Nerdette

This week, we are bringing you a special LIVE edition of Nerdette Book Club!!! The great Amor Towles, author of 'A Gentleman in Moscow' and 'The Lincoln Highway,' joined us in front of a live audience at the Athenaeum Theater in Chicago to discuss our May Book Club selection, his most recent book 'Table for Two!' It’s a collection of six different short stories set in New York City and a novella based on characters from his first novel, 'Rules of Civility,' set in Los Angeles during the...

This week, we’re sharing some of the best new music out this summer! Our friend Kristen Kurtis is the assistant music director and Morning Show host at WXPN in Philadelphia. We asked her to bring us some fun and maybe even a little angry songs to rock out to this summer. You can find this collection of “joyfully defiant” songs below or listen along on our Spotify playlist.

Want to add to the playlist? Send us an email at nerdettepodcast@gmail...

Our April Book Club pick is Marie-Helene Bertino’s second novel 'Beautyland.' It tells the story of Adina, a girl born in Philadelphia in 1977, just as the Voyager I spacecraft launches from Earth in search of extraterrestrial life. As a child, Adina learns she herself is an alien, and her mission is to send her observations about humanity to her supervisors via fax machine (it is the ‘80s, after all)...

This week, we are taking some time to reflect on the past *11 years* of Nerdette by listening to two of our all-time favorite interviews. First, Greta and Stephen King (yes, that Stephen King) bond over their shared love of corgis. Then, poet Ross Gay tells us about 'The Book of Delights,' a collection of essays about finding delight everyday.

We also want to let you know that Nerdette’s last episode at WBEZ will be May 28...

This week, senior Reset producer Meha Ahmad and journalist Araceli Gómez-Aldana join us to unpack the week. We get into friendship breakups over Taylor Swift, a new airline for dogs and Olympic fashion.

Then, Maura Cheeks tells us about her debut novel Acts of Forgiveness. The book imagines a world where the U.S. government awards cash reparations to the descendants of enslaved people.

This week, our friends Dan Pashman, host of 'The Sporkful' podcast and author of the new cookbook 'Anything’s Pastable,' and Helen Rosner, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the newsletter 'The Food Scene,' go all in on food in another round of our favorite game: Burden or Delight.

Plus, producer Anna Bauman adventured to Indianapolis this week to see the total solar eclipse. We listen to what it was like to stop and wonder at our sky.

We are unpacking the week that was with Amory Sivertson, host of the WBUR podcasts Beyond All Repair and Endless Thread, and Kristina Lopez, producer of Glamorous Trash. We discuss the reasons why women need more sleep than men, age gap relationships and “Stick Nation.”

Then, Vulture film critic Alison Wilmore tells us about why women in action movies all seem to be doing the same particular stunt. She dubs it “killer gams.”

Our April selection is Marie-Helene Bertino’s gorgeous and entrancing novel 'Beautyland.' It’s about Adina, who realizes she is actually an alien disguised as a young girl living in Philadelphia. Her task is to send reports on humanity back to her home planet via fax machine. The novel is tender, full of heart and weird in the best possible way...

We're on Spring Break this week so we're bringing you a podcast that we think you'll love from our friends at The Culture Study Podcast. Get ready for a deep conversation into the world of A Court of Thorns and Roses, and the 'romantasy' genre as a whole!

Our March book club pick is Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel ‘Martyr!’ It’s about Cyrus, who was born in Iran and moved to the midwest as a child after his mom died. She was one of the victims of the real-life event where the United States Navy shot an Iranian passenger-plane out of the sky reportedly by accident. The book picks up when Cyrus is in his 20s in Indiana and he’s struggling in more ways than one...