If president-elect Donald Trump learned anything from his mentor Roy Cohn, it was this: punch first and never apologize. Cohn was notorious for going on the attack—as counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy during the communist witch-hunts of the f

The Price of Being President, by Richard Ben Cramer

Dec 6th, 2016 23m 50s

Published in 1992, Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes: The Way to the White House remains the richest and most unvarnished account of the personal price of running for president. The irony, as Cramer pointed out to C-SPAN shortly after the book

Martin Luther King Jr Is Still on the Case! by Garry Wills

Nov 14th, 2016 30m 16s

12 Years a Slave screenwriter John Ridley discusses Garry Wills’s 1968 profile, “Martin Luther King Jr Is Still on the Case!”

The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Oct 17th, 2016 33m 9s

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up," a series of essays from 1936 about his alcoholism and mental breakdown, set off a genre of confessional writing that persists and thrives today.

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, by Gay Talese

Sep 19th, 2016 31m 58s

And some of the most important people in some of the most important places in New York, New Jersey, Southern California and Las Vegas are suddenly developing postnasal drip

The American Male at Age Ten, by Susan Orlean

Aug 29th, 2016 26m 32s

What it feels like to be a boy in America.

The Shooter, by Phil Bronstein

May 16th, 2016 23m 47s

The man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden tells his story for the first time.

M, by John Sack

Dec 28th, 2015 33m 27s

“Oh my God—we hit a little girl.” This was the single, shocking cover line of the October 1966 issue of Esquire. Inside was John Sack’s 33,000-word New Journalism masterpiece, M, in which he followed a single company of American infantrymen fro

The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, by Joe Nocera

Dec 14th, 2015 26m 12s

Joe Nocera's "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs" from 1986 remains the most intimate and honest appraisals of the computer visionary ever written. Nocera, a longtime New York Times reporter and op-ed writer, joins host David Brancaccio to discuss

The Plane at the Bottom of the Ocean, by Bucky McMahon

Dec 13th, 2016 26m 27s

In the year 2015, with GPS and satellites and global surveillance everywhere all the time, how does a massive airplane simply go missing?

The Plane at the Bottom of the Ocean, by Bucky McMahon

Dec 13th, 2016 26m 26s

The question is astonishingly simple: In the year 2015, with GPS and satellites and global surveillance everywhere all the time, how does a massive airplane simply go missing? To find the answer, writer Bucky McMahon boarded one of the vessels

The Old Man and the River, by Pete Dexter

Nov 28th, 2016 22m 39s

Norman Maclean published A River Runs Through It when he was seventy-three, and only after his children implored him to write down the stories about fly-fishing, brotherhood, and the wilds of Montana that he’d told them for years. The resulting

The Days of Wine and Pig Hocks, by Jim Harrison

Nov 21st, 2016 24m 8s

Jim Harrison, the novelist and poet who died earlier this year at the age of 78, had a gargantuan, fearless appetite that would make both A.J. Liebling and Anthony Bourdain proud. He wrote about food—about eating, really— in a woolly, baroque s

Love in the Time of Magic, by E. Jean Carroll

Nov 7th, 2016 29m 23s

A chronicle of risk and romance on the sidelines of the NBA

The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce, by Tom Wolfe

Oct 31st, 2016 25m 41s

A meeting of two American masters: Robert Noyce and Tom Wolfe.

The House That Thurman Munson Built, by Michael Paterniti

Oct 24th, 2016 26m 41s

Trust me, he said, and the last great brawling sports team in America did. Twenty years after Thurman Munson’s death, Reggie, Catfish, Goose, Gator, the Boss—and a nation of former boys—still aren’t over it.

The Brain That Changed Everything, by Luke Dittrich

Oct 10th, 2016 34m 41s

When a surgeon cut into Henry Molaison’s skull to treat him for epilepsy, he inadvertently created the most important brain-research subject of our time—a man who could no longer remember, who taught us everything we know about memory. Six deca