Podcast Episodes

Shikha Jhingan, "The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema: Voice, Body, Technology" (Wayne State UP, 2025)

How the sound of the female playback voice impacts Bollywood's cultural, musical, and cinematic environment.

Drawing on sound studies and performance…

2 weeks, 5 days ago

Aditya Deshbandhu, "The 21st Century in 100 Games" (Routledge, 2024)

The 21st Century in 100 Games (Routledge India, 2024) is an interactive public history of the contemporary world. It creates a ludological retelling …

2 weeks, 5 days ago

Dating Apps, Queer Stigma, and Digital Intimacy in Kazakhstan

How queer men in Kazakhstan navigate dating apps in a context of stigma, surveillance, and limited legal protections. It shows how platforms like Gri…

2 weeks, 6 days ago

Margaret O’Mara on the Clintons, Tech, and Memory

We were joined by Professor Margaret O’Mara of the University of Washington, who had a front row seat to the Clinton campaign and went on to become a…

2 weeks, 6 days ago

Ann Carlson, "Smog and Sunshine: The Surprising Story of How Los Angeles Cleaned Up Its Air" (U California Press, 2026)

Los Angeles and smog have been synonymous for decades. From the 1940s through the 1980s, children breathed air so heavy with lead that their blood …

3 weeks, 1 day ago

Ashok Malhotra, "Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri La, 1900-1969" (UCL Press, 2026)

Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri La, 1900-1969 (UCL Press, 2026) is a global history project that examines the diffusio…

3 weeks, 1 day ago

Ralph Jones, "Microphone" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Since its invention more than 150 years ago, the microphone transformed the world in an instant. Yet its evolution and integration into our daily li…

3 weeks, 2 days ago

Rahul Mukherjee, "Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution" (MIT Press, 2026)

Around 2016, buoyed by so-called data kranti  ("data revolution"), an aspirational neo-middle class of users in India accessed internet for the first…

3 weeks, 5 days ago

Christos Lynteris, "How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)

Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without bei…

4 weeks, 1 day ago

Pedro Domingos, "The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World" (Basic Books, 2018)

In the world's top research labs and universities, the race is on to
invent the ultimate learning algorithm: one capable of discovering any knowledge…

4 weeks, 1 day ago