The Lives They're Living

Ben Yagoda
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  • SOCIETY & CULTURE
  • UPDATED SEMIWEEKLY

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" (Princeton University Press, 2024) and the novel "Alias O. Henry" (Paul Dry Books, 2025). For each episode, Ben talks to someone who is an expert on and fascinated by the subject at hand.

  1. Mike Jensen on William "Speedy" Morris

    NOV 24

    Mike Jensen on William "Speedy" Morris

    Mike Jensen spent 35 years covering basketball and other sports for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His book about Philadelphia basketball will be published in 2026 by Temple University Press. In 2024, Mike was inducted into the Big 5 Hall of Fame. He also won national Eclipse Awards for his horse racing coverage of Smarty Jones and Barbaro. Among other honors, he was named Pennsylvania Sportswriter of the Year and won the Jim O'Connell Award by the United States Basketball Writers Association for Excellence in Beat Reporting. He still has the trophy for winning a foul-shooting contest at the 1976 Julius Erving Basketball Camp. His subject, the legendary William "Speedy" Morris, spent more than fifty years coaching basketball in Philadelphia on the. high school and college levels. Morris's speech on being inducted into the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame in 2011. Mike Jensen article on the Speedy Morris "coaching tree." Comprehensive coverage of Morris after he coached his final game, in 2020. The photo of Morris, taken when he was coaching Penn Charter high school in 1983, is from this site. Morris teaching the pump fake.

    24 min
  2. David Bianculli on James L. Brooks

    NOV 19

    David Bianculli on James L. Brooks

    David Bianculli is the first return guest to The Lives They're Living. (We talked about Mason Williams in one of the first episodes.)  David has been the TV critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross since its inception, and has been writing about television since 1975, notably at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Daily News. He's written four books: The Platinum Age Of Television: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific (2016); Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 2009); Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously (1992); and Dictionary of Teleliteracy (1996). Bianculli is professor of Television Studies at Rowan University in New Jersey. His subject on this episode is the great writer, director, and producer James L. Brooks, who got his start some sixty years ago in an unexpected place. Since then, among many other achievements, Brooks co-created The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Simpsons, and wrote and directed the Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment. Conan O'Brien talks about Brooks's laugh. Clips of Brooks laughing. Albert Brooks speech from Broadcast News. Photo of Brooks by Bob Marshak, 2004.

    33 min
  3. Aimee Liu on Maxine Hong Kingston

    NOV 6

    Aimee Liu on Maxine Hong Kingston

    Aimee Liu is the bestselling author of the novel Glorious Boy, as well as Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face. Her nonfiction includes Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire. Aimee's books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. And her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, and many other periodicals and anthologies. She taught for many years in Goddard College's MFA in Creative Writing Program.   Aimee grew up mainly in Connecticut but also lived in India for two years. Her father was born in Shanghai, the son of a Chinese scholar-revolutionary and his American wife. She studied painting at Yale. Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of  The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), China Men (1980), and other works. Some links: 2020 New Yorker profile of Ms. Kingston by Hua Hsu. John Leonard's 1976 review of The Woman Warrior in the New York Times. Library of America's Maxine Hong Kingston page. "Your moment of Maxine Hong Kingston": Ms. Kingston reads from her memoir in verse, I Love a Broad Margin in My Life, in 2011.

    31 min
  4. Dave Barry on Roy Blount Jr.

    AUG 12

    Dave Barry on Roy Blount Jr.

    Dave Barry is an author and humorist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his syndicated column, which ran in more than 500 newspapers and was the inspiration for the TV show Dave's World. He has also written dozens of bestselling books, including Lessons From Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog, the novel Swamp Story, and, most recently, Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass. Along with Ridley Pearson, Dave wrote the bestselling Starcatchers series of young-adult novels, one of which was adapted as the Tony-award winning Broadway play Peter and the Starcatcher. His subject is Roy Blount Jr. (pronounced "blunt"), who was raised in Decatur, Georgia, and has been writing about athletes, the South, language, movies, food, and a lot of other things for almost sixty years. He's published twenty-four books, the first of which, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load (1974), was about the Pittsburgh Steelers and was described by The New Yorker as "the best of all books about pro football," and the latest of which is Save Room for  Pie: Food, Songs, and Chewy Ruminations. He's contributed articles, essays, and other stuff to 171 different publications. Roy is a panelist on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me; appeared frequently on A Prairie Home Companion; created and starred in a one-man show in New York, Roy Blount's Happy Hour and a Half; and wrote the screenplay for the Bill Murray movie Larger Than Life. Photo by Joan Griswold. Links Roy Blount's website. Roy's Substack. Dave Barry's website. Roy's 1984 Sports Illustrated profile of Yogi Berra. The Rock Bottom Remainders singing "Wild Thing" (Roy is in the long-sleeved white t-shirt). Video clip of Roy on the f-word (your moment of Roy Blount).

    27 min
  5. Paul Dickson

    MAY 6 · BONUS

    Paul Dickson

    This is a bonus episode because it's not in the usual format--me talking to person A about person B. For this one, I'm going directly to the subject: the prolific non-fiction writer Paul Dickson. I've been aware of and admired Dickson's work for a long time, probably not long after he set out on his own as an independent, aka freelance, writer in 1968. In time I came to think of him as my doppelganger, or me as his doppelganger, as I ended up hanging out my own shingle and writing about some of the same things he did, though nowhere near as prolifically: language, baseball, American history. All told, he has produced more than 60 non-fiction books and countless newspaper and magazine articles. The Washington Post called him "a one-man book factory" and Public Libraries magazine commented, "Paul Dickson could be called the Energizer bunny of authors …One of the amazing attributes of this prolific writer is that he can't be pigeonholed: his subject matter is always changing." A few of his recent books, all published within the past dozen years: "Words from the White House: Words and Phrases Created by Presidents of the United States""The Official Rules: 5,427 Laws, Principles, and Axioms to Help You Cope with Crises, Deadlines, Bad Luck, Rude Behavior, Red Tape, and Attacks by Inanimate Objects""Contraband Cocktails--How America Drank When it Wasn't Supposed To""The Hidden Language of Baseball" (Expanded and Revised Edition)His newest book is "The Rise of the G.I. Army 1940-1941," the story of how the American Army was mobilized from scattered outposts two years before Pearl Harbor into the disciplined and mobile fighting force.Paul Dickson's website. A final note for language nerds like Paul and me: At one point in the episode we discuss "elegant variation"--H.W. Fowler's dismissive term for creating an elaborate synonym to avoid word repetition. I mention that I made up an example to illustrate the practice--a baseball writer calling a second baseman "the fleet-footed second sacker" on second reference. And that I once Googled "fleet-footed second sacker" (in quotation marks) and found an actual use of the phrase back in the 1920s. (It was actually 1917, in the Athens [Georgia] Banner.) Well, I just repeated the exercise and found three additional uses of the phrase in newspapers, the most recent in 1961. Try it yourself!

    33 min
  6. David Remnick on John McPhee

    APR 17

    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, he was a staff writer at the magazine, and before that he was a reporter for the Washington Post. David won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, and is also the author of Resurrection and King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. Before joining the Post, he was a student at Princeton University, where he took John McPhee’s legendary class called “The Literature of Fact.” John McPhee, "A Sense of Where You Are." First published in The New Yorker January 25, 1965. McPhee's conversation with Robert Wright. In the interview, David Remnick refers kindly to my 2000 book About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. It seems to have gone out of print, but a good library should have it, and used copies pop up now and again. Photo credit: Princeton University, Department of Communication

    36 min
  7. Folk Icons II: Elijah Wald on Ramblin' Jack Elliott

    APR 10

    Folk Icons II: Elijah Wald on Ramblin' Jack Elliott

    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 classic Swahili pop, the Bahamian guitar style of Joseph Spence, and Mexican corridos. He hit the road in his late teens as a rambling busker, and has toured all over the United States and much of the rest of the world   Elijah performed and recorded with Dave Van Ronk, and is also coauthor of Dave’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (which inspired the Coen brothers’ movie Inside Llewyn Davis).    In his equally impressive second career, he’s written books on Josh White and Robert Johnson, an exploration of Jelly Roll Morton and the censorship of early blues, an alternative history of popular music provocatively titled How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Dylan Goes Electric!, the basis of the film A Complete Unknown, which deservedly got great reviews and notices, including from Mr. Dylan himself. His subject is the legendary Ramblin' Jack Elliott, who was born Elliott Charles Adnopoz in Brooklyn in 1931, and left home at the age of 15 to join the rodeo. He's been on the road virtually ever since. Ramblin Jack Elliott's website. Elijah Wald's website. The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack, a documentary by Jack's daughter. Alyana.

    32 min
  8. Folk Icons I: Varda Bar-Kar on Janis Ian

    APR 3

    Folk Icons I: Varda Bar-Kar on Janis Ian

    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 song "Society's Child," Since then Ian's career has, well, careered. from high points to low points and back again, more times than you might think possible. Varda was born in England to a South African mother and aR omanian father and had lived on three continents by the time she was ten. Her documentary Big Voice (Netflix, 2015) takes a deep dive into the culture of artistic excellence fostered by Santa Monica High School choir director Jeffe Huls. And Fandango at the Wall (HBO/MAX, 2020) follows Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra Maestro Arturo O’Farrill to the United States-Mexico Border for a bi-national fandango with the masters of a three-hundred-year-old folk music tradition called son jarocho, transforming "the wall" from an object that divides to one that unites. Varda Bar-Kar's website. Janis Ian's website.

    27 min
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About

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" (Princeton University Press, 2024) and the novel "Alias O. Henry" (Paul Dry Books, 2025). For each episode, Ben talks to someone who is an expert on and fascinated by the subject at hand.

Information

  • Creator
    Ben Yagoda
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2025
  • Episodes
    29
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright Ben Yagoda
  • Show Website
    The Lives They're Living

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