Hi, NSC viewers. Happy Labor Day. We're off for the holiday weekend, and so we're sharing

one last rerun of the summer. This episode is one of my personal favorites from the early

days of the show. It's packed with great research, hilarious stories, and of course, the

signature Steven and Angela Banta that we've all come to know and love. We'll be back next

week with a brand new episode, but for now, enjoy these conversations from the NSQ archive.

We want to be praise, we want to be praiseworthy, I want to get a candle. I'm Angela Duckworth.

I'm Steven Dubner, and you're listening to no stupid questions. Today on the show, why do we forget

some of our favorite books? We don't always remember what we remember. Also, do we overestimate

our significance in other people's lives? This is so forward. He's just arrived, and he wants to

come join our group. Steven, I've been thinking about a conversation that we had about a tree

grows in Brooklyn. Do you recall this conversation? I do recall it. You said you loved that book,

loved, loved it, but you couldn't remember a single thing about it. Yeah, so I thought you might

have even forgotten the conversation about how I had forgotten. Anyway, my point is that it's a

really interesting thing that people can read books that they absolutely love so much that they're

like evangelical. They're trying to get everyone to read this book. Then when you ask that person,

oh, well, what's it about? There's this long pause because like me, they have no idea at all who

the protagonists were, the plot was it a tragedy. They just have this residue of emotion that says,

I loved the experience of this book. It makes me think of that. Actually, I don't think it's actually

a Maya-Azulu quote. People may forget what you said, but they'll never forget how you made them feel.

I don't think Maya-Azulu said that, but I do think it's an interesting question whether we may

forget what is in a book, but we don't forget how it made us feel. What do you think? There's a nice

thought on this topic that resonated with me, Pamela Paul, who's the editor of the New York Times

...