Episode 460: Mary Roach

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2021

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mary Roach is the author of seven nonfiction books, including her latest, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. "In these realms of the taboo, there's a tremendous amount of material that is really interesting, but that people have stayed away from. ... I'm kind of a bottom feeder. It's down there on the bottom where people don't want to go. But if that's what it takes to find interesting, new material, I'm fine with it. I don't care. I'm not easily grossed out. I don't feel that there's any reason why we shouldn't look at this. And over time, I started to feel that ... the taboo was preventing people from having conversations that it would be healthy to have." Show notes: @mary_roach maryroach.net Roach on Longform 01:00 Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (W.W. Norton • 2021) 01:00 Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (W.W. Norton • 2003) 01:00 Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (W.W. Norton • 2008) 01:00 Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (W.W. Norton • 2010) 01:00 Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (W.W. Norton • 2014) 02:00 "Cute Inc." (Wired • Dec 1999) 12:00 Roach's Salon archive 46:00 "Hot Seat" (Discover • Mar 1998) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the long form podcast.
0:08.0	This is Evan Ratliff, one of your hosts, the other two are Aaron Lamar and Max Linsky.
0:12.8	Hello.
0:13.8	Hey, hey you guys, Evan, who is on the old program this week?
0:18.2	Max, I am very excited this week.
0:21.1	This week I talked to the one, the only Mary Roach, hey oh, I wanted to have Mary on
0:25.7	the show for a long time and she has a new book out so I finally took the opportunity
0:30.8	to get off my ass and do it.
0:32.3	She has written I think seven New York Times nonfiction bestsellers.
0:37.8	This most recent one is called Fuzz when Nature breaks the law, which is about difficult
0:43.4	encounters between humans and animals, things like bears and leopards killing people or
0:49.7	a population of macaques taking over an entire city.
0:53.5	And we talked about that book, we talked about our whole career, a bunch of other books,
0:58.6	which I'll just give you listener if you haven't read a Mary Roach book you should.
1:02.7	But I'll give you a quick thumbnail on the ones that I think came up in case you haven't
1:06.9	read these.
1:07.9	Her first book is called Stiff.
1:09.3	It's about the science of death and cadavers, it's your own book called Bunk, which is
1:13.5	about sex, packing for Mars, about space, and gut about the digestive system, a couple
1:20.0	of others but I'm not sure they came up.
1:21.8	And let me just say one more thing, which is I do not think I have laughed this much
1:25.4	in any interview I've ever done for this podcast.
	...

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