Books “make people who are not like us more human,” says Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation. She grew up loving books and their ability to make readers more empathetic to unfamiliar ideas and characters, even when all the reading is done in our bedrooms by ourselves. Lucas gives us her Brief but Spectacular take on how books can connect us to one another.

As filmmaker Damon Davis tells it, being black in America comes with anxiety. To survive, he says, you’re constantly walking on eggshells because the way you talk and the clothes on your back can be used as a weapon against you. Davis, co-director of the documentary “Whose Streets,” gives his Brief but Spectacular take on finding courage after the death of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

As a longtime writer for The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin was less interested in directly explaining why what he was writing was important than in just telling a good story. Trillin offers his Brief but Spectacular take on some of the best lessons he learned on writing and why he always shared his rough drafts with his wife, Alice.