Profiling remarkable people who are a little more under the radar than they deserve to be. Your host is Ben Yagoda, the author, co-author, or editor of fourteen books, including "Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English," due out in September 2024 from Princeton University Press. For each episode, Ben talks to someone who is an expert on and fascinated by the subject at hand.

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Latest Episodes

David Remnick on John McPhee

David Remnick has been editor of the New Yorker since 1998 (making him the second-longest-serving editor in the magazine's history, behind William Shawn). Before that,...

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Elijah Wald has been singing and playing guitar for almost fifty years in a wide variety of styles, from blues, folk, ragtime, swing, country, and cowboy songs to clas...

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Varda Bar-Kar is the director of the 2025 documentary Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, about the singer who burst on the scene in 1966, at the age of fifteen, with her son...

Robert Strauss on Lois Smith

Robert Strauss is a veteran journalist and the author of three books: Daddy's Little Goalie: A Father, His Daughters, and Sports; Worst. President. Ever.: James Buchan...

John Barth on Bill Siemering

John Barth has a long and distinguished career in public broadcasting, which started in earnest in the very early 1980s when he got a peculiar and life-changing phone ...

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