Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchAyo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018)
Episode 303
From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproduct…
8 months, 3 weeks ago
Maxim Samson, "Earth Shapers: How Humans Mastered Geography and Remade the World" (Profile Books, 2025)
Episode 127
Mountains, meridians, rivers, and borders--these are some of the features that divide the world on our maps and in our minds. But geography is far le…
8 months, 3 weeks ago
154 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson
Episode 65
With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson has e…
8 months, 3 weeks ago
David J. Helfand, "The Universal Timekeepers: Reconstructing History Atom by Atom" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Episode 6
Atoms are unfathomably tiny. It takes fifteen million trillion of them to make up a single poppy seed—give or take a few billion. And there’s hardly …
8 months, 3 weeks ago
The Social Impact of Automating Translation
Episode 55
In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Esther Monzó-Nebot, Associate Professor in Translation and Interp…
8 months, 4 weeks ago
Gavin Williams, "Format Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Episode 163
With the rise of the gramophone around 1900, the shellac disc traveled the world and eventually became the dominant sound format in the first half of…
9 months ago
On Bullshit in AI
Today we’re continuing our series on Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work, On Bullshit. I have the privilege to speak with Arvind Narayanan co-author of th…
9 months ago
Christa Kuljian, "Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
When Christa Kuljian arrived on the Harvard College campus as a first-year student in the fall of 1980 with copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and Ms. m…
9 months ago
Anil Ananthaswamy, "Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI" (Dutton, 2024)
Episode 90
Machine learning systems are making life-altering decisions for us: approving mortgage loans, determining whether a tumor is cancerous, or deciding i…
9 months ago
Book Talk 67 : The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
Episode 141
What is reliable knowledge? Listen to philosopher Michael Strevens, author of The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, to und…
9 months ago