Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchChad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky, "Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space" (MIT Press, 2023)
Episode 2
An essay collection exploring the board game's relationship to the built environment, revealing the unexpected ways that play reflects perceptions of…
2 years, 7 months ago
What Reality TV Says About Us
Episode 2
Reality TV shapes and reflects how we see ourselves, and what we regard as normal. Professor Danielle J. Lindemann watched thousands of hours of real…
2 years, 7 months ago
Jordan Frith, "Barcode" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Episode 71
Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Billions of them are scanned each day and they impact everything from how we shop to how we trave…
2 years, 7 months ago
Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, "Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
Episode 683
Over the past 40 years, lawmakers in America's two major political parties have taken increasingly extreme positions on ideological issues. Voters fr…
2 years, 7 months ago
Peter Nelson, "Computer Games As Landscape Art" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
Episode 1
Peter Nelson's book Computer Games As Landscape Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) proposes that computer games are the paradigmatic form of contemporary…
2 years, 7 months ago
Maaheen Ahmed, "The Cambridge Companion to Comics" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Episode 260
Today’s guest is Maaheen Ahmed, who has edited a new collection of essays, The Cambridge Companion to Comics (Cambridge University Press, 2023). This…
2 years, 7 months ago
Akiko Takeyama, "Involuntary Consent: The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Episode 506
In a world dominated by the notion of autonomy, free choice, and consent, Akiko Takeyama takes us on a thought-provoking journey into the heart of Ja…
2 years, 7 months ago
The Future of Cancelling: A Conversation with Greg Lukianoff
Episode 84
Cancel culture is something all academics are aware of and some are concerned about. Certainly that’s true of Greg Lukianoff who was the co-author (…
2 years, 7 months ago
Michael Serazio, "The Authenticity Industries: Keeping It Real in Media, Culture, and Politics" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Episode 321
In recent decades, authenticity has become an American obsession. It animates thirty years' worth of reality TV programming and fuels the explosive v…
2 years, 8 months ago
Jeff Jarvis, "Magazine" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Episode 113
For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy - until they were overthrown by the voices of the public t…
2 years, 8 months ago