PODCAST · arts
The Avid Reader Show
by Samuel Hankin
The Avid Reader is a podcast for book lovers. Tune in for interviews, recommendations, and insider news from Sam Hankin, host and owner of independent bookstore Wellington Square Bookshop - www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com
Episodes
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Episode 794: Amy Westervelt: How Corporations Shape What We Believe | Brought to You By
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…
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Episode 793: Eli Burnstein: Famous Quotes We Get Wrong | Phrased & Confused
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…
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Episode 792: Lisa Crites: From Breast Cancer Survivor to Inventor | Beautifully Unbroken
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…
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Episode 791: Sam Roberts: Who Gets Remembered? | Are They Dead Yet?
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…
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Episode 790: Sam Kean: Lost Cities, Ancient Mysteries & The Museum of Lost Things
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…
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Episode 789: Antonio Damasio: Why We Feel, What Makes Us Conscious, and What AI Lacks
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…
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Episode 788: Keza MacDonald - Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play
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...
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Episode 787: Ancient Algorithms - Katrine ØGaard Jensen
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...
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Episode 786: Elegy in Blue - Mark Helprin
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...
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Episode 785: Marcus Hall - Our Bodies, Our Planet: A Parasite's History of Us
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...
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Episode 784: Andreas Marks - Japan's Manga Revolution: From Painted Scrolls to Comic Books 1680-1920
Manga didn’t begin in the 20th century — it emerged from a rich, inventive world of illustrated books in early Japan. 🇯🇵📚 In Japan’s Manga Revolution, art historian Andreas Marks takes us through the playful, dramatic, and groundbreaking works that defined Japanese visual storytelling…
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Episode 783: Eric Rath - Kanpai: The History of Sake
Lift a glass to the story of sake—from Japanese homebrew to global phenomenon. Sake, Japan’s iconic rice-based alcoholic drink, has been central to Japanese culture for over 1,300 years. Traditionally made with rice, water, and koji mold, it was consumed in early brewpubs and was vital to samurai...
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Episode 782: Steve Ramirez - How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist's Quest To Alter The Past
A disarmingly personal account of the new science of memory manipulation by one of today's leading pioneers in the field As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brain science, he foresees a...
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Episode 781: William O. Stephens - Marcus Aurelius: Philosopher-King
The moving life and legacy of Rome’s great emperor philosopher. This book guides us through the fascinating life and writings of Marcus Aurelius, Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor. Philosopher William O. Stephens explores Marcus’s reluctant rise to power, his marriage, and his efforts to mold…
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Episode 780: James Barrat - The Intelligence Explosion: When AI Beats Humans At Everything
With the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence, both existential fears and uncritical enthusiasm for AI systems have surged. In this era of unprecedented technological growth, understanding the profound impacts of AI — both positive and negative — is more crucial than ever. In The...
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Episode 779: Michaela Vieser & Isaac Yuen - The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds across Landscapes and Imagination
Mapping the acoustic onto the human soul, moving meditations on the power and meaning of sound. Nature writers Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen set out in search of sounds beautiful and loathsome, melodious and disturbing, healing, strange, and intimate. The phenomena of sound may be fleeting and...
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Episode 778: Mary Roach - Replaceable You: Adventures In Human Anatomy
From the New York Times best-selling author of Stiff and Fuzz, a rollicking exploration of the quest to re-create the impossible complexities of human anatomy. The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer.…
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Episode 777: Svend Brinkmann - The Experience Society: Life Beyoned Subjectivity
An enlightening look at how our elevation of the sensorial and the subjective has impaired our ability to connect—and how we might build that connection back. In today’s so-called experience society, everything is judged by personal experience, from online shopping to funerals. Value is measured…
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Episode 776: Einstein in Oxford - Andrew Robinson
An intimate account of Albert Einstein’s visit to Oxford in the 1930’s, casting new light on why he continues to be the world’s most famous scientist. In 1931, Albert Einstein visited Oxford to receive an honorary degree and lecture on relativity and the universe. While teaching, he naturally...
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Episode 775: Hidden in the Heavens - Jason Steffen
Are we alone in the universe? It’s a fundamental question for Earth-dwelling humankind. Are there other worlds like ours, out there somewhere? In Hidden in the Heavens, Jason Steffen, a former scientist on NASA’s Kepler mission, describes how that mission searched for planets orbiting Sun-like...
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Episode 774: Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy - Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember
We tend to think of our memories as impressions of the past that remain fully intact, preserved somewhere inside our brains. In fact, we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them. Memory Lane introduces readers to the cutting-edge science of human memory…
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Episode 773: David Bates - An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence
A new history of human intelligence that argues that humans know themselves by knowing their machines. We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies—autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to David W. Bates, emerged in the seventeenth century when…
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Episode 772: Gareth Gore - Opus
A thrilling exposé recounting how members of Opus Dei—a secretive, ultra-conservative Catholic sect—pushed its radical agenda within the Church and around the globe, using billions of dollars siphoned from one of the world’s largest banks. In an era of disinformation and deep fakes, here is a...
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Episode 771: Jonathan Silvertown - Selfish Genes to Social Beings: : A Cooperative History of Life
For all the "selfishness" of genes, they team up to survive. Is the history of life in fact a story of cooperation? Amid the violence and brutality that dominates the news, it's hard to think of ourselves as team players. But cooperation, Jonathan Silvertown argues, is a fundamental part of our...
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Episode 770: Elizabeth Winder - Parachute Women: The Women Behind The Rolling Stones
Parachute Women: Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Bianca Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and the Women Behind the Rolling Stones Discover the true story of the four women who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help shape and curate the image of The Rolling Stones—perfect for fans of Girls Like Us....
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Episode 769: Jim Baggott - Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement
The definitive account of the great Bohr-Einstein debate and its continuing legacy In 1927, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein began a debate about the interpretation and meaning of the new quantum theory. This would become one of the most famous debates in the history of science. At stake were an...
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Episode 768: Lewis Cohen MD - Winter's End: Dementia and Dying
Arguably among the worst of all medical afflictions, the dementias slowly destroy one's personality, take a tremendous emotional, physical, and financial toll on patients and families, and are irreversible and inexorably fatal. Winter's End: Dementia and Its Life-Shortening Options is constructed...
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Episode 767: Rowan Jacobsen - Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao's Soul
When Rowan Jacobsen first heard of a chocolate bar made entirely from wild Bolivian cacao, he was skeptical. The waxy mass-market chocolate of his childhood had left him indifferent to it, and most experts believed wild cacao had disappeared from the rainforest centuries ago. But one dazzling…
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Episode 766: Debbie Urbanski - After World
A groundbreaking debut that follows the story of an Artificial Intelligence tasked with writing a novel—only for it to fall in love with the novel’s subject, Sen, the last human on Earth. Faced with uncontrolled and accelerating environmental collapse, humanity asks an artificial intelligence to...
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Episode 765: Roz Dineen - Briefly Very Beautiful: A Novel
Roz Dineen’s Briefly Very Beautiful is a spellbinding dystopian novel about the lengths one will go to for their children in a world teetering on the edge of apocalypse. In a land destabilized by unsafe air, wildfires, floods, viruses, supply shortages, and homegrown terror, Cass is raising three...
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Episode 764: Chris French - The Science Of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure The Paranormal
An accessible and gratifying introduction to the world of paranormal beliefs and bizarre experiences. Ghostly encounters, alien abduction, reincarnation, talking to the dead, UFO sightings, inexplicable coincidences, out-of-body and near-death experiences. Are these legitimate phenomena? If not,...
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Episode 763: Adam Forrest Kay - Escape From Shadow Physics: The Quest to End the Dark Ages of Quantum Theory
The received wisdom in quantum physics is that, at the deepest levels of reality, there are no actual causes for atomic events. This idea led to the outlandish belief that quantum objects—indeed, reality itself—aren’t real unless shaped by human measurement. Einstein mocked this idea, asking...
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Episode 762: Christy Spackman: The Taste of Water Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage
Have you ever wondered why your tap water tastes the way it does? The Taste of Water explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water...
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Episode 761: Martin Fitzgibbon - Behind The Curtain: My Life And Rocky Horror
It's 1973 and The Rocky Horror Show is about to be launched onto an unsuspecting world for the first time. Martin Fitzgibbon was the young drummer recruited specifically to play an integral part in the show's success. Here, for the first time, Martin gives his unique insight into how the show and...
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Episode 760: Anne Curzan - Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words
A kinder, funner usage guide to the ever-changing English language and a useful tool for both the grammar stickler and the more colloquial user of English, from linguist and veteran professor Anne Curzan Our use of language naturally evolves and is a living, breathing thing that reflects who we...
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Episode 759: Sadie Dingfelder - Do I Know You? A Faceblind Reporter's Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination
An award-winning science writer discovers she’s faceblind and investigates the neuroscience of sight, memory, and imagination—while solving some long-running mysteries about her own life. Science writer Sadie Dingfelder has always known that she’s a little quirky. But while she’s made some…
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Episode 758: Jamie Collinson - The Rejects: An Alternative History of Popular Music
Imagine you've made it. You and your friends have hit the big time in music and you're going to be a star. But then, quite suddenly, it's over. Your best friends don't want you anymore, and you're on the outside. Perhaps they're tired of your bad habits, they think you're not good enough, or they...
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Episode 757: Theodore P. Snow & Don Brownlee - The Sixth Element: How Carbon Shapes Our World
A cosmic perspective on carbon--its importance in the universe and our lives When we think of carbon, we might first think of a simple element near the top of the periodic table: symbol C, atomic number 6. Alternatively, we might think of something more tangible--a sooty piece of coal or a...
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Episode 756: Kenneth Miller - Mapping The Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked The Mysteries Of Sleep
From award-winning journalist Kenneth Miller comes the definitive story of the scientists who set out to answer two questions: “Why do we sleep?” and "How can we sleep better?” A century ago, sleep was considered a state of nothingness—even a primitive habit that we could learn to overcome. Then,...
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Episode 755: Chris Haufe - Fruitfulness: Science, Metaphor, and the Puzzle of Promise
Some ideas seem to possess a disproportionate ability to lead to new insights, new discoveries, new ideas, and even entirely new ways of thinking. Such ideas are said to be fruitful. Looking across the history of science and mathematics, we see creative minds preoccupied with the search for ideas...
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Episode 754: Ken McNab - Shake It Up, Baby!: The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963
A vivid, captivating account of the Beatles’s musical transformation throughout the pivotal year of 1963, as the world became caught up in the maelstrom of Beatlemania and its far-reaching cultural impact. The Beatles broke up more than half a century ago, yet millions around the globe are still...
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Episode 753: Oliver Crisp, James Arcadi & Jordan Wessling - Analyzing Prayer: Theological & Philosophical Essays
Analyzing Prayer draws together a range of theologians and philosophers to deal with different approaches to prayer as a Christian practice. The essays included deal with issues pertaining to petitionary prayer, prayer as reorientation of oneself in the presence of God, prayer by those who do not...
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Episode 752: Joe Fassler - The Sky Was Ours
From prizewinning writer Joe Fassler comes a brilliant modern reimagining of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus as a story of obsession, longing, and the radical pursuit of utopia It’s 2005, and 24-year-old Jane is miserable. Overworked, buried in debt, she senses the life she wanted slipping...
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Episode 751: Nick Bantock - The Corset & the Jellyfish: A Conundrum of Drabbles
The internationally bestselling author of Griffin & Sabine returns with his newest literary mystery--a charming assemblage of his own illustrated stories. Each of the invitingly strange tales is paired with its own glyphic creature (perhaps created by Sabine herself). Little is known of the...
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Episode 750: Harry Cliff - Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding Of The Universe
Experimental physicist at CERN and acclaimed science presenter Harry Cliff offers an eye-opening account of the inexplicable phenomena that science has only recently glimpsed, and that could transform our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality. Something strange is going on in the...
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Episode 749: Richard Schacht - Nietzsche's Kind Of Philosophy: Finding His Way
A holistic reading of Nietzsche’s distinctive thought beyond the “death of God.” In Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy, Richard Schacht provides a holistic interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s distinctive thinking, developed over decades of engagement with the philosopher’s work. For Schacht,...
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Episode 748: Sy Montgomery - Secrets Of The Octopus
Remarkable new discoveries affirm the octopus as one of nature’s most intelligent and complex animals. This new book—written by the beloved author of the international bestseller The Soul of an Octopus, along with Warren Carlyle, founder of Octonation, and enhanced with vivid National Geographic...
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Episode 747: Dr. Marshall Poe - Plagiarism and AI
Sam and Dr. Marshall Poe, the creator and chief editor of The New Books Network, explore the topic of plagiarism within the academic world amid the current climate of political division. They discuss the actions of political factions aimed at either identifying and removing academics who...
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Episode 746: Sy Montgomery - Secrets Of The Octopus
Remarkable new discoveries affirm the octopus as one of nature’s most intelligent and complex animals. This new book—written by the beloved author of the international bestseller The Soul of an Octopus, along with Warren Carlyle, founder of Octonation, and enhanced with vivid National Geographic...
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Episode 745: Kevin J Mitchell - Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will
An evolutionary case for the existence of free will Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency--or free...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Avid Reader Show have?
The Avid Reader Show currently has 803 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Avid Reader Show about?
The Avid Reader is a podcast for book lovers. Tune in for interviews, recommendations, and insider news from Sam Hankin, host and owner of independent bookstore Wellington Square Bookshop - www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com
How often does The Avid Reader Show release new episodes?
The Avid Reader Show releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 803 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to The Avid Reader Show?
You can listen to The Avid Reader Show on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Avid Reader Show?
The Avid Reader Show is created and hosted by Samuel Hankin.
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