Knox Pods

The City of Knoxville’s Deputy to the Mayor and Chief Policy Officer Dr. William Lyons discusses the book The signal and the noise : why so many predictions fail-- but some don't by Nate Silver. (Recorded January 16, 2013) Silver is the statistician behind The New York Times' FiveThirtyEight election blog. In his book, Silver examines successful forecasters on the topics of hurricanes, baseball, p...

In this podcast Knoxville News Sentinel editor Jack McElroy summarizes and comments on the book Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed , by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond. (Recorded June 19, 2013) "The subject matter of Jared Diamond’s Collapse is, in some ways, the opposite of his earlier Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel ," McElroy says. "That book dealt with t...

Dr. Nissa Dahlin-Brown of the Howard Baker Center for Public Policy discusses  The death and life of the great American school system : how testing and choice are undermining education  by Diane Ravitch. (Recorded May 15, 2013) Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education and a leader in the drive to create a national curriculum, examines her career in education reform and repudiates positions...

Elizabeth Wright, Director of Women’s Advocacy and Written Communications at Young Women's Christian Association Knoxville, discusses The new feminist agenda: defining the next revolution for women, work, and family by Madeleine Kunin. (Recorded April 17, 2013) According to Kunin, progress is evident considering that women now comprise nearly 60 percent of college undergraduates and half of all me...

Jay Leutze talks about his book Stand up that mountain: the battle to save one small community in the wilderness along the Appalachian Trail, that tells the story of how his neighbors formed a coalition to save a treasured mountain peak from destruction by a mining company. (Recorded March 20, 2013) One day the author got a call from fourteen-year-old Ashley and her Aunt Ollie. Ashley and Ollie sa...

Former Knoxville Chief of Police Sterling Owen remarks on the history of violence as he discusses The better angels of our nature : why violence has declined by Steven Pinker. (Recorded February 20, 2013) Pinker, a New York Times bestselling author, shows that despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding...

When we consider our monumental environmental challenges—climate change, air and water pollution, environmental toxins, etc.—it seems that we must be the first civilization to face environmental degradation serious enough to threaten our very way of life. According to author Clive Ponting, we aren’t the first, and history does have something to teach us. Steve Cotham, Manager of the Knox County Pu...

Marianne Wiggins is the author of seven books of fiction including Evidence of Things Unseen , which is set in Knoxville. She has won an NEA grant, the Whiting Writers' Award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and she was a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist in fiction for Evidence of Things Unseen . An evening with Marianne Wiggins was sponsored by Friends of the Library in honor...

Christopher Walsh, author of In the Wake of the Sun: Navigating the Southern Works of Cormac McCarthy , discusses his favorite aspects of McCarthy's work in this recording edited from his public remarks on April 7, 2010.

Miss Evelyn Hazen, a beautiful and independent woman of a prominent family, caused a stir in Knoxville society when she sued her lover for jilting her. The reading is edited and compiled from several Knoxville Journal stories filed in Covington, KY in 1934 as Miss Hazen's courtship was examined in a court of law.

James Agee's A Death in the Family has been a staple in American literature for 50 years, but it is not the novel the author intended to publish. University of Tennessee professor Michael A. Lofaro restored the novel to reflect the manuscript Agee left completed at his death. In this recording he discusses the new version: A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text .

On July 28, 2008 the Sunsphere was both the site and the subject of a luncheon lecture by one of the architects who worked on creating the theme structure for the 1982 World's Fair. William Denton spoke about the challenges of constructing the world's first spherical building, and what he hoped Knoxville would do with it. Former mayor Randall Tyree spoke following Mr. Denton's remarks.

The first in a podcast series based on readings of old Knoxville newspapers, this article is "A Night on the Bowery," published in The Journal and Tribune , Sunday, July 8, 1900. Robby Griffith reads the article, after which Knox County Historian and librarian Steve Cotham provides the historical context. The music was performed by Music Therapy, recorded live at the Time Warp Tea Room in Happy Ho...

As part of our 2007 Big Read, the library hosted discussions of the book To Kill A Mockingbird and a screening of the film. Gerald Wood, Dean of Humanites at Carson-Newman College, and Barbara Moore, Professor in the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee, joined us to discuss the film adaptation of the book.