Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchGretchen Heefner, "Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Episode 1255
Deserts, the Arctic, outer space—these extreme environments are often seen as inhospitable places at the edges of our maps. But from the 1940s thro…
2 months, 1 week ago
Spirituality, Science and Environmentalism in Taiwan
Episode 1253
Who is Shennong, the Divine Farmer? And how can he help us understand the intricate relationships between spirituality, science and environmentalism …
2 months, 1 week ago
Mary E. Mendoza, "Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border" (UNC Press, 2026)
Episode 1252
As many as ten thousand people attempt to illegally cross the border between the US and Mexico each month, braving deserts, rivers, and other envir…
2 months, 2 weeks ago
Ali Fard, "Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
Episode 1251
Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shado…
2 months, 2 weeks ago
Meena Khandelwal, "Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women's Technology in India" (U Arizona Press, 2026)
Episode 1250
Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to f…
2 months, 2 weeks ago
Sadiah Qureshi, "Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction" (Penguin, 2025)
Episode 1249
Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of …
2 months, 3 weeks ago
Podcast Intellectuals Podcast Panel #3 with Allison Carruth and Ellen Horne
Episode 1247
This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On May 13, 2026, Princeton’s Center for Human Values hosted a …
2 months, 3 weeks ago
Making Microbes Explicit
Episode 1248
This episode takes listeners into the latest issues of Gastronomica, with a special feature on microbes. Sarah Elton and Maya Hey talk with Dan Bende…
2 months, 3 weeks ago
Susannah Crockford, "A Perturbed System: Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
Episode 1245
Our ecological system is disturbed, and with it, every other system we’ve built to inhabit it. We do not face inevitable destruction, yet many of us …
2 months, 4 weeks ago
Shawn William Miller, "Dream Road to Pan America: A Century in Pursuit of the World's Longest Highway" (U California Press, 2026)
Episode 1246
A century after the Pan-American Highway was first conceived, its story remains largely unknown—even to the hundreds of motorists who annually atte…
2 months, 4 weeks ago