Library Talks

In this episode of Library Talks, author Edward McPherson sits down with fellow author Robert Sullivan to discuss his latest book, Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View.

Look Out is an exploration of long-distance mapping, aerial photography, and top-down and far-ranging perspectives—from pre–Civil War America to our vexed modern times of drone warfare, hyper-surveillance at home and abroad, and quarantine and protest. Blending history, reporting, personal experience, and accounts of activists, programmers, spies, astronauts, artists, inventors, and dreamers, Edward McPherson reveals that to see is to control—and the stakes are high for everyone.

In this episode of Library Talks, prizewinning constitutional historian Akhil Reed Amar talks about his new book Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840–1920.

Born Equal recounts the dramatic constitutional debates that unfolded across eight decades, across those eight decades four amendments abolished slavery, secured Black and female citizenship, and extended suffrage regardless of race or gender. An ambitious narrative history and a work of legal and political analysis, Born Equal is a new portrait of America's winding road toward equality.

In this episode of Library Talks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and physician Siddhartha Mukherjee joins Library Talks to discuss the updated edition of his groundbreaking book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Originally published in 2010, The Emperor of All Maladies is a humane "biography" of cancer, tracing the disease from its first documented appearance thousands of years ago through the 20th century's battles to cure, control, and understand it. Siddhartha Mukherjee expands on the book including four new chapters that illuminate extraordinary developments in cancer detection, prevention, and what the future may hold in the fight against this complex disease.

Mukherjee discusses the latest edition of his book with physician Dhruv Khullar.

In this episode of Library Talks, The legal scholar and former White House official, Tim Wu, examines how today's tech giants extract wealth from ordinary citizens and deepen America's class divide.

The Internet was once celebrated as a democratizing force promising widespread prosperity. In his new book, The Age of Extraction, Tim Wu explores how it has instead fueled the rise of new economic hierarchies and widened the wealth gap and deepened inequality. Wu, who famously coined the term "net neutrality," charts the ascent of dominant tech platforms, the extraordinary power they wield, and the unprecedented ways they extract wealth, data, and attention from us all—reshaping both our economy and our society. Tim Wu is joined by Lina Khan former chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

In this episode of Library Talks, 4th generation Russ & Daughters co-owners Niki Russ Federman & Josh Russ join the podcast to talk about their book Russ & Daughters: 100 Years of Appetizing with fellow writer Joshua David Stein.

From the legendary New York destination for Jewish appetizing, a beautiful and inspiring cookbook that encompasses history, tradition, and absolutely delicious food.

In 1907, a Jewish immigrant named Joel Russ landed in New York City, where he took a pushcart of herring and built a legacy that would pass down through fathers and daughters (and sons and husbands and wives) for more than a hundred years. Four generations later, the ancestral heart of Russ & Daughters continues to bustle on the Lower East Side, with three more locations throughout the city.

In this episode of Library Talks, writer Amanda Vaill joins the podcast to discuss her new book Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. Discover America's Founding Era anew through the lives of the Schuyler sisters, two women as formidable as the famous men they loved, married, and mothered.

Amanda Vaill worked on Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution during her 2018-2019 Fellowship at the Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She will discuss her book with biographer and critic Bill Goldstein.

In this episode of Library Talks, science writer Mindy Weisberger discusses her new book Rise of the Zombie Bugs: The Surprising Science of Parasitic Mind-Control with Neuroscientist Paula Croxson.

Zombies aren't just the stuff of nightmares. Explore the fascinating world of real-life insect zombification.

In Rise of the Zombie Bugs, Mindy Weisberger explores the eerie yet fascinating phenomenon of real-life zombification in the insect class and among other invertebrates. Zombifying parasites reproduce by rewriting their victims' neurochemistry, transforming them into the "walking dead": armies of cicadas, spiders, and other hosts that helplessly follow a zombifier's commands, living only to serve the parasite's needs until death's sweet release (and often beyond). Blending scientific rigor with a flair for the macabre, Weisberger takes readers on a global journey—from Brazilian rainforests to European meadows—to uncover the dark secrets of parasitic manipulation.

In this episode of Library Talks, award-winning journalist Margalit Fox joins Library Talks to discuss her latest book, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss, the true story of a once-infamous criminal mastermind and visionary businesswoman in Gilded Age New York.

Drawing on deep historical research, Fox tells the true story of a once-famous heroine whose life exemplifies—and simultaneously upends—America's enduring rags-to-riches narrative, placing Mandelbaum's story within the larger context of nineteenth-century crime in New York City's Gilded Age.

In this episode of Library Talks, author Lance Richardson joins Library Talks to discuss his new book True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen. He's joined by award-winning writer Sam Anderson.

A towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) defies categorization. He co-founded the Paris Review while working undercover for the CIA in postwar Paris, then escaped into a series of expeditions that found him floating through the Amazon to recover a fossil or embedding with a tribe in Netherlands New Guinea. His travels inspired prize-winning novels about Caymanian turtle hunters and outlaws in the Florida Everglades. Meanwhile, his legendary nonfiction ranged from influential nature books like Wildlife in America to advocacy journalism supporting Cesar Chavez and Leonard Peltier. Underlying all these disparate pursuits was Matthiessen's existential

In this episode of Library Talks, award-winning author and New York Times Magazine staff writer Jonathan Mahler joins the podcast to discuss the transformative, tumultuous era in New York City he evokes vividly in The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990, with bestselling novelist Amor Towles.

The Gods of New York is an immersive portrait of a city whose identity was suddenly up for grabs: Could it be both the great working-class city that lifted up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture—a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker—when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the systems meant to protect them? New York City was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This is the story of how that happened.