Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchMatt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
Episode 46
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat…
6 years, 7 months ago
Adrian Currie, "Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences" (MIT Press, 2018)
Episode 246
The “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. Ho…
6 years, 7 months ago
Adrian J. Boas, "The Crusader World" (Routledge, 2015)
Episode 710
The Crusader World (Routledge, 2015), edited by Adrian J. Boas, is a multidisciplinary survey of the current state of research in the field of crusad…
6 years, 7 months ago
Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)
Episode 154
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillip…
6 years, 8 months ago
K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)
Episode 103
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. Howe…
6 years, 9 months ago
Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)
Episode 42
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infogr…
6 years, 10 months ago
Kathleen Sheppard, "The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology" (Lexington, 2017)
Episode 36
After Napoleon occupied Egypt, Europeans became obsessed with the ancient cultures of the Nile. In Britain, the center of Egyptology research was Uni…
6 years, 11 months ago
Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing
Episode 45
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most tra…
6 years, 11 months ago
J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)
Episode 81
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude …
7 years ago
John D. Hawks, "Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story" (National Geographic, 2017)
Episode 34
John D. Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal…
7 years, 3 months ago