Judd B. Kessler, "Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics of Getting More of What You Want" (Little, Brown Spark, 2025)
What's the secret to scoring a reservation at a hot new restaurant? When should you enter a lottery to increase your odds of winning? Why did your neighbor's kid get into a nearby preschool while your...
3 Jan 51min
Matt Dawson, "The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies" (Routledge, 2023)
Matt Dawson's The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies (Routledge, 2023) presents Durkheim as an important political sociologist, inspired by and advocating socialism. Through a series o...
2 Jan 46min
Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World" (Penguin, 2023)
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don't resort to violence, we...
1 Jan 44min
Henrike Kohpeiß, "Bourgeois Coldness" (Divided Publishing, 2025)
Bourgeois Coldness (Divided Publishing, 2025) refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and...
27 Des 202550min
Suvi Rautio, "The Invention of Tradition in China: Story of a Village and a Nation Remade" (Springer Nature, 2024)
Today, anthropologist Professor Anru Lee is joining NBN as a guest host to interview me, Suvi Rautio, on my new book, The Invention of Tradition in China: Story of a Village and a Nation Remade publis...
25 Des 20251h 18min
Emanuel Deutschmann, "Mapping the Transnational World: How We Move and Communicate Across Borders, and Why It Matters" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Increasingly, people travel and communicate across borders. Yet, we still know little about the overall structure of this transnational world. Is it really a fully globalized world in which everything...
23 Des 202537min
Karma F. Frierson, "Local Color: Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz" (U California Press, 2025)
The Caribbean port city of Veracruz is many things. It is where the Spanish first settled and last left the colony that would go on to become Mexico. It is a destination boasting the “happiest Carniva...
23 Des 202549min
Tourism and a Kyoto in Flux: A Conversation with Dr. Chiara Rita Napolitano
In today’s episode Julia Olsson continues her talk with Dr. Chiara Rita Napolitano from last episode, and they discuss the issue of overtourism and its effect on traditional urban neighbourhoods in Ky...
22 Des 202528min
