Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchAthena Aktipis, "The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer" (Princeton UP, 2020)
Episode 1
When we think of the forces driving cancer, we don’t necessarily think of evolution. But evolution and cancer are closely linked because the historic…
1 year, 2 months ago
Ayo 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…
1 year, 2 months ago
Emilio Elizalde, "The True Story of Modern Cosmology: Origins, Main Actors and Breakthroughs" (Springer, 2021)
Episode 142
This book tells the story of how, over the past century, dedicated observers and pioneering scientists achieved our current understanding of the univ…
1 year, 2 months 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…
1 year, 2 months 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 …
1 year, 2 months 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…
1 year, 2 months 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…
1 year, 3 months 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…
1 year, 3 months ago
On Bullshit in AI
Episode 2641
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…
1 year, 3 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…
1 year, 3 months ago