All Episodes
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...
Super 100th Spectacular!
University of Minnesota Press, est. 1925, turns 100 this year. Yes, we are twice as old as Saturday Night Live. And just as old as The New Yorker and The Great Gatsby....
Playhouses and the architecture of childhood.
Between the 1850s and 1930s, before playhouses for children reached the mainstream, they were often fully functional cottages designed by well-known architects for Bri...
“I want to be a living work of art”: On the Marchesa Luisa Casati
“If the public can predict you, it starts to like you. But the Marchesa didn’t want to be liked.” For the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Marchesa Lu...
It’s a microbe’s world. We just live in it.
Microbes: We can’t see them, but we have no choice but to live with them. Microbes have significant, enduring impacts on human health and remind us to resist the abstr...
Our shared needs connect us: Writers respond to the science of animal conservation.
Humans are one species on a planet of millions of species. The literary collection Creature Needs is a project that grew out of a need to do something with grievous, a...
The partitioning of public education
Public schools are one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—and are also some of our most unequal institutions. In Unsettling Choice, Ujju...
Science Fiction and the Alt-Right
The first major neo-Nazi party in the US was led by a science fiction fan. So opens Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness, a book that traces ideas about white nat...
Public policy and the room where it happens.
Policy expert and climate scientist Anna Farro Henderson explores how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined in her new book, Core Samples: A Climate Sci...
Cyberlibertarianism and the fraught politics of the internet
In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology argues that right-wing ide...
Futures of the Sun
Energy transition is crucial to the struggle against climate change. Imre Szman is concerned with who is trying to lay claim to the narratives guiding our transition f...
I know you are, but what am I? The cultural legacy of Pee-wee Herman.
"We aren't done with Pee-wee's Playhouse because there's much to learn from sticking with it." So opens Cait McKinney's I Know You Are, but What Am I?, a book that thi...
Casino gaming in Macau
Identified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, contemporary Macau has metamorphosed into a surreal, hypermodern urban landscape augmented by massive casino megaresorts, i...
Art and public space in socialist Zagreb
In the decades leading up to the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, a collective of young artists based in Zagreb used the city’s public spaces as a platform for rad...
On Trans Philosophy and troubling a Western-dominant sense of trans.
Across language and politics, feminism and phenomenology, and decolonial theory, Trans Philosophy addresses trans worldmaking in all its beauty and mundanity. The volu...
Resilience and writing history: The first woman lieutenant governor of Minnesota
Marlene M. Johnson’s memoir is an essential record of the ascension of women in American politics. In Rise to the Challenge: A Memoir of Politics, Leadership, and Love...
Extractive mediation, from the deep sea to oil culture
How are spaces once imagined to be empty, vast, and mysterious transformed into something with material and cultural value? Two authors tackle this same question, one ...
The early film writings of Chris Marker
For Chris Marker, writing came before filmmaking. A decade after Marker’s death, critics continue to rediscover his remarkable oeuvre, which comprised writing, photogr...
Deconstructing deep time.
Has the idea of the end of the world captured your imagination? Ted Toadvine’s book The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology contends that a preo...
Translating the post-exotic writer Antoine Volodine
Antoine Volodine is the primary pseudonym of a French-Russian writer of many books. The meditative, postapocalyptic noir Mevlido’s Dreams, translated by Gina M. Stamm,...
Untold stories of America’s earliest immigrants.
Joanna Brooks’s ancestors were among the early waves of emigrants to leave England for North America. Her book Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First...