Podcast Episodes

Jenny Linford, "Repast: The Story of Food" (Thames & Hudson, 2025)

Our insatiable appetite for creativity in the kitchen – or around the open fire – is reflected in the fascinating array of objects explored in this book. Authored by food writer Jenny Linford in cons…

Published on 3 weeks ago

Lauren E. M. Everett, "Fortunate People in a Fortunate Land: At Home in Santa Monica's Rent-Controlled Housing" (Temple UP, 2025)

Rent control and other tenant protections have profound and positive impacts on individuals’ and communities’ lives. Dr. Lauren Everett’s Fortunate People in a Fortunate Land: At Home in Santa Monica…

Published on 3 weeks ago

What is Happening in the Mediterranean Right Now – And Why You Should Care

Since 2014 more than 32,000 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe. As the EU and its member states have been increasingly prioritising migration deterrence over human lif…

Published on 3 weeks ago

Sharon White Rewires Disco

At the center of 1970s New York's most iconic clubs—from the celebrity-studded Studio 54 to the premiere lesbian discotheque Sahara—stood a queer Black woman on the turntables: Sharon White. With a s…

Published on 3 weeks ago

Jochen Hellbeck, "World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews" (Penguin Group, 2025)

Episode 189

In the West, World War II is commonly understood as the Allies’ struggle against Nazism. Often elided, if not simply forgotten, is the Soviet Union’s crucial role in that fight. With this book, accla…

Published on 3 weeks, 1 day ago

Micah S. Muscolino, "Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2025)

From the 1940s to the 1960s, soil and water conservation measures transformed both the arid, erosion-prone environment of China’s Loess Plateau and the lives of rural people. Remaking the Earth, Exha…

Published on 3 weeks, 1 day ago

Elizabeth Anne Davis, "The Time of the Cannibals: On Conspiracy Theory and Context" (Fordham UP, 2024)

In 2009, the body of a former president of the Republic of Cyprus, Tassos Papadopoulos, was stolen from his grave. The Time of the Cannibals reconsiders this history and the public discourse on it to…

Published on 3 weeks, 1 day ago

Renata Keller, "The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War" (UNC Press, 2025)

Despite twenty-first-century fears of nuclear conflagrations with North Korea, Russia, and Iran, the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the United States has come to nuclear war. That history has la…

Published on 3 weeks, 1 day ago

Aviva Rubin, "White: A Novel" (RE: Books, 2024)

Sarah Cartell, who grew up in a White Supremacist family controlled by a violent grandfather who preaches hate and violence, learns from books and a kind librarian that there’s another way to see the…

Published on 3 weeks, 1 day ago

Andrew H. Jaffe, "The Random Universe: How Models and Probability Help Us Make Sense of the Cosmos" (Yale UP, 2025)

An award-winning astrophysicist looks at how the understanding of uncertainty and randomness has led to breakthroughs in our knowledge of the cosmos

All of us understand the world around us by constr…

Published on 3 weeks, 1 day ago