Sound Authorities shows how experiences of music and sound played a crucial role in nineteenth-century scientific inquiry in Britain. In Sound Authorities, Edward J. Gillin focuses on hearing and aurality in Victorian Britain, claiming that the development of the natural sciences in this era cannot be understood without attending to the study of sound and music. During this time, scientific practitioners attempted to fashion themselves as authorities on sonorous phenomena, coming into conflict w...
May 18, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 661
Ordinary people can perform acts of astonishing selflessness, sometimes even putting their lives on the line. A pregnant woman saw a dorsal fin and blood in the water--and dove right in to pull her wounded husband to safety. Remarkably, some even leap into action to save complete strangers: One New York man jumped onto the subway tracks to rescue a boy who had fallen into the path of an oncoming train. Such behavior is not uniquely human. Researchers have found that mother rodents are highly mot...
May 12, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 660
Medieval books that survive today have been through a lot: singed by fire, mottled by mold, eaten by insects, annotated by readers, cut into fragments, or damaged through well-intentioned preservation efforts. In this book, Michelle Warren tells the story of one such manuscript--an Arthurian romance with textual origins in twelfth-century England now diffused across the twenty-first century internet. This trajectory has been propelled by a succession of technologies--from paper manufacture to pr...
May 05, 2022•55 min•Ep. 659
Cities pose formidable obstacles to nonhuman life. Vast expanses of asphalt and concrete are inhospitable to plants and animals; traffic noise and artificial light disturb natural rhythms; sewage and pollutants imperil existence. Yet cities teem with life: In rowhouse neighborhoods, tiny flowers bloom from cracks in the sidewalk. White clover covers lawns, its seeds dispersed by shoes and birds. Moths flutter and spiders weave their webs near electric lights. Sparrows and squirrels feast on the ...
May 05, 2022•45 min•Ep. 658
The Dark Ride collects John Kessel’s best short fiction, beginning with 1981’s “Not Responsible! Park and Lock It!” and ending with 2021’s “The Dark Ride.” The stories range from flash pieces to novellas, from comedy to existential horror, from far future SF to Kafkaesque fantasy, including 40,000 words of never-before-collected fiction and extensive author’s notes. "Completely strange and idiosyncratic. His stories are singular experiences. ...They burst out of their texts with news that is str...
Apr 26, 2022•55 min•Ep. 657
In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Riley Black walks readers through what happened in the days, the years, the centuries, and the million years after the impact, tracking the sweeping disruptions that overtook this one spot, and imagining what might have been happening elsewhere on the globe. Life’s losses were sharp and deeply-felt, but the hope carried by the beings that survived sets the stage for the world as we know it now. Picture yourself in the Cretaceous period. It’s a sunny afternoon i...
Apr 25, 2022•50 min•Ep. 656
The acclaimed author of the celebrated literary horror novels The Hunger and The Deep turns her psychological and supernatural eye on the horrors of the Japanese American internment camps in World War II. 1944: As World War II rages on, the threat has come to the home front. In a remote corner of Idaho, Meiko Briggs and her daughter, Aiko, are desperate to return home. Following Meiko's husband's enlistment as an air force pilot in the Pacific months prior, Meiko and Aiko were taken from their h...
Apr 22, 2022•47 min•Ep. 655
Trilobites were some of the most successful and versatile organisms ever to exist. Among the earliest forms of complex animal life, these hard-shelled marine invertebrates inhabited the primal seas of the Paleozoic Era. Their march through evolutionary time began in the Lower Cambrian, some 521 million years ago, and lasted until their demise at the end of the Permian, more than 250 million years later. During this vast stretch of planetary history, these adaptable animals filled virtually every...
Apr 21, 2022•49 min•Ep. 654
For some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others, it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full autonomy, claiming that machines will take over production and supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the immense human labor behind autonomous processes. Ther...
Apr 19, 2022•43 min•Ep. 653
Pain is an inevitable part of existence, but severe debilitating or chronic pain is a pathological condition that diminishes the quality of life. The Brain and Pain explores the present and future of pain management, providing a comprehensive understanding based on the latest discoveries from many branches of neuroscience. Richard Ambron--the former director of a neuroscience lab that conducted leading research in this field--explains the science of how and why we feel pain. He describes how the...
Apr 18, 2022•57 min•Ep. 652
The pressure to "be digital" has never been greater, but you can meet the challenge. The digital revolution is here, changing how work gets done, how industries are structured, and how people from all walks of life work, behave, and relate to each other. To thrive in a world driven by data and powered by algorithms, we must learn to see, think, and act in new ways. We need to develop a digital mindset. But what does that mean? Some fear it means that we all need to become technologists who maste...
Apr 18, 2022•44 min•Ep. 651
The incredible story of Benjamin Franklin’s parting gift to the working-class people of Boston and Philadelphia—a deathbed wager that captures the Founder’s American Dream and his lessons for our current, conflicted age. Benjamin Franklin was not a gambling man. But at the end of his illustrious life, the Founder allowed himself a final wager on the survival of the United States: a gift of two thousand pounds to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent out to tradesmen over the next two centuries to ...
Apr 18, 2022•59 min•Ep. 651
The New York Times bestselling author of The Rose Code returns with an unforgettable World War II tale of a quiet bookworm who becomes history’s deadliest female sniper. Based on a true story. In 1937 in the snowbound city of Kiev (now known as Kyiv), wry and bookish history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son—but Hitler’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia sends her on a different path. Given a rifle and sent to join the fight, Mila must forge hersel...
Apr 07, 2022•51 min•Ep. 650
They're underemployed. Underpaid. And trying to survive the end of the world while trapped inside an office complex. Who knew temp work could be this dangerous? Jacob Elliot doesn't want a temporary job in the mailroom at Delphi Enterprises, but after two post-college years of unpaid internships and living in his parents' basement, he needs the work. Then, on his first day, the unthinkable happens: toxic gas descends on a meeting in Delphi's outdoor amphitheater, killing all the regular employee...
Mar 30, 2022•51 min•Ep. 648
A revelatory new guide to building wealth amidst stock market crashes and uncertain economic conditions, drawing upon financial modeling, behavioral psychology, and market history to offer practical advice to everyday investors. Investing is scary. Never is that more true than during market pullbacks and recessions, whether the Great Recession of 2008; the brief, vertiginous COVID crash in 2020; or any number of recent smaller, yet still wrenching, periods of economic turbulence. We see those fl...
Mar 28, 2022•48 min•Ep. 647
Set in a working-class town on the Rhode Island coast, O'Nan's latest is a crushing, beautifully written, and profoundly compelling novel about sisters, mothers, and daughters, and the terrible things love makes us do. In the first line of Ocean State, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from there with incredible momentum is thus one of the build-up to and fall-out from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the ...
Mar 26, 2022•43 min•Ep. 646
C. S. Lewis had one of the great minds of the twentieth century. Many readers know Lewis as an author of fiction and fantasy literature, including the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. Others know him for his books in apologetics, including Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain . But few know him for his scholarly work as a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature. What shaped the mind of this great thinker? Jason Baxter argues that Lewis was deeply formed not only by the w...
Mar 09, 2022•40 min•Ep. 645
The Heights is a tall, slender apartment building among warehouses in London. Its roof terrace is so discreet, you wouldn’t know it existed if you weren’t standing at the window of the flat directly opposite. But you are. And that’s when you see a man up there—a man you’d recognize anywhere. He may be older now, but it’s definitely him. But that can’t be because he’s been dead for over two years. You know this for a fact. Because you’re the one who killed him. Get the book: https://wellingtonsqu...
Feb 25, 2022•48 min•Ep. 644
From Insomniac City author Bill Hayes, "who can tackle just about any subject in book form, and make you glad he did" (SF Chronicle)—a cultural, scientific, literary, and personal history of exercise. Exercise is our modern obsession, and we have the fancy workout gear and fads from HIIT to spin classes to hot yoga to prove it. Exercise—a form of physical activity distinct from sports, play, or athletics—was an ancient obsession, too, but as a chapter in human history, it's been largely overlook...
Feb 23, 2022•49 min•Ep. 643
A poet’s audio obsession, from collecting his earliest vinyl to his quest for the ideal vacuum tubes. A captivating book that “ingeniously mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an indispensable guide for the search of acoustic truth” (Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan). Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begi...
Feb 22, 2022•54 min•Ep. 642
What really happened in Area 51? Adam Pagnucco is just trying to help out a stranger who's down and out. He has no idea that man is Winston Koop, his exceptionally talented, ex-best friend. Koop and Nuke had been inseparable in college, but then life happened. Nuke finally quit drinking, and Koop--Koop was at the center of a massive conspiracy that the government faked UFOs just to cover it up. Even after confessing to removing the memories of hundreds of people, Koop is still hiding something c...
Feb 22, 2022•53 min•Ep. 641
A leading philosopher takes a mind-bending journey through virtual worlds, illuminating the nature of reality and our place within it. Virtual reality is genuine reality; that’s the central thesis of Reality+ . In a highly original work of “technophilosophy,” David J. Chalmers gives a compelling analysis of our technological future. He argues that virtual worlds are not second-class worlds, and that we can live a meaningful life in virtual reality. We may even be in a virtual world already. Alon...
Feb 22, 2022•46 min•Ep. 641
The New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with a guide to the power of literature in turbulent times, arming readers with a resistance reading list, ranging from James Baldwin to Zora Neale Hurston to Margaret Atwood. What is the role of literature in an era when one political party wages continual war on writers and the press? What is the connection between political strife in our daily lives, and the way we meet our enemies on the page in fiction? How can litera...
Feb 22, 2022•34 min•Ep. 640
In 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika Crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus. Once unleashed, the Arctic plague will reshape life on Earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventi...
Feb 22, 2022•45 min•Ep. 640
Reflections from a life lived in medicine. Pediatrician Mark Vonnegut has spent forty years treating children for coughs, fevers, ear infections, and sometimes more serious complaints. In that time he has seen the American medical system change in ways he couldn't have imagined as a medical student--some of them good, others not so good. But what hasn't changed is his commitment to his young patients, whose stories fill the pages of this book. There's Anna Maria, a little girl with an incurable ...
Jan 21, 2022•58 min•Ep. 639
The dramatic story of how a humble bookseller fought against incredible odds to bring one of the most important books of the 20th century to the world in this new novel from the author of The Girl in White Gloves. When bookish young American Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare and Company on a quiet street in Paris in 1919, she has no idea that she and her new bookstore will change the course of literature itself. Shakespeare and Company is more than a bookstore and lending library: Many of the promi...
Jan 14, 2022•51 min•Ep. 638
A truly original book in every sense of the word, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows poetically defines emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express, until now—from the creator of the popular online project of the same name. Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, realizing that everyone is the main character in their own story, each living a life as vivid and complex as your own? That feeling has a name: “sonder.” Or maybe you’ve watched a t...
Nov 16, 2021•47 min•Ep. 637
Bestselling biographer Laurence Leamer delves into the years following the acclaimed publication of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1958 and In Cold Blood in 1966, when Capote struggled with a crippling case of writer’s block. While enjoying all the fruits of his success, he was struck with an idea for what he was sure would be his most celebrated novel…one based on the remarkable, racy lives of his very, very rich friends. For years, Capote attempted to write Answered Prayers, what he believed wou...
Nov 10, 2021•40 min•Ep. 636
As a child, Jerad Alexander lay in bed listening to the fighter jets take off outside his window and was desperate to be airborne. As a teenager at an American base in Japan, he immersed himself in war games, war movies, and pulpy novels about Vietnam. Obsessed with all things military, he grew up playing with guns, joined the Civil Air Patrol for the uniform, and reveled in the closed and safe life “inside the castle,” within the embrace of the armed forces, the only world he knew or could imag...
Nov 10, 2021•5 min•Ep. 635
Lily King, one of the most "brilliant" ( New York Times Book Review ), "wildly talented" ( Chicago Tribune ), and treasured authors of contemporary fiction, returns after her recent bestselling novels with Five Tuesdays in Winter, her first book of short fiction. Told in the intimate voices of complex, endearing characters, Five Tuesdays in Winter intriguingly subverts expectations as it explores desire, loss, jolting violence, and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A reclusive booksel...
Nov 08, 2021•1 min•Ep. 634
