Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchLizzie Wade, "Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures" (Harper, 2025)
Episode 373
A richly imagined new view on the great human tradition of apocalypse, from the rise of Homo sapiens to the climate instability of our present, that …
1 year, 3 months ago
Dan Reiter, "Untied Hands: How States Avoid the Wrong Wars" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Episode 1563
How do states advance their national security interests? Conventional wisdom holds that states must court the risk of catastrophic war by “tying thei…
1 year, 3 months ago
Bradley Morgan, "Frank Zappa's America" (LSU Press, 2025)
Episode 1562
From his early albums with the Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa established a reputation as a musical genius who pushed the limits of culture throug…
1 year, 3 months ago
Martin Shuster, "Critical Theory: The Basics" (Routledge, 2024)
Episode 1561
Why does critical theory matter today? In Critical Theory: The Basics (Routledge, 2024), Martin Shuster, a Professor of Philosophy and the Isaac Swi…
1 year, 3 months ago
On Bullshit in AI
Episode 1560
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
Arianne Edmonds, "We Now Belong to Ourselves: J. L. Edmonds, the Black Press, and Black Citizenship in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Episode 1559
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Black press provided a blueprint to help Black Americans transition from slavery and find opportunities to …
1 year, 3 months ago
Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Knopf, 2025))
Episode 1593
More than a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, historians are still searching for exactly when the U.S. Civil Wa…
1 year, 3 months ago
Hanno Sauer, "The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality " (Oxford UP, 2024)
Episode 248
In this sweeping new history of humanity, told through the prism of our ever-changing moral norms and values, Hanno Sauer shows how modern society is…
1 year, 3 months ago
Sarah Teasley, "Designing Modern Japan" (Reaktion Books, 2022)
Episode 81
Sarah Teasley's Designing Modern Japan (Reaktion, 2022) unpicks the history of Japanese design from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twen…
1 year, 3 months ago
Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao, "Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise" (Yale UP, 2022)
Episode 44
Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Christopher Marquis & Dr. Kunyuan Qiao presents a tho…
1 year, 3 months ago