Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta (U Nebraska Press, 2025) tells the story of Muhammad Ali’s return to the ring in 1970, after a more than three-year suspension for refusing his draft notice as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. With Ali’s career still in doubt, he found new support in shifting public opin ... Show More
Today
Najati Sidqi, "Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist: The Secret Life of Najati Sidqi" (U Texas Press, 2025)
In the public eye, Najati Sidqi was known as a journalist and writer, a translator of Russian classics, and an outspoken opponent of Nazism. However, Sidqi concealed a critical component of his life from the world and his family. He was an underground activist for the Palestinian ... Show More
25m 54s
Jan 28
Betty Boyd Caroli, "A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Betty Boyd Caroli's biography of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch is the first full-length work on a seminal figure in the settlement house movement, which spearheaded efforts to improve the life of immigrants and to counter urban squalor in cities around America in the early 19th cent ... Show More
59m 33s
Jan 27
Duy Lap Nguyen, "Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy: A New Historical Materialism" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, who tragically died at 48 years old in 1940 as he fled the advance of the Third Reich on the French-Spanish border. Most writers and critics see Benjamin’s work as fragmented, d ... Show More
38m 19s
Jul 2024
Alan Lightman, "Einstein's Dreams" (Vintage, 1992)
Einstein’s Dreams (Vintage, 1992) by Alan Lightman, set in Albert Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, is a novel about the cultural interconnection of time, relativity and life. As the young genius creates his theory of relativity, in a series of dreams, he imagines other worlds, ... Show More
55m 6s
Apr 2025
693 Understanding the Wonders of Nature (with Alan Lightman) | My Last Book with Alan Lightman
In today's world of specialization, Alan Lightman is that rare individual who has accomplished remarkable things in two very different realms. As a physicist with a Ph.D. from Cal Tech, he's taught at Harvard and MIT and advised the United Nations. As a novelist, he's written awa ... Show More
56m 13s
Jun 2020
Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV ... Show More
2 h
Oct 2022
British Academy Book Prize 2022
Deafness and communication, writing Chinese, women as killers in Chile, German postwar history, testimony from a Swedish village and a global history of science are the topics explored in the books shortlisted for this year's prize for Global Cultural Understanding run by the Bri ... Show More
45m 2s
Sep 2023
Jonathan Leal, "Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop" (Duke UP, 2023)
In Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop (Duke UP, 2023), Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Blending lyrical nonfiction with transdisciplinary critique and moving beyond standa ... Show More
1h 19m
Feb 2025
523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with neuroscientist, bestselling author, and PBS presenter Dr. David Eagleman. They discuss brain plasticity, how perception works, whether free will exists (and if it’s superordinate), how willingness to engage with higher entropy indicates sophi ... Show More
1h 35m