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In his new novel, “Lazarus Man,” Richard Price presents a rich tapestry of lives intertwining and a portrait of a neighborhood in the midst of change.

“Colored Television” by Danzy Senna is a take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex. The book follows Jane, a novelist, as she struggles to create a picture-perfect life with her husband and kids. Jane learns being a writer is hard and working in Hollywood is even harder.

Writer Colum McCann of "Let the Great World Spin" and "American Mother" advocates the radical act of talking to our adversaries: “We do not need to love each other, we do not even need to like each other—although we hope that we could—but we absolutely need to understand each other.” McCann tells us about Diane Foley and Café Singer.

Poet, theologian, and host of the On Being Studios podcast “Poetry Unbound” Pádraig Ó Tuama enjoys a particular pencil but is not a fanatic: “I use anything to get the idea down. I have written with pens and pencils; I have written on the back of sick bags on airplanes.” Computers. Cellphones. No crayon, but he’s not above it.

Astronomers have long sought the origin of the universe, and hence ourselves as well. Using our best equipment, we observe that every galaxy cluster is rushing away from us, and from all others. For every extra one million light-years of distance, galaxy clusters recede 13 miles per second faster. When we retrace their paths we see that everything must have been in a single spot 13.8 billion years ago, which was right here. Clearly, the universe originated then and there. This week: The Big Bang!

Billy Collins is a former Poet Laureate of the United States and is the author of twelve collections of poetry. His latest is Water, Water: Poems. It is a collection of sixty new poems where Collins explores the subtle beauties and ironies of daily life.

The spongy moth caterpillar has been defoliating forests in the United States for more than a century. Now, a study hopes to learn how the invasive species is affecting populations of the tick that carries Lyme disease.And we’ll visit the ancient sand dunes of a unique upstate New York landscape.

Playlist as aired on Saturday, December 7th, 2024

(Airs 11/01/24 & 11/03/24 @ 6 p.m.) The Media Project is an inside look at media coverage of current events with former Times Union Editor, current Upstate American, Substack columnist Rex Smith, Judy Patrick, former Editor of the Daily Gazette and Vice President for Editorial Development for the New York Press Association, Barbara Lombardo, Adjunct Professor at the University at Albany and former Editor of the Saratogian, and David Guistina, Media Project Producer, Morning Edition Anchor, and Adjunct Professor at the University at Albany. On this week’s Media Project, Rex, Judy, Barbara, and David talk about the Washington Post and other newspapers deciding not to make an endorsement in the presidential race, how the media covers racist and other inappropriate language in a Presidential campaign, and much more.

With the current Moon a thin crescent that sets before nightfall, we can be thinking about dark skies and the Northern Lights. Of course, it’s the Sun’s activity that controls the aurora, not our calendar, so if a strong solar flare or even more powerful coronal mass ejection blasts tons of the Sun’s charged particles in our direction, we’ll likely get auroras a couple of days later. Tune in to hear about the aurora avalanche!