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A.O. Scott, The Times’s co-chief film critic, is (temporarily) wearing a different hat, writing a series of pieces for the Book Review about American writers who give a sense of the country’s complex identity. He visits the podcast this week to discuss the first of those pieces, about Wallace Stegner, and to further explain what he sees as the purpose of the series.

“American literature, it’s always seemed to me, presents a much richer and more complicated — just a different — landscape from what we tend to perceive or how we tend to think about this country in political discourse or social science or journalism or any of those kind of neat packages that we wrap up our national experience in,” Scott says. “And I thought it might be helpful, just as a sort of corrective, or just a respite, from this intensely conflictual and political way of talking that we’re used to, to read some of these writers.”

David Kamp visits the podcast this week to discuss his new book, “Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America,” which traces the origin of “Sesame Street,” “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and other shows.

“These professionals who created all of these programs, they respected the interiority of children, the emotional intelligence of children,” Kamp says. “Generationally, it wasn’t just people like Mister Rogers and Jim Henson, the Sesame Street people, it was also people like Maurice Sendak and Ursula Nordstrom, who was the children’s books editor at Harper & Row, who said: ‘Hang on a minute, kids have an emotional life that’s not being properly addressed by the literature or by the TV programming.’”

Also on this week’s episode, Elizabeth Harris has news from the publishing world; and Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai talk about their recent reviews. Pamela Paul is the host.

Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:

• “Entangled Life” by Merlin Sheldrake

• “The Vanishing Half” by Brit Bennett

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.