Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series has sold more than 300 million books since the first installment was published in 2007. The star of the series is the famous line drawing, Greg Heffley, a frequently frowning, middle-school-aged antihero. Now, Kinney is out with Partypooper, the 20th book in the series. In today’s episode, Here & Now’s Robin Young travels to An Unlikely Story in Plainville, Massachusetts, the bookstore Kinney owns with his wife. There, Young and Kinney discuss the inspiration behind Greg, whom Kinney says is a “funhouse” version of himself.
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Amanda Holmes reads Elizabeth Jennings’s “Absence.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
Father Frost (the Soviet Santa Claus) asks: "To whom do we owe all the good things in our socialist society?,” to which, it is said, the children chorus the reply, "Stalin."
Author and journalist Vijay Prashad returns to Bad Faith initially to discuss Venezuela but gets sidetracked by Briahna's frustration with several media happenings from last week: the Compact article "The Lost Generation" arguing that white millennial men have faced discrimination as a consequence of DEI, and Vivek Ramaswamy's New York Times op/ed that attempts to pull the GOP back from its descent into open racism, which often manifests in the use of anti-Indian slurs against Ramaswamy and Second Lady Usha Vance. The two do get to Venezuela eventually, but life is about the journey.
With an unprecedented decades-long run of success, Warren Buffett is retiring on December 31, 2025. Buffett’s turning point began with the acquisition of a failing textile mill called Berkshire Hathaway. What began as a “terrible mistake” became the foundation for his empire. Today on the show, how did Buffett become this legendary figure?
Mahmood Mamdani — a professor of government at Columbia University and the father of Zohran Mamdani, NYC’s next mayor — has spent decades researching colonialism and its effects on the African continent. His work is both political and personal, influenced by his own experience in Uganda as an exiled citizen deemed nonindigenous by colonial structures. In today’s episode, Mamdani talks to NPR’s Leila Fadel about his newest book, Slow Poison, an account of colonial legacy in Uganda, the rise of the country’s modern autocrats, and the politics of belonging that surround it all.
To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday
Episode: 1495 The new technological elite: chauffeurs then, computer experts today. Today, we learn to drive our own cars -- and manage our own computers.