Happy To Be Here

From Murphy Brown to Kidding to Doctor Who and more, New York Times TV critic Margaret Lyons reveals the shows she’s excited about. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois is one of only 52 women to ever serve in the Senate. There are currently 23 female senators, which is an all-time high.  “There are not enough women,” Duckworth tells Nerdette host Greta Johnsen. “We’re 20 percent of the Senate. That’s it. That’s wrong. We’re 51 percent of the population, yet 20 percent of those who make the laws that govern our lives.” Duckwo...

... Well, technically it's Pysc 157.  This week Nerdette host Greta Johnsen speaks with the professor responsible for the most popular class in Yale University's 316-year history. Laurie Santos created a course called "Psychology and the Good Life” and about 1,200 students quickly enrolled in it.  Put simply, the course teaches students how they can be happier. “The good news is that we can do it,...

Here at Nerdette, we've wanted to visit Argonne National Laboratory for MANY YEARS. Why? Because it's a massive research facility, it's just outside of Chicago, and it shares many similarities with Hawkins National Laboratory, the fictional government science complex from the Netflix show Stranger Things. Greta, Tricia and our trusty guide Justin Breaux take a tour of Argonne, where we talk with a...

Hey! Nerdette is about to go on a little summer break, but before we do we wanted to share this lovely conversation Greta had with WBEZ’s Jenn White and the owner of Volumes Bookscafe in Chicago, Rebecca George. They talk about what makes a good summer read before offering an INUNDATING LIST of killer summer books. You can check out the full list of those recommendations at this link .  Enjoy! Hav...

Super-talented singer-songwriter Neko Case is not immune to self-doubt. In the years before becoming “an adult,” she tells us she had a complicated relationship with ambition.  “I wanted to be in a band and I wanted to play music, but I couldn’t have even told you that then,” Case said. “I wouldn’t have even thought that I was capable of that, even though I was completely obsessed and had been my...

“I’d been patronized as a child,” Dame Stephanie Shirley — a.k.a. Steve — tells us this week. “I wasn’t going to be patronized as an adult.” The kind of company that Stephanie Shirley wanted to work for didn’t exist in 1962, so she created her own. “I wanted a company that was suitable for me [and] that I would like to work in,” Shirley says. “And I knew there were lots of women who had also hit t...

Speaking out about traumatic incidents can sometimes be more traumatic than the incidents themselves. That was the case for one reporter after she documented rampant sexual harassment at a recent music festival. Vera Papisova is the wellness editor for Teen Vogue and runs the magazine’s sexual assault awareness campaign. After Teen Vogue published her explosive article about sexual assault at Coac...

Audie Cornish says she had something like an epiphany after posting a photo of herself and her new baby on Twitter in April.  "I realized, oh my god, I’m part of the problem," Cornish tells Greta Johnsen. "Because there is absolutely nothing worse than opening up a glossy magazine and seeing a picture of some woman with, like, a pet and a 3-year-old, everyone’s groomed to the nines, and she’s like...

If you’re looking for a way to combat the online trolls and bots fomenting unrest in the U.S., comedian Negin Farsad might have a solution for you. It’s a philosophy she calls “Being aggressively delightful.” You might think that sounds exhausting, but Farsad says not so! “I also think rage is exhausting,” she told us in February 2018. “I might think rage is more exhausting than trying to be frien...

On Nerdette , our guests assign us homework. It’s usually something to read, watch, or do — like a great book, a compelling TV show, or a life-changing daily routine.  We’ve been lucky enough to have famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on the show TWICE, and both times he assigned homework that essentially asks you to save the world. “If I were to give homework, the homework would be that the...

On a scale of 1 to famous, Tom Hanks is off the charts.  So how did we land this amazing interview? Easy! We put a 1939 Underwood Champion typewriter into a recording studio and lured him in Elmer Fudd style! (Bugs Bunny:Carrots::Tom Hanks:Typewriters) The reason we're rebroadcasting part of this episode right now is because our little show is celebrating a birthday. We've been around for FIVE YEA...

Nerdette has been around for FIVE YEARS! And we're celebrating our birthday by showcasing some of our favorite parts of our favorite episodes.  Did you know that writer Roxane Gay has a fascination with Channing Tatum's neck? You're about to! Because this special episode is from our 2017 interview with the amazing author of Difficult Women. Roxane Gay also tells us about her love of Thor, her co-a...

In 2016, Grace Bonney spoke with 100 women doing creative work and turned those interviews into a book, In the Company of Women .   It became a New York Times bestseller, and earlier this month, Bonney released a follow up: a biennial business magazine called Good Company . Plus, while she’s out promoting her new publication, she also runs the creativity website Design*Sponge .  Like so many of us...

We brought brothers Hari and Ashok Kondabolu on Nerdette to talk about making time for self-care in what can be a grinding, freelance economy. Instead, they unpacked their relationship.  “Do you look up to me at all?” Hari asks his younger brother, with host Greta Johnsen listening in the wings. “No, we have completely different lives,” Ashok immediately responds. “This is not relaxing!” Hari says...

Near the end of STS-125 , NASA’s final space shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope back in 2009, bad weather in Florida initially stopped the seven-member team from returning to Earth. The two-day delay that followed presented the astronauts with some unusual but much needed downtime. So what did they do with it?  Looked out the windows. “I liked to listen to music and watch the world go b...

Let’s be real: life can be hectic sometimes. You don’t need to tell that to Amy Schumer and Aidy Bryant, two of the nation’s top female comedians.  Who better to kick off our new project,  Power Up ?   For the next few months, we're asking fascinating people how they set themselves up for success in an exhausting world.  Knitting? Bowling? Researching the presence of alternate dimensions? “I liter...

Here at Nerdette we’ve been thinking a lot about how much the world can wear us down. Which has led us to a very important question: How do so many successful, inspiring people have the time and energy to be so successful and inspiring? Power Up is a new project where we ask fascinating people how they set themselves up for success in what can be an exhausting world. How do amazing (non-robot) hum...

Tomi Adeyemi is the 24-year-old author of 'Children of Blood and Bone,' a new young adult novel that — in terms of pop culture blockbusters — could be on par with 'The Hunger Games' or 'Harry Potter.' The book, the first in a West African-inspired fantasy series, hit shelves earlier this month — more than a year after the movie rights were picked up by Fox 2000.  Adeyemi tells Nerdette that part o...

As a four-year old in Juneau, Alaska, Nerdette host Greta Johnsen was diagnosed with an eye condition known as "Best disease." That name is a misnomer for several reasons — the big one being that "Best disease" causes premature macular degeneration — but curiously it happens to be among the best diseases for experimenting with CRISPR, a genetic engineering tool that can be used to edit DNA.  This...

Anna Deavere Smith might be best known for her acting roles on NBC’s The West Wing and Showtime’s Nurse Jackie . But she’s also one of the most prolific playwrights of “documentary-style theater,” where she uses verbatim interviews as source material in hopes of pushing her audience toward “an adjustment in the way that they think.”  Her latest work is a one-woman show called Notes From The Field...

If you’re looking for a way to combat the online trolls and bots fomenting unrest in the U.S., comedian Negin Farsad might have a solution for you. “I guess if I were to name it, it’s a philosophy called ‘being aggressively delightful,’” she tells us. Farsad, an Iranian-American Muslim, is the co-host of the podcast  Fake the Nation , the author of the book  How to Make White People Laugh , and so...

Ilene Chaiken has been a showrunner for TV hits like Fox’s Empire, an executive producer for Hulu’s The Handmaid's Tale, and a writer, producer, and director for Showtime’s The L Word in the mid-2000s. In other words, she’s a boss.  “I don’t like the word that much,” Chaiken said on Nerdette. “I mean, I like it as in, ‘Oh, she’s a boss.’ You know, ‘She’s a badass. She’s a boss.’ But I don’t like t...

Olympians and experts on the science of fear, the physics of sliding down ice super duper fast, and the feminist fight to get women into more sports. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

When Teresa Woodruff started working for a biotech company fresh out of graduate school, her employer revealed that the first studies for a new heart attack treatment had been performed on 50,000 men. “And so I kinda raised my hand and said, ‘That’s interesting. Where are all the women?” Today, Teresa is an expert in ovarian biology and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern Univ...