Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchCory Doctorow, "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" (Verso, 2023)
Episode 350
Big Tech locked us into their systems by making their platforms hard to leave by design. The impossibility of staying connected to people on their pl…
2 years, 10 months ago
Daniel Foliard, "The Violence of Colonial Photography" (Manchester UP, 2022)
Episode 1342
The late nineteenth century witnessed a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in whi…
2 years, 10 months ago
Jeff Deutsch, "In Praise of Good Bookstores" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Episode 97
Do we need bookstores in the twenty-first century? If so, what makes a good one? In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton UP, 2022), Jeff Deutsch--the…
2 years, 10 months ago
The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games
Episode 135
We may think of video games as being "fun," but in The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul claims that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video g…
2 years, 10 months ago
Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information
Episode 132
The world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and formats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the scene; screens, lar…
2 years, 10 months ago
Olga Fedorenko, "Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
Episode 3
An ethnography of advertising in postmillennial South Korea, Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads (U Hawaii Press, 2022) de…
2 years, 10 months ago
Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation
Episode 130
Computer graphics (or CG) has changed the way we experience the art of moving images. Computer graphics is the difference between Steamboat Willie an…
2 years, 10 months ago
Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation
Episode 130
Computer graphics (or CG) has changed the way we experience the art of moving images. Computer graphics is the difference between Steamboat Willie an…
2 years, 10 months ago
Why Photography Matters
Episode 127
Photography matters, writes Jerry Thompson, because of how it works--not only as an artistic medium but also as a way of knowing. With this provocati…
2 years, 10 months ago
Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program
Episode 124
In July 1969, ninety-four percent of American televisions were tuned to coverage of Apollo 11's mission to the moon. How did space exploration, once …
2 years, 10 months ago