Radio, today, can feel like a faithful old companion, but its early history was sensational. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was transformed by what was known as the Radio Craze. Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home (Bodleian Library, 2025) expresses what the radio's arrival signified at a personal level. This narrative history recounts the perspective ... Show More
Yesterday
Myles Lennon, "Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2025)
In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Both envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. However, ... Show More
1h 10m
Jul 7
Joseph Darda, "Gift and Grit: Race, Sports, and the Construction of Social Debt" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
In 1998, Bill Clinton hosted a town hall on race and sports. 'If you've got a special gift,' the president said of athletes, 'you owe more back.' Gift and Grit shows how the sports industry has incubated racial ideas about advantage and social debt since the civil rights era by s ... Show More
1h 13m
Jul 6
Kelsea Best, Kayly Ober, Robert A. McLeman, "Migration and Displacement in a Changing Climate" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
This book provides insight into the impact of climate change on human mobility - including both migration and displacement - by synthesizing key concepts, research, methodology, policy, and emerging issues surrounding the topic. It illuminates the connections between climate chan ... Show More
47m 18s
Dec 2024
Reem Hilu, "Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s: The Intimate Life of Computers" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s: The Intimate Life of Computers (U Minnesota Press, 2024) shows how the widespread introduction of home computers in the 1980s was purposefully geared toward helping sustain heteronormative middle-class families by shaping relationships between ... Show More
29m 12s
May 2018
Peter Hoar, “The World’s Din: Listening to Records, Radio and Films in New Zealand 1880–1940” (Otago University Press, 2018)
In his new book, The World’s Din: Listening to Records, Radio and Films in New Zealand 1880–1940 (Otago University Press, 2018), Peter Hoar, a senior lecturer in radio and media history at Auckland University of Technology, explores how new technology shaped how New Zealanders ex ... Show More
17m 52s
Jan 2024
William G. Pooley, "Body and Tradition in 19th-Century France: Félix Arnaudin and the Moorlands of Gascony, 1870-1914" (Oxford UP, 2019)
The moorlands of Gascony are often considered one of the most dramatic examples of top-down rural modernization in nineteenth-century Europe. From an area of open moors, they were transformed in one generation into the largest man-made forest in Europe.Body and Tradition in Ninet ... Show More
58m 24s
Aug 2024
The not-so-secret life of plants
From the perspective of Western science, plants have long been considered unaware, passive life forms; essentially, rocks that happen to grow. But there’s something in the air in the world of plant science. New research suggests that plants are aware of the world around them to a ... Show More
35m 49s
Jul 2024
Sarah Milton, "Ageing and New Intimacies: Gender, Sexuality and Temporality in an English Salsa Scene" (Manchester UP, 2024)
The 'baby boom' generation, born between the 1940s and the 1960s, is often credited with pioneering new and creative ways of relating, doing intimacy and making families. With this cohort now entering mid and later life in Britain, they are also said to be revolutionising the exp ... Show More
53m 25s
Oct 2024
Febreze Scentstories: A fake CD player that smells
Shania Twain was the spokesperson for Febreze Scentstories, a product that debuted in 2004 to much confusion. The contraption looks like a CD player, but instead of music it plays…fragrances. We don’t get it either, but we will assess today how and why it failed. Plus: while Norw ... Show More
13m 55s