Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchBen Ratliff, "Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening" (Graywolf Press, 2025)
Episode 1892
Ben Ratliff is the author of Every Song Ever and Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Run…
9 months, 1 week ago
Andrew Burstein, "Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Episode 1891
The deepest dive yet into the heart and soul, secret affairs, unexplored alliances, and bitter feuds of a generally worshipped, intermittently revil…
9 months, 1 week ago
Christopher Lynch, "Formulating Foster: Stephen C. Foster and the Creation of a National Musical Myth" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Episode 1890
Stephen C. Foster (1826–1864) was a prolific song composer. A few of his minstrel tunes have become so enmeshed in American musical culture that they…
9 months, 1 week ago
Oline Eaton, "Finding Jackie: The Second Act of America's First Lady" (Diversion Books, 2023)
Episode 145
In her new book, Finding Jackie: A Life Reinvented (Diversion Books, 2023), scholar and writer Oline Eaton examines the story of an era's biggest "st…
9 months, 1 week ago
Giles Tremlett, "El Generalísimo: A Biography of Francisco Franco" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Episode 1888
From a scrawny, overlooked military graduate to the youngest general in Europe, Francisco Franco was known for his ambition, talent and calculated ri…
9 months, 2 weeks ago
Everything Is Fine, I'll Just Work Harder: Confessions of a Former Badass
Episode 1887
In Everything Is Fine, I’ll Just Work Harder: Confessions of A Former Badass (Street Noise Books, 2025), Professor Cara Gormally draws us into the …
9 months, 2 weeks ago
Luiz Guilherme Burlamaqui, "The Making of Global FIFA: Cold War Politics and the Rise of João Havelange to the FIFA Presidency, 1950-1974" (De Gruyter, 2023)
Episode 1885
Today we are joined by Luiz Guilherme Burlamaqui, author of The Making of Global FIFA: Cold War Politics and the Rise of João Havelange to the FIFA P…
9 months, 2 weeks ago
Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, "P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance" (Duke UP, 2026)
Episode 1886
P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance (Duke UP, 2026) explores the work of Puerto Rican musical superstar Bad Bun…
9 months, 2 weeks ago
Chris Boucher, "Harry "Bucky" Lew: A Biography of the First Black Professional Basketball Player" (McFarland, 2026)
Episode 305
Harry "Bucky" Lew leapt over pro basketball's color wall in 1902 and continued to integrate every single role in the game over the next 25 years. He …
9 months, 2 weeks ago
Matthew Kennedy, "On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Episode 184
In the oceans of ink devoted to the monumental movie star/businesswoman/political activist Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (1932-2011), her beauty and not-…
9 months, 2 weeks ago