Happy To Be Here

This week’s guest is one of Greta’s favorite authors! Ann Patchett is out with her ninth novel, ‘ Tom Lake .’ It’s about a family that’s brought together to their northern Michigan cherry orchard during the quarantine days of the pandemic. As the parents and three daughters spend their days picking cherries, the mother tells a story. At first glance, it’s about the play ‘Our Town,’ and acting, and...

This week, Dylan Marron, host of the podcast The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks , and Jo Firestone, comedian and host of the podcast Dr. Gameshow , stop by to play one of our favorite games, “Burden or delight.” They evaluate the number of spiders we eat in our sleep and the best time of day to eat dinner. Then, we check in on what the heck is going on in Hollywood. The writers’ strike hit the 100 da...

This week, Daily Fail hosts Maura Currie and Kristen Meinzer join us to unwind from a particularly steamy week! We swap tricks for staying cool, talk about the joy of eating in front of the TV , and debunk sexist myths about hunter gatherers . Plus, in another installment of our ongoing Nerdy Jobs series, we meet Jennifer Mundt . She is a sleep psychologist at Northwestern Medicine, where she dire...

Nerdette Book Club’s August selection is Andrew Leland’s memoir The Country of the Blind . Andrew is gradually losing his sight due to a rare degenerative eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa, which he was diagnosed with as a teen. In this vulnerable, funny conversation, host Greta Johnsen shares her own experience with a degenerative eye disease. The two dig into how blind people have advocate...

This week, our panelists are the host of the NHPR podcast ‘ The 13th Step ,’ Lauren Chooljian, and Jonquilyn Hill, who hosts the Vox podcast ‘ The Weeds .’ We talk about whether we indulged in Barbenheimer, then recommend some stuff to read, do, and listen to this summer. You can find a list of their recommendations here , at our website. Then, Aomawa Shields tells us about her circuitous trajecto...

Nerdette Book Club is back to discuss our July selection, Tania James’ book Loot . It’s historical fiction, but the story centers around a real artifact: a life-sized, wooden automaton of a tiger devouring an English soldier known as Tipu’s Tiger. It was built in the late 1700s in Mysore, India, and it resides in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Our protagonist is Abbas, a young and talented w...

This week, we share some of the best things to watch and eat this summer! Our guests are Shilpa Uskokovic, food editor at Bon Appetit, and Shirley Li, staff writer at The Atlantic covering the entertainment industry. What to watch: ‘ How to With John Wilson ’ season 3 (July 28) ‘ Problemista ’ (August 4) ‘ Bottoms ’ (August 25) What to eat: Grilled Corn Tiger Salad Lemony Zucchini with Sour Cream...

It’s summer blockbuster season! Northwestern University’s Arionne Nettles and Chalkbeat Chicago’s Becky Vevea stop by to get excited about the opening week of both ‘ Barbie’ and ‘ Oppenheimer .’ We also chat about this year’s Emmy nominations and what in the world “ girl dinner ” is. Then, Simon Pegg reflects on an extremely nerdy career, his role in the latest ‘Mission Impossible’ movie, and whet...

This week, we are bringing you a special episode from our friends When Magic Happens from WBEZ! The podcast features intergenerational conversations between Black women. And this episode is for the nerds! Hosts Taylor Coward, Cheryle Jackson and Jennifer “Shea Love” Long get into why some nerdy hobbies challenge traditional notions of Blackness. They embrace the idea that the Nerdette team really...

This week, the hosts of the podcast Just Between Us , Gabe Dunn and Alison Raskin, stop in to talk about the concert-goers who keep throwing objects on stage, why everyone is in Europe right now, and the people who got stuck upside down on a roller coaster. Then, The New York Times ’ Alexandra Alter unpacks her story about how review-bombing on Goodreads is impacting the publishing industry. She a...

July’s Nerdette Book Club pick is the historical novel ' Loot ' by Tania James! The story opens in Mysore, India when a young wood carver named Abbas is summoned to the Sultan’s palace to help make a mechanical tiger. The novel spans continents and decades, but that tiger is at the center of the story. It’s based on the real artifact ‘ Tippoo’s Tiger ’ in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London t...

ICYMI podcast hosts Rachelle Hampton and Candice Lim, stop by to play our new game, Burden or Delight? We consider the Army’s new tactical bras , location sharing , and Fall Out Boy’s updated version of Billy Joel’s classic “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Then, we dive into the Guinness Book of Records. Journalist and author Imogen West-Knights tells about how the company known for the world’s most od...

Nerdette Book Club is back to discuss our June pick ‘ The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi ’ by Shannon Chakraborty. The book weaves together fantasy and history in a propulsive plot set on the high seas of the Indian Ocean in the 12th century. Our protagonist is Amina al-Sirafi, a retired pirate who is called back to the high seas for one last job. She rallies her old crew and embarks on the treasur...

Aisha Harris, co-host of the NPR show ‘ Pop Culture Happy Hour ,’ joins us to chat about her new book ‘ Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me .’ The book is a testament to the fact that, whether we want to or not, we inevitably learn a lot about the world from TV shows and movies and music videos. In essays on everything from the Spice Girls to film critic Roger Ebert to ‘King Ri...

In our new game “Burden or delight?,” we ask our panelists to determine if stories from the week’s news are in fact burdensome or delightful. To give it a try, we invited WEBZ metro reporter Adora Namigadde and ' The Rundown ' podcast host Erin Allen to play along with us. We consider a surprise discovery of one million pennies, a new single from The Beatles, and waking up at your own funeral. The...

Way back in the year 2013, “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore was at the top of the charts, President Obama began his second term, and Disney released the blockbuster Frozen. But perhaps most importantly, the podcast Nerdette was born. In this anniversary episode, co-host emeritus Tricia Bobeda rejoined Greta behind the mic to reflect on ten whole years of the show. They also welcomed back Peter Sagal, h...

June’s Nerdette Book Club pick is The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty! It is the first of a new trilogy about pirates, magic, and mystical artifacts. While the book is technically fantasy, it is also deeply grounded in the history of the Crusades. Author Shannon Chakraborty joined us for this spoiler-free conversation about mixing fantasy and history, middle-aged protagonists,...

This week, scholar, author, and organizer Eve Ewing joins forces with X-Ray Vision podcast co-host Jason Concepcion to talk about Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown and the importance of soft pants. Then, podcast host and TV writer Jamie Loftus stops by to tell us about her new book Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs . It’s a travelogue with a slice of American history, a squirt of capitali...

This month’s book club selection is Idra Novey’s Take What You Need , a novel that centers around Jean, an older woman who welds giant sculptures in her rural Pennsylvania living room, and Leah, her estranged ex-stepdaughter. We’re joined by two novelists who wrote books that came out in 2022: Cleyvis Natera, the author of Neruda on the Park , and Fellowship Point author Alice Elliott Dark for a r...

Nerdette had the great privilege of hosting a live WBEZ event with Samantha Irby to celebrate the release of her newest book Quietly Hostile . Like her other books, it’s a collection of essays that span a huge variety of topics. She writes about lesbian nun porn fantasies, living with teenage stepkids, why her wife has SO many condiments in their fridge, and chronic illness. (If you’ve read Sam’s...

This week, Greta is joined by host of City Cast Chicago Jacoby Cochran and WBEZ reporter Araceli Gómez-Aldana. We get into the newly announced sequel to Freaky Friday and whether Martha Stewart’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover is really breaking down barriers. Then, NPR host-at-large Elise Hu tells us about her new book Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital . It’s abo...

Tracie Hunte, correspondent and producer for WNYC studios, and Arionne Nettles, journalism lecturer at Northwestern University, join us to wade through some of the week’s most amusing stories, from the coronation to a study on how to properly call a cat. Then, Tre’vell Anderson tells us about their beautiful new book We See Each Other: A Black Trans Journey Through TV and Film . It’s a look at the...

The Pulitzer Prize in fiction was awarded this week to Hernan Diaz’s novel ‘Trust,’ a Nerdette Book Club pick! To celebrate, we are sharing our book club conversation with the author from December of last year. In this spoiler-free episode, Hernan discusses the novel, male privilege, and who does – and doesn’t – have the power to tell their own story. Hernan shares the prize with Barbara Kingsolve...

Get ready to add a LOT of new titles to your TBR list this summer! Three of the best readers around came on to talk about the book they’re extra excited about: Liberty Hardy, senior contributing editor and podcast host at Book Riot, Lupita Aquino, who is on Instagram and Substack as Lupita Reads, and Traci Thomas, host of The Stacks podcast. Head to our website for more info on the books mentioned...

Our May book club pick is ‘Take What You Need’ by Idra Novey. The story opens with Leah, who has just learned that her estranged stepmother Jean died falling off a ladder while making a giant, metal sculpture. The book alternates points of view between Leah in the novel’s present day, and Jean before she died. It explores messy familial relationships, creativity, and the changing American cultural...