MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
And finally today, we want to leave you with a few more recommendations from our recent guests. We've been asking people to share something to read or watch that would help people make sense of the current moment, and here is what they said.
ERIC MARCUS: Hi. I'm Eric Marcus, founder and host of the "Making Gay History" podcast. And I recommend that everyone watch a documentary called "Brother Outsider: The Life Of Bayard Rustin." And for those who don't know, Bayard Rustin was a key mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and also a principal architect and organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. And he was an openly gay African American man.
And I try to live my life by one of the things he often said. He said, we need in every community a group of angelic troublemakers. And that was Bayard Rustin - an angelic troublemaker.
LIZ MONTAGUE: Hi. I'm Liz Montague. I'm a New Yorker cartoonist and illustrator. And I would recommend watching "Insecure" by Issa Rae. It's on HBO. She does an incredible job of just fully showing Black womanhood and Black people and the Black experience. And it's excellent television.
TIM KAINE: This is Senator Tim Kaine. And I think a wonderful book to read right now that's both scary but at the end of the day a little bit hopeful is Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" because it suggests that America can be led down a path that is extremely harmful. But in this book, I think he believes there's kind of an innate goodness deep within us that would lead to a snap-back - that we could be led pretty far down a bad path, but there would be a snap-back.
And I hold onto that same belief that we can be tested and maybe not always be up to the task, but at the end of the day, we'll rise to the occasion. And I believe that.
MARTIN: That was Senator Tim Kaine, Liz Montague and Eric Marcus. If you missed our conversations with them, you can find them at npr.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF BORIS GARDINER HAPPENING'S "BREEZIN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.