Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Doubleday, 2019), Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria an ... Show More
Today
Andrew H. Jaffe, "The Random Universe: How Models and Probability Help Us Make Sense of the Cosmos" (Yale UP, 2025)
An award-winning astrophysicist looks at how the understanding of uncertainty and randomness has led to breakthroughs in our knowledge of the cosmos
All of us understand the world around us by constructing models, comparing them to observations, and drawing conclusions. Scientis ... Show More
1h 29m
Nov 19
Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)
In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even tod ... Show More
54m 29s
Nov 13
Craig Hogan, "The Unlikely Primeval Sky" (American Scientist, November-December)
Of all the patterns that could possibly be preserved in the post–Big Bang radiation, the one we see is surprisingly smooth on large angular scales. Sitting by a campfire on a dark night, looking up at the Milky Way, a curious child asks, “What does the sky tell us? Where does it ... Show More
30m 27s
Apr 2024
Alexander Statman, "A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Alexander Statman's book A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science.
The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new idea ... Show More
50m 2s
May 2022
Ferenc Hörcher, "The Political Philosophy of the European City: From Polis, Through City-State, to Megalopolis?" (Lexington Book, 2021)
To many the city might seem simply a large urban area to live within, but it actually forms an important political concept and community that has been influential throughout European history. From the polis of Ancient Greece, to the Roman Republic, to the city-states of the Itali ... Show More
1h 19m
Jul 2021
Ryan J. Lynch, "Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography: The Futuh Al-Buldan of Al-Baladhuri" (I. B. Tauris, 2021)
Of the available sources for Islamic history published before the 9th century of the Christian Era, few are of greater importance than Kitab Futuh al-Buldan (The Book of the Conquest of Lands), by al-Baladhuri, a ninth-century administrator at the Abbasid court. The text has been ... Show More
1h 13m
Sep 2020
Jeff Schauer, "Wildlife between Empire and Nation in 20th-Century Africa" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
The protection of African wildlife enjoys the support of large numbers of individuals and institutions throughout the world. In Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth Century Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Jeff Schauer explains how this global attention to African wi ... Show More
50m 48s
Jul 2021
Ryan J. Lynch, "Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography: The Futuh Al-Buldan of Al-Baladhuri" (I. B. Tauris, 2021)
Of the available sources for Islamic history published before the 9th century of the Christian Era, few are of greater importance than Kitab Futuh al-Buldan (The Book of the Conquest of Lands), by al-Baladhuri, a ninth-century administrator at the Abbasid court. The text has been ... Show More
1h 11m
May 2014
Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating window into the ways that thi ... Show More
59m 49s
Jul 2021
Germán Campos Muñoz, "The Classics in South America: Five Case Studies" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Germán Campos Muñoz, The Classics in South America: Five Case Studies (Bloomsbury, 2021) examines the long and complex history of the Greco-Roman tradition in South America, arguing that the Classics have played a crucial, though often overlooked, role in the self-definition in t ... Show More
1h 34m