In this episode of Gweek, I talked to Ruben Bolling and Nate DiMeo.

Ruben Bolling is the creator of “Tom the Dancing Bug,” the weekly comic strip that premieres every Wednesday on Boing Boing. “Tom the Dancing Bug” has won many awards and is a multiple Harvey Award nominee for Best Comic Strip. You can join the INNER HIVE, the comic strip’s subscription service.

Nate DiMeo is the creator of the Memory Palace, a podcast and public radio segment. He’s an on again off again journalist and has written for the TV show Parks and Recreation and was a finalist for the Thurber Prize in American Humor for co-writing a companion book for Parks and Rec called Pawnee: the Greatest Town in America.

Here's what we talked about:

Cinebook, a line of European comic books, including Lucky Luke, Yakari, Blue Coats

Marble Season, by Gilbert Hernandez

Waze, a traffic and GPS app

The Books of Beginning series, a middle-grade fantasy adventure trilogy by John Stephens

Super Flat Times, a kinda lost, unheralded, terrific collection of short stories about a bonkers dystopian world by Matthew Derby

The Hunter, by Richard Stark

Wikireader, $20 gadget contains "the entire English Wikipedia with 3 million topics"

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In this episode of Gweek, I talked to Ned Vizzini and Chris Columbus about their new book, House of Secrets. Harry Potter creator J. K. Rowling calls House of Secrets “a breakneck, jam-packed, roller-coaster of an adventure about the secret power of books.”

Ned Vizzini is an award-winning author and television writer. He’s the author of the novels Be More Chill and It's Kind of a Funny Story, and he was on Gweek 069 last year when his delightful young adult novel, The Other Normals was published. He’s also written for TV, including MTV’s Teen Wolf.

Chris Columbus is the writer, director, and producer of many award winning movies, including Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Goonies, Gremlins, The Help, and Home Alone.

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In this episode of Gweek, I talked to the terrific crime writer Duane Swierczynski. Duane has a new book out today, called Point & Shoot. It's the third and final novel in his Charlie Hardie series (see my review here). Next week, Dark Horse is releasing X #1, written by Duane. We talked about his novels, non-fiction work, and comic book writing. We also geeked out on our favorite crime writers, and I added several authors to my list of books I want to read before I die.

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What we talked about in this episode:

Fun & Games

Hell & Gone

Point & Shoot

The Wheel Man

The Blonde

Frauds, Scams, and Cons

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Dean Putney and I interviewed Lucy Knisley, one of my favorite cartoonists. From her website:

Lucy is an illustrator, comic artist and author. Occasionally she is a puppeteer, ukulele player and food/travel writer. She likes books, sewing, bicycles, food you can eat with a spoon, ornery cats, art you can climb on, manatees, nice pens, costumes, baking, television, cheese and Oscar Wilde.

Her first published book, French Milk, is a drawn journal about living (and eating) in Paris with her mother. (From Touchstone Publishing from Simon and Schuster), August of 2008.

Her newest book, Relish, from First Second Books, is about growing up in the food industry. (First Second Books, April 2013.)

Beginning with a love for Archie comics, Tintin and Calvin and Hobbes, she has been making comics in some form or another since she could hold a pencil.

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What we talked about in this episode:

Mailbox

Primates

Pretty Girls Ugly Faces

Record!!

Moves

Candy Crush Saga

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

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<p>One day in 1990 I was scanning the racks of my local comic book store in Boulder Colorado, and I came across the first issue of a comic book called <em>Real Stuff</em>. The cover was drawn by <a href="http://www.google.com/cse?cx=partner-pub-2170174688585464%3Ad58nno-rqp8&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=peter+bagge&siteurl=#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=peter%20bagge&gsc.page=1">Peter Bagge</a>, who was the creator of a comic book series called <em>Neat Stuff</em>. I assumed <em>Real Stuff</em> was a new comic written and illustrated by Bagge, so I pulled it off the shelf without scrutinizing it further, and added it to the other comics I’d selected to buy that day. </p>

<p>When I got home, I sat down to read it. It turned out not to be a new comic book by Peter Bagge, but a series of autobiographical short stories written by a man named Dennis Eichhorn.</p>

<p>From the very first story, I knew I was going to love <em>Real Stuff</em>. Dennis has had some of the strangest life experiences you can imagine, and he comes across as a person who is adventurous, compassionate, curious, and enjoys laughing at himself. Best of all, he is a terrific storyteller.</p>

<p><em>Real Stuff</em> is one of my favorite comics of all time, and I have some good news to share. Boing Boing is going to start running the amazing stories from the pages of Real Stuff, once a week. I’m immensely excited that a new audience is going to be able to read Real Stuff on Boing Boing, free of charge. I hope you’ll enjoy reading, or re-reading them.</p>

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I spoke with food blogger and Meatshare founder Melissa McEwen. Her blog, Hunt Gather Love is about "the intersection between evolutionary biology and food."

Melissa is profiled in today's Chicago Reader article about a supper club run by amateur chefs.

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David and I spoke with Marina Gorbis about her new book, The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World.

When Marina Gorbis was a child, growing up in the Soviet Union, she lived with her sister and widowed mother, a medical doctor at a government clinic in Odessa. Her mother’s salary was meager, and her mother wasn’t a member of the privileged communist party elite, and yet Marina says she and her sister enjoyed a life filled with the arts, good food, fashionable clothes, travel, and education. It was all possible, she says, because her mother knew the value of social capital. “Social connections,” Marina writes, “were a powerful currency that flowed through [my mother’s] network of friends and acquaintances, giving her access to many goods and services and enabling our comfortable, if not luxurious, lifestyle.”

Marina never forgot this lesson about the incredible power of networked individuals, and it directed the course of her professional life. For the past 7 years, Marina has been the executive director of the Institute for the Future, an independent, non-profit research organization and creative design studio in Palo Alto California where David is also a researcher. IFTF helps organizations think about the future to make better decisions in the present.

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David and I had a terrific conversation with Nick Harmer, bass player for Death Cab for Cutie. We talked about state of home recording, great crime novels, the best places to use the toilet while on tour, and much more.

Nick provided a list of enjoyable books he's read while on tour:

• A Darkness More Than Night, by Michael Connelly
• The Cabinet of Curiosities, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (I dig the character Agent Pendergast)
• The Guards, by Ken Bruen
• Out, by Natsuo Kirino
• The Night Gardner, by George Pelecanos
• Print The Legend, by Craig McDonald
• In The Woods, by Tana French
• Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn [Boing Boing interviewed Gillian on Gweek 073 in 2012]

Nick says: "Pretty much anything by these authors is great reading. Other notable go-to authors for me include: James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, James Sallis, and Walter Mosley to name a few."

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I had an enlightening conversation with Josh Gosfield and Camille Sweeney, authors of a great new book called The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well. Josh and Camille interviewed 36 notable people -- artists, entrepreneurs, actors, athletes -- asking them their secrets of success. Joining me on the episode was Gweek's frequent co-host, Joshua Glenn, co-editor of Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun and HiLowBrow.

In this episode:

The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well

Ye-Ye Profile: Gigi Gaston

Fathom Butterfly - the notorious beauty queen, showgirl, Hammer horror actress, porn star, felon and feminist filmmaker tweets her memoirs

Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun, by Elizabeth Foy Larsen and Joshua Glenn.

Katana, by Ann Nocenti and Alex Sanchez

Science-Fiction: The Early Years, by Everett Franklin Bleiler

In Praise of Messy Lives, by Katie Roiphe

Geek Battle: The Game of Extreme Geekdom

Flow Free

This was a fun episode! I spoke with John Glassie, author of A Man of Misconceptions, a non-fiction book about the unusual 17th-century polymath, Athanasius Kircher, and Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein, which recounts Joshua’s yearlong quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top "mental athletes.”

In this episode:

A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change, by John Glassie

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, by Lawrence Weschler

"Utopian for Beginners: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented," a New Yorker article by Joshua Foer

"Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm," a Wired article by Gary Wolf

Atlas Obscura is the definitive guide to the world's wondrous and curious places.

Language learning apps and websites: Memrise, iAnki, Dr. Moku's Hiragana Mnemonics, Dr. Moku's Katakana Mnemonics