All Episodes
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...
Is aggression inevitable?
“There is no such thing as a raw, natural, aggressive urge that underlies human violence. While we inherit defense mechanisms, they work only when triggered culturally...
The rural Midwest, foreign policy, and the ways we do history
Scholars have long challenged the common assumption of midwestern isolationism. In Global Heartland, historian Peter Simons reorients the way we look at the critical p...
Judith Butler and Talia Mae Bettcher talk philosophy, personhood, resistance
Talia Mae Bettcher’s Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship be...
Thinking elementally, from the microbe to the vast seafloor
"Infrastructure is invisible until it breaks." How do we visualize something that cannot be physically seen? What limitations do existing knowledge structures impose ...
Coral and coralations with Melody Jue and Ann Elias
There's living coral, and then there's Coral—the iconicity and imaginary of living coral. As Melody Jue writes in Coralations, coral alternates between signifying an o...