Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchIrvin Weathersby Jr., "In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space" (Viking, 2025)
Episode 1969
Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot…
1 year, 1 month ago
Kit W. Myers, "The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States"(U California Press, 2025)
Episode 251
This episode features Dr. Kit W. Myers, associate professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced, …
1 year, 1 month ago
Melody Glenn, "Mother of Methadone: A Doctor's Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis" (Beacon Press, 2025)
Episode 66
Dr. Melody Glenn was a burned-out emergency physician who had grown to resent the large population of opioid dependent patients passing through her E…
1 year, 1 month ago
Timothy W. Kneeland, "Declaring Disaster: Buffalo's Blizzard of '77 and the Creation of FEMA" (Syracuse UP, 2021)
Episode 221
Join me for an insightful and timely conversation with historian Timothy Kneeland about his book Declaring Disaster: Buffalo's Blizzard of '77 and th…
1 year, 1 month ago
On Bullshit in AI
Episode 1965
Today we’re continuing our series on Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work, On Bullshit. I have the privilege to speak with Arvind Narayanan co-author of th…
1 year, 1 month ago
Jess Reia, "Urban Music Governance: What Busking Can Teach Us about Data, Policy and Our Cities" (Intellect, 2025)
Episode 1964
What happens when precarious urban cultural laborers take data collection, laws, and policymaking into their own hands? Buskers have been part of our…
1 year, 2 months ago
Michael Stauch, "Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
Episode 1594
The criminalization of Black youth was central to policing in urban America during the civil rights era and continued in Detroit even after the rise …
1 year, 2 months ago
Mark 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…
1 year, 2 months 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…
1 year, 2 months ago
Osita Nwanevu, "The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding" (Random House, 2025)
Episode 1960
Frustrated with our political dysfunction, wearied by the thinness of contemporary political discourse, and troubled by the rise of anti-democratic a…
1 year, 2 months ago