You Just Have to Read This: Books by Alumni, Spring 2026

Hilary Jacobs Hendel ’85, P’18, and Juli Fraga, Parents Have Feelings, Too (Penguin Random House)

In Parents Have Feelings, Too, Hilary Jacobs Hendel and Juli Fraga turn a compassionate lens toward an often-overlooked truth: Caregiving is emotionally complex, and parents’ emotions matter, too. Drawing on psychological insight, the book validates the full spectrum of parental emotions—joy, exhaustion, resentment, love, grief—emphasizing strategies that allow parents to work through them calmly and confidently.

Grounded in contemporary therapeutic frameworks, the authors encourage parents to recognize, name, and process their feelings rather than suppress them in the name of selflessness. By tending to their own emotional health, Hendel argues, parents not only strengthen their resilience but model emotional literacy for their children. Practical and empathetic, this work speaks to anyone navigating the layered, imperfect, and deeply human experience of raising a family.

Hilary Jacobs Hendel ’85 is a psychotherapist, writer, and advocate for emotional education, known for her work on emotions and healing.

Jason Loviglio ’87, Empathy Machines: This American Life, Podcasting, and the Public Radio Structure of Feeling (Bloomsbury)

In Empathy Machines, Jason Loviglio offers a sharp cultural history of American public radio and its transformation in the age of podcasting. Centering on the influential program This American Life, Loviglio traces how intimate storytelling, confessional narration, and carefully crafted sound design helped redefine how audiences experience journalism—not only as a narrative mechanism but also as a “liberal feeling.”

The book’s title gestures to its central claim: that programs like This American Life function as “empathy machines,” cultivating emotional connection across distance and difference. Loviglio situates the rise of podcasting within broader shifts in media culture, asking how public radio’s aesthetics have shaped contemporary political discourse, identity, and civic imagination. Both media history and cultural critique, Empathy Machines will resonate with readers interested in storytelling, sound studies, and national politics.

Jason Loviglio ’87 is a scholar of media and cultural studies whose work examines radio, popular culture, and the politics of feeling in American media.

Hillary Rosner ’93, Roam: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World (Patagonia)

In Roam, Hillary Rosner turns her curiosity towards the interconnected nature of our home planet, question its human-centered view and how it has impacted the way wildlife live and roam. At a moment when ecosystems are increasingly fragmented by roads, fences, and climate change, Rosner explores the urgent global movement to reconnect landscapes and restore the ancient migratory routes of wild animals. From wildlife corridors to rewilding projects, she examines how scientists, conservationists, and communities are reimagining coexistence in a fractured world.

At its heart, Roam asks: What does freedom mean for animals whose survival depends on movement? And what might their struggle to roam teach us about resilience, interdependence, and repair? Blending narrative reporting with environmental science, Rosner delivers a timely and hopeful account of conservation at its most ambitious—an appeal not only to protect wildlife, but to rethink the boundaries we impose on the natural world.

Hillary Rosner ’93 is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in publications including National Geographic, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.