It’s the choice we make every day: when we have a chance to engage with a stranger on an airplane or sitting in a waiting room, do we put on our headphones or start a conversation? To speak or not to speak? Stan’s guest this week is University of Chicago psychologist Nicholas Epley, talking about …Continue Reading »
Stan’s guest this week is distinguished historian Alan Taylor, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History, and the 2026 Vincent J. Dooley Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the Georgia Historical Society. Alan joins Stan to talk about his latest book, Tower Hill: A Plantation on the Edge of Rebellion (WW Norton, 2026), which draws on …Continue Reading »
What does it mean to be an American? Historian Daniel J. Boorstin, Librarian of Congress and one of the most important public intellectuals of the 20th century, spent a lifetime pondering that question. Stan’s guest this week is Boorstin’s son Jon Boorstin, a novelist and Oscar-nominated filmmaker, who discusses his new book, The American: The …Continue Reading »
Stan’s guest this week is author and historian Keri Leigh Merritt, discussing her new book, An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America (St. Martin’s Press, 2026). Smith, born in 1897, was a white Southern woman living in the Jim Crow South who defied all stereotypes: she …Continue Reading »
Stan’s guest this week is historian Craig Fehrman, author of This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark (Avid Reader Press, 2026), an exciting new history of the Corps of Discovery. Thirty years after Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, Fehrman offers a fresh and more accurate account of one of the most important episodes …Continue Reading »