Jake Berman, "The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been" (U Chicago Press, 2023)| Listen on Anghami

Yesterday

Ron Hayduk, "Untangling the Political Roots of Immigration and Inequality in the United States" (Routledge, 2026)

Untangling the Political Roots of Immigration and Inequality in the United States (Routledge, 2026) examines the causes, consequences, and politics of mass migration and growing inequality by investigating the case of the United States – the quintessential immigrant nation. Whil ... Show More

30m 14s

Feb 4

Ning Leng, "Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China" (Cambridge, 2025)

In her new book, Politicizing Business: How Firms Are Made to Serve the Party-State in China (Cambridge, 2025), Ning Leng shows how Chinese officials systematically treat formally private firms as political instruments, extracting services that advance careers and maintain social ... Show More

55m 45s

Feb 4

Dafeng Xu, "Chinatown: San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake and the Paradox of American Immigration Policy" (JHU Press, 2026)

San Francisco's Chinatown is the oldest Chinatown in North America and one of the largest Chinese enclaves outside Asia. Spanning 30 city blocks and home to tens of thousands of monolingual Chinese residents, its endurance is remarkable—especially given how close it came to erasu ... Show More

53m 53s

Sep 2024

Amir Alexander, "Liberty's Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Seen from an airplane, much of the United States appears to be a gridded land of startling uniformity. Perpendicular streets and rectangular fields, all precisely measured and perfectly aligned, turn both urban and rural America into a checkerboard landscape that stretches from h ... Show More

58m 11s

Oct 2025

The London Underground

The London Underground – often known simply as the Tube – is central to the city’s global identity. A pioneering feat of engineering at the time of its construction in the 19th century, on a typical weekday, the network now carries 5 million passengers between 272 stations, on 11 ... Show More

54m 25s

Mar 2025

The Birth of New York City

<p>Exactly 400 years ago, the Dutch West India Company built Fort Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan island, a beacon of power and resilience against threats from Europeans and Indigenous Americans. But how did things change when England invaded in 1664?</p><br><p>Profess ... Show More

44m 38s

Oct 2025

Train Hopping

In this week’s Flightless Bird, David talks to a man who lived as a train hopper for two years. They talk about the lifestyle, dangers and chaos of illegally hitching rides across America using the railroad system. The country’s first train tracks were laid down in the 1820s - an ... Show More

1h 27m

Sep 2025

People of the railways

The story of Britain's railways isn't just about steam engines and steel tracks—it's about the people who built them, worked on them, and sometimes fought for their rights along the way. To mark the 200th anniversary of the first modern passenger railway in 2025, this episode exp ... Show More

43m 46s

Jun 2025

Usonia: Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘utopian’ town

In 1948, the foundation was laid for a “utopian” community of houses designed by a man described as America’s greatest ever architect.Frank Lloyd Wright had been approached by a group who wanted to create a social collective of affordable homes, on land an hour north of New York ... Show More

10m 13s

Jan 2025

Jennie Lightweis-Goff, "Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when “urban” and “rural” indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson’s anti-ur ... Show More

56m 51s

Apr 2025

How the English took Manhattan

How did the English take Manhattan from the Dutch in the 17th century without firing a single shot? Speaking to Elinor Evans, historian Russell Shorto explains a many-layered colonial history, including pragmatic deals, personal rivalries, and ideological divides, that led to the ... Show More

44m 5s

Sep 2023

4. This Train Has Been Delayed

Singapore, 2016. A high-tech driverless train system starts glitching in wild and unpredictable ways. The train company, the government, even the military are at a loss: no-one can figure out what is causing the problem. Until Jason Bay and his team of data scientists assemble an ... Show More

13m 29s

Jul 2024

Amanda McMillan Lequieu, "Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Half a century ago, deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. But today, these places are not ghost towns. People still call these communities home, even as they struggle with unemployment, poverty, and other social and economic crises. Why do people re ... Show More

41m 40s

Jake Berman, "The Lost Subways of North ...