Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchBrian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)
Episode 20
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for …
6 years ago
Santiago Zabala, "Being at Large: Freedom in the Ago of Alternative Facts" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020)
Episode 170
In recent years, questions around the nature of truth and facts have reentered public debate, often in discussions around journalistic bias, and w…
6 years ago
Cailin O’Connor, "The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread" (Yale UP, 2018)
Episode 49
Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the …
6 years ago
Alexander Zevin, "Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist" (Verso, 2019)
Episode 727
The Economist is a curious publication. It always takes a point of view (as opposed to the all-the-news-that’s-fit-to-print approach). It maintains a…
6 years, 1 month ago
Mallika Kaur, "Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
Episode 100
Punjab was the arena of one of the first major armed conflicts of post-colonial India. During its deadliest decade, as many as 250,000 people were ki…
6 years, 1 month ago
Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)
Episode 193
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. …
6 years, 1 month ago
Christopher D. Bader, "Fear Itself: The Causes and Consequences of Fear in America" (NYU Press, 2020)
Episode 138
From moral panics about immigration and gun control to anxiety about terrorism and natural disasters, Americans live in a culture of fear. While fear…
6 years, 1 month ago
Travis Lupick, "Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction" (Arsenal, 2108)
Episode 92
North America is in the grips of a drug epidemic; with the introduction of fentanyl, the chances of a fatal overdose are greater than ever, prompting…
6 years, 2 months ago
Arthur Asseraf, "Electric News in Colonial Algeria" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Episode 75
Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the workings of the “news ecosystem” in Algeria from the …
6 years, 2 months ago
Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
Episode 46
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat…
6 years, 2 months ago