conversation with Ride, the first American woman to travel to space, was “a special and unique experience for someone just starting to think about what they want to do with their life.”

Tell us how you power up!

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Let’s be real: life can be hectic sometimes. You don’t need to tell that to Amy Schumer and Aidy Bryant, two of the nation’s top female comedians. 

Who better to kick off our new project, Power Up? For the next few months, we're asking fascinating people how they set themselves up for success in an exhausting world. 

Knitting? Bowling? Researching the presence of alternate dimensions? “I literally will say to myself out loud in the mirror, like, ‘You got this, bitch,’” Schumer tells Nerdette host Greta Johnsen. 

Schumer and Bryant also talk about what drew them to their new film, I Feel Pretty, which is now in theaters. 

We also want to know how YOU power up. Record yourself on your phone and email the audio file to [email protected].

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Here at Nerdette we’ve been thinking a lot about how much the world can wear us down. Which has led us to a very important question: How do so many successful, inspiring people have the time and energy to be so successful and inspiring?

Power Up is a new project where we ask fascinating people how they set themselves up for success in what can be an exhausting world. How do amazing (non-robot) humans recharge their (hypothetical) batteries? We want to know! Because we all have the same number of hours in a day — even the scientists, poets, astronauts and adventurers — and as Oprah might say: You need to LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE.

Subscribe now and get the first episode of Power Up delivered to you on April 27. Click the play button above to hear a preview.

We also want to hear how YOU power up. Send us an email — or, better yet, record yourself on your phone and send the audio file to [email protected]. This project is for all of us, which means it’ll be even better if you weigh in.

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Tomi Adeyemi is the 24-year-old author of 'Children of Blood and Bone,' a new young adult novel that — in terms of pop culture blockbusters — could be on par with 'The Hunger Games' or 'Harry Potter.' The book, the first in a West African-inspired fantasy series, hit shelves earlier this month — more than a year after the movie rights were picked up by Fox 2000. 

Adeyemi tells Nerdette that part of her motivation to write the book stemmed from racist reactions to 'The Hunger Games' movies. 

“There were people online being like, ‘Why’d they make Rue and Cinna black? Why’d they make all the good characters black? It wasn’t sad when Rue was speared to death because she was black,’” Adeyemi says. “Seeing that level of racism applied in a fictional world heightened it for me. Because yes, The Hunger Games isn’t real, but the fact that someone could feel that strongly and have that much hatred for something that isn’t even real? I’m like, if that’s what you feel for fake things, then what do you feel about me?”

Adeyemi talks with Nerdette host Greta Johnsen and special guest-host Jenn White (of WBEZ's Making Obama and Making Oprah podcasts) about how she came to write a fantasy novel that simultaneously depicted the modern black experience.

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As a four-year old in Juneau, Alaska, Nerdette host Greta Johnsen was diagnosed with an eye condition known as "Best disease." That name is a misnomer for several reasons — the big one being that "Best disease" causes premature macular degeneration — but curiously it happens to be among the best diseases for experimenting with CRISPR, a genetic engineering tool that can be used to edit DNA. 

This very special episode of Nerdette follows Greta, her father, and Dr. Bruce Conklin, the scientist who's currently trying to develop the perfect CRISPR system to inject into some Johnsen family eyeballs. Plus, you can't have a conversation about experimental gene editing without discussing the ethical implications of making irreversible changes to human evolution. 

“We’d be permanently altering the course of evolution if we decide that we think it’s OK to edit human embryos," says Megan Hochstrasser, a science communications manager and CRISPR expert. "Is that something we want to be able to do as a society?”

That's a great question. Let's talk about it. 

Special thanks this week to the Innovative Genomics Institute as well as the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of California, San Francisco.

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Anna Deavere Smith might be best known for her acting roles on NBC’s The West Wing and Showtime’s Nurse Jackie. But she’s also one of the most prolific playwrights of “documentary-style theater,” where she uses verbatim interviews as source material in hopes of pushing her audience toward “an adjustment in the way that they think.” 

Her latest work is a one-woman show called Notes From The Field, which was recently released on HBO. It examines how minority students living in poverty often end up incarcerated. To make it, Smith interviewed 250 people affected by the school-to-prison pipeline, including inmates, educators, and witnesses to injustice. 

Smith told Nerdette co-host Tricia Bobeda about how she made Notes From The Field and what she hopes it will achieve.

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