What Is The Blueprint For Stories About Heroes?
Host Guy Raz raises the curtain on this episode by exploring the hidden blueprint embedded within our most popular and powerful stories.
Books
How Can Mentors Turn An Uncertain Journey Into A Heroic One?
Jarrett J. Krosoczka is a successful author and illustrator. But, he says, his life could have gone in a completely different direction, if he hadn't had a long line of mentors.
Cook Your Own Adventure: 11 Cookbooks For Kitchen Dreamers
This year's cookbooks point to big dreams, and a kind of comfort with concepts once considered the province of professional cooks.
Bodies Through Time: A Historian Traces Our Evolving Relationship With The Dead
Thomas Laqueur, author of The Work of the Dead, discusses the ways people have dealt with human remains over the course of history. Modern cemeteries, he says, are byproducts of the French Revolution.
'The Book Of Pears': A Love Letter To A Once Pre-Eminent Fruit
A British fruit historian convincingly argues in a new book that the pear is "the most exciting of the tree fruits." And she says it's time to revive pear culture and explore the fruit's diversity.
Neil Gaiman On Returning To 'Sandman,' Talking In His Sleep And The Power Of Comics
Twenty-five years after he initially created Sandman, Gaiman returns to one of his most enduring characters. Gaiman says writing The Sandman: Overture was "the most intense period of my life."
Best-Selling Author James Patterson To Award $1.75 Million In Literary Grants
James Patterson has donated hundreds of thousands of books and millions of dollars to promote reading. In partnership with Scholastic, this year he is giving nearly $2 million to school libraries.
Rebel Brew: What The Boston Tea Party And The Mad Hatter Had In Common
This week marks the 242nd anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. This year is the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland. If you'll follow us down the rabbit hole, you'll find some surprising links.
'Map' Is An Exquisite Record Of The Miles — And The Millennia
Map: Exploring the World is a new collection of maps, selected by an international panel of cartographers, academics and collectors, spanning everything from the Aztecs to modern digital imaging.
![According to Aja Raden, a Hungarian countess commissioned the first wristwatch from watchmaker Patek Philippe around 1868. "[It] was a spectacularly expensive piece of jewelry," the author says.](http://wfdd-live.s3.amazonaws.com/images/story/From-Trading-Beads-To-The-First-Wristwatch-A-History-Of-Shiny-Objects-459723752-1450205133.jpg)
From Trading Beads To The First Wristwatch, A History Of Shiny Objects
Author Aja Raden says jewelry is the perfect lens through which to view human history. In Stoned, she tells the story of the glass beads used to purchase Manhattan and the rise of the wristwatch.