All Episodes
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...
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...