Yesterday
Benjamin Robert Siegel, "Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Markets of Pain offers a sweeping history of the business of licit opium--following cultivators, merchants, scientists, and policymakers--and shows how this potent crop reshaped global trade, medicine, and geopolitics. For centuries, opium has been a source of both profit and pe ... Show More
37m 23s
May 10
Rachel Grace Newman, "The Future in Their Hands: Making Mexico's Foreign-Educated Elite" (U California Press, 2026)
The Future in Their Hands: Making Mexico's Foreign-Educated Elite (U California Press, 2026), by Dr. Rachel Grace Newman is a deep history of the politics of foreign education in Mexico, where many influential figures have degrees from European or US institutions. Reconstructing ... Show More
59m 28s
May 9
Olivier Sylvain, "Recovering the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control-And How We Can Take It Back" (Columbia Global Reports, 2026)
Recovering the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control-And How We Can Take It Back (Columbia Global Reports, 2026)is an indictment of how Big Tech cloaks ruthless commercial exploitation in the language of free speech. Olivier Sylvain, a leading legal scholar and former senior adviso ... Show More
31m 54s
May 2023
How AI could help rebuild the middle class
For the last four decades, technology has been mostly a force for greater inequality and a shrinking middle class. But new empirical evidence suggests that the age of AI could be different. We speak to MIT's David Autor, one of the greatest labor economists in the world, who envi ... Show More
21m 22s
Nov 2024
Mara Kardas-Nelson, "We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance" (Metropolitan Books, 2024)
In this deeply researched and compelling narrative, journalist Mara Kardas-Nelson examines the complex history and impact of microfinance - the practice of giving small loans to poor people, particularly women, that was once hailed as a revolutionary solution to global poverty. T ... Show More
43m 54s
Dec 2024
Carrie M. Lane, "More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn't Working" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
This study of organizing and decluttering professionals helps us understand—and perhaps alleviate—the overwhelming demands society places on our time and energy.
For a widely dreaded, often mundane task, organizing one’s possessions has taken a surprising hold on our cultural ima ... Show More
38m 43s
May 2025
David Bornstein — On Our Lives with the News
A calming and helpful conversation for making sense of the very story of our time, and how that is coming to us and being powerfully shaped through media and journalism. The theory of change of journalism as it came out of the 20th century, David Bornstein says, is that shining a ... Show More
54m 53s
Jul 2023
Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell, "Uncomfortably Off: Why Higher-Income Earners Should Care about Inequality" (Policy Press, 2023)
How can we build a better social and political settlement? In Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care about Inequality (Policy Press, 2023), Marcos González Hernando an Honorary Research Fellow at the UCL Social Research Institute and Postdoctoral Researcher at ... Show More
43m 17s
Sep 2025
The Victorians, Part 1 of 2
Over the course of Queen Victoria’s reign, Britain transformed into the world's foremost industrial and imperial power. The Victorians built railways that spanned continents, invented life-changing technologies, and expanded a vast realm that stretched from the Caribbean to India ... Show More
55m 35s
Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara Ehrenreich, who conceived of EHRP, once described as "the ... Show More
