What happens to people who work in manufacturing when their work disappears?

Thara Stockman will join us to talk about her new book, American Made.

How do you turn the history of physics into gripping fiction?

Benjamin Labatou joins us to talk about his new book when we cease to understand the

world. Liz Harris will be here to talk about what's going on in the publishing world,

plus my colleagues and I will talk about what we're reading. This is the Book Review

podcast from the New York Times. As October 22nd, I'm Pamela Paul.

Thara Stockman joins us now from Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is a member of the editorial board

at the New York Times and the author of a new book, American Made. What happens to people

when work disappears? Thara, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me on.

So you're my colleague at the New York Times. And yet we've never met.

I've had a full disclosure. We have never encountered one another and you also have one of those jobs

where our work really doesn't intersect, except when you write a book. Explain to us if you would

what it means to be on the editorial board of the New York Times and how did you get there because

you've been at the Times for a while. Yeah, good question. We write editorials which is unsigned

pieces that represent the paper's views on any number of things. I specialize in foreign policy.

We also are starting to write signed editorials more, which are essentially like columns that express

our own personal views on things. So we're still journalists. We still report, but we get to have

an opinion in areas that reporters would have to keep their opinion under wraps. And I used to work

at the editorial page at the Boston Globe. I spent most of my career at the Boston Globe and

Katie Kingsbury was an editor there. And when she moved over to the Times, she eventually convinced

me to come over. I had been on the National Best Covering National Stories before, which is when

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