The airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds
47 episodes transcribedIn 2004, historian Thomas Frank proposed a theory about the rightward drift of the white working class. Was he a prescient king whose work presaged th...
Peter and Michael discuss the book that launched the phenomenon of New Atheism and asked the question: What if we hated Muslims, but in a secular way?...
What should workers do when they get laid off? In 1998 a bleak, asinine bestseller told them to find another whey. Where to find us: Peter's oth...
New York’s favorite criminal is in the news, so here is our episode about his ridiculous life.To hear all of our bonus episodes, support us on Patreon...
Is fact-checking a legitimate enterprise? Is America's most famous fact-checker nothing more than a dweeb? Michael and Peter discuss.To hear the...
A memoir about parenting very badly and then getting weirdly defensive when anyone asks you about it.Where to find us: Peter's other podcast, 5-4...
Is social media to blame for the teen mental health crisis? It's complicated!Thanks to Emily Weinstein, Amy Orben, Andrew Przybylski, Dean Burnet...
To celebrate ("celebrate") Donald Trump choosing JD Vance as his running mate we are re-releasing our "Hillbilly Elegy" episode. E...
Peter and Michael discuss "The Origins of Woke," a glimpse into the dark aspirations of the Republican Party and the mind of a very unusual...
Peter and Michael discuss the media coverage of the protests at Columbia — from the crazed, bloodthirsty ravings of right-wing media to the more muted...
Peter and Michael discuss Michael Lewis’s bestselling book about the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, a young prodigy whose only flaw was that he d...
2 Better 2 AngelsSupport us on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPodWhere to find us: Peter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, M...
We're finally discussing a good book! Naomi Klein's "Doppelgänger" chronicles the long, steady descent of another Naomi — Wolf (bu...
In 2013, Sheryl Sandberg became an icon for women who wanted to move from middle management at a tech company into upper management at a tech company....
This week we're tackling Steven Pinker's 900 page dissection of the reasons why violence, torture and war have declined over the last 10,000...
Before Donald Trump became America's most prominent politician and birth certificate inspector, he spent his days making everyone in New York Cit...
To hear the rest of the episode, support us on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod
"There are two kinds of political scientists: The types who deal with noisy data and post on Twitter with a bunch of caveats. And then there are...
To hear the rest of the episode, support us on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod
You stare, mouth agape, at the bookstore display. It’s a self-help book, but with curse words in the title?! This must be a revolutionary new framewor...
