Library Talks

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Fintan O'Toole: The Idiocy of Greatness

April 22, 2026

In this episode of Library Talks, the acclaimed Irish writer, Fintan O'Toole, delivers the annual Robert B. Silvers lecture.    The idea of greatness has infused politics across much of the globe in the last decade, from Brexit to Donald Trump's MAGA movement. In this lecture, Fintan O'Toole suggests why greatness is, after all, not so great: it is in thrall to an imagined past, it generates a constant state of disappointment, and it drains energy away from the achievement of ordinary dec...

Maile Chapman with Larissa MacFarquhar: The Spoil

April 15, 2026

In this episode of Library Talks, acclaimed author Maile Chapman joins the podcast to discuss her first novel in fifteen years from acclaimed, The Spoil.   As a young girl growing up on the outskirts of Tacoma in the 1970s, Mandy is preoccupied by the paranormal phenomena she reads about in magazines: alien visitations, ESP, the Bermuda Triangle. What follows is a gripping and often terrifying story of familial grief in which the past is both elusive and paralyzing. Maile Chapman worke...

Bob Crawford with Alexis Coe: America's Founding Son

April 08, 2026

In this episode of Library Talks, The historian and bass player for The Avett Brothers, Bob Crawford revisits the life of John Quincy Adams in his book America's Founding Son. Adams was born nine years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and he died as the United States was sliding irrevocably toward Civil War. In between he was a foreign ambassador, secretary of state, sitting president, and finally ex-president and sitting congressperson.   Crawford talks to preside...