Parks and Recreation changed the trajectory of actor Jim O'Heir's career. He landed a small part as Jerry Gergich on the NBC sitcom, ultimately becoming a series regular. Now, 10 years after the show wrapped, O'Heir is out with a memoir, Welcome to Pawnee.

Twenty-five years into the new millennium, Y2K aesthetics and millennial nostalgia are still alive and well in Colette Shade's new book, Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was), where she examines the impact of the era on everything from pop culture to politics.

A new book from writer, BBC broadcaster and cellist Kate Kennedy tackles the stories of four cellists connected by a mutual musical obsession. Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound focuses on musicians like Lise Cristiani, the first female professional cello soloist, and Pál Hermann, a Jewish-Hungarian cellist captured by the Gestapo during World War II.

Today, we revisit conversations with two 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning authors. First, King: A Life, the biography by Jonathan Eig, provides a fresh perspective on the life of one of America's most important activists.

Author Mark Lilla is professor of humanities at Columbia University specializing in intellectual history. His new book, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know, examines the tendencies for willful ignorance in human nature and the correlations of those tendencies to education castes.

A new cookbook from America's Test Kitchen pays homage to the diverse communities of women who have defined food in the American South. When Southern Women Cook includes recipes and accompanying culinary histories from women with a variety of backgrounds. Each of the book's 14 chapters opens with an essay from a historian, author or chef that goes deep on a recipe's backstory or cultural context.

Today's books take readers into the secret lives of farm animals. The first, Pig Years, is a memoir by the writer Ellen Gaydos, who began working as a farmhand at 18 years old. In Pig Years, she writes lyrically about working with, raising and admiring pigs–all while knowing they'll one day be slaughtered.

Colonization and the Wampanoag Story is a 2023 history book for middle school readers about the tribe's first encounters with English settlers. In the early 17th century, European contact set off years of destruction for the Wampanoag Nation, including a disease that killed an estimated two-thirds of the population. Earlier this year, the nonfiction work was recategorized as fiction at a library in Montgomery, Texas, following complaints by an anonymous cardholder. But last month, a judge ruled that the book must be returned to the library's nonfiction section.

Steve Urkel, the nerdy, bespectacled neighbor in Family Matters, is one of '90s television's most iconic characters. Urkel's nasally voice, oversized glasses and signature catchphrases made the character nearly inescapable in pop culture – and also made a star out of Jaleel White, the actor who played him.

Lexy Bloom first read Haruki Murakami in the '90s, when she picked up A Wild Sheep Chase. At that point, not much of the Japanese author's work had been published in English. But Bloom often read his stories in The New Yorker, trying to guess which of his three translators had worked on each one. Bloom, who is now a senior editor at Knopf, began to edit Murakami's English translations years later, starting with 1Q84. Now, Murakami has a new novel out, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, a revision of an earlier novella.