Read Learn Live Podcast

By Jon Menaster : Lover of Literature

Society & Culture Arts Education

What's Read Learn Live Podcast about?

Read Learn Live Podcast - Improve Yourself Through Literature

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Read Learn Live Podcast episodes:

03.31.2022
Learning America – Ep 96 with Luma Mufleh
It was a wrong turn that changed everything. When Luma Mufleh—a Muslim, gay, refugee woman from hyper-conservative Jordan—stumbled upon a pick-up game of soccer in Clarkston, Georgia, something compelled her to join. The players, 11- and 12-year-olds from Liberia, Afghanistan, and...
02.27.2022
The Kaiju Preservation Society – Ep 95 with John Scalzi
When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls “an animal rights...
01.23.2022
The Sleep Fix – Ep 94 with Diane Macedo
Roughly thirty percent of the population is estimated to be living with insomnia, while many more suffer from other sleep disorders. ABC anchor/correspondent Diane Macedo—a former insomniac herself—understands the struggle. Now, in The Sleep Fix, Macedo presents perspective-shifting research and...
12.14.2021
Read Until You Understand – Ep 93 with Farah Jasmine Griffin
Farah Jasmine Griffin is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University where she also served as the inaugural Chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department. She is the author of five...
09.07.2021
The Power of Nothing to Lose – Ep 92 with William L. Silber
Following books by Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Ariely, noted economics professor William L. Silber explores the Hail Mary effect, from its origins in sports to its applications to history, nature, politics, and business. A quarterback like Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers gambles...
08.07.2021
Catch the Rabbit – Ep 91 with Lana Bastašić
Winner of the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature, Lana Bastašić’s powerful debut novel Catch the Rabbit is a modern-day Alice in Wonderland set in post-war Bosnia, in which two young women plunge into the illusive landscape of their shared...
07.06.2021
Ridgeline – Ep 90 with Michael Punke
Ridgeline is the thrilling, long-awaited return of the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Revenant In 1866, with the country barely recovered from the Civil War, new war breaks out on the western frontier—a clash of cultures between the...
06.16.2021
A Master of Djinn – Ep 89 with P. Djèlí Clark
Forty years ago in Egypt, the mystic and inventor Al-Jahiz pierced the veil between realms, sending magic into the world before vanishing into the unknown. Think steampunk meets history meets detective novel meets magic! Now in 1912 Cairo, humans brush elbows...
05.19.2021
From PA to LA – Ep 88 with Yogi Roth
From PA to LA isn’t like anything you’ve read before. Expect this book to cut deeper than your traditional tell-all. Built around a detailed, inside look at the Pitt and USC football programs, it is at heart a story about...
04.04.2021
Beloved Beasts – Ep 87 with Michelle Nijhuis
A vibrant history of the modern conservation movement―told through the lives and ideas of the people who built it. In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal species...
03.12.2021
A Beginner’s Guide to America – Ep 86 with Roya Hakakian
A stirring, witty, and poignant glimpse into the bewildering American immigrant experience from someone who has lived it. Also, a mirror held up to America. Into the maelstrom of unprecedented contemporary debates about immigrants in the United States, this perfectly timed...
02.06.2021
The Women’s History of the Modern World – Ep 85 with Rosalind Miles
The internationally bestselling author of Who Cooked the Last Supper? presents a wickedly witty and very current history of the extraordinary female rebels, reactionaries, and trailblazers who left their mark on history from the French Revolution up to the present day.Now...
01.05.2021
Mental Illness and Graphic Novel as Memoir – Ep 84 with Joshua Kemble
Josh thought he was living the artist’s dream. The young, ambitious comic book creator had a hip Portland apartment, an affectionate fiancé, and his whole life ahead of him. Until the night he finds himself on Burnside Bridge, willing himself...
12.02.2020
Don’t Judge a College Athlete by Their Cover – Ep 83 with Corey Sobel
The Redshirt challenges tenacious stereotypes, shedding new light on the hypermasculine world of American football. Over the course of their first year playing for a Division One college football program that is willing to win at all costs, roommates Miles Furling...
11.01.2020
A Mayan Creation Story – Ep 82 with Ilan Stavans
Popul Vuh: A Retelling is an inspired and urgent prose retelling of the Mayan myth of creation by acclaimed Latin American author and scholar Ilan Stavans, gorgeously illustrated by Salvadoran folk artist Gabriela Larios and introduced by renowned author, diplomat,...
10.15.2020
Stories From a Syrian Refugee – Ep 81 with Perween Richards
Drawn from her experiences of growing up as a young woman in the ‘world’s largest prison’—Gaza—Nayrouz Qarmout’s stories in The Sea Cloak (translated by Perween Richards) stitch together a stirring patchwork of perspectives exploring what it means to be a...
08.22.2020
You Ought To Do A Story About Me – Ep 80 with Ted Jackson
You Ought To Do A Story About Me: Addiction, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Endless Quest for Redemption is the heartbreaking, timeless, and redemptive story of the transformative friendship binding a fallen-from-grace NFL player and a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who...
08.01.2020
E.E. Cummings And The Great War – Ep 79 with Alison Rosenblitt
An incisive biography of E. E. Cummings’s early life, including his World War I ambulance service and subsequent imprisonment, inspirations for his inventive poetry. E. E. Cummings is one of our most popular and enduring poets, one whose name extends beyond...
07.16.2020
Our Moral Character – Ep 78 with Christian B. Miller
We like to think of ourselves, our friends, and our families as decent people. We may not be saints, but we are still honest, relatively kind, and mostly trustworthy. Author and philosopher Christian B. Miller argues in his new book,...
06.27.2020
In Praise of Walking – Ep 77 with Shane O’Mara
In this captivating book, neuroscientist Shane O’Mara invites us to marvel at the benefits walking confers on our bodies and brains, and to appreciate the advantages of this uniquely human skill. From walking’s evolutionary origins, traced back millions of years...
06.14.2020
How To Get things DONE – Ep 76 with Ellen Goodwin
DONE: How To Work When No One is Watching is a hands-on guidebook that teaches, through stories, examples, and activities how working with (and around) your brain, can make all the difference in what can be accomplished every day;...
05.25.2020
Baseball’s Swing Kings – Ep 75 with Jared Diamond
From the Wall Street Journal’s national baseball writer, the captivating story of the home run boom, following a group of players who rose from obscurity to stardom and the rogue swing coaches who helped them usher the game...
05.08.2020
Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space – Ep 74 with Amanda Leduc
If every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how does the Beast ever imagine a happily-ever-after? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the...
04.22.2020
Jimmy and the Kid – Ep 73 with Lee Silber
When a twelve year-old girl wants to play baseball with the boys, she’s lucky to have the help of Jimmy Parks, a former Major Leaguer and someone with the power to change her life forever. Escaping to the empty baseball...
03.14.2020
The Amateurs – Ep 72 with Liz Harmer
“The Amateurs” is a speculative novel of rapture and romance in the vein of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and Tom Perotta’s The Leftovers. In the near future, the world’s largest tech company unveils the “Port”, a personal...
02.27.2020
A Flag of No Nation – Ep 71 with Tom Haviv
A meditation on world invention and collapse, A Flag of No Nation traces the stories of Turkish Jews in the 20th century, blind colonists in a white ocean, and performers enacting new rituals around a nationless flag. Through forms of...
02.13.2020
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau – Ep 70 with Michael Zapata
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau is the mesmerizing story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New Orleans. In 1929 in New Orleans, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau...
01.09.2020
Even That Wildest Hope – Ep 69 with Seyward Goodhand
Even That Wildest Hope bursts with vibrant, otherworldly characters—wax girls and gods-among-men, artists on opposite sides of a war, aimless plutocrats and anarchist urchins—who are sometimes wondrous, often grotesque, and always driven by passions and yearnings common to us all....
12.19.2019
Always Blue – Ep 68 with John Dermot Woods
Always Blue is a work of literary science fiction that explores how our day-to-day struggles and inconveniences—irritating colleagues, entitled students, aloof administrators, uninspired lunch choices—can make it impossible to see the real threats to our world. John Dermot Woods writes stories...
12.06.2019
The Friar’s Lantern – Ep 67 with Greg Hickey
You may win $1,000,000. You will judge a man of murder.An eccentric scientist tells you he can read your mind and offers to prove it in a high-stakes wager. A respected college professor exacts impassioned, heat-of-the-moment revenge on his wife’s...
11.21.2019
My Penguin Year – Ep 66 with Lindsay McCrae
For 337 days, award-winning wildlife cameraman Lindsay McCrae intimately followed 11,000 emperor penguins amid the singular beauty of Antarctica. This is his masterful chronicle of one penguin colony’s astonishing journey of life, death, and rebirth―and of the extraordinary human experience...
10.16.2019
Caregiving and Caretaking – Ep 65 with Germ Lynn
What You Call is a glimpse into the future and part of the Radix Media science fiction chapbook series, Futures. It’s the story of a rogue “support unit” that is desperate for a charge and along the way they try...
09.25.2019
Landscape Architecture, California Style – Ep 64 with Kelly Comras
Landscape architect Ruth Shellhorn helped define the distinctive mid-century regional aesthetic of Southern California. Most well known for her work with Walt Disney on the original design of Disneyland, she also designed original landscape plans for the Bullock’s department stores...
09.18.2019
French Youth Resistance in World War II – Ep 63 with Ronald Rosbottom
The author of the acclaimed When Paris Went Dark, longlisted for the National Book Award, returns to World War II once again to tell the incredible story of the youngest members of the French Resistance—many only teenagers—who waged a hidden...
09.05.2019
Unlonely Planet – Ep 62 with Jillian Richardson
You can live the loneliest life while being surrounded by people. You can be the busiest person and still feel unfulfilled. In an age when individualism and self-reliance are prized above all other traits, how can we feel connected? Where...
08.21.2019
Family and Identity – Ep 61 with Hal Y. Zhang
In this episode Jon speaks with Hal Y. Zhang, author of Hard Mother, Spider Mother, Soft Mother. Hard Mother, Spider Mother, Soft Mother is a story about the imprecise nature of memories and how they affect our relationships. You can read...
07.03.2019
The Cape Cod National Seashore – Ep 60 with Ethan Carr
In the mid-nineteenth century, Thoreau recognized the importance of preserving the complex and fragile landscape of Cape Cod, with its weathered windmills, expansive beaches, dunes, wetlands, harbors, and the lives that flourished here, supported by the maritime industries and saltworks....
06.19.2019
Dauntless Women – Ep 59 with Caitlin Grace McDonnell
Introducing “Fierce”, thirteen powerful, entwined biographies and memoirs that describe a staunchly Feminist approach: “To thine own self be true.” Historical documentation of human affairs informs the past, but what of the understated and overlooked herstories of half of the...
06.05.2019
Aloha Rodeo – Ep 58 with David Wolman
In the spirit of The Boys in the Boat comes the captivating true story of the native Hawaiian cowboys who traveled to Wyoming in 1908 to compete at the “world championships” of rodeo, overcoming prejudice to beat the greatest white...
05.22.2019
The Casket of Time – Ep 57 with Andri Magnason
The world, according to Grace, is under an ancient curse. There once was a princess named Obsidiana, who was trapped in time by the greedy king of Pangea. To protect Obsidiana from dark and gloomy days, the king put her...
05.08.2019
Waking Up To The Dark, Part 2 – Ep 56 with Clark Strand
Waking Up to the Dark is a book for those of us who awaken in the night and don’t know why we can’t get back to sleep, and a book for those of us who have grown uncomfortable...
04.24.2019
Waking Up To The Dark, Part 1 – Ep 55 with Clark Strand
Waking Up to the Dark is a book for those of us who awaken in the night and don’t know why we can’t get back to sleep, and a book for those of us who have grown uncomfortable...
04.10.2019
Leading Imperfectly – Ep 54 with James T. Robilotta
In today’s episode, Jon interviews author James T. Robilotta about his book Leading Imperfectly: The value of being authentic for leaders, professionals and human beings. There is a problem in today’s developing leaders-they think they need to be someone they are...
03.28.2019
The Body Papers (Part 2) – Ep 53 with Grace Talusan
Jon speaks with author Grace Talusan about her book The Body Papers. Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few...
03.13.2019
The Body Papers (Part 1) – Ep 52 with Grace Talusan
Jon speaks with author Grace Talusan about her book The Body Papers. Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few...
02.28.2019
The Stories of Their Lives – Ep 51 with Lisa Gornick
Jon interviews author Lisa Gornick about her newest novel, The Peacock Feast. Spanning the twentieth century and three continents, The Peacock Feast ricochets from Manhattan to San Francisco, from the decadent mansions of the Tiffany family to the death...
01.31.2019
Why Biodiversity is Good – Ep 50 with Rob Dunn
Even when the floors are sparkling clean and the house seems silent, our domestic domain is wild beyond imagination. In Never Home Alone, biologist Rob Dunn introduces us to the nearly 200,000 species living with us in our...
01.17.2019
Robert Murray Sculpture – Ep 49 with Jonathan Lippincott
Spanning six decades, Robert Murray: Sculpture includes photographs of nearly two hundred works, seen in galleries, museums, and private collections, at public outdoor exhibitions, in his studios, and in the workshops of his fabricators. Jonathan D. Lippincott’s introduction and interview...
12.01.2018
How Hormones Control Just About Everything – Ep 48 with Randi Hutter Epstein
A guided tour through the strange science of hormones and the age-old quest to control them. Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control...
11.10.2018
Chasing Prosperity in Mozambique (Part 2) – Ep 47 with Rowan Moore Gerety
Go Tell the Crocodiles explores the efforts of ordinary people to provide for themselves where foreign aid, the formal economy, and the government have fallen short. I tell the story of contemporary Mozambique through the stories of people on the...

What's Read Learn Live Podcast about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Read Learn Live Podcast episodes:

Learning America – Ep 96 with Luma Mufleh

The Kaiju Preservation Society – Ep 95 with John Scalzi

The Sleep Fix – Ep 94 with Diane Macedo

Read Until You Understand – Ep 93 with Farah Jasmine Griffin

The Power of Nothing to Lose – Ep 92 with William L. Silber

Catch the Rabbit – Ep 91 with Lana Bastašić

Ridgeline – Ep 90 with Michael Punke

A Master of Djinn – Ep 89 with P. Djèlí Clark

From PA to LA – Ep 88 with Yogi Roth

Beloved Beasts – Ep 87 with Michelle Nijhuis

A Beginner’s Guide to America – Ep 86 with Roya Hakakian

The Women’s History of the Modern World – Ep 85 with Rosalind Miles

Mental Illness and Graphic Novel as Memoir – Ep 84 with Joshua Kemble

Don’t Judge a College Athlete by Their Cover – Ep 83 with Corey Sobel

A Mayan Creation Story – Ep 82 with Ilan Stavans

Stories From a Syrian Refugee – Ep 81 with Perween Richards

You Ought To Do A Story About Me – Ep 80 with Ted Jackson

E.E. Cummings And The Great War – Ep 79 with Alison Rosenblitt

Our Moral Character – Ep 78 with Christian B. Miller

In Praise of Walking – Ep 77 with Shane O’Mara

How To Get things DONE – Ep 76 with Ellen Goodwin

Baseball’s Swing Kings – Ep 75 with Jared Diamond

Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space – Ep 74 with Amanda Leduc

Jimmy and the Kid – Ep 73 with Lee Silber

The Amateurs – Ep 72 with Liz Harmer

A Flag of No Nation – Ep 71 with Tom Haviv

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau – Ep 70 with Michael Zapata

Even That Wildest Hope – Ep 69 with Seyward Goodhand

Always Blue – Ep 68 with John Dermot Woods

The Friar’s Lantern – Ep 67 with Greg Hickey

My Penguin Year – Ep 66 with Lindsay McCrae

Caregiving and Caretaking – Ep 65 with Germ Lynn

Landscape Architecture, California Style – Ep 64 with Kelly Comras

French Youth Resistance in World War II – Ep 63 with Ronald Rosbottom

Unlonely Planet – Ep 62 with Jillian Richardson

Family and Identity – Ep 61 with Hal Y. Zhang

The Cape Cod National Seashore – Ep 60 with Ethan Carr

Dauntless Women – Ep 59 with Caitlin Grace McDonnell

Aloha Rodeo – Ep 58 with David Wolman

The Casket of Time – Ep 57 with Andri Magnason

Waking Up To The Dark, Part 2 – Ep 56 with Clark Strand

Waking Up To The Dark, Part 1 – Ep 55 with Clark Strand

Leading Imperfectly – Ep 54 with James T. Robilotta

The Body Papers (Part 2) – Ep 53 with Grace Talusan

The Body Papers (Part 1) – Ep 52 with Grace Talusan

The Stories of Their Lives – Ep 51 with Lisa Gornick

Why Biodiversity is Good – Ep 50 with Rob Dunn

Robert Murray Sculpture – Ep 49 with Jonathan Lippincott

How Hormones Control Just About Everything – Ep 48 with Randi Hutter Epstein

Chasing Prosperity in Mozambique (Part 2) – Ep 47 with Rowan Moore Gerety