Transcript / LoLT: The Skellig Coast Dark Sky Festival and Two New Books — 28 March 2025

This is a transcription of LoLT: The Skellig Coast Dark Sky Festival and Two New Books — 28 March 2025

[cheerful music]

Melissa: Coming up, a collision of historical fiction and fantasy set in 1930s Vienna.

David: Behind the voices and controversies of NPR.

Melissa: Plus, our Distraction of the Week. I’m Mel.

David: I’m Dave. This is The Library of Lost Time.

Melissa: You know how sometimes you want a sandwich that’s just, like, a really great baguette, butter, and salami? But other times, you want an over-the-top combo of, maybe, a slab of fried chicken with spicy sauce and too much mayo and lots of pickles on bread that might as well be cake. [DAVE] You want a flavor explosion. Sometimes.

Melissa: That’s how I feel about books. Sometimes, I just want a straight-up murder mystery. Or a Victorian classic. Or a family saga. A story that stays in its lane.

Melissa: Then other times, I crave a book that smashes genres together. Something like ‘The Kingdoms’ by Natasha Pulley that’s a love story with time travel and history and mystery. Or ‘Prague Spring’ by Simon Mawer that’s a literary character study hiding inside a road trip story that tilts into a spy novel.

Melissa: If I could drop everything and read a book from cover to cover today, my pick would be the new novel ‘The Expert of Subtle Revisions’ by Kirsten Menger-Anderson. It combines pre-WWII history, literary fiction, time travel, and a mystery — all told across two timelines: one in 2016 California, and the other in the intellectual cafe culture of 1933 Vienna. [DAVE]

Melissa: Here’s the setup: In 2016, a young woman waits for her father’s boat to arrive at the port in Half Moon Bay, California. Although they set the time and date, he never shows up. He told her this might happen, and he gave her instructions for what to do. She’s to go to the public library in Berkeley, find a particular book by an Austrian mathematician, turn to page 71, and follow the instructions. [DAVE] That’s pretty much all I need to know, but there’s more.

Melissa: She ekes out a living doing odd jobs, including editing Wikipedia entries. She doesn’t do big re-writes, but she powerfully changes the meaning of words, editing ‘killed’ to ‘murdered’ or ‘riot’ to ‘protest’. She knows that words matter. Her dad did, too. She says, ‘Like me, he enjoyed the site because he could be invisible and visible, an outsider and a participant simultaneously, a contradiction realized.’

Melissa: And that’s just the modern timeline. The WWII thread delves into the Engelhardt Circle, a group of intellectuals fighting against the rise of fascism. There’s also a music box that might be a time machine. [DAVE]

Melissa: The author was inspired to write this book by her grandfather’s memoir. He was a mathematician and a member of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers and scientists who met at the University of Vienna in the 1920s and ’30s.

Melissa: This sounds like the kind of book you can really fall into. The LA Times said the 1933 chapters feel ‘eerily contemporary,’ and Publisher’s Weekly called it an ‘appealing intellectual mystery.’ I can’t wait to take a big bite.

Melissa: It’s ‘The Expert of Subtle Revisions’ by Kirsten Menger-Anderson, and it’s out now.

David: I have a lot of respect for the people at NPR, National Public Radio. Since its founding in 1970, NPR has gone from a small, scrappy broadcasting group into one of the most trusted and influential media organizations in the United States.

David: Have you ever sat in your car, idling the engine because you’re caught up in the middle of an NPR story? From the start, NPR offered news that was deeper and richer and more thoughtful and better produced than anything else that was happening in radio at the time. And they never slowed down. They developed a storytelling style built around empathy, curiosity, and insight — they trusted their audience. That resulted in iconic shows like Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and This American Life. Voices like Bob Edwards, Susan Stamberg, Terry Gross, Ira Glass, and Cokie Roberts became friends — and they have all shaped NPR’s thoughtful and approachable identity.

David: They could have stopped there; they did not. The powers at NPR were brave enough in the early days of podcasting to give us groundbreaking shows – like Planet Money, Invisibilia, Serial. For me, NPR has consistently set the bar for audio production, storytelling and presentation for the last fifty years.

David: There’s a new book out that takes us behind the scenes there. It’s called ‘On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR,’ and it’s by Steve Oney. Oney is a longtime journalist. He worked for many years as a staff writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Magazine and Los Angeles magazine. He’s been working on this book for the last 14 years.

David: ‘On Air’ starts you from the early days of cassette tapes and smoky editing rooms. It takes you through fights with the White House, 9/11, the controversial firing of Juan Williams, the sloppy dismissal of Bob Edwards, all the way up to almost now: as NPR tries to navigate a deeply divided America and has yet another existential crisis.

David: If you’re curious about a great American experiment in storytelling and journalism, or if you just want to know a little more about the voices that come out of the box, I suspect you will enjoy this. It just came out this month. It’s ‘On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR,’ and it’s by Steve Oney.

David: And now our Distraction of the Week.

David: If you’re listening to this on release day, tonight marks the first night of the Skellig Coast Dark Sky Festival. Now, that might sound like a jumble of words that don’t quite fit together yet. But we’re going somewhere delightful. I’m going to walk you into it.

David: Our journey starts in Ireland. Specifically along the southwest coast in County Kerry. That’s the Skellig Coast. There you’re going to find dramatic cliffs dropping into the Atlantic Ocean. You’ll see green, rolling hills stretching to the horizon, and villages with colorful cottages tucked into the landscape. Just offshore, they’ve got a sixth-century monastery perched on a steep, rocky island. You can visit and marvel at what life there must have been like, hundreds of years ago.

David: Then there’s the wildlife! You might see a red deer or an Irish hare or maybe a puffin. The whole area — the Skellig Coast — is remote enough that it’s got a sense of timelessness; it feels ancient and alive. If you were there and ran into a troll, your first thought might be, ‘Excuse me for intruding on your home.’ Not: THERE’S A TROLL HERE.

David: There’s something else that makes the Skellig Coast special. It’s a Dark Sky area.

David: That’s an official designation made by Dark Sky International, a non-profit dedicated to protecting natural nightscapes. It means that here, in this corner of the world, there’s very little artificial light. And that means that at night, on a clear night, you can see, really see, the stars, the planets, the Milky Way. You can see the sky that our ancestors looked up at.

David: I have never been to a Dark Sky Area. People who have been have said that it’s beautiful and humbling and awe-inspiring.

David: There are Dark Sky spots all over the world. There’s Big Bend National Park in Texas, Snowdonia Park in Wales, Jasper Park in Canada. but the one in Ireland is the Kerry Dark Sky Reserve, and that it where the festival is happening.

David: Tonight, and for the next two nights, the Skellig Coast Dark Sky Festival celebrates the wonders of the night sky and why it’s worth protecting. If you are there, you can meet astrophysicists and astronomers, hear their their excitement and expertise, look through their giant telescopes at planets and galaxies light-years away. You could try your hand at astrophotography. And – because it’s Ireland – you could enjoy the music and art and storytelling and a little bit of Irish folklore.

David: This year’s theme is ‘Under One Sky.’ It’s all about how, no matter where we are in the world, the sky brings all of us together.

David: Now, if you’re not near the Skellig Coast, and you’re still intrigued by the Dark Sky Festival idea, you still have options. At the end of April, there’s a Star festival in Texas, close to Marfa. In June, there’s the Grand Canyon Star Party. England’s Exmoor Dark Skies Festival happens in October. There’s a Star Festival in Okinawa in August, and another in Thailand. Or, of course, you could always plan ahead and be at next year’s Skellig Coast Dark Sky Festival.

Melissa: Visit strongsenseofplace.com/library for more on the books we talked about today and details about how to attend a dark sky festival.

David: Thanks for joining us in the Libary of Lost Time. Remember to visit your local library and your independent bookstore to lose some time yourself.

Melissa: Stay curious. We’ll talk to you soon.

[cheerful music]

Top image courtesy of Clint McKoy/Unsplash.