Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchBench Ansfield, "Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City" (Norton, 2025)
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as f…
10 months, 1 week ago
Kate Herrity, "Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown" (Bristol UP, 2024)
The soundscape of prison life is that of constant clangs, bangs and jangles. What is the significance of this cacophonous din to those who live and w…
10 months, 1 week ago
Prudence Peiffer, "The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever" (Harper, 2023)
For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became t…
10 months, 1 week ago
Jamie Wang, "Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore" (MIT Press, 2024)
As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the ima…
10 months, 2 weeks ago
Edward Berenson, "Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia" (Yale UP, 2025)
The rise and fall of William J. Levitt, the man who made the suburban house a mass commodity.
Two material artifacts defined the middle-class America…
10 months, 2 weeks ago
Alexandra Freidus, "Unequal Lessons: School Diversity and Educational Inequality in New York City" (NYU Press, 2025)
Episode 257
Unequal Lessons: School Diversity and Educational Inequality in New York City (NYU Press, 2025) argues that diversity and racial integration efforts …
10 months, 2 weeks ago
Irvin Weathersby Jr., "In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space" (Viking, 2025)
Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot…
10 months, 2 weeks ago
Nezar AlSayyad and Heba Safey Eldeen, "Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Urban Modernity from Reel to Real" (American U in Cairo Press, 2022)
Episode 8
The relationship between the city and cinema is formidable. The images and sounds of the city found in movies are perhaps the only experience that ma…
10 months, 2 weeks ago
Eiko Maruko Siniawer, "Ten Moments that Shaped Tokyo" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Episode 250
How did Tokyo—Japan’s capital, global city, tourist hotspot and financial center—get to where it is today? Tokyo–or then, Edo–had a rather unglamorou…
10 months, 3 weeks ago
S2.E3. A Spatial History of Disco
In the third episode of Season Two of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares take you on an immersive journey through the hot nights …
10 months, 3 weeks ago