Lee Gutkind is the founder of the literary magazine, Creative Nonfiction. He’s edited or authored over 30 books during his time on the faculty of, first, the University of Pittsburgh and, more recently, Arizona State University. His latest book is The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-do-wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction (Yale UP, 2024). This episode encapsulates the journey that Lee Gutkind has made, as a self-confessed former hippie motor...
Mar 01, 2024•27 min•Ep. 9
Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara Ehrenreich, who conceived of EHRP, once described as "the real face of journalism today: not million dollar-a-year anchorpersons, but low-wage workers and downwardly spiraling professionals."One ess...
Feb 28, 2024•55 min•Ep. 145
From talking heads on cable news to hot takes online, there seems to be more opinion than ever in journalism these days. There’s an entire body of research about how this shift toward opinionated news impacts the people who consume news, but far less on how these changes impact the people who create it. Kimberly Meltzer tackles some of these questions in her book From News to Talk: The Expansion of Opinion and Commentary in U.S. Journalism (SUNY Press, 2019). The book features interviews with jo...
Feb 14, 2024•58 min•Ep. 49
Listen to this interview of Christopher Reddy, environmental chemist and Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. We talk about his book Science Communication in a Crisis: An Insider's Guide (Routledge Earthscan 2023). Christopher Reddy : "Communication definitely teaches us scientists things that we hadn't knows or appreciated, even in our own research. I mean, when you have to rethink about how and why you're doing something and what the outcomes mean, tha...
Feb 13, 2024•54 min•Ep. 157
An indispensable guide for telling fact from fiction on the internet—often in less than 30 seconds. The internet brings information to our fingertips almost instantly. The result is that we often jump to thinking too fast, without taking a few moments to verify the source before engaging with a claim or viral piece of media. Information literacy expert Mike Caulfield and educational researcher Sam Wineburg are here to enable us to take a moment for due diligence with this informative, approachab...
Feb 10, 2024•33 min•Ep. 113
Undercover investigators have been celebrated as critical conduits of political speech and essential protectors of transparency. They have also been derided as intrusive and spy-like, inconsistent with private property rights, and morally or ethically questionable. In Truth and Transparency: Undercover Investigations in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Alan K. Chen and Dr. Justin Marceau rigorously examine this duality and seek to provide a socio-legal context for...
Jan 31, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 73
The effort to destroy facts and make America ungovernable didn't come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of seventy years of strategic denialism. In On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy (MIT Press, 2023), Lee McIntyre shows how the war on facts began, and how ordinary citizens can fight back against the scourge of disinformation that is now threatening the very fabric of our society. Drawing on his twenty years of experience as a scholar of science denial, McIntyre ...
Jan 27, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 120
Why games are still niche and not mainstream, and how journalism can help them gain cultural credibility. Mainstreaming and Game Journalism (MIT Press, 2023) addresses both the history and current practice of game journalism, along with the roles writers and industry play in conveying that the medium is a “mainstream” form of entertainment. Through interviews with reporters, David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman retrace how the game industry and journalists started a subcultural spiral in the 1980...
Jan 15, 2024•34 min•Ep. 5
This episode’s host, Adina Zemanek, invited Sherry Lee, Chief Operating Officer and Deputy CEO of the non-profit, independent media organization The Reporter, for a conversation on a recent graphic journalism series, The Reporter File. We talked about what inspired the inauguration of this series and its role alongside traditional news reporting, the characteristics of these graphic narratives, pathways for establishing collaboration with the publisher of the print edition and with comics artist...
Jan 13, 2024•31 min•Ep. 18
Once upon a time, if you wanted to know if a movie was worth seeing, you didn’t check out Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB. You asked whether Siskel & Ebert had given it “two thumbs up.” On a cold Saturday afternoon in 1975, two men (who had known each other for eight years before they’d ever exchanged a word) met for lunch in a Chicago pub. Gene Siskel was the film critic for the Chicago Tribune. Roger Ebert had recently won the Pulitzer Prize—the first ever awarded to a film critic—for his work at ...
Jan 13, 2024•59 min•Ep. 185
A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Ayelet Brinn offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex and often unexpected ways that women and ideas about women shaped widely read Jewish newspapers. Between the 1880s and 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers rose from obscurity to become successful institutions integral to American Jewish life. During this period, Yiddish-speaking immigrants came to view newspapers as indispensable parts of th...
Jan 09, 2024•32 min•Ep. 463
Until the recent political shift pushed workers back into the media spotlight, the mainstream media had largely ignored this significant part of American society in favor of the moneyed upscale consumer for more than four decades. Christopher R. Martin now reveals why and how the media lost sight of the American working class and the effects of it doing so. The damning indictment of the mainstream media that flows through No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class...
Jan 07, 2024•49 min•Ep. 142
In Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television (Yale University Press, 2016), Christine E. Evans reveals that Soviet television in the Brezhnev era was anything but boring. Whether producing music shows such as Little Blue Flame, game shows like Let's Go Girls or dramatic mini-series, the creators of Soviet programming in the 1950s through 1970s sought to produce television that was festive. Evans demonstrates that television programmers conducted audience research and audienc...
Dec 29, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 64
My Life in Propaganda: A Memoir about Language and Totalitarian Regimes (Durvile, 2023) is Magda Stroińska’s personal account of growing up with communist propaganda in Eastern Europe. She looks at the influence of her family history that contradicted what she was taught at school; the cognitive and emotional effects of compulsory school readings; socialist realist art and film; and Radio Free Europe and Voice of America and their role in shaping her generation’s collective view of the world. Th...
Dec 21, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 215
Hunter S. Thompson was never a hippie, but his writing nonetheless helped define the counterculture and the San Francisco scene of the 1960s and early 1970s. In Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo (U California Press, 2022), literary scholar and California historian Peter Richardson examines Thompson less as a cultural figure than as a member of a literary movement. Richardson explores the roots of Thompson's "gonzo journalism" writing style and explains his influences...
Dec 15, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 148
It wasn’t easy writing a biography the mysterious, shape-shifting Thomas King Forçade, but after nine years of research and extensive interviews, Sean Howe did it. His new book, Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s (Hachette Books), chronicles the life and times of Forçade, an enigmatic figure of the center of America’s counterculture, who crafted several iconic lives for himself before his tragic death in 1978. Linking the history of the undergroun...
Dec 10, 2023•52 min•Ep. 58
For close to half a century after World War II, Marty Glickman was the voice of New York sports. His distinctive style of broadcasting, on television and especially on the radio, garnered for him legions of fans who would not miss his play-by-play accounts. From the 1940s through the 1990s, he was as iconic a sports figure in town as the Yankees’ Mickey Mantle, the Knicks’ Walt Frazier, or the Jets’ Joe Namath. His vocabulary and method of broadcasting left an indelible mark on the industry, and...
Dec 09, 2023•40 min•Ep. 263
Dr. Amy Matthewson's Cartooning China: Punch, Power, & Politics in the Victorian Era (Routledge, 2022) explores the series of cartoons of China and the Chinese that were published in the popular British satirical magazine Punch over a sixty-year period from 1841 to 1901. Filled with political metaphors and racial stereotypes, these illustrations served as a powerful tool in both reflecting and shaping notions and attitudes towards China at a tumultuous time in Sino-British history. A close r...
Dec 06, 2023•36 min•Ep. 6
In How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023), Jonathan D. Fitzgerald examines a mode of journalistic storytelling dating back nearly two centuries. Literary journalism arose in the decades before the U.S. Civil War alongside the era's sentimental literature. Combining fact-based reporting with the sentimentality of popular fiction, literary journalism encouraged readers to empathize with subjects by presenting more nuanced and engagi...
Dec 04, 2023•52 min•Ep. 72
A dictator's power is secure, the authors begin in this muscular, impressive study, only as long as citizens believe in it. When citizens suddenly believe otherwise, a dictator's power is anything but, as the Soviet Union's collapse revealed. This conviction – that power rests ultimately on citizens' beliefs – compels the world's autocrats to invest in sophisticated propaganda. Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by ...
Nov 19, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 115
China’s news sector is a place where newsmakers, advertising executives, company bosses, and Party officials engage one another in contingent and evolving arrangements that run from cooperation and collaboration to manipulation and betrayal. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with journalists, editors, and executives at a newspaper in Guangzhou, China, The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era (U Michigan Press, 2023) brings its readers ...
Nov 13, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 266
Over the past 40 years, lawmakers in America's two major political parties have taken increasingly extreme positions on ideological issues. Voters from the two parties have become increasingly distinct and hostile to one another along the lines of race, religion, geography, and culture. In Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young illustrates how political leaders and media organizations capitalize on s...
Nov 06, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 683
In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked—but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named “digital asset”? As he observed this frenzy, investigative reporter Zeke Faux had a nagging question: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as cur...
Nov 04, 2023•52 min
A deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States. From the climate crisis to the opioid crisis to the Coronavirus crisis, the language of crisis is everywhere around us and ubiquitous in contemporary American politics and policymaking. But for every problem that political actors describe as a crisis, there are myriad other equally serious ones that are not described in this way. Why has the term crisis been asso...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 168
In recent decades, authenticity has become an American obsession. It animates thirty years' worth of reality TV programming and fuels the explosive virality of one hot social media app after another. It characterizes Donald Trump's willful disregard for political correctness (and proofreading) and inspires multinational corporations to stake activist claims in ways that few "woke" brands ever dared before. It buttresses a multibillion-dollar influencer industry of everyday folks shilling their f...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 321
For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy - until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Magazine (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Jeff Jarvis, part of the Object Lessons series is a tribute to all that magazines were. From their origins in London and on Ben Franklin's press; through their boom - enabled by new technologies - as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-suppo...
Oct 31, 2023•40 min•Ep. 113
Thanks to the First Amendment, Americans enjoy a rare privilege: the constitutional right to lie. And although controversial, they should continue to enjoy this right. When commentators and politicians discuss misinformation, they often repeat five words: "fire in a crowded theater." Though governments can, if they choose, attempt to ban harmful lies, propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation, how effective will their efforts really be? Can they punish someone for yelling "fire" in a crowde...
Oct 24, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 200
Valentina Marcella's Laughing Matters: Graphic Satire Reckoning with the 1980 Coup in Turkey (Istituto per l’Oriente C. A. Nallino 2022) focuses on the production of political cartoons in Turkey in the context of authoritarianism and repression that was brought about by the coup d’état of September 12 1980, and by the military rule that followed. It builds on theories of political satire as an active element of political culture. Political cartoons serve as the lens through which the evolution o...
Oct 12, 2023•51 min•Ep. 237
In Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Johannes Schmid’s new book considers documentary comics in relationship to framing, that is both the strategic use of communication to encourage a particular interpretation of a scenario; secondly, the process of structuring a representation (or portions thereof) by situating it within certain boundaries, in the case of comics, a panel or a page, for example. Dr. Schmid combines theories of framing analysis and cognitive nar...
Oct 09, 2023•44 min•Ep. 168
Before email, when long distance telephone calls were difficult and expensive, people wrote letters, often several each day. Today, those letters provide an intimate and revealing look at the lives and loves of the people who wrote them. When the author is a brilliant writer who lived an exciting, eventful life, the letters are especially interesting. Martha Gellhorn was a strong-willed, self-made, modern woman whose journalism, and life, were widely influential at the time and cleared a path fo...
Oct 03, 2023•51 min•Ep. 66
