Our friends from NYPL's The Librarian Is In podcast recorded their first-ever live episode, featuring NYU sociologist and author Eric Klinenberg. His new book "Palaces for the People" looks at how shared public spaces like gardens, child-care centers, and—yep, you guessed it—libraries are essential to maintaining a healthy democratic society. Klinenberg talks about his research at NYPL's Seward Park branch, social infrastructure, and what books he's reading with podcast hosts and librarians, Gwen and Frank.

To celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Dickens' classic, we're rebroadcasting this very special reading by writer and comic book author, Neil Gaiman. His live performance from 2013 uses a rare prompt copy that belonged to Charles Dickens himself and now resides in The New York Public Library. Dickens marked it up and annotated it for the express purpose of performing the story in front of an audience, which he did regularly in the 1850s and 1860s.

Award-winning journalist Alma Guillermoprieto delivered this year's annual Robert B. Silvers lecture, a series named in honor of the co-founding editor of The New York Review of Books. In her lecture titled  “Among the Drug Dealers, Criminals, Rapists: A Reporting Life in Latin America,” Guillermoprieto shares insights from her 40 years of experience. Born in Mexico, Guillermoprieto came to New York in 1965 to join the Martha Graham dance studio. By the late 1970s, she had left dance to cover the Central American civil wars as a journalist. Since then she has written extensively about Latin America for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and National Geographic. 

Wayétu Moore's debut novel explores African diasporic identity through historical fiction and magical realism. In a conversation with Buzzfeed writer, Isaac Fitzgerald, Moore talks about the stories behind her new book "She Would Be King":  the history of her native Liberia and the childhood stories her family used to tell her. Moore says, "I grew up hearing stories that always included someone disappearing or shapeshifting or casting a spell...when I moved to America these things were relegated to Disney, but back home, that just wasn't the case."

In his seventh collection of essays, The Patch, master non-fiction writer John McPhee shares a montage of stories and reflections that range from a visit to the Hershey chocolate factory to encounters with Oscar Hammerstein, Joan Baez, and Mount Denali. Calling on his signature devotion to structure, McPhee has winnowed this body of work to present a random assembly he calls an “album quilt,” a memoir as only he could write it. He spoke with Paul Holdengräber about the arc of his life and career.