Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchCycling Cities: Lisbon and Tehran with M. Luísa Sousa and Kazem Afradi
Episode 1743
Cycling Cities is a series of books that investigates 150 years of cycling policy and practice across fifty cities in twenty-five countries, and keep…
2 months, 4 weeks ago
Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The War of the Worlds
Episode 1742
In light of the dismal Disclosure Day (2026), we return to two films that show Spielberg tackling alien visitation (or invasion) stories while at the…
3 months ago
Jinwon Kim, "Koreatown, NYC: The Consumption of a Transnational Brand" (NYU Press, 2026)
Episode 1741
How Manhattan's Koreatown functions as a new ethnic enclave
In the past decade, Korean entertainment has gained global recognition, with Korean movie…
3 months ago
Elijah Wald, "Rock ‘N’ Roll: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Episode 1740
Rock 'n' roll appeared in the 1950s as the high-energy, electrically amplified music of young dancers and listeners, first in the United States and t…
3 months ago
Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman, "The Fictional Female Presidency in Film, Television, and Literature: Representations from 1932 to 2024" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)
Episode 1739
Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman has a new book out that focuses on the reality of women running for president in the United States, and the fictional repr…
3 months ago
David Denby, "Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer" (Henry Holt, 2025)
Episode 1737
What made a generation of Jewish artists and intellectuals transform American culture? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with acclaimed cu…
3 months, 1 week ago
David I. Waddington, "The Hidden Curriculum of Video Games" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026)
Episode 1738
Despite decades of inflammatory rhetoric, the real risk of video games lies not in their violent imagery but in the ethical and political sensibiliti…
3 months, 1 week ago
Daniel L. Gardner, "Thresholds of Digital Gameplay" (MIT Press, 2025)
Episode 1736
Contemporary digital gameplay is only accessible by navigating an ecosystem of interfaces that support its computational nature. Account logins, c…
3 months, 2 weeks ago
Stefan Höltgen et al., "Commodore 64: Past, Present, and Future of a Home Computer" (Projekt Verlag, 2026)
Episode 1735
The Commodore 64 is the most significant computer of its era. From 1982 to 1994, a total of 27 million units were sold—more than any other computer fr…
3 months, 2 weeks ago
Mike F. Alvarez, Warren J. Bareiss, and Jolane Flanigan eds., "Suicide in Popular Media and Culture: Studies in Framing a Social Catastrophe" (Bristol University Press, 2026)
Episode 1734
NB: This episode contains a discussion of suicide and may not be appropriate for all listeners. If you are thinking about hurting yourself, help is…
3 months, 2 weeks ago