We started the New York Public Library podcast in 2014. This past year, we doubled down,  launching The Librarian Is In, a biweekly podcast hosted by Gwen Glazer and Frank Collerius about books, culture, and what to read next. And once again in 2016, guest after guest has kept us intrigued, delighted, and hungry for more. We've talked about breakthroughs in genetics with a Pulitzer Prize-winning doctor-author, gotten the lowdown on Sherlock Holmes from a six-time NBA champion, and heard from two luminaries of autocriticism. Whether you're new to the NYPL podcast or already a subscriber, we hope you enjoy some of our favorite podcast episodes from 2016. Tell us the episodes you loved in the comment section below.
 

The NYPL Podcast #103: Darryl Pinckney and Zadie Smith on Achievement and Beyoncé



"The first thing I feel looking at a Beyoncé video is old. You know, and I'm not sure I understood it. It is a very deep change because of hip-hop from my political generation in the attitude toward materialism. Of course the revolution was righteous and so you expected people to give up all this stuff, which you know, no one wanted to go to the demo and sneak off. This generation doesn't feel any contradiction between success and being black. And I think that's really very good, and here's this woman married to this tycoon, and she's a tycooness, and she's got an amazing body and can do this stuff that my mother would really not approve of. It would shock her so much. The lyrics I found shocking once I understood them. I didn't get them right away."

The NYPL Podcast #126: Maggie Nelson and Wayne Koestenbaum on Clarity and Cruelty



"I don’t feel like a very creative person; I feel like a clarifier, and I think via the act of clarifying the magic is that you may end up making something... [T]his kind of idea of writing or via clarity you could show yourself you know, offer the thread that leads back out of the labyrinth so that you got back to someplace before you became trapped seems to me the whole game, you know, and I think what’s amazing about it, and this is the amazing thing about words is that well, I always think about this Robert Creeley quote where he said, 'in poetry I’m trying to express something very, very specific, it’s just not the same as saying, I’ll be back in five minutes or I have to go to the bathroom, but it’s still something specific that you’re trying to say.'"

The NYPL Podcast #135: Tim Wu on How the Internet Is Not Really Free



"One of the things I'm really concerned about with the future of living is how much we can trust the devices that are in our home and that we wear? How often do they have your interests fully at stake or are they actually of mixed motives because if you are an attention merchant, you have an advertising platform. Many of our phones for example, they are both doing what we say, they call people, but they also want to be able to deliver us to advertisers at the right time... Most devices now they sort of do what you say but they also manipulate you. These devices, they want to buy stuff for you or the self-driving car wants to go where you say but they might also have some other things they'd like you to do. I'm worried about a future where everything is a trip to a gift store."

The NYPL Podcast #129: Edwidge Danticat on Silence, Bridging Audiences, and Participating in Stories



"Part of one of the clichés of the immigrant dilemma is that if the kids get supereducated, they’re alienated from their community. I’ve never felt that thing, and though I live in a different even country from many of my family members and so forth, so I’ve felt—I mean I feel the privilege of this back and forth, but there is this feeling.  I mean, I don’t think it’s—people often think with me it’s language because I write in English, but I think there’s a feeling that all people who write, for example, must feel this sense that a lot of people won’t be—a lot of people dear to you, you know, in my case, even in my family, won’t be able to participate in the story this particular way."

The NYPL Podcast #123: Siddhartha Mukherjee on Genetics and Storytelling



"We are at a quickening for a particular kind of genetic intervention in humans. We are trying to find out how these interventions can be managed, what their future might be, we don’t know, we don’t have any precepts to know what to do about it but the technology marches right on. Just to give you an example, this week, I didn’t anticipate all this in the book, this week, as you very well know, in the news, there’s an attempt to artificially synthesize, based from chemicals alone, a full human genome...  and the idea is that what if I could take that thing that makes David Remnick David Remnick and synthesize, not all of it, but one quarter of it, from scratch, I would string together the chemicals, and in principle, we don’t know, in principle, if I were to introduce those chemicals into a cell, into an embryonic cell that I’d unhusked, taken its own genetic material away, would that now cell become your clone? Would that be you in what way, similar ways, dissimilar ways? We have no moral or personal or literary or scientific precepts to know what the hell to do with that kind of idea."

The NYPL Podcast #127: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Walter Mosley on Empire, English, and Beethoven



"My dad went to Julliard School of Music, and he was a trombone player. In order to get out he had to take piano. He had to play Moonlight Sonata. I think it's Beethoven. I'm pretty sure. And he'd be practicing it all the time. I ended up where I knew it by heart just listening to him practice all the time, and I remember I'd be in my room, and he'd be out practicing, and I'd be like, 'When is he ever going to stop playing that song?' but I went on ahead and practiced my hook shot in the same way and same determination to make it, to get into high school, to get a scholarship to high school."

The NYPL Podcast #105: Nathaniel Kahn on Outer Space, Weird Science, and Film



"The Hubble is only three hundred miles over our heads, so just to give you a sense of this new telescope that is being built. Because we don’t talk about it much, we don’t have time to show you those clips. The James Webb Space Telescope will be, yes, a hundred times more powerful than Hubble, but there are other things about it that make it quite remarkable. One of the most remarkable things of it is it’s bigger than can fit in a rocket. So it has to fold up, it’s really an origami telescope... So talk about precision. This thing has to fold up perfectly and then it has to unfold perfectly, and the difference with Webb, of course, is that with between Hubble, Hubble is one mirror, it looks like basically a ground-based telescope, only in space, but Hubble has eighteen mirrors, all of which have to work together, fold up, unfold, work together to create a single image, and also unlike Hubble, Hubble is 250 miles over our head, the James Webb Space Telescope, because it is also an infrared telescope, it has to be very cold, has to be much further away from the Earth, it’s going to be a million miles away."

The NYPL Podcast #97: Toni Morrison and Angela Davis on Connecting for Progress



"Citizen suggests some relationship with your neighbors, your block, your town, with the village. After World War II they stopped using that word and we were consumers. That’s all you could hear, the American consumer this and the American consumer that. And we bought things for status and that’s what we were supposed to do. Now, what are we? We are taxpayers. All of a sudden, it’s about my little tax, my little money, I don’t want to give it to the government, those people who should not have it. You know, the people, we talk about capitalism sort of seeping into the blood, they just change the language and redefine us and we go for it. My driver was fussing about his taxes. I said, 'so what? You pay taxes, so what?' But you know, all of a sudden we lose who we are, or are redefined. And when the language changes, we change. The labels change, so all of a sudden it’s about taxes. If I hear any something else about taxes—but if we were still citizens, that’s a different thing. We feel some obligation. We don’t pass by people."

The NYPL Podcast #144: Michael Chabon and Richard Price on Plot, Secular Judaism, and Remembering to Make Stuff Up



"Plot is always the hardest thing for me. It's always the thing I wrestle with the most. It's a part of writing books that I hate the most, and to be honest, it's a part of reading them in a way that I hate the most because it's always because of plot that character is betrayed. Like when a book goes wrong, and you start to feel like 'He wouldn't say that, he wouldn't do that, she wouldn't do that to him.' That's when you can feel the author's wrestling to get the character onto the armature of plot, and when a book is really well-plotted, so tightly plotted, so suspenseful, I hate that the most. I can't stand suspense. I would rather never find out what happened than have to like suffer through the tension of waiting to find out."

The NYPL Podcast #131: Yanis Varoufakis and Noam Chomsky on Money and The Sickest Joke in the History of Humankind



"I mean the whole notion that there can be a market system which is at an arm’s length separated from a state, which is the enemy, is the sickest joke in the history of humankind. If you think that this narrative of private wealth creation which is appropriated by the big bad wolf, the state, on behalf of trade unions and the working class that need a social welfare net, is just a preposterous reversal of the truth that wealth is being created collectively and appropriated privately but right from the beginning. I mean, the enclosures in Britain would never have happened without the king’s army and without state brutality for pushing peasants off their ancestors’ land and creating the commodification of labor, the commodification of land which then gave rise to capitalism. Just half an hour ago, we were being shown, some of us, the magnificent collection of maps of the city of New York in this wonderful building and you could see in one of the maps of Alabama, the precise depiction of the theft of land from Native Americans, the way in which it was parceled up, commodified. Now that would never have happened without the brutal intervention of the state and created the process of privatization of land and therefore of  commodification."

The NYPL Podcast #108: Maya Lin on Memorializing What Is Missing



"To me though in a very funny way the most moving memorials, whether it’s the memorials to the missing in World War I that you brought up or what you just read, it’s all about absence, and it’s about there is an impossibility you absolutely can’t attain. So this is—this memorial, which is Lutyens’s Memorial to the Missing in Thiepval, France, is very directly connected to my design for the Vietnam Memorial, not so much formally, but twofold... [W]ritten on the white stone are the names of I think over a hundred thousand soldiers killed in one battle, over I think it was a three-day period, the Battle of the Somme, and they’re all missing. Why are they missing? Because there are no dog tags. So I had—you know, everyone knows this story. I designed the memorial, Vietnam memorial, as a class project, in the class project as a senior at Yale you have an option, you can set up your own class, so seven of us said, 'we’re interested in funereal architecture.' The design we did, right before we decided, 'oh, let’s design the Vietnam memorial, there’s a competition, that’s a great way to end the school.' The assignment was to design a memorial to World War III, and so I had started studying all about memorials, so you get back into the plot about the famous versus the missing or the individual."

 

“We have a colleague who said, OK, I am going to read to my child’s class, and I work at the New York Public Library; I have to be good… so I said, Well, this book has the word ‘underpants’ in it. The fact that it has ‘underpants’ — you’ll have them at ‘underpants.’ It’s so crazy, but it’s true. You need sound effects and the words ‘underpants,’ ‘booger,’ ‘butt’… I point to my butt and the kids are rolling on the floor. I’m not embarrassed at all; I’m always willing to make fun of myself.”