Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchPrudence Peiffer, "The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever" (Harper, 2023)
Episode 1437
For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became t…
1 year, 2 months ago
Matthew Facciani, "Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How It Spreads, and What to Do about It" (Columbia UP, 2025)
Episode 1436
Why are people inclined to believe misinformation? Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How It Spreads, and What to Do about It (Columbia UP, 2025…
1 year, 2 months ago
Richard Mainwaring, "What the Ear Hears (And Doesn't): Inside the Extraordinary Everyday World of Frequency" (Sourcebooks, 2022)
Episode 1435
What do the world's loneliest whale, a black hole, and twenty-three people doing Tae Bo all have in common?
In 2011, a skyscraper in South Korea bega…
1 year, 2 months ago
Alisha Mughal, "It Can’t Rain All the Time: The Crow" (ECW Press, 2025)
Episode 1433
Alisha Mughal's It Can’t Rain All the Time: The Crow (ECW Press, 2025) weaves memoir with film criticism in an effort to pin down The Crow’s cultural…
1 year, 2 months ago
Philip Carr-Gomm, "A Brief History of Nakedness" (Reaktion, 2010)
Episode 1434
Philip Carr-Gomm joins Jana Byars to talk about A Brief History of Nakedness (Reaktion, 2010) on the occasion of its newest paperback edition. From t…
1 year, 2 months ago
Matthew R. Sparks and Olivia Sizemore, "Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers" (UP of Kentucky, 2024)
Episode 1432
Matthew Sparks and Oliva Sizemore join Jana Byars for a fun, chilling, and thoughtful discussion about about Haint Country: Dark Tales from the Hills…
1 year, 2 months ago
Meredith McCarroll, "Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film" (U Georgia Press, 2018)
Episode 56
If you mention Appalachia to many people, they may immediately respond with the "Deliverance" dueling banjos theme. Unfortunately, this is an example…
1 year, 2 months ago
Irvin Weathersby Jr., "In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space" (Viking, 2025)
Episode 1429
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, 3 months ago
Liza Black, "Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
Episode 99
Behind the braided wigs, buckskins, and excess bronzer that typified the mid-century "filmic Indian" lies a far richer, deeper history of Indigenous …
1 year, 3 months ago
Heather Browning and Walter Veit, "What Are Zoos For?" (Policy Press, 2024)
Episode 81
Are zoos an anachronism in the 21st century when we can watch animals in their natural habitat, close-up from our couches without worrying about crue…
1 year, 3 months ago