The Avid Reader Show

Who shapes the information you trust, and whose interests does it serve?

Investigative journalist and Drilled podcast host Amy Westervelt joins Sam Hankin on The Avid Reader to discuss Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy.

Westervelt explains what she calls “information pollution”: the ways corporate interests influence news, academic research, think tanks, and public debate. Tracing the history of public relations through figures such as Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays, she argues that today’s struggles over misinformation and artificial intelligence have roots stretching back more than a century.

Their conversation examines corporate influence on universities, campaigns that disguise themselves as grassroots movements, and the lasting divisions that propaganda can leave in communities. They also discuss media literacy, regulation, and the practical questions readers can ask about any source: Who created this? Who funded it? What are they trying to persuade me to believe?

Get Brought to You By from Wellington Square Bookshop:
https://wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781639736324

Does “seize the day” really mean what we think it does? And was Robert Frost’s “road less traveled” actually less traveled at all?

Eli Burnstein joins Sam Hankin on The Avid Reader to discuss Phrased & Confused: The Curious Meanings of Timeless Quotations and the context we lose when familiar words become slogans.

They explore Burnstein’s reading of carpe diem, the irony behind Shakespeare’s “to thine own self be true,” and why “let them eat cake” became attached to Marie Antoinette. The conversation also ventures into Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” the philosophical origins of “the ghost in the machine,” and the enduring question of why there is something rather than nothing.

Along the way, Burnstein discusses how humor and Liana Finck’s illustrations help make difficult ideas accessible without stripping away their depth. A conversation for anyone who has repeated a famous quotation and then wondered what it actually means.

Get Phrased & Confused from Wellington Square Bookshop:
https://wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781419785528

After a bilateral mastectomy, Lisa Crites found herself showering in a plastic trash bag. Her frustration became the starting point for an invention.

The former television medical reporter joins Sam Hankin on The Avid Reader to discuss Beautifully Unbroken and the experiences that led her to create The Shower Shirt, a garment designed to protect surgical sites and drains while showering.

Lisa shares how she sought guidance, challenged doubts, and brought her idea to market. She also speaks candidly about her mother’s sudden death, her own breast cancer diagnosis, and the Christian faith she leaned on through grief and uncertainty.

Their conversation explores the emotional cost of revisiting those experiences for her memoir and the purpose connecting her work as an inventor and author: helping others feel less alone and find a way forward.

Get Beautifully Unbroken from Wellington Square Bookshop:
https://wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781997040293

Who gets an obituary in The New York Times, and who gets overlooked?

Obituary writer Sam Roberts joins Sam Hankin on The Avid Reader to discuss Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit and the difficult, revealing, often funny work of capturing a life on the page.

Starting with an AI-written obituary of Roberts himself, their conversation explores what facts alone can’t tell us about a person. Roberts describes his search for the “Rosebud moment” that changed someone’s life, the challenge of weighing achievements against misdeeds, and the delicate business of interviewing people for their own advance obituaries.

They also discuss overlooked lives, questionable famous last words, and how the internet has transformed newsroom research and deadlines. Along the way, the two Sams share their love of New York and independent bookstores, including a story about giving a young reader a copy of War and Peace that says more than a résumé ever could.

Get Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit from Wellington Square Bookshop:
https://wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781639733651

What have we lost that could change everything we think we know about the past?

Sam Kean returns to The Avid Reader to discuss The Museum of Lost Things, a journey through vanished treasures, forgotten knowledge, and the discoveries that bring history back into focus.

Sam and Kean explore the lost writings of the ancient world, the rediscovery of Troy, the legends surrounding Genghis Khan’s hidden tomb, and the detective work behind deciphering ancient languages. They also examine the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek mechanical computer whose discovery challenged assumptions about the technology of its time.

Along the way, Kean reflects on the human drama behind scientific discovery and a question that reaches beyond the ancient world: what might future generations forget about us?

Get The Museum of Lost Things from Wellington Square Bookshop:
https://wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781426223860

What if understanding consciousness starts with hunger, thirst, and pain?

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio joins Sam on The Avid Reader to discuss his book, Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness. Damasio makes the case that consciousness grows out of the body's need to sustain life, with feelings helping us recognize when something is wrong and act to protect ourselves.

Their conversation explores the difference between emotions and feelings, how the vagus nerve carries information from body to brain, what dreams reveal about consciousness, and why Damasio sees biology as essential to understanding the mind.

They also examine artificial intelligence: why intelligence and consciousness are different, what today's AI lacks, and why powerful systems without feelings give Damasio cause for concern.

Get Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness from Wellington Square Bookshop:
https://wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9798217207497

An exuberant, behind-the-scenes look at the designers and the company that brought us Mario, Zelda, Pokémon, and so much more, illuminating Nintendo's singular ethos, its massive cultural impact, and the innovative solutions behind its creative triumphs

What magical mushroom could have turned an unassuming playing card company into one of the dominant cultural forces of the twenty-first century?

In Super Nintendo, lifelong gamer and a renowned video games journalist Keza MacDonald traces Nintendo back to its quirky beginnings in 1889. Leaping from game to game, she tells the remarkable story of the people who brought us Super Mario Bros., Zelda, Pokémon, Animal Crossing, Splatoon, and more—not to mention the SNES, N64, Game Boy, Wii, Switch, and a host of other wacky gizmos—and charts the delights they’ve offered over the decades. 

MacDonald draws on private interviews with icons like Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, who continues to leave his stamp on the company, and takes readers on a trip to the secretive Nintendo HQ—making her one of the few Western journalists to have set foot inside the building. Along the way, she provides a close-up look at the company's willingness to take risks and place long-term success over short-term profits.

A carousel of wonders, Super Nintendo whisks you back to the couch in the den, a controller in your hands for the very first time, staring up at a screen of infinite possibilities.

In Ancient Algorithms, Katrine gaard Jensen mistranslates, rewrites, and remixes her award-winning translations of Danish Ursula Andkj r Olsen's poetry based on a series of self-imposed rules and rituals in collaboration with poets Sawako Nakayasu, Aditi Machado, CAConrad, Baba Badji, Paul Cunningham, and Ursula Andkj r Olsen herself. Envisioned as a shared debut, this collection of collaborative poems is equal parts exercise and exorcism, a haunting of literary influences that repositions translation as the very act of writing--exploring what it means for something to be an original, a translation, a poem.

Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a Danish poet and translator based in New York. She is a recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the National Translation Award in Poetry, the Kenyon Review's Peter Taylor Fellowship, and the Danish Arts Foundation's Young Artistic Elite Fellowship. Her translations include Third-Millennium Heart (Action Books 2017), Outgoing Vessel (Action Books 2021), and My Jewel Box (Action Books 2022) by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, as well as To The Most Beautiful by Mette Moestrup (co-im-press 2024). Since 2016, she has taught Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Columbia University, where she served as Acting Director of Literary Translation at Columbia (LTAC) from 2019-2020.

Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - ​
https://wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781956046434

Told in an exceptional literary voice, mixing comedy and tragedy, Elegy in Blue is a hymn to New York, memory, loyalty, and love.

High in a subsidized studio apartment, the unnamed 82-year-old narrator of Elegy in Blue looks out across the rooftops of Brooklyn all the way to the sea.

His distinguished career on Wall Street is in ruins, his mansion in Brooklyn Heights has been burned to the ground, and most of all, his father, his son, and his wife—the stunningly beautiful and equally kind Clare—have been taken from him, one by one, over the decades, by war and an act of violence.

Now his “allegiance is to his ghosts.” He’s almost lost to memory, reflection, and a purposeful letting go of life. But when violence threatens to destroy another family, he takes drastic action in hope of restoring a portion of justice to the world.

Can he fashion his life into an elegy, one that heals a broken heart and relieves the sting of death?

Mark Helprin is the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of Paris in the Present Tense, Winter’s Tale, In Sunlight and in Shadow, A Soldier of the Great War, Freddy and Fredericka, The Pacific, Swan Lake, Ellis Island, Memoir from Antproof Case, and numerous other works.

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https://wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781419786082

In praise of parasites, a surprising exploration of the profound impact of biological freeloaders on human history and our daily lives.
 
Parasites and parasitic relationships are fundamental to life on Earth and to human history. Our Bodies, Our Planet explores how vital they are. Unlike harmful pathogens, parasites may produce no ill effects and may even improve our well-being and the lives of the creatures that surround us. Marcus Hall shows how our fellow travelers have evolved to help keep us alive, or else they themselves will perish. Parasitism is a phenomenon of partnership, and the association of parasite and host has had far-ranging cultural, biological, and possibly geophysical consequences. From Ascaris to Zika, we are instinctively repulsed by these little freeloaders, but what collateral effects do they have on our lives, lifestyles, or even our imagination? As Hall demonstrates, we disregard our parasites at our peril.

Marcus Hall is professor of environmental history at the University of Zurich. His books include Earth Repair, Restoration and History, and Mosquitopia.

Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - ​
https://wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781836391074