All Episodes
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...
Policing and worldmaking.
Everything Is Police is a new book by Tia Trafford, who argues that institutional and interpersonal policing have been central to colonial modernity, the result of whi...
Meaning and livestreaming: On technical encounter’s aesthetics and ethics.
EL Putnam’s new book Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter considers how livestreaming constitutes new patterns of being together that are com...
Knowing Silence: How children understand and negotiate immigration status and its impact on their lives.
Educators who underestimate children’s knowledge about citizenship and immigration status can marginalize or misunderstand these students and their families. In Knowin...
Art, time, nonlinearity with Manuela Infante and Mandy-Suzanne Wong (Art after Nature 5)
Estado Vegetal is Manuela Infante’s riveting experimental performance art through which plants are charged with an agency capable of uprooting culturally grounded conc...
Tracing the roots of toxic masculinity.
Masculinity in Transition is a book that moves the study of masculinity away from an overriding preoccupation with cisnormativity, whiteness, and heteronormativity, an...
The disruptive forces of an oil boom
During the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled energy landscapes and imaginaries in the US. Settling the Boom, a volume of essays, studies how the disruptive for...
Expelling public schools: Antiracist politics and school privatization.
John Arena examines the more than two-decade struggle to privatize public schools in Newark, New Jersey—a conflict that is raging in cities across the country. Arena’s...
Blowdown in the Boundary Waters
More than twenty years ago, a bizarre confluence of meteorological events resulted in the most damaging blowdown in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness’s...
Sugar, coal, oil: No more fossils.
What is fossil civilization? In the book No More Fossils, Dominic Boyer tells the story of how we came to rationalize fossil fuel use through successive phases of sucr...
Comics, visual culture, and feminism in the 1980s
In Visible Archives is a book that explores a number of feminist and cultural touchstones of the 1980s and examines how visual culture interacts with these pivotal mom...
Care is more than human—it's creaturely.
Benjamin Meiches explores the role of animals laboring alongside humans (mine-clearance dogs, milk-producing cows and goats, disease-identifying rats) in humanitarian ...