The Daily

There were two stories in a book you wrote called Be Cool that stood out for me. And - Or Not Cool. Not Cool. Not Cool. I'm sorry. I have the specific title because the whole title really - Yes, yes. Not Cool. The Hipster Elite and Their War on You.

You just published this book. It's called The Philosopher in the Valley, about Palantir and its CEO, Alex Karp.

the 2017 Booker Prizewinning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo

Just because you mentioned Lincoln and the Bardo, which is about figures in the afterlife. You know, when I started reading Vigil, the new novel, and there were more figures from the afterlife sort of shepherding someone along, I thought he's doing angels again.

And her latest is last fall's heart-wrenching drama, Hamnet, an adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's historical novel about the death of Shakespeare's young son from the plague and the grief his parents experienced after.

Maggie said that she doesn't believe it's possible that the grief is any less.

And Hamnet, by the way, was what saved me in many ways, to have that film during that time.

And if you see in Hamnet, Will couldn't express his grief. But he could write a play about it. And then create such an intimate environment for people to grieve together. But he himself maybe hoping through the act of doing that, he himself could grieve.

Now, with his new book, A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness, he's jumped into the deep end.

The book is a highly personal exploration of human consciousness, what it is, where it comes from, what it's for, and what the different answers to those questions might mean for how we can make sense of our lives.

His book gets into some pretty profound, even mind-bending territory, as I think did our interview.

That's Michael Pollan. His new book, A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness, will be published on February 24th.

He also has a new novel out this month called Vigil, about a cantankerous oil tycoon on his deathbed.

When I started reading Vigil, the new novel, and there were more figures from the afterlife sort of shepherding someone along, I thought he's doing angels again.

Your book is gripping. It is heartbreaking. It is beautifully written. And this is the first time that people will be able to have heard from you personally, your own words, your own story.

When I wrote this book, I wanted it to be useful. It also allowed me to look inward at myself, to take stock of my life and to try to rebuild myself from the ruins.

A lot of this book seems to be an attempt to understand who you actually married and also what you actually felt during that time.

You write that a wave of shame swelled up inside of me after this revelation. Can you talk me through why you felt shame at that moment?

If the last 50 years of my life were taken away from me, it would be as if I had never existed, I range, but it's a lot like grieving. You grieve for the life you had. And I couldn't erase all of the good memories because otherwise I'd lose everything. My existence would be void.

A subsequent book, The Committee of Sleep, examined the role of dreams in creativity, noting that dreams were credited as the direct origin of, to name a few examples, Jasper Johns' Flag, the character Stuart Little and the plot of Frankenstein, The Beatles' Song Yesterday, the first ironclad battleship, the scientific breakthrough that earned researchers the 1936 Nobel Prize in Medicine, and, though this one may be apocryphal, the structure of the periodic table.

when ... wrote in their book When Brains Dream, No longer was dreaming just a mystical mental phenomenon that seemed to come from nowhere, except maybe the hidden resources of our psyche. Suddenly there was a biology of dreaming.

In the famed Harley ethnography, Subcultures of Consumption, John W. Schutten and James H. McAlexander identify four factors they believe contribute to the spirituality of the motorcycle riding experience.

Quote, the increased closeness to nature, the heightened sensory awareness, the mantric throbbing of the engine, the constant awareness of risk, and the co-committent mental focus.

She helped design an Olympics opening ceremony, served as the official artist-in-residence for NASA, made an opera out of Moby-Dick, and played a concert for dogs at the Sydney Opera House.

Let's think back to classic spy movies or classic spy novels. You know, the Red Sparrow novels, they talk about American spies in Moscow going to meet a source, spending hours trying to elude the KGB or FSB tail, and that they were just doing all these elaborate moves to lose the tail, to go black in the parlance of the CIA.

Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the court's liberal members, is on a book tour. And his book is actually on this topic. It's called The Authority of the Court in the Peril of Politics.

she wrote in her 1979 book Eyewitness Testimony

writes in his recent book Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free, modern science suggests that much of such testimony is inherently suspect but not in ways that jurors can readily evaluate from their own experience

Disabilities, Kim E. Nielsen writes in A Disability History of the United States, rub up against the American value of individualistic, selfsufficient grit. People with disabilities are thus often cast as a drain.

I'm reading Immodest Acts, which is a book about lesbian nuns in the Renaissance.

In the Dark, most recently in 2008 with the release of Fernando Meireles' adaptation of Jos Saramago's novel Blindness. It argued that the film and the novel about an epidemic of sudden blindness that leads to a societal breakdown, which is in its broad strokes not unlike a zombie movie, portrayed blind people as monsters.

I think everybody in America should read Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois

Tony Judt in his magnificent, magnificent history, Postwar. It's a thick book, but it's a beautifully written book. It is a sharp history and a sharp confrontation with some acts of just straight up evil.