Princeton Alumni Weekly Podcasts

Only one creature, other than humans, substantially engineers the landscape around it: the beaver. Many millions of these furry dam builders once busily trapped water in ponds across North America, keeping the landscape lush and fertile, until colonists in the 1600s discovered the lucrative fur trade. In her new book, titled “Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America,” Leila Philip ’86, an Eng...

What happens when a donor kidney becomes available to somebody who needs one? In the U.S., a hundred thousand people are waiting on lists, all with different ages, complications, and circumstances. How do you decide who gets it? In his new book, Voices in the Code, David Robinson ’04, a scholar and co-founder of the equity-focused NGO Upturn, takes a look at the algorithm used to match kidneys and...

Washington Post columnist Christine Emba ’10 has been watching the approach that young, single people are taking to sex these days, and it isn’t pretty. What’s more, often it’s bad. It’s bad sex, full of unwanted, unsatisfying encounters, influenced more by porn than pleasure, that women and men are nevertheless consenting to. Why? In her new book, titled ‘Rethinking Sex: A Provocation,’ Emba expl...

Internships are a staple of the business world, and a step almost mandatory for young people entering many areas of the workforce. But how many are full of busywork? How many are unpaid? Rob Khoury, who founded and runs his own consulting company, Agile Rainmakers, wants internships to reach their true potential, as fulfilling experiences that mutually benefit both hosts and college students — inc...

Tom Szaky ’05 says everything we own eventually comes to the end of its lifespan, whether it’s a shirt you’ve worn for years or the cup from a coffee you bought this morning. Where does it all go? How much actually gets recycled? And with evidence mounting that all this waste is damaging our world, how can we throw on the brakes? Over the 20 years since he was a Princeton undergrad, Szaky has beco...

Just a few days before graduating as valedictorian of Princeton’s Class of 2022, Natalia Orlovsky spoke with PAW about her love for both the sciences and humanities and her hopes for going into academia. As a student she worked in a bioengineering lab, served on the peer review board of the Princeton Undergraduate Research Journal, was an undergraduate course assistant, served on the board of Thea...

Leo Damrosch *68 is a Harvard professor of literature, emeritus, who has written biographies of Jonathan Swift, William Blake, and others. In his new book, titled Adventurer, he tackles Giacomo Casanova — the real Casanova, separate from the many fictionalized accounts that his name has inspired over the centuries, and separate from the version he painted of himself in a massive autobiography towa...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted a flood of refugees seeking safety in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere. As president of Refugees International, Eric Schwartz *85 has had an eye on the situation, and on refugee crises in places that aren’t receiving as much attention. Schwartz spoke to PAW in mid-March about what he saw in Ukraine during a trip there early in the invasion, and about the po...

That little cellphone in your pocket can do more than you think. On the latest PAWcast, Rosa Wang *91 describes her work bringing mobile banking and digital financial services to some of the world’s poorest and most remote places. Using her background in investment banking, she found that cellphones have incredible potential for empowering women. In her new book, titled “Strong Connections, Storie...

Why do some people step up to help or speak up in a crisis, while others don’t? On this episode of the PAWcast, Amherst professor Catherine Sanderson *97 explains how she analyzed the psychology of this phenomenon for her new book, Why We Act. She explains the science behind how we’re wired to behave as bystanders and shows that with the right tools, training, and education, anyone can be turned i...

Having a baby shouldn’t be a high-pressure experience — yet somehow it has become one. Emily Lammers ’06 worked hard to carve her own path through parenting, and then she wrote a book about it: No Drama First-Time Mama. On this episode of the PAWcast, Lammers breaks down the pressures directed at first-time moms, from breastfeeding to helicopter parenting to neglecting their own well-being, and of...

Ghosts and monsters, strong families and a connection to the Earth fill the two young adult novels penned by Darcie Little Badger ’10. Readers also find traditional Lipan Apache storytelling elements that Badger, a member of the Lipan Apache tribe, learned from her family while growing up in Texas. Badger spoke with PAW about her books — Elatsoe and A Snake Falls to Earth — about facing rejection...

As a practicing dermatologist, Christine Ko ’95 is usually in the doctor’s seat. But when her son was diagnosed with profound deafness at two years old, she suddenly found herself on the patient’s side of the relationship. What she learned and experienced over the next few years led her to write a new book, titled How to Improve Doctor-Patient Connection. Ko, who is also a professor of dermatology...

A criminal record can stand firmly between a potential new hire and a company that needs to fill an open job. But should it? On this episode of the PAWcast, business strategist Jeff Korzenik ’85 discusses his book, Untapped Talent, making a strong case for why smart companies will meet the coming global talent shortage with second-chance hiring. And he lays out a road map for how to do it right, w...

On the north coast of Maine, about as far as you can go before reaching Canada, lies a wild, poor, beautiful place known as Downeast. Many people there make their living on lobster boats, and many have deep family roots, interwoven over generations. Gigi Georges *96 spent four years here, starting in 2016, following the lives of five teenage girls, in hopes of telling a story about rural America m...

Robert Masello ’74 has carved a niche in the writing world: His novels place real historical figures in fictional stories with a touch of the supernatural. One follows Albert Einstein into a battle between good vs. evil at Princeton; the latest sends H.G. Wells through a haunted adventure. With a second edition of his nonfiction book about writing due out in September, Masello shared his story on...

As a journalist, Cate Holahan ’02 covered some dark stories, like the Bernie Madoff scandal. Today, she uses what she learned to write domestic psychological thrillers. Karma always comes for her characters, but there are no perfect villains, and no one emerges a complete hero. In her fifth and latest book, “Her Three Lives,” Holahan probes the way security technology can twist a mind pushed to th...

Taishi Nakase, an operations research and financial engineering concentrator who hails from Melbourne, Australia, was named Princeton’s valedictorian for the Class of 2021. He spoke with PAW about his research into measles vaccinations campaigns, his plans for medical school, and the challenges and lessons of being a Princeton student in this pandemic year.

Wisconsin’s Appleton Coated nearly became the next American paper mill to go under, even as state officials fought to bring in a massive new electronics plant, Foxconn, with public subsidies. But Appleton didn’t go under, thanks to a fight by the mill’s workers and the county executive, Thomas Nelson *04. Nelson’s book, “One Day Stronger: How One Local Union Saved a Mill and What it means for Amer...

Birds arrived in Julia Zarankin’s life at a moment of change. In her memoir, Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder, she writes that the career she worked so hard for had become unfulfilling, and her first marriage had fallen apart. Her search for meaning took her to a birding group in Toronto, where she fell hard for the red-winged blackbird. That sighting began a decade-long love affair with t...

Princeton 43, UCLA 41. Twenty-five years after the final backdoor layup dropped through the net, the Tigers’ memorable 1996 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament upset win lives on in the memories of fans — and not just Princetonians. On this month’s PAWcast, we talk about how Princeton knocked off the defending national champs with the starting five from that game: Chris Doyal ’96, Sydney Johnson ’97,...

Jeffery Schwartz *87, the author of Work Disrupted: Opportunity, Resilience, and Growth in the Accelerated Future of Work, leads the Future Work practice for Deloitte. Over the last decade or so, his team has said that we are on the precipice of major transformations in how and where we do our work. In this PAWcast, he speaks about his findings over the years and how COVID-19 has, in many regards,...

Our guest this month is Maria Tatar, the John L. Loeb Research Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. Maria, who received her Ph. D. from Princeton in 1971, has recently published a book, Fairest of the Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters, which explores Disney’s Snow White and all of the Snow White-esque folklore...

Eleanor Roosevelt was many things: an orphaned child in a prominent family, a stellar student, an ambitious social reformer, a savvy political spouse, a tireless humanitarian, and a syndicated columnist whose daily dispatches were followed by millions of readers. According to David Michaelis, author of the new biography Eleanor, the former first lady built a remarkable legacy by engaging with the...

This month, Cara Jones ’98 and her father, Farley Jones ’65 discuss their relationship with the Unification Church created by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Cara grew up deeply devoted to the religion, like her father, and accepted a marriage arranged by the Rev. Moon. But in a new documentary, Blessed Child, she explains how that marriage ultimately led to her disillusionment with the religion and her...