The Atlantic — 50 Best Podcasts of the Year

My dad is the gift that keeps on giving.  When Esquire Classic made #20 in a list of best podcasts of the year, My Father the Bachelor was singled out as the “gateway” episode.  I love that we beat out The New Yorker Radio Hour (#23) and Fresh Air (#24)

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20. Esquire Classic
Most literary podcasts adopt a familiar highbrow voice, but Esquire Classic makes English lit conversational. Each episode sees the show reexamine one great piece from the magazine, poring over all the insider details: what Susan Orlean was thinking when she profiled a 10-year-old boy, or why Richard Ben Cramer was the perfect foil for Ted Williams. By interweaving readings of the essays with conversations between the host and someone close to the piece (usually a writer or editor), the podcast contextualizes the making of essential literature.

Gateway Episode: “My Father the Bachelor, by Martha Sherrill

Banner Episode: “What It Takes, by Richard Ben Cramer

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/12/the-50-best-podcasts-of-2016/510698/

The Cyber Effect

Fascinating, wild, scary — finally, something that makes sense of the behavior we are seeing online and in real life these days. I am very proud to have collaborated with Mary Aiken on The Cyber Effect (Spiegel & Grau, 2016)

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“Just as Rachel Carson launched the modern environmental movement with her Silent Spring, Mary Aiken delivers a deeply disturbing, utterly penetrating, and urgently timed investigation into the perils of the largest unregulated social experiment of our time.” — Bob Woodward

“Drawing on a fascinating and mind-boggling range of research and knowledge, Mary Aiken has written a great, important book that terrifies then consoles by point a way forward so that our experience online might not outstrip our common sense. This is a must-read for this moment in time.”
— Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics.

“We can look away, we can deny it, but the more we’re online, the more compulsive, more secretive, more cruel and more disconnected from our better selves we are liable to become. This cyber-effect not only threatens adults but also is influencing our children and the kind of grown-ups they will be.”
— Catherine Steiner-Adair — in The Washington Post review.

 

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