Mpr News With Kerri Miller

Rules are good. Discretion is better. So argues philosophy professor Barry Lam in his new book, “Fewer Rules, Better People.” While Lam acknowledges law as the backbone of society, he says America has forgotten the good of discretion. Be it a sports referee, a parent, a police officer or a prosecutor, decision makers need the freedom to exercise discernment about how the rules get applied. Lam joins Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas for a philosophical and practical discussion about how discretion greases the wheels of our culture and why removing it creates a lumbering bureaucracy. Guest:Barry Lam is a professor of philosophy at UC Riverside and host of the podcast Hi-Phi Nation. His new book is “Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion.” Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

“The story of America in the 21st century is the story of chosen scarcities.” So begins “Abundance,” the new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has politicos abuzz. In it, they argue that progressives have created a culture of scarcity the last few decades, especially when it comes to solving America’s thorniest problem, like homelessness, housing affordability and green energy. The solution, they say, is to face up to the failures of liberal policies, no matter how well intended, and renew a politics of plenty. “If you look back in American history, America used to built things — proudly,” Thompson tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “And then at some point over the last 50 years, liberalism — which was once defined as the politics of building — became defined as the politics of blocking. [In the book], we’re trying to execute a bit of a paradigm shift here: We want to marry the politics of building with modern progressivism.”Guest: Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atla

Can one decision be the fulcrum of a life?Or is destiny really millions of tiny choices swirled with events out of our control? That’s one of the many questions at the heart of Eric Puchner’s gorgeous new novel, “Dream State.” It’s received a dizzying amount of praise since it was released in February — making the New York Times best seller list, becoming an Oprah Book Club pick. But despite the buzz, the novel is deceptively hard to pin down. Set in rural Montana, the book begins with two college buddies, as one of them, Charlie, prepares to marry the love of his life. But when Cece heads to the family cabin early to prepare for the wedding and meets no-nonsense best friend Garrett, her world wobbles. What happens next — amidst a wedding besieged by norovirus — launches the next 50 years, as the three friends remain intertwined by regrets and grief, possibilities and love. Puchner joins host Kerri Miller for a wide-ranging conversation on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. Among topics of discussion: why

For more than 20 years, author Chris Bohjalian carried the seed of a Civil War story in his imagination. It was inspired by the true story of a Southern woman who nursed a Union soldier back to health after he was injured on the battlefield. But the idea didn’t grow roots until the racial uprisings after the murder of George Floyd, when Confederate statues came tumbling down. “Years ago, Tony Horowitz wrote a remarkable book called ‘Confederates in the Attic,’ wondering why so much of the South was still fighting the Civil War,” Bohjalian tells host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “Horowitz journeyed through the (region) to understand why the Lost Cause still existed in the minds of so many Southerners. I thought about that book a lot in 2020, as the statues came down on Monument Avenue in Richmond. That’s when it really clicked in my mind.”Bohjalian and Miller also talk about the delicate dance of writing historical fiction — when facts must be accurate but the story enticing — and how

When superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on Eiren Caffall’s childhood home of New York City, her first thought was: What about the museums? That distressing question provoked her first novel, “All the Water in the World.” In this futuristic dystopia, climate change is unchecked. Cities are drowned, people are adrift. But already, some are thinking of the after by looking to the past. The former curators and researchers at the American Natural History Museum have taken up residence on the museum’s roof, forming a new sort of family and thinking about how to preserve the artifacts still in their power.“Museums are … the repositories of our collective understandings, evidence of discoveries, warehouses of materials that will fuel discoveries in the future,” writes Caffall. “They hold the past in trust for the future.”This week, Caffall joins host Kerri Miller to talk about the hope she wants to see in dystopian fiction. “The narratives we have in the popular culture about what disasters do to people are mostly incorr

Lauren Francis-Sharma was a young law student interning in Johannesburg in 1996 when she was given the opportunity to observe portions of the Truth and Reconciliation Amnesty Hearings, which were set up to expose the horrors of apartheid in South Africa. Listening to testimony of atrocities and knowing that these public confessions came with exoneration changed her. She filled legal pad after legal pad with stories and kept them for decades. “I think it’s brilliant, in some respects — how a country moves forward from such an atrocious history. What can we do to heal a nation?” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “But I was left asking myself: Is this enough? Do people feel satisfied by truth alone?” And in fact, that’s the question at the center of Francis-Sharma’s taut new thriller, “Casualties of Truth.” Shifting between South Africa in the late 1990s and Washington, D.C., in 2018, the novel tells the story of Prudence Wright who is forced to confront a violent past she has tried

When historian Martha Jones began excavating the history of her own family, she found a remarkable story of what she calls the trouble with color. But that might not mean what you think.“In this book, the term trouble has two meanings,” Jones tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. ”I open the book with the lyrics of a spiritual, ‘Wade in the Water.’ You know, ‘God’s gonna trouble the water.’ And that comes from the book of John. In the book of John, we learn that when God troubles the water and we step into it, we are healed. This is the way forward for us. I think in some ways, trouble is precisely what we need.” Her new book, “The Trouble of Color” tells the honest story of her own family — filled with pain but also joy and resilience. Because, as Jones says, she believes we all have the capacity to sit with hard stories and be healed. Guest: Martha S. Jones is a historian and writer with numerous titles to her name. Her latest book is “The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir.”

Why do some people view winter as a magical season when others see it as something to dread? The secret is in the mindset, according to health psychologist Kari Leibowitz. She spent a year doing research in Tromsø, Norway studying how the people who live above the Arctic Circle celebrate deepest winter. What she discovered is that it goes beyond hygge. It depends on where your brain settles its focus. “Winter is many things. It’s paradoxical,” says Leibowitz. “Yes, it’s cold and dark, and it can be gloomy and depressing. But it can also be beautiful and quiet and cozy and magical. The mindset we have about winter helps us make sense of this paradox. Is winter wonderful or dreadful? Is the season a limiting time of year, or is it full of opportunity? Research shows us mindsets matter most in these ambiguous situations.”Leibowitz joins Kerri Miller this week on Big Books and Bold Ideas to explore how shifting your mindset about winter can be a useful life skill. She also tackles the question about who has the

Grief didn’t come easily to novelist Geraldine Brooks. When her husband, journalist and author Tony Horowitz, died of a cardiac event on a Washington, D.C., sidewalk, she was stunned. He was only 60. What happened? But she didn’t have time to mourn, seeing as her boys needed support, her books needed writing, the world needed answers. As she describes in her new book, “Memorial Days,” it took her three years to recognize she was operating on autopilot, disassociated from her life and her body due to unrealized grief. So she traveled home to Australia and forced herself into solitude to relive the worst days of her life and finally give her grief sway. This week, Brooks joined host Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about what happened next. Guest:Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author. Her new memoir is “Memorial Days.” Audio book excerpts courtesy Penguin Audio. Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or

Lindsay Chervinsky knew other historians had written extensively about America’s second president, John Adams. But none of those books were written before January 6, 2021, when an insurrection at the nation’s capitol ended the tradition of peacefully transferring power in the U.S. — a tradition that started with Adams himself. In her new book, “Making the Presidency,” Chervinsky looks back at Adams life and focuses on how George Washington’s successor shaped the presidency in the final years of the 18th century. She argues that it was Adams who established political norms for the executive branch — norms that are quickly being discarded by the current administration. What can the second president teach us about our country’s 47th? That’s on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. Guest:Lindsay Chervinsky is a presidential historian and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Her new book is “Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic.”Subscribe to

It’s Valentine’s Day! To mark the occasion, Big Books and Bold Ideas is dipping into the archives to focus on love — and not just romantic love. This show highlights love of all kinds: familial love, love between friends, even the love of books. We start with Leif Enger, who joined host Kerri Miller in Red Wing last June to talk about his novel, “I Cheerfully Refuse.” Enger’s latest book is dystopian in nature, but at its heart, it’s a love story. We then dip into Miller’s conversation with British-Nigerian author Ore Agbaje-Williams, whose subversive and wickedly funny novel, "The Three of Us,” delves into love between friends. Is it possible our friendships are more foundational than the bonds we form with romantic partners? We end with Jedidiah Jenkins and his memoir, “Mother, Nature.” It recounts a five-thousand-mile road trip he and his mother took to retrace the route his parents traversed in the 1970s as they walked across America. It sounds sentimental. But it’s really Jedidiah’s attempt to recon

At what cost revolution? In Fabienne Josaphat’s new novel, “Kingdom of No Tomorrow,” 20-year-old Nettie Boileau trades the turmoil of Duvalier’s Haiti for the tumult of 1960s America. Settling with her aunt in Oakland, she is drawn to the social programs spearheaded by the burgeoning Black Panther Party. But her focus on healing and public health is soon subsumed by the revolution and her passionate relationship with Black Panther leader Melvin Mosley. Josaphat drew on her own family’s history for insight into the activism of the Panthers. Her father, an attorney, was imprisoned during Francois Duvalier’s reign in Haiti. And she remembers reading her father’s books as a child, biographies and memoirs of leaders in the Civil Rights Movement. “I remember starting to do my research about the Black Panthers and thinking to myself, ‘I think I know about this already but I don’t know how. Where did I learn this?’” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “And then I realized, it was probably

Sarah Hoover knows her new memoir, “The Motherload,” isn’t flattering. She’s made peace with the fact that “people will judge me on the internet,” as she says on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.She’s telling her story anyway because she believes an honest rendering of modern motherhood is necessary. “In my defense, birth and motherhood did not match up to the narrative I’d been fed, and it felt like a nasty trick,” she writes. “And while my mental breakdown was embarrassing at times, especially considering how it exposed me as a puerile and spoiled little fool, it also showed how pernicious it is to sell tales of motherhood as being so wonderful and feminine, the very essence of womanhood.” Hoover’s memoir is brutally honest about the disassociation and rage she felt the year after her son was born, and how her eventual diagnosis of postpartum depression felt like like both a relief and a betrayal. She joined host Kerri Miller on this week’s show to talk about the taboos of motherhood, the trad wife tren

David Wright Faladé didn’t learn the truth about his lineage until he was 16. That’s when his mother told him that his biological father was a West African student she initially met in post-war Paris, as she grappled with the trauma of her Jewish family surviving the Holocaust. It was a shock to a mixed-race boy growing up in the panhandle of Texas, playing football and drinking Slurpee’s in 1970s America. But the surprises didn’t stop there. When Wright Faladé eventually moved to France and met his father, he discovered a connection to Dahomey royalty and a past complicated by the slave trade and colonialism. From 2022 David Wright Faladé on the all-Black brigade that inspired his new historical novel This made-for-TV personal history inspired his new novel, “The New Internationals,” which details the love triangle formed by a Holocaust survivor, a Sorbonne student from colonial West Africa and a Black GI from America. This week, he joined Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold

President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated for a second term on Monday, Jan. 20. So this week, Big Books and Bold Ideas asked two historians who’ve written about America’s past to reflect on America’s future and give us a broader view of where we are. They point to eras in our past that predict our present. They also discuss what they’ll be watching for as Trump returns to the Oval Office.Guests:Carol Anderson a historian and professor of African-American studies at Emory University. She’s the author of many books, including “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide” and “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy.”Lindsay Chervinsky is a presidential historian, the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library and the author of “Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic.” If you missed it, be sure to check out Big Books and Bold Ideas 2024 series on the state of American democracy. It kicked off with historian

Robin Wall Kimmerer embodies an abundance mindset. The naturalist and author sees the world through the lens of her Anishinaabe ancestors, where interdependence is reality, and humans are neither above nor below the natural world. We are just one part, kin to every animal and plant and stream. Her beloved book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” laid out this philosophy. Published in 2013, it enjoyed a gentle rise to public consciousness, not jumping onto the bestseller list until six years after publication. But it remains there to this day, a beloved devotional to millions.Now Kimmerer is back “The Serviceberry” — with a slim book that expounds on one of her core tenants: that nature’s generosity is an invitation to explore our own. Kimmerer joined Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to take us all on a virtual field trip to behold the humble serviceberry, where we get a lesson on generosity, gratitude and relationship. Guest: Robin Wall Kimmerer is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation,

In Nov. 2024, The Atlantic’s cover article rang alarm bells among readers, writers, college professors and parents alike. The article was headlined: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.The premise is that many students admitted to elite colleges arrive having read very few books all the way through.“It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading,” says the article. “It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.”This week on Big Books and Bold Ideas, two writers who have also been college literature professors share their views on the article’s argument. What have they seen in their own students? And how can deep reading be encouraged?Guests: Karen Swallow Prior is an English professor, a monthly columnist for Religion News Service and the author of, among other books, “On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books.”Taiyon Coleman is dean of liberal arts and academic foundations at North Hennepin Community College. Her latest book is “Traveling wi

Maggie Burkhardt is 81, a deceptively sweet former Wisconsinite who now resides in Egypt at a once-fashionable hotel. She’s landed there somewhat mysteriously, but hotel staff and guests alike are charmed by her eccentric wit — until they find themselves on the receiving end of her “help.”Widowed Maggie believes it is her life’s mission to fix what she perceives as broken. Or as puts it: “I liberate people who don’t know they’re stuck. … I change people’s lives for the better whether they see it that way or not.”If that sounds ominous, that’s on purpose. Christopher Bollen wanted to crank the lines of suspense tight for his newest novel. And when Maggie meets her match in an equally troubled little boy and the two wage battle, this thriller takes readers on the wildest of rides.Bollen joined host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to dive into the creation of “Havoc.” They talk about the destabilizing force of loneliness, how both the elderly and the young are conventionally overlooked, and

Charles Bock is honest from the beginning of his new memoir, “I Will Do Better”: He never wanted to be a dad. He was much more interested in pursuing his literary dreams than shepherding a child to adulthood. But his wife really wanted a baby. And he didn’t think it would be right to tell her no. “In the book, I say: She wants to be a mom? OK. Let her. I’ll continue with my ambitions. On weekends, I’ll put on the Baby Bjorn, tell friends ‘we’re parenting,’ using that plural. That’s what I thought I was going to do. I was going to put in my time, let [my wife] handle the heavy lifting.” But then Diana, Bock’s wife, was diagnosed with an advanced form of leukemia when Lily was just six months old. She died a few days before Lily’s third birthday. Bock had to step up.As he tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, his new memoir “is about the emotional and physical journey, of this little girl with no mom who wants to go to the ball, and I have to grow up and be man enough to take her and handl

The pandemic shook up the way many of us work. It accelerated change in a system often slow to adapt. But more change is needed, argues journalist Brigid Schulte. Her new book, “Over Work,” is centered on the idea that work has not really worked for “far too may people for far too long.” Americans increasingly say they are dissatisfied with their jobs and burned out. It’s a bleak setting for employees — and employers. So how do we make work work? Can the daily grind be transformed? Schulte joins MPR News host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about why we work the way we do and the changes that could make work more productive, autonomous and joyful. Guest:Brigid Schulte is a journalist and the director of the Better Life Lab. Her new book is “Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life.”Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the