20 years ago this month, the New York Times published its very first podcast.

This is Sam Tannenhouse, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and welcome to our podcast, where we huddly tweak on the shores of light and

curse the encroaching darkness.

Yes, that was the very first episode of the show. Two decades later, hundreds of

notable authors and literary personalities have passed through these metaphorical walls.

Tony Morrison, Robert Caro, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Franzen, Judy Blum, Stephen King, I could go on and on and on.

Even Keith Richards came through, and I was sadly not here for that one.

Today, to celebrate this august occasion, we're going to look back at the last 20 years in books.

Literary hits, fan favorites, scandals, and scuttlebutt.

I'm Gilbert Cruz, and I have the ideal duo to mark the occasion with me, Tina Jordan, who has

worked in and around books for 35 years and is now deputy editor of the book review. Tina, welcome.

Hi, Gilbert. And Dwight Garner, longtime book critic here at the Times, and appropriately for this episode,

the man who came up with the idea for this very podcast in the first place. Dwight, it's so

great to have you here. Great to be here, Gilbert. So let's go back 20 years to when this podcast first came out.

It's 2006. G.W. Bush was president. Twitter had just launched. We did not know the joys that this platform would bring us in the ensuing decades. The iPhone had not been invented yet, thankfully. And just as the year kicked off, the book world was consumed with a scandal.

I don't know what is true, and I don't know what isn't.

So first of all, I wanted to start with the smoking gun report titled The Man Who Conned Oprah,

and I want to know where they write.

I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate, absolutely.

In January of 2006, there was a controversy involving a book called A Million Little Pieces.

This was a big deal. Do you remember this?

Of course I do.

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