Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaung. When I was a young producer at NPR,

I did an interview with a scientist working on grain production, and I said something naive about how,

oh, if this works, we could fix world hunger. And he went silent on the other end of the phone

for a beat and went, uh, no, world hunger isn't a science problem.

We have the science. It's everything else that's the issue. I thought about that conversation

while listening to today's interview with John Green, author of the book, Everything is Tuberculosis.

It's a look at a disease that some people might think of as old-timey, but still kills more than a million people a

year. And in this interview with Hearing Now is Robin Young, Green makes the point that the science

exists to cure TB, but people are still dying anyway. That's coming up. In the U.S., national

security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.

On our new show, Sources and Methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people

helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Author John Green, the guy behind bestselling fiction like The Fault in Our Stars, which was

partly inspired by a young girl named Esther Earle who'd been battling cancer.

Well, John has a new book out, which also takes inspiration from a young person named

Henry, who also had a disease. For millennia, it was the world's most deadly infectious

disease, and it still kills more than a million people every year. It's tuberculosis,

and John Green says, yes, this bacteria has plagued humanity, but in recent years, it's because

we allow it to. His latest book, Everything is Tuberculosis, the history and persistence of

...