Podcast Episodes

A Divine Comedy: On Hollywood, Creativity, and Religion with Rob Long

Here in Episode 9 of Season 5, I interview Mr. Rob Long. A longtime Hollywood professional, he was a writer and producer for the classic sitcom Cheer…

3 months ago

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, "Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word and Me" (37 Ink, 2026)

The N-word is one of the most perplexing, controversial and misunderstood words in the American lexicon. It’s a word that Elizabeth Pryor has not onl…

3 months, 1 week ago

Steven Nadler, "Spinoza, Atheist" (Princeton UP, 2026)

In 1656, a young Amsterdam merchant was excommunicated by his Portuguese-Jewish community in the harshest terms it had ever used. Baruch Spinoza was…

3 months, 1 week ago

Craig Fehrman, "This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark" (Simon & Schuster, 2026)

In 1806, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark return from their journey—having led the Corps of Discovery across eight thousand miles of rapids, …

3 months, 1 week ago

Annette Gordon-Reed ed., "Jefferson on Race: A Reader" (Princeton UP, 2026)

From The New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, a groundbreaking collection of Thomas Jefferson…

3 months, 1 week ago

Lauren W. Westerfield, "Woman House: Essays and Assemblages" (U Massachusetts Press, 2026)

A compelling and inventive memoir exploring how pain and pleasure are passed down through generations of women

For years, Lauren W. Westerfield look…

3 months, 1 week ago

Tony Lee Moral, "A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, the Myths, the Legacy" (UP of Kentucky, 2026)

For over a century, Alfred Hitchcock has remained one of cinema's most influential directors. Known as the Master of Suspense, this visionary filmm…

3 months, 2 weeks ago

Tom Meschery, "The Mad Manchurian: From the Internment Camps of Tokyo to the Hardwood Courts of the NBA" (Coffeetown Press, 2025)

I was born in Harbin, Manchuria, (later China), in 1938. At the outbreak of the Second World War my mother, sister and I, along with other non-combat…

3 months, 3 weeks ago

Shannon McKenna Schmidt, "You Can't Catch Us: Lady Bird Johnson’s Trailblazing 1964 Campaign Train and the Women Who Rode With Her" (Sourcebooks, 2026)

From the author of The First Lady of WWII comes You Can't Catch Us: Lady Bird Johnson’s Trailblazing 1964 Campaign Train and the Women Who Rode With …

3 months, 4 weeks ago

Maria Lucia, " What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

In What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To (U Minnesota Press, 2025) an iconic rock DJ of the Twin Cities tells her harrowing s…

4 months ago