Podcast Episodes

William R. Brody, "Uncommon Sense: Rethinking Ordinary Problems in Extraordinary Ways" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)

Today I’m speaking with William R. Brody about his book, Uncommon Sense: Rethinking Ordinary Problems in Extraordinary Ways (Johns Hopkins Universit…

1 month, 1 week ago

Rugged Individualism

In this special student edition of High Theory, Andrew Bennett, Jo Hoffman, Kai North, and Ally Sullivan tell us about Rugged Individualism, a concep…

1 month, 1 week ago

Heather Shay, "Identity Building Among Role-Playing Gamers: Slaying Goblins in the Real World" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

In Identity Building Among Role-Playing Gamers: Slaying Goblins in the Real World (Bloomsbury 2025), Heather Shay draws from 19 months of participant…

1 month, 1 week ago

A Shakeup Is Coming for the Nation-State: A Conversation with Stephen Sims

Stephen Sims’ New Atlantis essay examines how emerging technologies are reshaping the structure and authority of the modern nation-state. He argues t…

1 month, 1 week ago

Caste and Race: Ambedkar and King with the Ambedkar King Study Circle

This episode features S. Karthikeyan and S. Subbulakshmi, the Convenor and Secretary of the Ambedkar King Study Circle, an anti-caste organization ba…

1 month, 1 week ago

Chinatown

“Forget it, Jake—it’s Chinatown.” This piece of advice is as famous as it is useless: Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) will never be able to forget what …

1 month, 1 week ago

Susanna Elm and Kristina Sessa, "War and Community in Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Susanna Elm and Kristina Sessa, War and Community in Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Late Antiquity (ca. 250–600 CE) was a world at war: barbaria…

1 month, 1 week ago

Kaitlin P. Reed, "Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California" (U Washington Press, 2023)

Despite it's centrality to a hippie counterculture which claimed an environmentalist ethos, California's "green rush" of cannabis growing from the mi…

1 month, 1 week ago

Assessing Global Democratic Health Amidst a Growing Shadow of Autocracy

This week on Democracy Dialogues, host Maya Tudor speaks with two democracy experts at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Freedom House t…

1 month, 1 week ago

The British General Election of 2024: A Conversation with Robert Ford and Paula Surridge

Why and how did Labour win the 2024 election? In The British General Election of 2024 Robert Ford, a Professor of Politics at the University of Manch…

1 month, 1 week ago