Truly a novel for our times, The Emilys is about motherhood, friendship, marriage, and community and how to navigate these things in a world that is forcing us to reckon with the physical environment in unsettling ways. If you're looking for a smart, speculative, literary page-turner, this episode is for you.

Heather Abel’s second novel, The Emilys (Random House), came out inJune, 2026. Her debut novel, The Optimistic Decade (Algonquin) was published in May, 2018. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, and the online Paris Review among other places. She worked as a reporter and editor in California and Colorado before moving to New York where she received an MFA in fiction writing from the New School University. She lives in Northampton, MA and currently teaches creative writing at Smith College. Follow her on instagram here and find her website here.

If you’ve ever bemoaned the lure of your I-phone, you’re not alone. In this interview, Emmy-winning MSNOW host Chris Hayes explains how our attention is being extracted against our will for corporate gain. His NYT best-selling book The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource is a powerful reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society. This episode was recorded as a live zoom interview in February 2026.

London 1953: A boarding house, a dead body, and so many secrets. Reading Emma Garman's debut novel, The Kindness of Strangers, is like discovering a forgotten classic from the 1950s that was written with a surprisingly modern sensibility. An ingeniously plotted and moving story, this one's a must for mystery lovers.