Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchSteve Ramirez, "How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past" (Princeton UP, 2025)
As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brai…
3 months, 1 week ago
Ines Prodöhl, "Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900–1950" (Routledge, 2023)
Episode 132
Ines Prodöhl’s Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900-1950 (Routledge, 2023) is a history of how, why, and where the soybean…
3 months, 1 week ago
Elizabeth Kelly Gray, "Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Episode 189
Habitual drug use in the United States is at least as old as the nation itself. Elizabeth Kelly Gray's book Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America,…
3 months, 1 week ago
Caroline Peyton, "Radioactive Dixie: A Nuclear History of the American South" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
How and why did the South’s history, culture, and politics shape the region’s nuclear and energy industries? And how is that history linked to broade…
3 months, 1 week ago
Bruno J. Strasser and Thomas Schlich, "The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air" (Yale UP, 2025)
The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air (Yale UP, 2025) by Dr. Bruno J. Strasser and Dr. Thomas Schlich presents a history of masks protecting again…
3 months, 2 weeks ago
Alison Bashford, "Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Episode 39
Why did Isaac Newton read books on chiromancy, the occult science of hand reading that revealed the secrets of the soul? Why did Charles Darwin claim…
3 months, 2 weeks ago
Heino Falcke and Jörg Römer, "Light in the Darkness: Black Holes, the Universe, and Us" (HarperCollins, 2021)
Episode 165
An astrophysicist chronicles his quest to photograph a black hole and reflects on its spiritual ramifications in this international-bestselling memoi…
3 months, 3 weeks ago
Marc Berman, "Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
Episode 157
Dr. Marc Berman, the pioneering creator of the field of environmental neuroscience, has discovered the surprising connection between mind, body, and …
3 months, 3 weeks ago
Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold History" (Knopf, 2023)
Episode 72
The Earth Transformed. An Untold History (Knopf, 2023) is a captivating and informative book that reveals how climate change has been a driving force…
3 months, 3 weeks ago
Rachel Midura, "Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Episode 137
Rachel Midura joins Jana Byars to talk about Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cornell UP,…
3 months, 3 weeks ago