Nerdette

In 2016, Grace Bonney spoke with 100 women doing creative work and turned those interviews into a book, In the Company of Women.  It became a New York Times bestseller, and earlier this month, Bonney released a follow up: a biennial business magazine called Good Company. Plus, while she’s out promoting her new publication, she also runs the creativity website Design*Sponge.  Like so many of us, Bonney is busy. So how does she refuel? “That’s one of the things I think everyone has a really pithy answer to, like yoga or meditating,” Bonney told Nerdette host Greta Johnsen. “I don’t do any of those things. I think I ask for help.” Bonney tells us what asking for help looks like. PLUS: The Nerdette Rummage Sale IS NOW OPEN! Support Nerdette right now and get some sweet, sweet swag — like mugs and buttons and sweatbands for instance: www.wbez.org/nerdalert

We brought brothers Hari and Ashok Kondabolu on Nerdette to talk about making time for self-care in what can be a grinding, freelance economy. Instead, they unpacked their relationship.  “Do you look up to me at all?” Hari asks his younger brother, with host Greta Johnsen listening in the wings. “No, we have completely different lives,” Ashok immediately responds. “This is not relaxing!” Hari says.  Well, we tried.  But Hari and Ashok DID give us some wonderful ideas about how to recharge your batteries by ignoring the phone, taking aimless walks, and selling your clothes.  About our guests: Hari’s a comedian with a new Netflix special, Warn Your Relatives, and Ashok’s a former member of the rap group Das Racist who’s now producing the show Hey, How Ya Doin? The pair also co-host Earwolf's Kondabolu Brothers podcast, where they debate current events, share odd stories, and further unpack their relationship. PLUS: The Nerdette Rummage Sale IS NOW OPEN! Support Nerdette right now and get some awesome swag at a special discount!: wbez.org/nerdalert

Near the end of STS-125, NASA’s final space shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope back in 2009, bad weather in Florida initially stopped the seven-member team from returning to Earth. The two-day delay that followed presented the astronauts with some unusual but much needed downtime. So what did they do with it?  Looked out the windows. “I liked to listen to music and watch the world go by,” said Megan McArthur, a mission specialist on the Space Shuttle Atlantis. “It was pretty awesome.” For our new project, Power Up, we're asking fascinating people to explain how they set themselves up for success while living in (and, in this case, off of) an exhausting world.  McArthur told us about the seemingly difficult task of relaxing in outer space. She also described her role in helping the American Girl doll company create Luciana, a Chilean-American who is an aspiring astronaut.  “It helps for people to see a role model who represents them, right?” McArthur said of Luciana. “[Someone] who looks like them, maybe who has a similar experience as they have, in order for them to imagine themselves in that same kind of environment.” McArthur described her own experience meeting a role model: astronaut Sally Ride, who McArthur says she met when she was 16 years old. She says the 20-minute conversation with Ride, the first American woman to travel to space, was “a special and unique experience for someone just starting to think about what they want to do with their life.” Tell us how you power up!

Let’s be real: life can be hectic sometimes. You don’t need to tell that to Amy Schumer and Aidy Bryant, two of the nation’s top female comedians.  Who better to kick off our new project, Power Up? For the next few months, we're asking fascinating people how they set themselves up for success in an exhausting world.  Knitting? Bowling? Researching the presence of alternate dimensions? “I literally will say to myself out loud in the mirror, like, ‘You got this, bitch,’” Schumer tells Nerdette host Greta Johnsen.  Schumer and Bryant also talk about what drew them to their new film, I Feel Pretty, which is now in theaters.  We also want to know how YOU power up. Record yourself on your phone and email the audio file to nerdettepodcast@gmail.com.

Here at Nerdette we’ve been thinking a lot about how much the world can wear us down. Which has led us to a very important question: How do so many successful, inspiring people have the time and energy to be so successful and inspiring? Power Up is a new project where we ask fascinating people how they set themselves up for success in what can be an exhausting world. How do amazing (non-robot) humans recharge their (hypothetical) batteries? We want to know! Because we all have the same number of hours in a day — even the scientists, poets, astronauts and adventurers — and as Oprah might say: You need to LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE. Subscribe now and get the first episode of Power Up delivered to you on April 27. Click the play button above to hear a preview. We also want to hear how YOU power up. Send us an email — or, better yet, record yourself on your phone and send the audio file to nerdettepodcast@gmail.com. This project is for all of us, which means it’ll be even better if you weigh in.

The 90s TV drama 'My So-Called Life' had a profound impact on Nerdette host Greta Johnsen. (“Jordan Catalano still holds a special place in my heart,” she said of the fictional Liberty High School heartthrob played by Jared Leto.) Jason Katims helped create that TV show, along with other heart-wrenching dramas like 'Parenthood' and 'Friday Night Lights.' Now Katims is the writer and executive producer of another dramatic network TV show set in high school: 'Rise,' which combines football, musical theater, and plenty of high school teen angst.  “I mean, I’m clearly stuck in my own progression in life,” Katims tells Nerdette. “I got stuck at 17 and never moved on.” Katims talked with us about 'Rise,' why so much of his writing examines adolescence, and what a busy Hollywood showrunner does to recharge. (Plus, get hyped for plenty of TV clips featuring PEAK teen angst.)

Tomi Adeyemi is the 24-year-old author of 'Children of Blood and Bone,' a new young adult novel that — in terms of pop culture blockbusters — could be on par with 'The Hunger Games' or 'Harry Potter.' The book, the first in a West African-inspired fantasy series, hit shelves earlier this month — more than a year after the movie rights were picked up by Fox 2000.  Adeyemi tells Nerdette that part of her motivation to write the book stemmed from racist reactions to 'The Hunger Games' movies.  “There were people online being like, ‘Why’d they make Rue and Cinna black? Why’d they make all the good characters black? It wasn’t sad when Rue was speared to death because she was black,’” Adeyemi says. “Seeing that level of racism applied in a fictional world heightened it for me. Because yes, The Hunger Games isn’t real, but the fact that someone could feel that strongly and have that much hatred for something that isn’t even real? I’m like, if that’s what you feel for fake things, then what do you feel about me?” Adeyemi talks with Nerdette host Greta Johnsen and special guest-host Jenn White (of WBEZ's Making Obama and Making Oprah podcasts) about how she came to write a fantasy novel that simultaneously depicted the modern black experience.

As a four-year old in Juneau, Alaska, Nerdette host Greta Johnsen was diagnosed with an eye condition known as "Best disease." That name is a misnomer for several reasons — the big one being that "Best disease" causes premature macular degeneration — but curiously it happens to be among the best diseases for experimenting with CRISPR, a genetic engineering tool that can be used to edit DNA.  This very special episode of Nerdette follows Greta, her father, and Dr. Bruce Conklin, the scientist who's currently trying to develop the perfect CRISPR system to inject into some Johnsen family eyeballs. Plus, you can't have a conversation about experimental gene editing without discussing the ethical implications of making irreversible changes to human evolution.  “We’d be permanently altering the course of evolution if we decide that we think it’s OK to edit human embryos," says Megan Hochstrasser, a science communications manager and CRISPR expert. "Is that something we want to be able to do as a society?” That's a great question. Let's talk about it.  Special thanks this week to the Innovative Genomics Institute as well as the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of California, San Francisco.

Anna Deavere Smith might be best known for her acting roles on NBC’s The West Wing and Showtime’s Nurse Jackie. But she’s also one of the most prolific playwrights of “documentary-style theater,” where she uses verbatim interviews as source material in hopes of pushing her audience toward “an adjustment in the way that they think.”  Her latest work is a one-woman show called Notes From The Field, which was recently released on HBO. It examines how minority students living in poverty often end up incarcerated. To make it, Smith interviewed 250 people affected by the school-to-prison pipeline, including inmates, educators, and witnesses to injustice.  Smith told Nerdette co-host Tricia Bobeda about how she made Notes From The Field and what she hopes it will achieve.

If you’re looking for a way to combat the online trolls and bots fomenting unrest in the U.S., comedian Negin Farsad might have a solution for you. “I guess if I were to name it, it’s a philosophy called ‘being aggressively delightful,’” she tells us. Farsad, an Iranian-American Muslim, is the co-host of the podcast Fake the Nation, the author of the book How to Make White People Laugh, and sometimes you can hear her on our very own WBEZ as a panelist for NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! She told us how she manages to be aggressively delightful, even when confronted with intolerance.

Ilene Chaiken has been a showrunner for TV hits like Fox’s Empire, an executive producer for Hulu’s The Handmaid's Tale, and a writer, producer, and director for Showtime’s The L Word in the mid-2000s. In other words, she’s a boss.  “I don’t like the word that much,” Chaiken said on Nerdette. “I mean, I like it as in, ‘Oh, she’s a boss.’ You know, ‘She’s a badass. She’s a boss.’ But I don’t like the kind of hierarchical aspect of it.”  Chaiken talked with Nerdette co-hosts Tricia Bobeda and Greta Johnsen about the upcoming reboot of The L Word, her recently greenlit pilot project with Fox, and about how she became a boss. She also had some important homework for you: “I want to know who hasn’t seen herself — and I’ll just make it gendered — who hasn’t seen herself represented on television, and what would she like to see?” If you’ve got an answer, tweet them to @NerdettePodcast and @IleneChaiken.

Olympians and experts on the science of fear, the physics of sliding down ice super duper fast, and the feminist fight to get women into more sports.

When Teresa Woodruff started working for a biotech company fresh out of graduate school, her employer revealed that the first studies for a new heart attack treatment had been performed on 50,000 men. “And so I kinda raised my hand and said, ‘That’s interesting. Where are all the women?” Today, Teresa is an expert in ovarian biology and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University in Chicago. We ask her why so many prescription drugs were tested only on men for so many decades, what that’s meant for women’s health, and what’s changed.  Plus, Teresa tells us about Repropedia, her encyclopedia for reproductive health, and “A New You, That's Who” (think “Schoolhouse Rock!” but instead of conjunctions, it's about puberty.)   More info on Teresa Woodruff’s work can be found at www.woodrufflab.org.

Comedian John Hodgman, longtime fan of the lovingly-reviled Swedish spirit called Malört, tells Nerdette, “I’m fascinated with things that are still regional in an increasingly non-regional country.” He also calls the disagreeable beverage "“a delightful, heady blend of pencil shavings and shame.”  Nerdette's Tricia Bobeda talked with Hodgman about his new book, Vacationland, before inviting in Sam Mechling, director of marketing for Jeppson's Malört, to better help us all understand this unique, wormwood-based liqueur. Prost!

Jennifer Egan won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. Her most recent novel, Manhattan Beach, was among 10 works of fiction long-listed for the 2017 National Book Award. Not too shabby, right? But Egan told Greta that an early draft of Manhattan Beach was so bad she almost scrapped the whole thing. “I probably came as close to abandoning this as I have to any project I’ve worked on,” she said. On this week's Nerdette, Egan explains why things got rough, how she powered through, and the evolutionary advantage of forgetting how hard things can be.  Plus, we get some help from Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Historical Society, to break down Egan's nerd obsession: Out of place buildings.