Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchJames M. O’Toole, "For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Episode 37
For generations, American Catholics went faithfully to confession, admitting their sins to a priest and accepting through him God’s forgiveness. The …
1 year, 7 months ago
Surekha Davies, "Humans: A Monstrous History" (U California Press, 2025)
Episode 1550
Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science in Humans: A Monstrous History (University of…
1 year, 7 months ago
Tracie Canada, "Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football" (U California Press, 2025)
Episode 353
Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a differen…
1 year, 7 months ago
Andrew Clapham, "War" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Episode 1445
This book poses the question: How relevant is the concept of war today? Professor Andrew Clapham of the Graduate Institute of International and Devel…
1 year, 7 months ago
Richard Reichbart, "The Anatomy of a Psychotic Experience: A Personal Account of Psychosis and Creativity" (Ipbooks, 2022)
Episode 263
In Anatomy of a Psychotic Experience (Ipbooks, 2022), psychoanalyst Richard Reichbart recounts a psychotic experience when he was in his thirties jux…
1 year, 7 months ago
Rahul Rao, "The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire" (Pluto Press, 2025)
Episode 762
From Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond, statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present. The P…
1 year, 7 months ago
Bryan Caplan, "Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing" (Cato Institute, 2024)
Episode 203
Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel’ can be applied …
1 year, 7 months ago
Luca Trenta, "The President's Kill List: Assassination and Us Foreign Policy Since 1945" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
Episode 757
Investigative reporter Bob Woodward once noted that assassination was the Scarlett letter of American politics because targeted killings challenge th…
1 year, 7 months ago
Kobi Kabalek, "Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism" (U Wisconsin Press, 2025)
Episode 171
In Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective After Nazism (U Wisconsin Press, 2025), Kobi Kabalek examines how the rescue of Jews durin…
1 year, 7 months ago
Mark Neocleous, "Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police" (Verso, 2025)
Episode 125
Today I talked to Mark Neocleous about his new book Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police (Verso, 2025).
For more than two decades, Neocleo…
1 year, 7 months ago