And best-selling writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has been selected as one of this year’s 24 winners of the MacArthur genius grants. Coates is the author of the new book, “Between the World and Me,” which has been called “required reading” by Toni Morrison. On July 22, we spent the hour with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: “What I wanted to do with this book is to give the reader some sense of what it meant to live under a system of plunder as an individual, to express that, to take it out of the realm of numbers and to take it directly into, you know, individual people. How does it feel every day in your life to live under such a system? How do you cope with that? How is it warping? How is it perverse? What sort of effects does it ultimately have on you? And how do you, you know, as much as possible, make your peace with it?”

That was best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of this year’s winners of the MacArthur genius grants. Other winners include Lin-Manuel Miranda, the writer and star of the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton”; Gary Cohen, an environmental health activist; and Juan Salgado, a Chicago-based immigrant rights organizer.