Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchM. D. Usher, ed. "How to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Cynicism" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Episode 48
The Cynics were ancient Greek philosophers who stood athwart the flood of society's material excess, unexamined conventions, and even norms of polite…
3 years, 6 months ago
Christopher Goscha, "The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Episode 113
The Vietnamese victory over the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina, is one of …
3 years, 7 months ago
Jenny C. Mann, "The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Episode 179
Today’s guest is Jenny Mann, who has a new book titled The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (Princeton University Pre…
3 years, 7 months ago
Peter J. Kalliney, "The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Episode 47
How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Litera…
3 years, 7 months ago
James Belich, "The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Episode 1268
In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and cause…
3 years, 7 months ago
John Peter DiIulio, "Completely Free: The Moral and Political Vision of John Stuart Mill" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Episode 154
As we emerge from a period of government-mandated lockdowns and as threats to free speech multiply, we would be wise to re-engage with the work of a …
3 years, 7 months ago
Olivier Zunz, "The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Episode 222
In 1831, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functioni…
3 years, 7 months ago
Karen Hunger Parshall, "The New Era in American Mathematics, 1920–1950" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Episode 77
In The New Era in Mathematics, 1920-1950 (Princeton University Press, 2022) Karen Parshall explores the institutional, financial, social, and politic…
3 years, 7 months ago
The Future of the Jesuits: A Discussion with Markus Friedrich
Episode 29
After its founding in 1540 by an aristocrat turned spiritualist turned intellectual, Ignatius of Loyola, the Society of Jesus—or the Jesuits—establis…
3 years, 8 months ago
Justin Grimmer et al., "Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Episode 118
From social media posts and text messages to digital government documents and archives, researchers are bombarded with a deluge of text reflecting th…
3 years, 8 months ago