Midday on WNYC

We’ll find out about how four people became connected and how those connections have changed lives. Esquire executive editor Mark Warren and writer-at-large Tom Junod went to Mississippi and the Gulf after Hurricane Katrina, where they met a woman named Stephanie Lee, whose husband had been killed in Iraq two months earlier and who was 9 months pregnant when Katrina hit. Years later the magazine wrote about a scientist/mathematician named Dr. Eric Schadt. Then, when Stephanie Lee was diagnosed with colon cancer, Warren and Junod connected her with Dr. Schadt, who is now Chairman of the Mount Sinai Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. He accepted Stephanie into a study on developing a new, personalized means of killing cancers. Junod and Warren are authors of “There’s a Whole New Way of Killing Cancer: Stephanie Lee Is the Test Case” in Esquire.

Professor Scott Simmon talks about the National Film Preservation Foundation’s DVD set, Lost and Found: American Treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive. The collection includes “Upstream” (1927), a charming backstage comedy feature directed by John Ford; “Won in the Cupboard” (1914), the first surviving film directed by and starring Mabel Normand; and “The White Shadow” (1924), the first surviving feature on which Alfred Hitchcock has a credited role, and other treats.

Kevin Peraino explains how Abraham Lincoln evolved into one of our seminal foreign-policy presidents and helped point the way to America’s rise to world power. Lincoln had never traveled overseas and spoke no foreign languages, yet, during the Civil War, Lincoln and his team skillfully managed to avoid European intervention on the side of the Confederacy. In Lincoln in the World, Kevin Peraino reveals Lincoln to be an indispensable diplomat.

Tim Teeman talks about Gore Vidal’s private life. He interviewed many of Vidal’s closest family and friends, including Claire Bloom and Susan Sarandon, and surveyed Vidal’s own personal archive in his book In Bed with Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master.

Robert Klara talks about the Truman administration’s controversial rebuilding of the White House, which was in danger of collapsing when President Harry Truman and his family moved in when he took office. The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America’s Most Famous Residence shows how Truman’s rebuilding of the White House is a snapshot of postwar America and its first Cold War leader, undertaking a job that changed the centerpiece of the country’s national heritage.

Pulitzer Prize winning Frontline correspondent Walt Bogdanich discusses “A Death in St. Augustine,” a collaborative project with The New York Times that investigates police officer-involved domestic violence. He discusses the hidden problem of officer-involved domestic violence, and the story at this investigation's heart: that of young single mother Michelle O'Connell who was found dead from a gunshot after she broke up with her boyfriend, who was a cop. The sheriff’s office ruled it suicide—but was it?

Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Dockser Marcus discusses her investigative health piece, “Trials.” For six years, The Wall Street Journal followed a group of parents and scientists seeking a treatment for a rare and fatal genetic disease (Niemann-Pick Type C) that strikes primarily children. Their collaboration accelerated development of a promising drug and, along the way, pushed the boundaries of medical science itself.

Producers/directors Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt talk about their documentary “Young Lakota,” along with Sunny Clifford, who’s featured in the film. It follows Sunny, a young Lakota woman who returns to the Pine Ridge Reservation with a dream to change the world around her. Her political awakening begins when the tribe’s first female president, Cecelia Fire Thunder, defies a South Dakota law banning abortion by threatening to build a women’s clinic on the reservation. “Young Lakota” is playing as part of Independent Lens on PBS on November 25, at 10:00 p.m.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union and director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, connects the dots on government surveillance: where we are, where we need to go, and how to get there. The ACLU has filed a lawsuit challenging the NSA’s phone records collection program, and Jaffer is arguing against the Justice Department attorneys.

Bob Brier, one of the world's foremost Egyptologists, discusses our 3,000-year-old fixation with recovering Egyptian culture and its meaning. His book Egyptomania draws on his personal collection and is an inventive and mesmerizing tour of how an ancient civilization endures in ours today.

Melissa Clark tackles Thanksgiving 101! She’ll share tips for making lumpless gravy, flaky pie crusts, using turkey leftovers, and creating a schedule for the day. She's New York Times Dining Section columnist and cookbook writer, and her most recent cookbook is Cook This Now: 120 Easy and Delectable Dishes You Can't Wait to Make. Do you have a Thanksgiving cooking question? Leave it as a comment, below!

Michael Ruhlman sings the praises of schmaltz (or rendered chicken fat), a staple ingredient in traditional Jewish cuisine. But schmaltz is at risk of disappearing from use due to modern dietary trends and misperceptions about this versatile and flavor-packed ingredient. The Book of Schmaltz: Love Song to a Forgotten Fat takes a fresh look at traditional dishes like kugel, kishke, and kreplach, and also ventures into contemporary recipes that take advantage of the versatility of this marvelous fat.

Vegetarian cookbook pioneer and illustrator Mollie Katzen talks about her new cookbook, The Heart of the Plate: Vegetarian Recipes for a New Generation. With The Moosewood Cookbook, Katzen brought vegetarian cuisine into the mainstream. In this new book, she  reinvents the vegetarian repertoire, introducing her “absolutely most loved” dishes.

For this week’s Please Explain, New York Times Social Q’s columnist Philip Galanes gives advice on how to survive the holidays! He’ll answer listener questions on social conundrums such as awkward holiday office parties, hosting guests, gift-giving, and all kinds of difficult family dynamics. He's the New York Times Social Q’s columnist and author of Social Q's: How to Survive the Quirks, Quandaries and Quagmires of Today. Do you have a question about how to survive the holidays? Ask it! Leave a comment, below!

E-cigarettes—small devices which deliver vaporized nicotine to users—are a $2 billion industry. The three large tobacco companies have also made forays into the market. While regulators study the health impacts and safety of e-cigarettes, the demand for the product continues to grow. E-cigarettes are not subject to New York City bans on smoking in public parks or beaches, and it’s not uncommon to see users “vaping” in restaurants, subways and theaters. Dr. Richard Hurt, director of the Nicotine Dependence Center at the Mayo Clinic, and Dr. Deepak Saxena, assistant professor of basic science and craniofacial biology at the NYU College of Dentistry, talk about how e-cigarettes work and their growing popularity.