NPR's Book of the Day

Natalie Heller Mills is a tradwife influencer with 5 million followers. She drinks raw milk, eats farm fresh eggs, and is “perfect at being alive.” But when she wakes up in 1855, the very time period she’s fetishized, she feels afraid – and paranoid that she’s being filmed. In today’s episode, Caro Claire Burke joins NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe for a conversation about the author’s debut novel, Yesteryear. They discuss Natalie as an anti-hero, Burke’s interest in power hierarchies over religion, and how the author pushed the tradwife trend to “its final conclusion.”

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Demis Hassabis says when he set up an AI lab in 2010, “no one believed in it.” The Google DeepMind co-founder and Nobel Prize winner is the subject of Infinity Machine, a new biography by Sebastian Mallaby. The book is a portrait of Hassabis, who Mallaby characterizes as a rare competitor across both science and business. In today’s episode, Mallaby speaks with NPR’s Steve Inskeep about Hassabis’ origins as a young chess player, his Einstein-level ambition, and parallels between Hassabis and Robert Oppenheimer.

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In Maria Semple’s new novel, Adora Hazzard works as a moral trainer to the tweens of a wealthy family on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She’s a content, divorced stoic philosopher in her late 50s with a coven of likeminded, middle-aged female friends. But one night at the ballet, she falls into conversation with a stranger and gets seduced by a world of secrecy, black-market art, and international intrigue. In today’s episode, Semple joins NPR’s Scott Simon for a conversation about Go Gentle, stoicism, and “getting the party started” in her 50s.

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This week, we're celebrating National Poetry Month by revisiting some of our favorite conversations with poets. In 2024, then U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón edited and introduced You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a collection of poems by writers like Joy Harjo and Jericho Brown that pays homage to landscapes across the United States. In today's episode, Limón joins NPR's Rachel Martin on Wild Card. They discuss pivotal moments in Limón's life marked by natural scenery — and go beyond that into conversations about grandparents, memory and mortality.

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This week, we're celebrating National Poetry Month by revisiting some of our favorite conversations with poets. In 2020, Kwame Alexander was feeling the weight of being Black in America and didn't know how to make sense of his feelings. So, he made sense of them through his book of poetry, Light For The World To See: A Thousand Words On Race And Hope. It's three poems on three historic events: the murder of George Floyd, Colin Kaepernick's protests, and Barack Obama being elected president. Alexander told NPR's Rachel Martin he wrote this as a call for Black people to remember their humanity.

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