Jamieson Webster, "On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe" (Catapult, 2025)
A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a socie...
20 Feb 202548min
Melinda Cooper, "Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance" (Zone Books, 2024)
At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over soaring public debt burdens, while central bankers ...
18 Feb 20251h 19min
Yoni Appelbaum, "Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity" (Random House, 2025)
We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are inaccessible to all but the very wealthy. But, in America, this wasn’t always the case. Though for most of world h...
18 Feb 202527min
Briony Hannell, "Feminist Fandom: Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
What is the connection between fan culture and feminism? In Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr (Bloomsbury, 2023), Briony Hannell, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Manchester, exp...
15 Feb 202539min
Professor Priyamvada Gopal on Anticolonial Resistance
In this episode Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid talked to Professor Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. We talked about her important work on anticolonial...
14 Feb 202557min
Peter Burke, "Ignorance: A Global History" (Yale UP, 2024)
Throughout history, every age has thought of itself as more knowledgeable than the last. Renaissance humanists viewed the Middle Ages as an era of darkness, Enlightenment thinkers tried to sweep super...
14 Feb 202543min
Iain D. Thomson, "Rethinking Death in and after Heidegger" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
We are coming up on the centenary of Heidegger’s Being and Time, a text that radically reshaped the intellectual landscape. One of its most central themes, death, remains one of its most difficult to ...
12 Feb 20251h 29min
Failed Passing
Ian Fleishman develops the concept of failed passing in his new book Flamboyant Fictions, which reimagines free will in queer lives as an accidental affirmation of identity despite efforts towards adh...
12 Feb 202519min
