New books argue that far-off goals and humor can help shift daily routines

Summary

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NPR’s Book of the Day – January 23, 2026

Episode Overview

In this episode, NPR’s Book of the Day explores two new books that invite listeners to break free from mundane routines: “Live to See the Day” by Mark Medley, which profiles people pursuing seemingly impossible or far-off goals, and “Humor Me” by Chris Duffy, which argues for humor as a practical tool to shift our outlook in daily life. Through author interviews and memorable anecdotes, the episode encourages embracing patience, persistence, and laughter—even when the odds of success or a perfect life seem out of reach.

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Segment 1: Pursuing the Unattainable with Mark Medley

“Live to See the Day: Impossible Goals, Unimaginable Futures, and the Pursuit of Things That May Never Be”

[02:12] The Spark: Profiling “No Hope” Candidates

• Origin Story: Mark Medley explains the book’s origins: A profile of Liz White, perennial federal candidate in Canada who never expects to win but runs anyway, led him to seek more dreamers chasing unlikely victories.
  • “She would run in every single election. And it wasn’t like over the years she was getting better results. After watching this continue for like a decade, it struck me this had the makings of a book.” — Mark Medley [03:16]

[04:08] Case Study: The Search for Oran Pendek

• Profile: Jeremy Holden, a British photographer, has spent over 30 years in Sumatra searching for the mythical ape Oran Pendek.
  • Despite seeing the creature in 1994 and dedicating his life to proving its existence, he was unable to capture a photograph.
  • “He was so dumbstruck by what was in front of him that he was just in a state of paralysis.” — Mark Medley [04:44]

[05:03] Patience vs. Delusion

• Where is the line? The interviewer probes whether this kind of persistence is determination or delusion.
  • Medley rejects “delusion” as negative, reframing it as a source of initial motivation.
  • “Delusion can actually help you start something. Because if you willingly knew from the outset that you were not going to achieve this goal, a lot of us wouldn’t start in the first place.” — Mark Medley [05:16]
  • He relates this to his own experience writing the book, knowing it likely won’t reach bestseller status.

[06:21] Pop Culture Parallel: “Contact” Movie Clip

• Inspiration: The film “Contact,” inspired by SETI scientist Jill Tarter, is cited as illustrative of the challenges faced by obsessed visionaries.
  • “Contact’s one of my favorite movies. It’s one of the reasons I became interested in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.” — Mark Medley [06:59]

[07:25] The Pink-Headed Duck Quest

• Profile: Richard Thorns — A UK menswear worker-turned-amateur naturalist devotes his life to seeking the pink-headed duck, which hasn’t been seen in the wild since 1935 but isn’t officially extinct.
  • “For the last 15 odd years, he has been like a one-man search party for the pink-headed duck.” — Mark Medley [07:38]

[08:27] Lessons Learned: Persistence and Embracing Failure

• Personal Growth: Medley reflects on how reporting these stories taught him to embrace patience and failure.
  • “If I realize ... there’s something I want that I’m never gonna get, then that’s okay. That’s part of life, that’s part of the journey and that actually might lead me somewhere better, somewhere more interesting.” — Mark Medley [08:38]

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Segment 2: Using Humor to Transform Daily Life with Chris Duffy

“Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy”

[10:22] Rediscovering Joy in the Everyday

• Backstory: Comedian Chris Duffy describes losing his sense of humor while working as a teacher in tough circumstances.
  • A fifth grader’s hilarious cafeteria food column rekindled his joy.
  • “It reconnected me to the idea that we can still be joyful ... and laugh even while we are in tough times.” — Chris Duffy [10:38]

[11:14] Can Humor Be Learned?

• Humor as a Muscle: Duffy insists anyone can develop humor, likening it to a muscle or a practiced skill.
  • “A lot of humor is actually a practice. ... The more that you do it, the easier it gets.” — Chris Duffy [11:26]

[12:10] Overcoming Routine with a “New Bathroom Mindset”

• Breaking Autopilot: Duffy advocates adopting the perspective of a visitor—pay attention as if seeing your surroundings for the first time.
  • “The more we can walk through the world with a little bit of that new bathroom mindset, the more that we’ll find the delightful, strange quirks that make us laugh…” — Chris Duffy [13:03]

[13:30] Finding the Funny in Tragedy: The Funeral Home Story

• Anecdote: Duffy shares a friend’s experience of laughter breaking through grief due to a comically inapt “Hope to see you soon” printed on a funeral home receipt.
  • “It made them, for a moment, have this release. ... Humor can snap us out of how we’re feeling.” — Chris Duffy [13:43]

[14:21] Is It Wrong to Laugh When the World Is Bad?

• Guilt and Humor: Duffy acknowledges the feeling of guilt that can come with laughter amid hardship, distinguishing humor from toxic positivity.
  • “Humor, to me, doesn’t say, actually it’s good, but it lets you laugh at it sometimes.” — Chris Duffy [14:40]

[15:43] The Powerful Social Impact of Humor

• Connection and Health: Research shows connections matter for health; humor is a powerful catalyst for forming bonds.
  • “The big power of humor is that it makes all of that work feel fun. It makes it feel like play, and it makes you magnetic.” — Chris Duffy [15:59]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Delusion as Motivation:
  • “Delusion can actually help you start something ... because if you willingly knew from the outset that you were not going to achieve this goal, a lot of us wouldn’t start in the first place.” — Mark Medley [05:16]
• On Seeing the Extraordinary in the Ordinary:
  • “The more we can walk through the world with ... that new bathroom mindset, the more we’ll find the delightful, strange quirks that make us laugh.” — Chris Duffy [13:03]
• On Humor Amid Hardship:
  • “Humor, to me, doesn’t say, actually it’s good, but it lets you laugh at it sometimes.” — Chris Duffy [14:40]
• On the Magnetic Power of Laughter:
  • “Everyone loves to spend time with someone who’s laughing and who’s joyful and who makes them laugh and have joy.” — Chris Duffy [16:18]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:12] Mark Medley — Impossible goals, origin of book
• [04:08] Jeremy Holden and the Oran Pendek quest
• [05:03] Patience, determination, and useful “delusion”
• [06:21] “Contact” movie & SETI’s Jill Tarter
• [07:25] Richard Thorns and the hunt for the pink-headed duck
• [08:27] Medley: Life lessons from his subjects
• [10:22] Chris Duffy — Losing and rediscovering humor
• [11:14] Humor as a skill and mindset
• [13:30] The funeral home story: laughing through grief
• [14:21] On feeling guilty for laughing in tough times
• [15:43] Humor’s surprising power for forming connections

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Takeaways

• Pursuing the impossible can be noble and transformative, even (or especially) if success seems unlikely.
• Humor is not just a trait, but a skill and mindset that anyone can cultivate to make daily life richer and more connected.
• Laughter has a uniquely powerful role in forming bonds, breaking habits, and letting us cope with adversity.

Both books ultimately argue for a shift in how we approach life—be it through chasing long-shot dreams or intentionally seeking out and exercising our sense of humor.

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Transcript

[Andrew Limbong]

Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Why do we do the things we do? When you get up in the morning, drink a glass of water, get dressed, go to work, all of these steps are for what exactly? I don't mean to hit you with an existential crisis on a Friday, but January is usually the time for that kind of thing, eh? And there are two books out now that take different approaches to helping you take stock of your life. If you in a bit. If you're feeling like you're living life on autopilot, a new book argues that humor is the perfect remedy. But first, let's hear about some people who are really going for it, trying to live their lives to the fullest, even if the people around them are a bit skeptical. Mark Medley's book Live to See the Day is a collection of profiles of people trying to achieve a goal that likely won't happen. I'm not talking about going scuba diving or building a car or something. I'm talking, I'm talking about people trying to find creatures that may or may not exist. NPR's A. Martinez talks to Medley about some of these people and what we people who aren't trying to make contact with aliens or whatever can learn from them. That's coming up.

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[Interviewer (possibly NPR host or journalist)]

Today as a new year kicks off, some may be busy checking off holistic goals and dreams they hope to accomplish in 2026. Now our next guest has traveled the world learning about people who have spent their lives chasing a reward that may come, at least not in their lifetime. There's the chase for a pink headed duck, largely known to have gone extinct in South Asia. There's a team in the United States working to defend the planet from objects in space. And let's not forget the photographer in the jungles of Indonesia chasing a mystery ape. Mark Medley is a journalist and the author of Live to See the Day, and he joins us now to talk more about this. So, Mark, first off, the idea behind this book, how did it even come about?

[Mark Medley]

This book really wouldn't exist if not for a woman named Liz White. She's the leader of what is now called the Animal Protection Party of Canada. And there was a federal election and I pitched my editor on the idea of profiling a no hope candidate, one of those names on the ballot who, you know, are lucky to muster a dozen votes, if that.

[Interviewer (possibly NPR host or journalist)]

The underdog story.

[Mark Medley]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And she would run in every single election. And it wasn't like over the years she was getting better results. After watching this continued for like a decade, it struck me this had the makings of a book. You know, people who are striving for a goal they know they're never gonna achieve, or as you said, it's not gonna happen in their lifetime. And so I went out in the world to find more people like Liz.

[Interviewer (possibly NPR host or journalist)]

So let's get into that. Because you just said striving for a goal they are never going to achieve, that doesn't seem like a good way to start anything.

[Mark Medley]

You would think so. And I wouldn't think so either. You know, I found in the years I was working on this book and I kind of got a glimpse of what they myself, I found it's a really admirable way to live.

[Interviewer (possibly NPR host or journalist)]

All right, Mario, let's get into some of these dreamers. Tell us first about the photographer who has spent pretty much his entire life pursuing a mystery ape.

[Mark Medley]

So that is Jeremy Holden. He's a British man and he spent over 30 years, much of that living in Sumatra, looking for a creature called Oran Pendek. So this is basically the Sumatran version of Bigfoot and has been in, you know, legend on the island for ages. What is it? It's a bipedal ape, and Jeremy claims to have seen one in 1994, soon after his arrival in Sumatra. And he has devoted his life since then to proving to the world that it's real.

[Interviewer (possibly NPR host or journalist)]

But he's a photographer. Why didn't he Have a camera, then?

[Mark Medley]

I mean, it's a very, very good question, and one I asked him, and one many, many people have asked him. The way he put it to me during his encounter, he didn't have a camera. And even if he did, he was so dumbstruck by what was in front of him that he was just in a state of paralysis. So that's Jeremy.

[Interviewer (possibly NPR host or journalist)]

So tell me then, Mark, with the people that you have spoken to on this what is the difference, or where is the line between patience and determination and just plain delusion?

[Mark Medley]

I mean, I don't think necessarily delusion is a negative thing. You know, I think delusion, even though it has these connotations, delusion can actually help you start something. Because if you willingly knew from the outset that you were not going to achieve this goal a lot of us wouldn't start in the first place. So one of the things I've really, really tried not to do is label them in this way because, you know, I might be delusional. The fact, writing a book, you know, knowing that the odds are this is not going to wind up on the New York Times bestseller list. Right. And yet I did it anyway. There were many, many times my wife probably thought I was delusional.

[Interviewer (possibly NPR host or journalist)]

Yeah, now you mentioned your wife. The one thing with some of these people is that there are people around them one way or the other, either positive influences or negative influences. And I want to play a scene from a movie, one of my favorite movies of all time, mark. It's Contact, 1997 film. Jodie Foster plays Ellie Arroway. She's a brilliant scientist, child prodigy who's obsessed with contacting extraterrestrial life. But her research gets shut down because it's just deemed as a waste of resources. Let's play that clip.

[Interviewer (Sacha Pfeiffer)]

Is it true? I'll let you pull the plug.

[Mark Medley]

No, you can't see it now, but I'm doing you a favor.

[Interviewer (Sacha Pfeiffer)]

You're far too promising a scientist to.

[Mark Medley]

Be wasting your gifts on this nonsense.

[Interviewer (Sacha Pfeiffer)]

I don't consider what could potentially be the most important discovery of the human race nonsense.

[Andrew Limbong]

Okay?

[Interviewer (Sacha Pfeiffer)]

There's 400 billion scientists and only two probabilities. One, there is intelligent life out there.

[Mark Medley]

But it's so far away you'll never contact it in your lifetime.

[NPR Sponsor Announcer (Shopify)]

Two.

[Mark Medley]

There'S nothing out there but noble gases and carbon compounds and you're wasting your time.

[Interviewer (possibly NPR host or journalist)]

Tom Skerritt is the other voice playing the President's science advisor, David Drumlin. I mean, Mark, Jodie Foster's character there, that could be a character in your book.

[Mark Medley]

She is a character in my book. Jill Tarter, she was one of the co founders of the SETI Institute which is in Mountain View, California. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence which I visited a couple of years back. And Jill was the inspiration for Ellie Ellraway's character in the novel. And so, you know. Yeah, listening to that, I mean Contact's one of my favorite movies. It's one of the reasons I became interested in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

[Interviewer (possibly NPR host or journalist)]

Before I let you go, I need to find out about the chase for the pink headed duck that I mentioned earlier. I mean I just, just to think of a duck with a pink head as. I mean I'm rooting for this, for this pink headed duck to be discovered.

[Mark Medley]

Yeah. So Richard Thorns is a gentleman who lives in the UK and he has no science background whatsoever. He was working in a menswear shop in a small when in the late 90s he went to the library and he found a book called Vanishing Birds and he read it over his lunch break and he decided that the story of this duck which was last seen in the wild in 1935, last one died in captivity in India in 1948. And even though it hasn't been seen in you know, 80 years, it has still not been declared fully extinct. And so what this guy has done is basically, you know, for the last 15 odd years is he has been like a one man search party for the pink headed duck.

[Interviewer (possibly NPR host or journalist)]

What do you think we can kind of learn from these people that are pursuing these passions and keep doing it regardless of the people around them or maybe forces at work against them?

[Mark Medley]

Well, I think in like my own life, like it has led me to be more patient. You know, I'm trying to embrace failure more than I ever have in my life. That's if something doesn't or if I realize, you know, there's something I want that I'm never gonna get, then that's okay. That's part of life, that's part of the journey and that actually might lead me somewhere better, somewhere more interesting.

[Interviewer (possibly NPR host or journalist)]

Mark Medley is the author of Live to See the Impossible Goals, Unimaginable Futures and the Pursuit of Things that May Never be. Mark, thank you very much.

[Mark Medley]

Thank you so much.

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[Andrew Limbong]

When was the last time you laughed? Not just tee hee hee hahaha, but a big, guttural, gut busting laugh. If it's been a minute, you might want to fix that. Chris Duffy's new book, Humor Me, is all about how humor can help us see our lives from a different slant, can help us connect with other people, and can make the drudgery of life a bit more bearable. Here's NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer.

[Interviewer (Sacha Pfeiffer)]

Chris Duffy is a comedian, but he'd reached a point in his life where he'd nearly forgotten the joy of laughter.

[Chris Duffy]

I was teaching at a school and I was dealing with a lot of really tough issues. You know, kids who were dealing with poverty or struggling with home situations or housing insecurity.

[Interviewer (Sacha Pfeiffer)]

But as Duffy describes in his new book, Humor Me, a fifth grader helped him find the funny alongside the grim.

[Chris Duffy]

I really had lost a lot of my sense of humor. There were not laughs in my day to day and it became really unsustainable. Like I just wasn't having fun and I was burning out and I felt like nothing I did really was making a difference. And then one of the students who I was working with, who actually was one of my more challenging students, he started a column in the school newspaper where he was a food critic who reviewed cafeteria food. And his reviews were so funny that I couldn't help but laugh. And it reconnected me to the idea that we can still be joyful and humorous and laugh even while we are in tough times and dealing with serious things. And that that kind of transformed my life, to be honest.

[Interviewer (Sacha Pfeiffer)]

And you make the argument in your book that humor can be taught, that we have humor muscles. Now that surprised me because I sort of thought of humor as something you have or you don't have. So explain the muscular part of this.

[Chris Duffy]

Yeah, a lot of people think that you're either born with a sense of humor or you're not. And I just completely disagree with that for a couple reasons. One is I have been a professional comedian for 12 years and I've seen tons of people go from not that funny to hilarious. And then I've also taught comedy to a lot of people and I've seen how you can really learn the skills of comedy. One of the biggest things for me is that a lot of humor is actually a practice. And it's a practice of noticing things that are odd and unusual and then asking some more questions about them. And the thing with any sort of attention or practice like that is the more that you do it, the easier it gets. So if you start noticing funny, unusual things, then you find that you notice more and more and more, and then your life is filled with hilarious, weird, unusual things where before it was kind of just a gray blur.

[Interviewer (Sacha Pfeiffer)]

Although you also acknowledge in the book that after a while we tend to go into autopilot. Like, our commute is the we might stop seeing things. So how do you think people should get out of their ruts or their routines and start thinking that thing around me that I barely noticed is actually really entertaining?

[Chris Duffy]

Okay, so we all have had this experience of like, you walk into your house, and it's not like you actually see anything in your house. You just know the path. You know it so well, you could do it with your eyes closed. You're on your commute, and you're not actually registering the things that you're driving past. You're just making the turns. And every once in a while, we get jolted out of that and we notice what is actually in front of us. We actually see what is on the floor in our living room or what is next to us on the street. And that's not always funny. But that's the root of what can be funny, is to actually notice things. So I encourage people to use what I would call a new bathroom state of mind. And so the way that I think about this is if you walk into a friend's house for the first time and you're using their restroom, you immediately notice, like, where is the hand towel? Do they put their toilet paper with the roll going down or do they face it over the top the correct way? Do they have a book in the bathroom? Is the book kind of disturbingly look like it has been wet and then dry? Like you notice all these? So I think that the more that we can walk through the world with a little bit of that new bathroom mindset, the more that we'll find the delightful, strange quirks that make us laugh and actually just make us pay attention.

[Interviewer (Sacha Pfeiffer)]

There are some places where you might think it's a stretch to find humor, but you mention an example in your book involving a funeral home, and I thought this one was very funny. And typically, if we're in a funeral home, there's not a happy setting. So can you tell the funeral home anecdote?

[Chris Duffy]

One of my friends, Michael, had a real tragedy and had a loss. And he was at the funeral home and he was paying the bill afterwards. And when they gave him the receipt, it said, thank you, hope to see you soon. And he said, like, that's no place in the world that I would hope to be seen soon. Less than the funeral home. What are you doing? But it also made him laugh for the first time in a really long time. Him and his wife, they had a really cathartic laugh. And I think that idea, right, that humor can snap us out of how we're feeling. It's not that it actually changes the situation. It didn't, like, improve the fact that they had had a horrible loss, but it made them, for a moment, have this release to.

[Interviewer (Sacha Pfeiffer)]

There are many people, obviously today who feel very down about the state of the world. You know, we know that there's a loneliness epidemic, that a lot of people feel isolated. Many people feel dismayed about politics. And because of that, people can actually feel a little guilty laughing or being lighthearted. What's your advice for them?

[Chris Duffy]

Yeah, it's something that I really relate to. I mean, you know, sometimes, especially because my job is to make people laugh. When the world is really terrible, it feels like, what am I doing? I mean, like, there's. There's tragedy, there's death, there's violence, there's war. What is the purpose of laughing? But what I keep coming back to is that humor and laughter, for me, they're kind of the opposite of toxic positivity, right? The idea that, like, hey, there's a silver lining in every cloud. Like, don't worry, there's a war going on, but there's a bright side. And that's ridiculous, right? Sometimes there are just things that are bad. They're just bad. They're not good. And humor, to me, doesn't say, actually it's good, but it lets you laugh at it sometimes. It's funny how bad it is, right? Like any parent can relate to. You're having a day where you're totally overwhelmed. Nothing is going right. And then right when finally it looks like the kids are going to go to sleep, one of the kids throws up all over the floor and you just have to laugh because it's like, this couldn't possibly be worse timing. But the laughter lets you release the tension. It lets you acknowledge the ridiculousness of the situation.

[Interviewer (Sacha Pfeiffer)]

On the website for your book, there's a blurb that really attributes a lot of power to humor. It says that humor can help you make friends be healthier, physically and mentally, be more creative, get through hard times. I mean, how powerful ultimately do you think humor is?

[Chris Duffy]

Well, I think that there's a ton of research that shows how important human connections are to our lives, that one of the biggest predictors of our health and our longevity is how many people you feel like you can talk to. And to me, that can sometimes feel like a homework assignment, right? Like, oh, I have to go out and talk to someone or call a friend or send a letter or do this work. And I think that the big power of humor is that it makes all of that work feel fun. It makes it feel like play, and it makes you magnetic. Everyone loves to spend time with someone who's laughing and who's joyful and who makes them laugh and have joy.

[Interviewer (Sacha Pfeiffer)]

It's true, isn't it? You gravitate towards those people totally.

[Chris Duffy]

They're magnetic. So I think that humor, its superpower is that it lets you make those really all important connections with other people in a way that feels effortless.

[Interviewer (Sacha Pfeiffer)]

That's Chris Duffy. He's the author of Humor Me How Laughing More can make you present creative, connected and happy. Chris, thank you.

[Chris Duffy]

Oh, thank you. This was an absolute pleasure.

[Andrew Limbong]

That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. Let us know what you think you can write to us at Book OF the [e-mail] I'm Andrew Limbong. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan with help from Ivy Buck. Our founding editor is Petra Meyer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Jacob Fenston, Elena Torrek, Emiko Tamagawa, Todd Month, Samantha Balaban, Melissa Gray, Lily Caroz, Adriana Gallardo, Ryan, Becky and Ed McNulty. Yolanda Sanguine is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.

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