I'd Rather Be Reading

For the only throwback pick of the January Wellness Series, I present to you the fabulous Dr. Samantha Boardman, who is talking to us today about vitality. Let’s be honest: do you ever think about vitality, let alone in your day-to-day life? If I put you on the spot and quizzed you, could you even totally define what vitality means? Today we not only define it but help you understand that vitality...

This might shock you (or maybe it won’t) but 75 percent of Americans don’t get the federally recommended weekly minimum of 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise (or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise), let alone the recommended two days of full body strength training. When we think about getting healthier, we often think about nutrition, as we should—but exercise is a critical part of the equati...

As our January Wellness Series continues, today we are speaking to the dynamic Neal Allen about taming our inner critic. We all have one, and it’s called the superego; the superego was developed in our respective childhoods as a survival mechanism, but as adults, we no longer need it for protection—but for so many of us, its presence in our lives is cumbersome at best and extremely damaging at its...

What if I told you that it was possible to control anxiety, ADHD, OCD, depression, and more by what you eat (or don’t eat)? That it was completely possible to calm your mind with food? That’s what today’s episode is all about, and we’re talking to Harvard nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo about the “powerful medicine of food,” looking at a groundbreaking, full-body approach to mental health,...

For today’s January Wellness Series conversation, we’re back to mental and emotional wellness, specifically this relatable topic: caring too much about what others think of you. Our guest today, Dr. Michael Gervais, calls caring too much about other people’s opinions “the single greatest constrictor of human potential,” and introduces the concept of “FOPO” (fear of other people’s opinions), assess...

As our January Wellness Series rolls on, today we switch from mental and emotional wellness to physical wellness. Aging is a good thing—hey, it certainly beats the alternative, right?—but I’d venture to guess that all of us want to continue to grow older without looking or feeling older. Today’s guest, Dr. Anthony Youn, teaches us how to do just that, looking at environmental and lifestyle factors...

Welcome to 2024, and welcome to our January Wellness Series! We are alternating episodes about mental and emotional wellness (like this one) and physical wellness, and I am thrilled to kickstart this series with perhaps my favorite book of 2023: How to Be the Love You Seek: Break Cycles, Find Peace, and Heal Your Relationships by Dr. Nicole LePera. In the book, Dr. LePera gives the simple but prof...

My annual best books episode with the dynamic Carla Jean Whitley never disappoints! Below are her picks, in order. Happy reading! The Best Books She’s Read This Year: I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai (Fiction)  Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone by Amy Key (Nonfiction)  Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano (Fiction) The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends...

Today on the show we have a career retrospective episode with journalist Nancy Jo Sales, who walks us through her career writing for the likes of Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar , and more. Nancy Jo is a New York Times bestselling author, and we also discuss her three books: The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked the World (which was made...

Simply put? Today’s guest, Aurora James, is a force . I have no idea what hidden stash of hours she has to do all that she does in a day, a week, a month, a year—but she is changing the world. One of my favorite books of 2023 was her memoir, Wildflower , and I’m not alone—it was praised globally for its vulnerability and candidness. Aurora contains multitudes: in addition to being an author, she i...

The one, the only Candace Bushnell is on the show today! *insert fangirl screaming here* As Sex and the City is my favorite show of all time—and Candace, you know, created the whole franchise back in 1994—this is a dream come true. I actually met Candace in person in 2019, when she was on her book tour for Is There Still Sex and the City? , and I found her to be as lovely as I hoped she would be....

For Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino—star of MTV’s Jersey Shore and a career reality show talent with other appearances on shows like Dancing with the Stars and Celebrity Big Brother —the highs have been very high, and the lows have been very low. At his highest point (or at least what he thought was his highest point at the time), Mike was a multimillionaire, the second highest-paid reality star o...

There will literally never be another "I'd Rather Be Reading" episode this short again. Enjoy it, and support your local booksellers this holiday season. That's all!

Today on the show we have one-half of one of my favorite writing duos: BBC’s Katty Kay who, along with fellow journalist Claire Shipman, has authored five books that are all about advancing womanhood. The bulk of our conversation today centers around The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance — What Women Should Know , addressing specifically the confidence gap between men and wome...

There are so many details when it comes to planning a wedding: what dress code will your guests wear? How about the flowers? Should you get a photographer, a videographer, or both? What do you want your wedding theme to be? (I honestly didn’t even know there was such a thing.) There are so many details to planning a wedding that it can be enormously overwhelming, but it will be decidedly less so w...

Some episodes of this show are more niche, and some apply to us all—and this is an example of the latter. No matter where you’re at in your personal finance journey—whether you’re debt free and have it all figured out or are in a rock bottom moment financially—my guest today is here to teach you something. I am so excited to introduce you to my personal finance heroine Tiffany Aliche, also known a...

Today’s season nine opener is so fun—I could have talked to Rob Harvilla forever! We are going back to our mutual favorite decade, the 1990s, specifically to talk the decade’s music. And what a random grab bag assortment that decade was in terms of music: grunge. Ska. Swing. The Latin explosion. Bubblegum pop. Hip-hop—perhaps some of the best of the genre, ever. MTV still played music videos (!),...

For our season eight finale, I had the honor of speaking to the editor-in-chief of Guideposts , a faith-based magazine I grew up reading, as my grandparents were subscribers. If you’ve listened to past episodes, you know that Alzheimer’s disease has profoundly affected my family, my grandparents, in particular—and that is the topic of conversation today, as I speak with Edward Grinnan about his mo...

Samantha Harris—a broadcaster who you know from co-hosting Dancing with the Stars alongside Tom Bergeron for seven seasons and hosting shows like E! News , Entertainment Tonight , and so many more—is the picture of health, and even wrote the book on it back in 2018. She’s also a breast cancer survivor and learned firsthand that, at the end of the day, if your health is compromised, not much else m...

Who knew that a text about blueberries could nearly end a marriage? Eve Rodsky received a text from her husband, Seth, asking why she didn’t pick up blueberries at the store—and it sparked a movement that has saved countless marriages and made women’s time and the value of it a topic in the forefront of conversation. A Harvard-educated lawyer, Eve is the author of two of my favorite books: Fair Pl...

This conversation lit a fire in me, and I knew I’d Rather Be Reading was nowhere near finished. Mitch is the author of my favorite work of fiction of all time, The Five People You Meet in Heaven , and his latest, The Little Liar , is just as powerful. It takes us back to the Holocaust, a beautiful tale during an awful time told masterfully by the well-researched and thoughtful Mitch Albom. This sh...

The Murdaugh saga (there is no better word I can find for it than that) gripped the nation earlier this year, as patriarch Alex Murdaugh was sentenced to two life sentences for the brutal murders of his wife, Maggie, and younger son, Paul. As horrific as that crime alone is, that’s nowhere near where the Murdaugh saga begins or ends. In 2019, a boat driven by Paul crashed and killed friend Mallory...

It’s very rare I know my guests on the show personally, but for today’s episode, I do. I have been proud to know Mark Dent and Rustin Dodd since our days as students at the University of Kansas, where we all graduated from journalism school in the same class—the class of 2009. (As the senior class president of the class of 2009 back in my glory days, to that I say a heartfelt Rock Chalk.) Mark and...

It's January 15, 1978. Kathy Kleiner is a student at Florida State University and is asleep in her room at the Chi Omega sorority house. Unbeknownst to her, a serial killer named Ted Bundy has discovered the sorority house’s back door is accessible—the lock is broken. That night, he broke into the house, murdered two of her sorority sisters, savagely injured Kathy and her roommate, and changed...

From beauty in our last throwback pick episode to fashion in this one, I have another of my heroes, Robin Givhan, on the program today. Robin is a fashion critic at The Washington Post and is a Pulitzer Prize winner, having won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2006—the first time that award was given to a fashion writer. Just as she herself has made history, her 2015 book The Battle of Versaill...