Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchPamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans, "The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels" (Crown, 2024)
Episode 362
For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potters’ fields—a Dickensian end that even the most hard-pressed families tried to a…
1 year, 9 months ago
Premilla Nadasen, "Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" (Haymarket Books, 2023)
Episode 458
During the COVID pandemic, billions of dollars in relief aid was sent out to help us ride out the storm, although many people who struggled through i…
1 year, 9 months ago
Jeffrey Reiman and Paul Leighton, "The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison" (Routledge, 2023)
Episode 182
For 40 years, this classic text has taken the issue of economic inequality seriously and asked: Why are our prisons filled with the poor? Why aren't …
1 year, 9 months ago
Mark Robert Rank, "The Poverty Paradox: Understanding Economic Hardship Amid American Prosperity" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Episode 360
The paradox of poverty amidst plenty has plagued the United States throughout the 21st century--why should the wealthiest country in the world also h…
1 year, 9 months ago
Joseph E. Stiglitz, "The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society" (Norton, 2024)
Episode 150
In his latest book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (W. W. Norton, 2024), Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz rethinks the nature o…
1 year, 9 months ago
Ryan Reft, "Heroin and Chocolate City: Black Community Responses to Drug Addiction in the Nation’s Capital, 1967-1973" (2024)
Episode 62
Ryan Reft is a historian in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, where he oversees collections pertaining to 20th and 21st century dom…
1 year, 9 months ago
Elise Andaya, "Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice" (NYU Press, 2024)
Episode 359
The low-wage service industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the US economy. Its workers disproportionately tend to be low-incom…
1 year, 9 months ago
Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia, "The Left Hand of Data: Designing Education Data for Justice" (MIT Press, 2024)
Episode 56
Educational analytics tend toward aggregation, asking what a “normative” learner does. In The Left Hand of Data: Designing Education Data for Justice…
1 year, 10 months ago
Liliana Doganova, "Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Episode 149
Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Dis…
1 year, 10 months ago
Maria Cristina Garcia, "State of Disaster: The Failure of U. S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change" (UNC Press, 2022)
Episode 110
Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political an…
1 year, 10 months ago