Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchJacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media" (Basic Books, 2022)
Episode 155
Jacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lone…
3 months, 4 weeks ago
Leslie James, "The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960" (Harvard UP, 2025)
In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printe…
4 months ago
Betto van Waarden, "Politicians and Mass Media in the Age of Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
How did politicians deal with mass communication in a rapidly changing society? And how did the performance of public politics both help and hinder d…
4 months, 2 weeks ago
Richard Fine, "The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany" (Cornell, 2023)
In The Price of Truth: The Journalist Who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany (Cornell, 2023), Richard Fine recounts the inten…
4 months, 3 weeks ago
Brooke Kroeger, "Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism" (Knopf, 2023)
Episode 63
Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism (Knopf, 2023) is a representative history of the American women who surmounted every impediment put …
5 months ago
Jeff Jarvis, "Magazine" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Episode 113
For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy - until they were overthrown by the voices of the public t…
5 months ago
Richard Bradford, "Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Episode 230
Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, firstly in 1969 for The Armies of the Night and again in 1980 for The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer's life co…
5 months, 1 week ago
Trymaine Lee, "A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America" (St. Martins, 2025)
A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why…
5 months, 1 week ago
Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French
The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright, 2025), the second work in a trilogy from best-selling…
5 months, 2 weeks ago
Terry Kirby, "The Newsmongers: A History of Tabloid Journalism" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
Episode 86
The Newsmongers unfolds the seedy history of tabloid journalism, from the first printed ‘Strange Newes’ sheets of the sixteenth century to the sensat…
5 months, 2 weeks ago