Category: Culture

Matt Siegel on The Secret History of Food

Books on Pod with Trey Elling | 15 September 2021 | 0h 55m | Listen Later | iTunes | Spotify
Interview with Matt Siegel about his book The Secret History of Food: Strange but True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat. Includes intriguing stories about the history of vanilla, ice cream, pies, cereal, corn, honey, fast food and olive oil.

See also Food Myths with Food Historian Rachel Laudan.

Dennis Duncan – Index, a history of the

How To Academy | 7 September 2021 | 0h 41m | Listen Later | iTunes | Spotify
Interview with Dennis Duncan about his book Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age. Discusses the history of the book index, revealing how it transformed the way we read and process knowledge.

Do You See Ice?

Time to Eat the Dogs | 5 June 2021 | 0h 29m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Karen Routledge about her book, Do You See Ice?: Inuit and Americans at Home and Away. Discusses Baffin Island’s Inuit community as it came into contact with western whalers and explorers in the nineteenth century. Even though the Inuit worked closely with outsiders, their views of the Arctic world, their ideas about the meaning of home, even their views of time itself remained different.

Michael Muthukrishna: Human Culture, The Cultural Brain, And Political Corruption

The Dissenter | 9 May 2019 | 1 h 13m | Listen Later
Interview with Michael Muthukrishna about the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie culture and how culture is transmitted, maintained and modified. Discusses the interplay between biology and culture in explaining large-scale human cooperation; the biological bases of human culture; the Cultural Brain Hypothesis; the relationship between individual-level psychology and group-level traits; genetic and cultural evolution; group selection; prosocial institutions; political corruption and how societies might promote it and also common strategies to fight it that might backfire.

Dana Gioia on Learning, Poetry, and Studying with Miss Bishop

EconTalk | 15 February 2021 | 1h 35m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Dana Gioia about his book Studying with Miss Bishop. Discusses the craft of being a poet, the business world, mentorship, loss, why poetry no longer seems to matter, and how it might begin to matter again.

The Black Count: Interview with Writer Tom Reiss

The Marc Steiner Show | 5 July 2017 | 0h 51m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Tom Reiss about his book The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. Discusses General Alex Dumas, a hero of the French Revolution, who was born to a Black slave mother and a fugitive white French nobleman in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). He was the father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, who used his father’s larger-than-life feats as inspiration for such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

Culture, Innovation, and the Collective Brain

Many Minds | 3 February 2021 | 1h 29m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Michael Muthukrishna about why our brains got so big; how culture makes us smart; where innovation comes from; the cultural brain hypothesis; what this means for a general theory of intelligence across species; explaining the Flynn Effect; how group size and interconnectedness power culture; the evolution of brain size in humans & cetaceans; why psychology needs to become a historical science; and more.

This episode was so insightful that I went looking for more. The episode with Michael Muthukrishna on The Dissenter is also very good.

What Would Orwell Be Without Nineteen Eighty-Four?

The Book Club | 31 January 2021 | 0h 43m | Listen Later | iTunes
Podcast marking the moment that George Orwell comes out of copyright. D. J. Taylor (author of On Nineteen Eighty-Four and Orwell: The Life) and Dorian Lynskey (author of The Ministry of Truth) discuss how Orwell speaks to us now, and how his reputation has weathered. Was he secretly a conservative? Was he a McCarthyite snitch? How would he be remembered had he died before writing Nineteen Eighty-Four? And does ‘Orwellian’ mean anything much at all?