All Episodes
The digitized afterlives of cultural objects.
What is the opposite of “big” data? In a society where households commonly store personal archives of photos, financial records, and other documents, the “little” data...
Indigenous filmmaking and futures
What lives in the spaces between dreams and apocalypse? Two authors discuss their books on Indigenous media: Karrmen Crey, whose Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Ind...
Surrealism and selfhood
In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the nascent discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as “ethnographic surrealism.” Joyc...
“Not everybody has seven mothers.”
In Copenhagen in 1972, during the exhilarating early days of women’s liberation in Scandinavia and dramatic social change around the world, seven women had a child tog...
Nonbinary Jane Austen
Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently from how she is classically understood; rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, Washington argues...
Three economies of transcendence
“Lack of political will and corruption of the ruling class are certainly enormous obstacles but do not (fully) explain the widespread inaction against our current mult...
Star Trek and the franchise era.
In his book Late Star Trek, Adam Kotsko analyzes the wealth of content set within Star Trek’s sprawling continuity, beginning with the prequel series Enterprise, highl...
Pseudoscientific phenomena and cultural thought
Some attributes of the paranormal mind are dismissed as nonsense, but what can an exploration of pseudoscientific phenomena tell us about accepted scientific and cultu...
Replacing the state.
Sasha Davis, an activist and scholar of radical environmental advocacy, brings new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have foun...
Capitalism Hates You: Horror film and Marxist theory.
From Get Out to The Babadook to Saint Maud: In his new book, Josh Gooch uses the horror film genre to expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism, drawing c...
Typophoto and graphic design’s early years.
Between the World Wars, ideas about meaning, truth, and the ethics of persuasion informed newly articulated principles for combining word and image. The young field of...
The dream of indefinite life.
From Plato and Derrida to anti-aging treatments, cryogenics, cloning, and whole-brain uploads, the dream of indefinite life is technological and, as Adam Rosenthal sho...
How fascist ideas permeate contemporary culture.
Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Alexander Menrisky, author of Everyday Ecofascism, shows how ext...
Public history, memory, and building a tribal archive.
The story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and its Historical Committee—and its fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite its history—is the focus of Rose Miron’...
Has the city become history?
Society has yet to fully grapple with the administrative chaos that has ensued from the growth of the urban. One such city allows tremendous insight into the process o...
To live lightly on the planet.
Tamara Dean's quest to live lightly on the planet in the midst of the environmental crises of our time led her to a landscape unlike any other: the Driftless area of W...
Can we design better public streets?
Cities across the US are rethinking streets, going beyond sidewalks and bike lanes to welcome nonmotorists to share the roadway. David L. Prytherch, author of Reclaimi...
Cinemal: Films and animals, majesty and mystery
Cinema can be furtive and intensely beautiful—and it can leave a viewer craving more. Cinemal is Tessa Laird’s passionate inquiry into the desire to write about animal...