Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchAaron Bateman. "Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative" (MIT Press, 2024)
Episode 157
A new and provocative take on the formerly classified history of accelerating superpower military competition in space in the late Cold War and beyon…
3 months, 3 weeks ago
Alexa Hagerty, "Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains" (Crown, 2023)
Episode 182
In Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Crown, 2023), anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forens…
3 months, 3 weeks ago
David Morris, "Stealing The Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia" (Watkins Media, 2025)
Episode 195
Stealing the Future is the first book to tell the true and full story of Sam Bankman-Fried and his historic crimes. It chronicles the $11 billion FTX…
3 months, 3 weeks ago
Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell UP, 2023)
Episode 138
Florentine Koppenborg’s Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance (Cornell UP, 2023) begins with the understated observation tha…
3 months, 3 weeks ago
Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World" (Penguin, 2023)
Episode 146
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking s…
3 months, 4 weeks ago
Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)
Episode 14
Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of…
3 months, 4 weeks ago
James Welsh et al., "Weathering Space" (American Scientist 114:1 2026)
Episode 163
Past human space missions were protected by Earth’s magnetic field and a measure of luck, but future missions beyond the Earth–Moon system will face …
3 months, 4 weeks 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…
3 months, 4 weeks ago
Jeremy Black, "A History of Artillery" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
Episode 184
Jeremy Black's book A History of Artillery (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) traces the development of artillery through the ages, providing a thorough st…
4 months ago
Colin Williamson, "Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
Episode 245
What do technical renderings of plant cells in trees have to do with Disney’s animated opus Fantasia? Quite a bit, as it turns out: such emergent sci…
4 months ago