Happy To Be Here

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...

Comedian John Hodgman, longtime fan of the lovingly-reviled Swedish spirit called Malört, tells Nerdette , “I’m fascinated with things that are still regional in an increasingly non-regional country.” He also calls the disagreeable beverage "“a delightful, heady blend of pencil shavings and shame.”  Nerdette 's Tricia Bobeda talked with Hodgman about his new book, Vacationland , before inviting in...

Jennifer Egan won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. Her most recent novel, Manhattan Beach,  was among 10 works of fiction long-listed for the 2017 National Book Award. Not too shabby, right? But Egan told Greta that an early draft of Manhattan Beach  was so bad she almost scrapped the whole thing. “I probably came as close to abandoning this as I have to any proj...

“I think it’s going to last more than a moment,” said the celebrated author on this week’s Nerdette . “But how much more than a moment, it remains to be seen."  Nerdette co-host Greta Johnsen talks with author Margaret Atwood about the recent TV adaptations of her novels  Alias Grace and The Handmaid's Tale , how her take on feminism has changed in recent years, and what needs to happen to make su...

Daveed Diggs says starring in the hit musical Hamilton opened a lot of doors for him. One of those doors? Meeting hip hop legend Busta Rhymes. “Like, I can text Busta Rhymes right now. That? That is a crazy thing to me.” Diggs stopped by WBEZ to talk with Greta about his first feature film,  Wonder, out in theaters Friday. They also talk about  Hamilton, his ABC TV series  The Mayor , and his rap...

Knitting can be dangerous. Just ask author, scholar, and (of course) knitter Eve Ewing. She explains what she calls “the sweater curse” to Nerdette hosts Tricia Bobeda and Greta Johnsen. They also discuss the impact of the late music icon Prince, the rise of Afrofuturism, and why Ewing can’t wait to get off social media. Plus, an excerpt from Ewing's new book of poetry Electric Arches . See Privac...

In her seminal work on 'Muppet Theory,' Slate reporter Dahlia Lithwick once wrote that "every living human" can be categorized as either a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet. On this super-special Supreme Court edition of Nerdette , lifelong SCOTUS-nerd and Nerdette host Tricia Bobeda asks Lithwick to apply her Unified Theory of Muppet Types to each Supreme Court Justice. The results are pure madness...

Like the Flintstones meeting the Jetsons, Betty and Veronica taking down the Predator alien, and Sabrina the teenage witch dating Eric Matthews on Boy Meets World , nothing beats an epic crossover. That’s why Nerdette hosts Greta Johnsen and Tricia Bobeda sat down with Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow, hosts of CALL YOUR GIRLFRIEND , the premiere podcast for long-distance besties everywhere. They tal...

It’s a "dinner and a TV show" kind of night for Nerdette this week. We talk to Jane the Virgin actress Yael Grobglas about what it’s like to play your own twin and creating a villain who people love to hate. Then Iron Chef winner and Chopped judge Alex Guarnaschelli joins us to help dive into Grobglas’ obsession with food. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Noti...

To celebrate the arrival of  Star Trek: Discovery , we decided to talk to the biggest Trekkie we know: On The Media co-host Brooke Gladstone. She told us about her all-time favorite characters, why science fiction is so good at capturing a moment in time, and where Star Trek-beginners might want to get started. Oh yeah, and what better way to keep the party going then by calling up Star Trek legen...

In a conversation with Nerdette host and known Whovian Tricia Bobeda, Alex Kingston discusses her role on ‘Doctor Who’ as fan-favorite River Song, which helped pave the way for the show’s first female Doctor. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Nadia Sirota is Juilliard-trained violist who hosts Meet The Composer , a podcast that shifts the conversation around classical music by featuring interviews with modern-day composers. She’s also worked with artists ranging from Kesha to Paul Simon. Plus, she explains how being on tour led to a love of aquariums, and Nerdette connects her with the Senior Curator of Fishes at Chicago’s Shedd Aquari...