Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchRandolph M. Nesse, "Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry" (Dutton, 2019)
Episode 49
Why do I feel bad? There is real power in understanding our bad feelings. With his classic Why We Get Sick, Dr. Randolph Nesse helped to establish th…
5 years, 1 month ago
Jenny Bangham, "Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
Episode 56
Blood is messy, dangerous, and charged with meaning. By following it as it circulates through people and institutions, Jenny Bangham explores the int…
5 years, 1 month ago
Deborah R. Coen, "The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter" (U Chicago Press, 2013)
Episode 37
Earthquakes have taught us much about our planet's hidden structure and the forces that have shaped it. This knowledge rests not only on the recordin…
5 years, 1 month ago
Joseph Rouse, "Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image" (U Chicago Press, 2015)
Episode 127
Naturalism as a guiding philosophy for modern science both disavows any appeal to the supernatural or anything else transcendent to nature, and repud…
5 years, 1 month ago
Michael D. Gordin, "On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Episode 5
Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience", typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or un…
5 years, 1 month ago
Adam Rogers, "Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern" (Houghton Mifflin, 2021)
Episode 52
From kelly green to millennial pink, our world is graced with a richness of colors. But our human-made colors haven’t always matched nature’s kaleido…
5 years, 1 month ago
Bijal P. Trivedi, "Breath from Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine Forever" (Benbella, 2020)
Episode 55
Cystic fibrosis was once a mysterious disease that killed infants and children. Now it could be the key to healing millions with genetic diseases of …
5 years, 1 month ago
Lucy van de Wiel, "Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging" (NYU Press, 2020)
Episode 163
How does egg freezing reshape our conception of time, aging and fertility? In her new monograph, Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the …
5 years, 1 month ago
Michelle Nijhuis, "Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction" (Norton, 2021)
Episode 26
In the late nineteenth century, as humans came to realize that our rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving other animal specie…
5 years, 1 month ago
Jason Karlawish, "The Problem of Alzheimer's: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It" (St. Martin's Press, 2021)
Episode 54
In 2020, an estimated 5.8 million Americans had Alzheimer’s, and more than half a million died because of the disease and its devastating complicatio…
5 years, 1 month ago