One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are-private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authorit ... Show More
Yesterday
Sebastian Truskolaski, "Adorno and the Ban on Images" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Adorno and the Ban on Images (Bloomsbury, 2022) upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism.
Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno's writings allow us to address what is argua ... Show More
58m 5s
Yesterday
Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edges of it. He performed alongside the brightest stars, wrote scores of plays, and toured the United States and England, but he neve ... Show More
1h 4m
Nov 23
Heather Davis, "Plastic Matter" (Duke UP, 2022)
Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in t ... Show More
1h 1m
Aug 2018
Robert N. Gross, “Public vs. Private: The Early History of School Choice in America” (Oxford UP, 2018)
There are numerous political debates about education policy today, but some of the most heated surround vouchers, charter schools, and other questions about public funding and oversight of private schools. Though many of these questions feel new, they, in fact, have a long histor ... Show More
1h 4m
Dec 2023
James A. Chamberlain, "Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work" (ILR Press, 2018)
This revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work (ILR Press, 2018), James A. Chamberlain argues that paid work and the civic duty to perform it subs ... Show More
45m 46s
Nov 2021
Sociology Ruins Private Equity
<p>You've probably heard the term private equity, but you might not know what it does. This episode looks at how private equity is embedded in our everyday lives, funded by the institutions that surround us, and what kind of impact that has on us. It also explores how sociologist ... Show More
31m 24s
Mar 2023
A "Do or Die" Moment for the Academic Labor Movement (w/ Matt Thomas, Kristina Mensik, Bryan Sacks, & Todd Wolfson)
<p>At colleges and universities across the country, a heated battle is playing out right now over workers' right to organize and have a say over how the institutions they keep afloat with their labor are run. From graduate student-worker unionization efforts and strikes at Temple ... Show More
1h 36m