Kinship and Contradictions

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz on the complexities of Native American identity

Overconsumed

Adam Minter on what happens to all the stuff we downsize, declutter, and discard

Fiction, Fakery, and Factory Farming

Spanish novelist Munir Hachemi talks about Living Things

American Horror Story

Jeremy Dauber on our obsession with fear

The Writing on the Wall

Augustine Sedgewick on his discovery of Henry David Thoreau’s connection to slavery

This Woman’s Work

Susannah Gibson opens the parlor doors on 18th-century feminism

Queen of the Night

Leigh Ann Henion embraces the creatures that light up the dark

A Toothsome Tale

Bill Schutt chomps through millennia to share the story of our pearly whites

A Rebel to Remember

Gregory P. Downs on the late Anthony E. Kaye’s groundbreaking history of Nat Turner

Going for Gold

Joshua Prager on a forgotten Olympic gymnast whose 1904 record still hasn’t been beaten

The Oldest Living Music in the World

One man’s quest to uncover the mysteries of Europe’s most enduring folk songs

Twin Pandemics

A conversation about Covid-19 and racism with Philip Alcabes and Harriet Washington

Preaching the Floral Gospel

How the Plant Messiah saves species from the brink of extinction

Read Me A Poem, Won’t You?

Behind the scenes of our sister podcast

Whale Song

Unlocking the mysteries of the world’s largest mammals with old bones and new technology

Founding Falsehoods

Reconsidering how we’ve been telling stories about American history

The Antebellum Feminine Mystique

Contrary to fables, white female slave owners in the South were just as deeply invested in the institution as their male counterparts

Still Junk Science

How scientific inquiry has been complicit in, or explicitly aligned with, racism and white supremacy

Reading Together, Alone

Books were social media all along

Cræft in the Time of Corona

What we make with our hands tell us a lot about ourselves, even in a pandemic

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