Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchMichael Shermer, “Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia” (Henry Holt, 2018)
For millennia, religions have concocted numerous manifestations of heaven and the afterlife, and though no one has ever returned from such a place to…
8 years, 4 months ago
Dmitry Novikov, “Cybernetics: Past to Future” (Springer Verlag, 2016)
With all of its entailed engagements with epistemology, emergence, and self-organization, cybernetics began (and arguably still is) the science of co…
8 years, 4 months ago
Howard I. Kushner, “On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017)
In the early twentieth century, Robert Hertz, a French anthropologist, and Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist, debated the causes and consequ…
8 years, 4 months ago
Ty Tashiro, “Awkward: The Science of Why We’re Socially Awkward and Why That’s Awesome” (Harper Collins, 2017)
Some people can’t help but be ‘awkward’ despite their lifelong efforts to blend in. They feel ashamed of their social ineptitude and end up shying aw…
8 years, 4 months ago
Erika Dyck and Alex Deighton, “Managing Madness” (U Manitoba Press, 2017)
Embracing a multi-perspectival authorial voice, Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada (Unive…
8 years, 4 months ago
Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, “Jonas Salk: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided t…
8 years, 5 months ago
Dan Flores, “Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History” (Basic Books, 2016)
Wile E. Coyote has a family tree with many roots and branches, argues University of Montana A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus Dan Flores in his recent …
8 years, 6 months ago
Abby Hafer, “The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not” (Cascade Books, 2015)
Have you ever asked yourself why humans have an appendix that will sometimes explode and kill us? Why do men’s testicles hang outside the body where …
8 years, 7 months ago
Climate Change Skepticism with Lawrence Torcello
Season 1 Episode 15
How does corporate misinformation and partisan skepticism effect what we know about climate change? Lawrence Torcello is an Associate Professor of Ph…
8 years, 7 months ago
Scott Bembenek, “The Cosmic Machine: The Science That Runs Our Universe and the Story Behind It” (Zoari Press, 2017)
Scott Bembenek‘s The Cosmic Machine: The Science That Runs Our Universe and the Story Behind It (Zoari Press, 2017) is a wonderful way to introduce a…
8 years, 8 months ago