Anything's Pastable and My Life in Recipes, new cookbooks from Dan Pashman and Joan Nathan, get personal in very different ways. Pashman, the James Beard Award-winning podcaster, sets out to revolutionize our relationship with pasta, while Nathan's 12th cookbook blends recipes and memoir to trace her family history through Jewish cuisine. In today's episode, Here & Now's Robin Young talks with Pashman about food innovation, his viral pasta shape and why home cooks shouldn't sweat over homemade sauce. Then, NPR's Ari Shapiro joins Nathan at her home to discuss Jewish holidays, her family's immigration story and the perfect matzo ball soup.
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Music
Pure (Ride the World) by (the extraordinary) Brendan Eder Ensemble
Violette... from Philippe Sarde's score to Violette et Francois
Merry-go-Round and People on Sunday by Domenique Dumont
Dane by Nils Frahm
Two different versions of Debussy's Passepied, the piano one is performed by Seong-Jin Cho, the synth one by Isao Tomita
Love from Matthew Herbert
Memorial Park from Bernard Herrmann's score to Obsession.
Jurassic Park creator Michael Crichton spent years working on a manuscript about a volcano on the verge of a disastrous eruption in Hawaii. After he died in 2008, his wife Sherri found his boxes and boxes of research and decided the novel needed to be finished – so she hit up James Patterson. In today's episode, she and Patterson speak with NPR's Ari Shapiro about how they got Eruption across the finish line more than a decade after her husband's death, and how they managed to pass off the pen throughout the course of the novel.
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In the Spring of 1846, a group of intrepid pioneers set out from Independence, Missouri, to cross the Oregon Trail to seek a better life in the fertile Oregon Territory.
However, almost nothing went according to plan for this group. They got a late start, took a devastating wrong turn, and were delayed by many natural obstacles.
They ended up being stuck in the mountains during the winter in one of the more horrific episodes in the history of the American West.
Learn more about the Donner Party, what went wrong, and their horrific fate on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Sponsors
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Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson remembers her first brush with the national spotlight as "white hot." When President Biden nominated her in 2022 to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, it kicked off an intense confirmation process for Jackson, the first Black woman ever appointed to the Supreme Court. In her new book, Lovely One: A Memoir, Jackson charts her path from the segregated South to the country's highest court. In today's episode, Justice Jackson sits down with NPR's Juana Summers to discuss whether the Supreme Court should adopt a more binding ethics code, the court's ability to deliver a credible opinion on this year's election and her family life, including her daughter's autism diagnosis.
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
Harriet Constable learned a lot about the real life of Anna Maria della Pietà — that she grew up in an orphanage, that she was a star violinist and a favored student of Antonio Vivaldi. But in her new novel, The Instrumentalist, Constable also merges fact with fiction to tell the story of Anna Maria's synesthesia and musical talents. In today's episode, she speaks with NPR's Scott Simon about Anna Maria's life, the challenges and excitement of the classical music world at the time, and what we make of Vivaldi today.
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