Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchLaura Zurowski et al., "City Steps of Pittsburgh: A History & Guide" (History Press, 2024)
Episode 114
In Pittsburgh, the elevation varies wildly, fluctuating 660 feet from highest to lowest points throughout the area and making it one of the hilliest …
2 years, 1 month ago
Katherine Hempstead, "Uncovered: The Story of Insurance in America" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Episode 106
Historically, the insurance industry in America has been fragmented. As a result, there have been debates and conflicts over the proper roles of fede…
2 years, 1 month ago
Jessica S. Henry, "Smoke But No Fire: Convicting the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened" (U California Press, 2021)
Episode 57
Jessica Henry's Smoke But No Fire: Convicting the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened (U California Press, 2021) explores a shocking but all-too-c…
2 years, 2 months ago
David Pozen, "The Constitution of the War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Episode 228
The U.S. government's decades-long "war on drugs" is increasingly recognized as a moral travesty as well as a policy failure. The criminalization of …
2 years, 2 months ago
Maarit Jänterä-Jareborg and Hélène Tigroudja, "Women’s Human Rights and the Elimination of Discrimination" (Brill/Nijhoff, 2016)
Episode 4
Despite global undertakings to safeguard the full enjoyment of human rights, culture, traditional practices and religion are widely used to discrimin…
2 years, 2 months ago
Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, "Nothing But Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
Episode 6
Distributed to millions of people annually across Africa and the global south, insecticide-treated bed nets have become a cornerstone of malaria cont…
2 years, 2 months ago
Patrick McKelvey, "Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation" (NYU Press, 2024)
Episode 47
In 1967, the US government funded the National Theatre of the Deaf, a groundbreaking rehabilitation initiative employing deaf actors. This project al…
2 years, 2 months ago
Francine Banner, "Beyond Complicity: Why We Blame Each Other Instead of Systems" (U California Press, 2024)
Episode 227
Beyond Complicity: Why We Blame Each Other Instead of Systems (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Francine Banner is a fascinating cultural…
2 years, 2 months ago
Matt Stoller, "Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy" (Simon & Schuster, 2020)
Episode 144
In Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism h…
2 years, 2 months ago
Ujju Aggarwal, "Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
Episode 236
What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually…
2 years, 2 months ago