Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchMark R. Rank, "Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Episode 99
Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood…
7 months, 2 weeks ago
Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Episode 32
Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental He…
7 months, 2 weeks ago
Osita Nwanevu, "The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding" (Random House, 2025)
Frustrated with our political dysfunction, wearied by the thinness of contemporary political discourse, and troubled by the rise of anti-democratic a…
7 months, 2 weeks ago
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, "Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)
Our national conversation about the border has taken a religious turn. When televangelists declare, “Heaven has a wall,” activists shout back, “Jesus…
7 months, 3 weeks ago
Ben Westhoff, "Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic" (Grove Press, 2019)
Episode 42
Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative journalist whose best-selling 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest …
7 months, 3 weeks ago
Dayna Bowen Matthew, "Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America" (NYU Press, 2022)
Episode 610
In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of…
7 months, 3 weeks ago
Phyu Phyu Oo, "Conflict-related Sexual Violence in Myanmar: The Role of the State" (De Gruyter, 2025)
Systemic sexual violence by the Myanmar army and proxies began to be widely reported in the 2010s, in the course of genocidal violence against Rohing…
8 months ago
Cat Dawson, "Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists Is Shaping the Memorial Landscape" (MIT Press, 2025)
For centuries, monuments have telegraphed the values and origin myths of dominant culture in public space and on massive scale. They have signaled bo…
8 months ago
Elizabeth Popp Berman, "Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy" (Princeton UP, 2022)
For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious cha…
8 months ago
David S. Wall, "Cybercrime: The Transformation of Crime in the Information Age" (Polity, 2024)
Episode 148
How has the digital revolution transformed criminal opportunities and behaviour? What is different about cybercrime compared with traditional crimina…
8 months ago