The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice. And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners—the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie—parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed—has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems. And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home. A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel’s Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero’s journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a fun-house mirror to our moment—for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice.
NPR’s annual Books We Love guide is back for its 13th year, sharing over 380 hand-selected reads by NPR staff and critics. In today’s post-Thanksgiving episode, host Andrew Limbong joins Morning Edition and All Things Considered to chat about all things Books We Love. First, he shares some top non-fiction picks with NPR’s Michel Martin; among them Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson’s biography of American fashion designer Claire McCardell, who you might want to credit for those handy pockets on womenswear. Then, he talks fiction with NPR’s Scott Detrow, recommending titles such as Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author.
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Marquette University Political Scientist Phil Rocco has a new book focusing on the 2020 U.S. Census and how the states, localities, and federal government all worked – at times well, at times not quite as well – to conduct the census. This is a fascinating exploration of federalism at work in the American system, with some states putting in place extensive mechanisms to help with the census, which is a national responsibility. Other states did far less; and the national government, which is constitutionally required to execute a census every ten years, approached the census with some controversial requirements, with the federal courts having to make decisions as to the constitutional validity of some of those requirements. Counting Like a State: How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shaped the 2020 U.S. Census (UP Kansas, 2025) explores this particular census as a kind of case study. The 2020 census was tricky on a number of fronts, not the least because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and because of the Trump Administration’s approach to the census itself. Rocco goes through the various approaches to the census as a national undertaking, searching for understandings of how the process actually worked and where there were positive and negative engagements with the process.
As a scholar of federalism, data science, and public policy, Rocco was intrigued by what he found in terms of cooperation on the state level, especially in places like California. The research also highlights various levels of mistrust of government entities and institutions, which makes the census process more difficult and potentially inaccurate because individuals are skeptical about completing the census forms. Because the census is required by law and regulation, it has a number of statutory deadlines, and in 2020, the Covid pandemic shattered the expected and legally compelled timeline for the reporting of results. This is another important aspect of this particular census that Rocco examines in order to assess how states and the national government tried to manage a rather unique process in 2020.
Counting Like A State: How Intergovernmental Partnerships Shaped the 2020 U.S. Census examines not only the 2020 census but also sketches out the history of the census process in the United States so as to provide context for the most recent census and the processes that were implemented across the board. This is a very interesting exploration of how the federal government works, especially in context of federalism and unanticipated constraints.
Some cookbooks don’t just provide recipes; they tell stories—and Nite Yun’s My Cambodia: A Khmer Cookbook is a perfect example. Yun discovered the rich history of her Cambodian-American heritage in the kitchen, and her debut cookbook tells these stories through her family’s most beloved recipes. In today’s episode, Yun talks with NPR’s Leila Fadel about her book’s unique creation process and the power of food to bring together families across generations and continents.
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Lacrosse is a uniquely American sport. We spoke with sports reporter Scott Price about his book, "The American Game: History and Hope in the Country of Lacrosse," for our series, Race Matters. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy
In Boston, music therapy is being used to enrich the well-being of people hoping to overcome trauma. Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports for our look at the intersection of art and health, part of our arts and culture series, CANVAS. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy
E. Lockhart understands the struggle of being a teenager. Her first novel We Were Liars was a standout YA hit of 2014, celebrated (and at times, criticized) amongst teens in particular for its twisty and devastating coming-of-age narrative set on a fictional island near Martha’s Vineyard. Lockhart returns to the East Coast for We Fell Apart, her third book in the series, crafting another summer tale of mystery and self-discovery. In today’s episode, Lockhart joins NPR’s Juana Summers to discuss her newest novel, and what we could all learn from teenagers — and perhaps their reading habits too.
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Our insatiable appetite for creativity in the kitchen – or around the open fire – is reflected in the fascinating array of objects explored in this book. Authored by food writer Jenny Linford in consultation with curators from the British Museum, Repast: The Story of Food (Thames & Hudson in partnership with the British Museum, 2025) focuses on artefacts in the museum’s collections – from ancient clay cooking vessels to exquisite gold goblets – spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Australasia, from prehistory to the present day.
Arranged into thirteen broad themes such as Hunting, Alcohol, Religion, Feasting and Eating Out, with lavish plates accompanying absorbing essays on subjects including tea (the world’s most consumed drink after water), pork (the world’s most widely consumed meat), and wheat (the source of 20% of the world’s human calorie consumption), Repast conveys the extraordinary global story of food, drink and the culinary arts.
This clearly structured, beautifully illustrated book will engage and delight the growing audience interested in the history of food and drink.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine is just a few months short of the four-year mark. PBS's Frontline, working with the Associated Press, will air "2000 Meters to Andriivka," a relentless portrait of life and death on the frontlines. Nick Schifrin spoke with filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy
Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United States has come to nuclear war. That history has largely been a bilateral narrative of the US-USSR struggle for postwar domination, with Cuba as the central staging ground--a standard account that obscures the shock waves that reverberated throughout Latin America. The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War (UNC Press, 2025), as the first hemispheric examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis, shows how leaders and ordinary citizens throughout the region experienced it, revealing that, had the missiles been activated, millions of people across Latin America would have been at grave risk. Traversing the region from the Southern Cone to Central America, Renata Keller describes the deadly riots that shook Bolivia when news of the Cuban Missile Crisis broke, the naval quarantine that members of Argentina's armed forces formed around Cuba, the pro-Castro demonstrations organized by Nicaraguan students, and much more. Drawing on a vast array of archival sources from around the hemisphere and world, The Fate of the Americas demonstrates that even at the brink of destruction, Latin Americans played active roles in global politics and inter-American relations.
