With the threats of sea water warming and ocean acidification, coral reefs have become both a fire alarm and a barometer for the dangers of human induced climate change. We now face the possibility of a world without coral. In this cogent and timely work, Ann Elias interrogates how we came to know coral reefs in the way we do and the complicity of this knowi ... Show More
Yesterday
Jacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media" (Basic Books, 2022)
Jacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lone Demosthenes of 4th-century BCE Athens to the recent controversies regarding Donald Trump. In Free Speech: A History from Socrates ... Show More
35m 47s
Feb 6
Polina Dimova, "At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism" (Penn State UP, 2024)
Inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Dr. Polina Dimova’s At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism (Penn ... Show More
1h 2m
Aug 2022
What do warmer waters mean for life below the waves?
<p>The Ocean, it covers more than 70% of the surface if our planet, it provides us with food, medicine and even influences the weather.</p><p>For years its also helped to mitigate the effects of climate change. Since the 1970’s over 90% of atmospheric warming caused by green hous ... Show More
27m 22s
Sep 2020
Jeff Schauer, "Wildlife between Empire and Nation in 20th-Century Africa" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
The protection of African wildlife enjoys the support of large numbers of individuals and institutions throughout the world. In Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth Century Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Jeff Schauer explains how this global attention to African wi ... Show More
50m 48s
May 2023
Colin Hoag, "The Fluvial Imagination: On Lesotho’s Water-Export Economy" (U California Press, 2022)
Landlocked and surrounded by South Africa on all sides, the mountain kingdom of Lesotho became the world's first "water-exporting country" when it signed a 1986 treaty with its powerful neighbor. An elaborate network of dams and tunnels now carries water to Johannesburg, the subc ... Show More
59m 23s
Aug 2023
Travis Holloway, "How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene" (Stanford UP, 2022)
the near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster.
The irony of ... Show More
51m 14s