What is the opposite of “big” data? In a society where households commonly store personal archives of photos, financial records, and other documents, the “little” database—the personal data collection that is stored and backed up and not accessed frequently—deserves a category of its own. In The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats, Daniel S…

What lives in the spaces between dreams and apocalypse? Two authors discuss their books on Indigenous media: Karrmen Crey, whose Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada considers the political and cultural conditions that enabled the proliferation of Indigenous media across Canada in the early 1990s. The product of years of em…

In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the nascent discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as “ethnographic surrealism.” Joyce Suechun Cheng considers the ethnographic dimension of the surrealist movement in its formative years in her new book The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the …

In Copenhagen in 1972, during the exhilarating early days of women’s liberation in Scandinavia and dramatic social change around the world, seven women had a child together. Recounting her mothers’ history—from the passions and beliefs they shared to the political divisions over sexual identity that ultimately split them apart—Pernille Ipsen’s chro…

Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently from how she is classically understood; rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, Washington argues that Austen leverages the generic restraints of the novel and envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that supposedly solidifies in the eighteenth cen…

“Lack of political will and corruption of the ruling class are certainly enormous obstacles but do not (fully) explain the widespread inaction against our current multidimensional crisis (ecological catastrophe, failing democracies, permanent and more destructive wars, etc.).” So opens Andrea Righi’s Three Economies of Transcendence, which takes a …

In his book Late Star Trek, Adam Kotsko analyzes the wealth of content set within Star Trek’s sprawling continuity, beginning with the prequel series Enterprise, highlighting creative triumphs and the tendency for franchise faithfulness to get in the way of new ideas. Arguing against the consensus that franchises are a sign of cultural decay, Kotsk…

Some attributes of the paranormal mind are dismissed as nonsense, but what can an exploration of pseudoscientific phenomena tell us about accepted scientific and cultural thought? In Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal, Derek Lee traces the evolution of psi epistemologies and uncovers how these ideas have migrated …

Sasha Davis, an activist and scholar of radical environmental advocacy, brings new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have found success by unconventional means. From contesting environmental abuse to reasserting Indigenous sovereignty, these movements demonstrate how people can collectively wrest control ove…

From Get Out to The Babadook to Saint Maud: In his new book, Josh Gooch uses the horror film genre to expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism, drawing connections between Marxist theory and contemporary narratives of psychological unease. Here, Gooch is joined in conversation with Jo Isaacson. This episode contains spoilers for multi…

Between the World Wars, ideas about meaning, truth, and the ethics of persuasion informed newly articulated principles for combining word and image. The young field of graphic design developed quickly during this period, and photography played a central role as a visual language of modern life. The concept Typophoto was coined by Bauhaus artist Lás…

From Plato and Derrida to anti-aging treatments, cryogenics, cloning, and whole-brain uploads, the dream of indefinite life is technological and, as Adam Rosenthal shows in Prosthetic Immortalities: a matter of prosthesis, the transformation of the original being. There can be no certainty of immortality and yet, the problem of immortality continue…

Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Alexander Menrisky, author of Everyday Ecofascism, shows how extremist sentiments have crept into everyday language, stories, and ideas. He illuminates ecofascism’s narrative patterns and their easy permeation of environmentalist discourses, from …

The story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and its Historical Committee—and its fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite its history—is the focus of Rose Miron’s award-winning book Indigenous Archival Activism. Miron’s research and writing are shaped by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations as part of her more-than-…

Society has yet to fully grapple with the administrative chaos that has ensued from the growth of the urban. One such city allows tremendous insight into the process of urbanization in the new millennium: Bengaluru. During the past two decades, Bengaluru’s real estate sector and infrastructure investments have exploded in a massive transformation t…

Tamara Dean's quest to live lightly on the planet in the midst of the environmental crises of our time led her to a landscape unlike any other: the Driftless area of Wisconsin, a region untouched by glaciers, marked by steep hills and deeply carved valleys, capped with forests and laced with cold, spring-fed streams. There she confronted, in ways l…

Cities across the US are rethinking streets, going beyond sidewalks and bike lanes to welcome nonmotorists to share the roadway. David L. Prytherch, author of Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets, traces the historical evolution of America’s streets and explores contemporary movements to retake them from cars for diverse fo…

Cinema can be furtive and intensely beautiful—and it can leave a viewer craving more. Cinemal is Tessa Laird’s passionate inquiry into the desire to write about animals and to write about art, juxtaposing the two and burrowing into the ways that films mimic the majesty, mystery, and movements of animals. Here, Laird is joined in conversation with G…

“There is no such thing as a raw, natural, aggressive urge that underlies human violence. While we inherit defense mechanisms, they work only when triggered culturally.” So opens John Protevi’s Regimes of Violence: Toward a Political Anthropology, which takes as its biocultural basis that social practices shape our bodies and minds, and analyzes hu…

Scholars have long challenged the common assumption of midwestern isolationism. In Global Heartland, historian Peter Simons reorients the way we look at the critical period in US history from the 1930s through 1950s, showing how farmers across the Midwest understood their work as contributing to an era of international upheaval, geographical reimag…

Talia Mae Bettcher’s Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity. Arguing that the tense relation between trans oppression and resistance is mediated through the complex social phenomenon of gender make-believe, Bettcher i…

​"Infrastructure is invisible until it breaks." How do we visualize something that cannot be physically seen? What limitations do existing knowledge structures impose that reverberate through planetary problem-solving processes, including public health and environmental crises? This episode brings together two scholars who think elementally: Lisa Y…

There's living coral, and then there's Coral—the iconicity and imaginary of living coral. As Melody Jue writes in Coralations, coral alternates between signifying an organism and signifying an environment, all too often imagined as a tourist destination. In rethinking the limitations of Coral, Jue opens up possibilities for a more expansive sense o…

University of Minnesota Press, est. 1925, turns 100 this year. Yes, we are twice as old as Saturday Night Live. And just as old as The New Yorker and The Great Gatsby. The Press has had only five directors in its history, and many current staff have been on for more than a few decades. How about another serendipitous milestone: this podcast, est. 2…

Between the 1850s and 1930s, before playhouses for children reached the mainstream, they were often fully functional cottages designed by well-known architects for British royalty, American industrialists, and Hollywood stars. Recognizing the playhouse in this era as a stage for the purposeful performance of upper-class identity, Abigail A. Van Sly…

“If the public can predict you, it starts to like you. But the Marchesa didn’t want to be liked.” For the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Marchesa Luisa Casati astounded Europe. Artists such as Man Ray painted, sculpted, and photographed her; writers such as Ezra Pound and Jack Kerouac praised her strange beauty. An Italian woman …

Microbes: We can’t see them, but we have no choice but to live with them. Microbes have significant, enduring impacts on human health and remind us to resist the abstraction of crucial forces in our everyday lives. Welcome to a multidisciplinary conversation about microbes, featuring Amber Benezra (Gut Anthro), Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (Microbial Resol…

Humans are one species on a planet of millions of species. The literary collection Creature Needs is a project that grew out of a need to do something with grievous, anxious energy—an attempt to nourish the soul in a meaningful way, and an attempt to start somewhere specific in the face of big, earthly challenges and changes, to create a polyvocal …

Public schools are one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—and are also some of our most unequal institutions. In Unsettling Choice, Ujju Aggarwal explores how the expansion of choice-based programs led to greater inequality and segregation in a gentrifying New York City neighborhood during the years following the Grea…

The first major neo-Nazi party in the US was led by a science fiction fan. So opens Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness, a book that traces ideas about white nationalism through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature a…

Policy expert and climate scientist Anna Farro Henderson explores how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined in her new book, Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood. Grounded in her experience as an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton, Henderson brin…

In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology argues that right-wing ideology was built into both the technical and social construction of the digital world from the start. Leveraging more than a decade of research, David Golumbia, who passed away in 2023…

Energy transition is crucial to the struggle against climate change. Imre Szman is concerned with who is trying to lay claim to the narratives guiding our transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, how they are doing it, and why and to what ends. Mark Simpson joins Szeman in conversation about Szeman’s new book, Futures of the Sun: The Strug…

"We aren't done with Pee-wee's Playhouse because there's much to learn from sticking with it." So opens Cait McKinney's I Know You Are, but What Am I?, a book that thinks across the ways we remember and misremember Pee-wee. McKinney explores the expansive, mediated landscape of the television show; engages a reparative retelling of the actor Paul R…

Identified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, contemporary Macau has metamorphosed into a surreal, hypermodern urban landscape augmented by massive casino megaresorts, including two of the world’s largest buildings. In Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China’s Consumer Revolution, Tim Simpson uncovers various roots of the region’s radical trans…

In the decades leading up to the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, a collective of young artists based in Zagreb used the city’s public spaces as a platform for radical individual expression. The Group of Six Authors and their circle in the period from 1975 to 1985 are the focus of Adair Rounthwaite’s book This Is Not My World: Art and Public Sp…

Across language and politics, feminism and phenomenology, and decolonial theory, Trans Philosophy addresses trans worldmaking in all its beauty and mundanity. The volume’s four editors, Perry Zurn, Andrea J. Pitts, Talia Mae Bettcher, and PJ DiPietro focus on the contributions of trans and gender-nonconforming philosophers from around the globe. Sh…

Marlene M. Johnson’s memoir is an essential record of the ascension of women in American politics. In Rise to the Challenge: A Memoir of Politics, Leadership, and Love, Johnson chronicles her life of learning and leadership in activism, entrepreneurship, politics, and public service, weaving professional play-by-plays with candidness about navigati…

How are spaces once imagined to be empty, vast, and mysterious transformed into something with material and cultural value? Two authors tackle this same question, one from the perspective of the seafloor, and one from Canada’s oil sands: key spaces where the meaning of sustainability is actively negotiated. Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation a…

For Chris Marker, writing came before filmmaking. A decade after Marker’s death, critics continue to rediscover his remarkable oeuvre, which comprised writing, photography, film, video, radio, and digital media. Associated with the Left Bank subset of the French New Wave, Marker is perhaps best recognized for directing La Jetée (1962). To celebrate…

Has the idea of the end of the world captured your imagination? Ted Toadvine’s book The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology contends that a preoccupation with the world’s precarity relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects the past and present with the goal of managing the future. Toadvine integrates insights fro…

Antoine Volodine is the primary pseudonym of a French-Russian writer of many books. The meditative, postapocalyptic noir Mevlido’s Dreams, translated by Gina M. Stamm, is an urgent communiqué from a far-future reality of irreversible environmental damage and civilizational collapse that asks what it means to love and care for others at the end of t…

Joanna Brooks’s ancestors were among the early waves of emigrants to leave England for North America. Her book Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America’s First Immigrants reveals the violence and dislocation that propelled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration, and follows American folk ballads back across the…

Everything Is Police is a new book by Tia Trafford, who argues that institutional and interpersonal policing have been central to colonial modernity, the result of which is a situation where we cannot practically experience or even imagine worlds free from policing. Trafford is joined here in conversation with Melayna Lamb. Tia Trafford is reader i…

EL Putnam’s new book Livestreaming: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Technical Encounter considers how livestreaming constitutes new patterns of being together that are complex, ambivalent, and transformative. Digging into how humans and technology co-evolve, Putnam and Noel Fitzpatrick engage in conversation about relation and hyper-individualism, glit…

Estado Vegetal is Manuela Infante’s riveting experimental performance art through which plants are charged with an agency capable of uprooting culturally grounded conceptions of the world. The book Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking, edited by Giovanni Aloi, is the first book dedicated to this performance and features essays from schola…

Masculinity in Transition is a book that moves the study of masculinity away from an overriding preoccupation with cisnormativity, whiteness, and heteronormativity, and toward a wider and more generative range of embodiments, identifications, and ideologies. Author K. Allison Hammer’s bold rethinking of masculinity and its potentially toxic effects…

During the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled energy landscapes and imaginaries in the US. Settling the Boom, a volume of essays, studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains of Williston, North Dakota, are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tet…

John Arena examines the more than two-decade struggle to privatize public schools in Newark, New Jersey—a conflict that is raging in cities across the country. Arena’s book Expelling Public Schools reveals the political rise of Cory Booker and Ras Baraka and what this particular case study illuminates about contemporary post-civil rights Black poli…

More than twenty years ago, a bizarre confluence of meteorological events resulted in the most damaging blowdown in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness’s history. It traveled 1,300 miles and lasted 22 hours, flattening nearly 500,000 acres of the Superior National Forest. Hundreds of campers and paddlers were stranded and dozens injur…