Today we’re joined by lawyer and author Bryan Stevenson for a conversation about the historical Mother Emanuel AME church, and what it means to tell the story of American history through a single institution.

Then Canadian journalist Paul Wells stops by for a look at the rise of The New York Times, and the lessons for news media writ large.

And finally, Bookends host Mattea Roach chats with Jayme about Ukraine, the power of the novel, and some very endangered snails.

The books:

Mother Emanuel by Kevin Sack

The Times by Adam Nagourney

Endling by Maria Reva

Some of our favourite guests of the year return to talk about books that helped meaningfully explain 2025.

We talk about the evergreen appeal of Plato as well as Jewish identity with former Yale fascism scholar Jason Stanley.

The déjà vu of trade wars and Canadian nationalism are tackled by journalist and author Stephen Maher. His pick is a book that details the last election of Sir John A. Macdonald and first election of Wilfrid Laurier.

Then the career works of Herman Melville as a blueprint for modern America with historian Rick Perlstein.

This is part one, in a series that will continue on tomorrow’s show!

The books:

The Republic Book 8 by Plato

Being Jewish After Gaza: A Reckoning by Peter Beinart

The History of Canada Series: The Destiny of Canada by Christopher Pennington

The Lightning-Rod Man by Herman Melville

In the 1980s and 90s, Satan and his followers were accused of brainwashing children, sacrificing babies, and infiltrating North American society on a massive scale — yet these thousands of alleged Satanists were nowhere to be found. Even so, the narrative became embedded in our cultural memory, warping everything it touched — including the lives of innocent people… And it never quite died out.

In the new 8-part series, The Devil You Know, Sarah Marshall (You’re Wrong About) explores the tangled web of the Satanic Panic, in a journey that will take you everywhere from Victoria, B.C. to rural Kentucky to San Antonio, Texas. This is a show about the people who experienced the Satanic Panic in real-time — the believers, the skeptics, the bystanders, and the wrongfully-convicted. What was it like to be a psychologist told to look for Satanists in every case; a mother slowly recovering memories of supposed Satanic abuse; a teenager accused of conspiracy to murder? The stories of these eyewitnesses point us toward the real underlying problems — individual and societal — that the Panic was a response to. The fault, as ever, was not with Satanists, but in ourselves.

You can find more episodes of The Devil You Know wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/TDYKxFB