Amy Tan sketches backyard birds, the secret life of food critic Craig LaBan, and ‘The Dictionary People’

Restaurant critics, they could be sitting right next to you at a restaurant, and you wouldn’t even know it. We talk with Craig LaBan, restaurant critic and columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, about his job, the restaurant industry, and some Philly culinary highlights.

The Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan joins us to talk about her latest book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles. She writes about her foray into birding, a hobby she took up in 2016 after feeling like she needed to find a source of calm in her life. This curious step into nature eventually grew into a love for birds and their unique behaviors.

Paying tribute to the original Wikipedia … a crowd-sourced resource called the Oxford English Dictionary. We hear from Sarah Ogilvie, author of the book The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary.