The death in March 2026 of Pulitzer winner Tracy Kidder—a reporter The Associated Press credits with turning “everything from computer engineering to life in a nursing home into unexpected bestsellers”—sent me diving back into the archives for the time in 1993 that I was fortunate enough to sit down with him to discuss his then-new book, Old Friends, documenting his year spent visiting and observing the proceedings at a nursing home in western Massachusetts.

To hear him now is to celebrate journalism at its best.

Here’s that interview, digitized and newly available for the first time since its broadcast on WNUA-FM in Chicago on Oct. 17, 1993. (Recorded Oct. 15, 1993.)

Hear more of my conversations with thought leaders through the years on this website, in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or Pandora, via your favorite podcast player and at Chicago Public Square.