The New York Public Library Podcast

The comedian and actor Patton Oswalt shares the posthumous true-crime masterpiece written by his wife Michelle McNamara, who died suddenly at the age of 46 in 2016. McNamara, a true crime reporter and creator of TrueCrimeDiary.com, spent years tracking a serial killer she dubbed the Golden State Killer. Between 1976 and 1986 he committed 50 sexual assaults and 10 murders up and down California. Oswalt wrote, “I can't help feeling that somewhere, in her final pages, she left enough clues for someone to finish the job she couldn't—to put California's worst serial killer behind bars.” Plus: a behind-the-scenes private tour of items from NYPL's true crime collections.

In 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers and revealed the true story of American involvement in Vietnam, he was holding on to a much larger and more terrifying set of American secrets than he was letting on. Ellsberg had to wait almost fifty years to bring them to light. What those secrets were and why they remained hidden for so long are revealed in his new book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

Aidan Flax-Clark speaks with author Neel Mukherjee about his new novel, "A State of Freedom" and his evolving notions of home, autonomy, migration, and ghosts. ”A ghost is someone who belonged to a particular world who had an unhappy or tragic or violent ending to that particular life and hasn’t found a resting place in another world,” Mukherjee says, “this could be a very a good working definition for who a migrant is.”

You may have read about Tayari Jones’s latest novel on quite a few “most anticipated books of 2018” lists, and for good reason. Inspired by her research into the painful realities of American incarceration, Jones’ “An American Marriage” blends equal parts heartbreak and humor to tell  the love story of a young couple whose marriage is tested by an unexpected calamity. It was recently selected by Oprah Winfrey for the Oprah Book Club. In a conversation with Isaac Fitzgerald, founding editor of Buzzfeed Books and co-host of Twitter Morning Show, #AmtoDM, Jones talks about her writing process, her relationships with her characters, and what it felt like to get an unannounced call from Oprah herself.

To celebrate the publication of When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors and her co-author asha bandele stopped by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Akiba Solomon, Editorial Director of Colorlines, interviews the two about the history of Black Lives Matter, from hashtag to global movement.

What do Mark Zuckerburg and Martin Luther have in common? Historian and political commentator Niall Ferguson explains in his newest book The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. Ferguson stopped by The New York Public Library to speak with Gillian Tett, U.S. Managing Editor of the Financial Times, about the power and limitations of networks throughout history, our news feeds and censorship. 

How did a former Harvard professor turned counterculture icon become an international fugitive? Authors Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis explain the larger-than-life story of Timothy Leary, the middle-aged acid enthusiast of the early 1970s, who famously preached "turn on, tune in, drop out." The PEN award-winning writers of Dallas 1963, talked with Aidan Flax-Clark about their research at NYPL and remarkable true story at the heart of their newest book, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon & the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD. We'd love to hear from you! Take our short podcast survey at www.nypl.org/podcastsurvey

The James Beard Award–winning food historian and cookbook writer was at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture this past fall to talk about her memoir, My Soul Looks Back, with chef and co-host of ABC's The Chew, Carla Hall.

The best-selling journalist speaks with Danish reporter on the Arctic, Martin Breum, about melting ice and global solutions for our changing climate.

The journalist and 2017 National Book Award Winner delivered the Library's annual Robert B. Silvers Lecture. The talk is named in honor of the co-founding editor of the New York Review of Books, who died in March 2017. With unexpected candor and intimacy, Gessen traced her own life as a sequence of choices and explored how notions of choice affect ideas about immigration, identity, and purpose.

Neil Gaiman's reading from 2013 uses a rare prompt copy that belonged to Charles Dickens himself and now resides in The New York Public Library. Dickens marked it up and annotated it for the express purpose of performing the story in front of an audience, which he did regularly in the 1850s and 1860s.

Is self-interest the only force motivating business? Or can altruism be an equally powerful driver? It's a question that Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize–winning father of microcredit, answers in his latest book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions. He spoke with fellow economist Jeffrey Sachs.

The titan of American poetry was at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in November to talk about her latest collection, A Good Cry. She spoke with Joy-Ann Reid, the host of MSNBC's AM Joy. 

The Pulitzer Prize–winning literary historian and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright discuss Greenblatt's latest book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, "a life history of one of the most extraordinary stories ever told." Exploring the power of narrative to travel from myth into reality, Greenblatt and Kushner traced the tale from its biblical origins through its imaginings in the minds of writers and artists from St. Augustine to Albrecht Dürer to John Milton. 

The Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Poetry Editor of The New Yorker speaks with Garnette Cadogan about his most recent work of nonfiction, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. Young traces the particularly American tradition of cons, hoaxes, and fakes, from P. T. Barnum to today.

The Soviet famine of the early 1930s killed around 5 million people; almost 4 million of them were Ukrainians. As Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum demonstrates in her latest book, Red Famine, it wasn't fate or chance that skewed those numbers so heavily—it was something much more deliberate, and much more sinister. And the story behind it was, until recently, in danger of disappearing. Applebaum spoke about recovering it at the New York Public Library with John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine.

Envisioning the archives of the future with the Chicago-based artist, who was joined by Nettrice Gaskins, director of the STEAM Lab at the Boston Arts Academy, and Greg Carr, a professor at Howard University.

Jones may be known as a liberal activist, but his new book, "Beyond the Messy Truth," is a call to action for all Americans seeking a way out of our ideological and cultural divisions. He spoke about it at the Library with CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin.

Ulysses S. Grant has for decades routinely listed as one of our worst presidents. Ron Chernow says the legacy of the Civil War hero and 18th president is deeply misunderstood, making the case in both his latest book and in this conversation with Richard Stengel, former managing editor of TIME magazine.

The co-editors of the essay collection Nasty Women along with select contributors to it explore the complications of being an American woman in 2017. Featuring Kate Harding and Samhita Mukhopadhyay, with Kera Bolonik, Zerlina Maxwell, and Meredith Talusan. Moderated by Jezebel founder Anna Holmes.