Searching for Habitable Worlds: Richard Powers, Winner of The Pulitzer Prize (#233)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Science, Physics, Natural Sciences

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2022

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He's won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2021, Powers has published 14 novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory. Powers’ latest book is Bewilderment in which, The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain… With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet? Bewilderment on Amazon http://www.richardpowers.net 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Neil deGrasse Tyson https://youtu.be/1kxgK6J4S5Y Michio Kaku: https://youtu.be/3to9ymn-XKI Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Produced by Brian Keating and Stuart Volkow P.G.A Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, impossible family. It is I. I am Brian Keating, your fearful host. In the time of
0:12.4	pandemic podcasting, luckily going to a close.
0:16.0	Taking my some of my first commercial airline flights and years and not gotten too much the worse for it.
0:24.0	A couple of weeks since the last podcast have been phenomenal in many, many ways,
0:30.0	including the involvement in a wedding.
0:35.4	I actually performed a wedding,
0:36.8	your fearful host, performed a wedding
0:39.1	for two dear friends very recently
0:42.0	and it was quite an honor to be a part of this ceremony.
0:46.4	It was between an interracial family and that was quite striking for me to do that on the date that is known as Loving Day a week ago if you're listening to this live on Father's Day,
0:57.0	2022, June 19th or thereafter.
1:01.0	So I'm coming off a high maybe of a lifetime getting asked to join
1:06.4	two people in a holy unending union and it's just really delightful to see especially
1:11.7	in times when you hear so much about the desire
1:16.2	for people not to have kids, not to get married,
1:19.2	really kind of an overall depressing and a
1:22.7	and somewhat pessimistic view of looking at the world
1:27.9	and especially on Father's Day.
1:29.1	I think it's worth looking into this
1:32.2	and it will play into the conversation that you're about to listen to between myself and Richard Powers, who is a phenomenal human being, an individual who was written, one of the most touching moving books that I've read and that's saying
1:45.7	something because his last book was the overstory which won the Pulitzer Prize.
1:48.9	I'm so delighted that he came on the show and this book, bewilderment, which I devoured,
	...

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