Modern Notion: Recent Episodes
Modern Notion
The radio extension of ModernNotion.com, a website for the ultra-curious that finds the science behind the story and the truth in every tale. It’s your middlebrow library for highbrow ideas. We tell stories about history, science, technology, culture and life.
On today’s episode of Modern Notion, we visit the salon in New York that originated Brazilian waxing. Jonice Padilha, one of the seven sisters behind Manhattan’s J Sisters salon, speaks to reporter Renee Gross about how the salon came up with the idea of taking it all off. From there, the trend took off—you’ll have…
What if we looked at the human body as a landscape, and mapped its features using a cartographer’s eye? That’s what Dr. Gavin Francis does in his new book, Adventures in Human Being: A Grand Tour from the Cranium to the Calcaneum (Basic Books, October 2015). On this episode of Modern Notion we dive into some…
Our guest on today’s (new! improved! weekly!) Modern Notion is Gordon Edgar, the longtime cheesemonger at Rainbow Cooperative Grocery in San Francisco. Gordon turns his attention to a specific kind of cheese in his new book, Cheddar: A Journey to the Heart of America’s Most Iconic Cheese (Chelsea Green, October 2015). In the midst of a cheese renaissance, Gordon…
On today’s show, we’re talking with author Simon Read about Winston Churchill—but probably not the Winston Churchill you already know. In his book, Winston Churchill Reporting: Adventures of a Young War Correspondent (Da Capo Press, October 2015), Read explores the five years Churchill spent as a war correspondent, which took him around the world, from Cuba…
On today’s show, our guest is Dave Goulson, a professor of biological sciences and the founder of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust in the UK. Goulson recently wrote a memoir of sorts about a farm he bought in France, called A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm (Picador, April 2015). For the last…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is David Talbot, the former CEO and editor-in-chief of Salon.com. Talbot has written a new book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (Harper, October 2015). Dulles was the director of the CIA until President John F. Kennedy fired him; and…
Jamie Holmes is our guest today, talking about his new book Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing (Crown, October 2015). Holmes argues that embracing ambiguity can help us lead more productive and happier lives. Also on the show, reporter Lila Cherneff visits a zebrafish lab on Mount Desert Island in Maine to learn about the science of…
On today’s show, novelist and English professor Eileen Pollack is discussing her new book, The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club (Beacon Press, September 2015). Pollack graduated from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in physics, but she believes that a lack of encouragement, and even active discouragement, led her to…
On today’s show, our guest is Clint Emerson, author of 100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation (Touchstone, October 2015). Emerson uses his experiences a Navy SEAL to give tips on how to stay ahead of “the bad guys”—mostly by using “bad guy” tactics. He gives detailed…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Wayne Wiegand, author of Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library (Oxford University Press, October 2015). Wiegand argues that libraries are about much more than books: they’re a community meeting place. And to answer the question in the headline: they’re not going anywhere.…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking with Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at Kings’ College London and author of The Diet Myth: Why the Secret to Health and Weight Loss Is Already in Your Gut (The Overlook Press, September 2015). Using twin studies, and testing out various diets for himself, Spector has…
The guests on today’s Modern Notion Daily show are Steve Ettlinger and Dwight Eschliman, coauthors of Ingredients: A Visual Exploration of 75 Food Additives and 25 Food Products (Regan Arts, September 2015). Ettlinger, who had previously written about artificial ingredients in his book Twinkie Deconstructed, teamed up with Eschliman, a photographer who has deconstructed food in previous visual…
Our guest on Modern Notion Daily is Susanna Moore, author of Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, September 2015). The book was recently longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award. Moore details the history of the archipelago, first inhabited by humans in the sixth century. We’ll learn about the origin of the…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Sasha Abramsky, author of The House of Twenty Thousand Books (New York Review Books, September 2015). Abramsky recalls his grandparents’ London home, filled with a vast rare book collection—but more importantly, he remembers the ideas discussed among those treasured volumes. Later in the hour, reporter Jessie Wright-Mendoza…
Our guest on today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily is Frances Dinkelspiel, author of Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California (St. Martin’s Press, October 2015). Dinkelspiel was intrigued by the 2005 arson of Wines Central, which destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of wine. But ultimately, her journey…
On today’s show, our guest is Robert Weintraub, author of No Better Friend: One Man, One Dog, and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage and Survival in WWII (Little, Brown and Company, May 2015). This is the story of Judy, a pointer dog who was a Japanese POW. She befriended Frank Williams, a British POW, and the two…
On today’s Modern Notion Daily podcast, our guest is Gillen D’Arcy Wood, author of Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (Princeton University Press, paperback September 2015). In 1815, the Tambora volcano on Sumbawa (part of Indonesia) erupted for three days, producing volcanic ash that was absorbed into the Earth’s atmosphere and stratosphere. People blame this…
Our guest on today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily is Caitlin Doughty, a mortician and author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Stories from the Crematory (W. W. Norton & Co., paperback September 2015). Doughty promotes “death positivity”—which does not mean you should be happy when a loved one dies, but that you should embrace the…
On Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Lillian Faderman, author of The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (Simon & Schuster, September 2015). Faderman starts this detailed account of the treatment of LGBT people and communities in the 1950s, when police raided gay bars and prosecuted people for their sexuality in courts of law. How did we…
This hour of Modern Notion Daily, our guest Karen Abbott talks about her book, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War (Harper Perennial, paperback September 2015). Abbott explored the lives of four women who contributed to the war effort in unusual ways, from the Confederate spy who bedded countless Union soldiers to…
Our guest on today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily is Casey Schwartz, author of In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis (Pantheon, August 2015). Schwartz completed a graduate program that allowed her to study psychoanalysis at the Anna Freud Centre in London and neuroscience at Yale. She constantly felt like the two disciplines were…
On today’s Modern Notion Daily podcast, our guest is Roger Giner-Sorolla, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent and a member of the team working on the Reproducibility Project for Psychology. The Reproducibility Project tasked psychologists with choosing 100 studies that they could replicate in their own labs as a way of…
Our guest on today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily is Pedro Domingos, a professor of computer science and the author of The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Basic Books, September 2015). Domingos is an expert in machine learning, which is the engine behind much of what happens in our…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is J. Kenji López-Alt, the managing culinary director of Serious Eats and author of the new book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking through Science (W. W. Norton, September 2015). López-Alt takes a scientific approach to cooking—which doesn’t mean he’s necessarily looking for the “perfect” way to make…
Our guest on today’s Modern Notion Daily is Andrew Moore, author of Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit (Chelsea Green, August 2015). Moore discovered the pawpaw, which is native to the United States, five years ago in a grove in Ohio. Despite its addictive taste and aroma (it’s been called a cross between a banana and…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is David Starkey, author of Magna Carta: The Medieval Roots of Modern Politics (Quercus, September 2015). Starkey was less interested in exploring the principles of the Magna Carta, and more interested in the process it took to get the document just right. In the year 1215, when the…
On today’s show, our guest is Robert M. Thorson, author of Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science (Harvard University Press, paperback August 2015). Thorson is a geologist who decided to read Thoreau’s classic literary work for its observations about nature. He argues that Thoreau was as skilled a naturalist as he was a…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Nicholas Carr, a science and technology writer whose most recent book is The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (W. W. Norton, paperback September 2015). Carr thinks that automation has advanced society and the greater good in innumerable ways, but we may have…
On today’s show, we’re talking with Linda Hirshman, a former attorney and author of the new dual biography, Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (Harper, September 2015). Hirshman argues that these first two women to sit on the Supreme Court could…
On this episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Christian Rudder, a co-founder of the online dating service OkCupid and author of Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity—What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves (Broadway Books, paperback September 2015). Rudder gained some attention when he wrote the OkTrends blog for OkCupid,…
On this episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is John Safran, an Australian comedian, documentary maker, and author of the book God’ll Cut You Down: The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, a Murder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi (Riverhead Books, paperback September 2015). As part of his…
Our guest today on Modern Notion Daily is Dick Lehr, coauthor with Gerard O’Neill of the definitive book on Boston’s most notorious gangster, Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal (PublicAffairs, reissued August 2015). Lehr and O’Neill were part of an investigative journalism team at The Boston Globe in the 1980s, covering…
Our guest today is Elijah Wald, author of Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (Dey Street Books, July 2015). Fifty years after the fact, we talk with Wald about the night Bob Dylan first performed with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival, shocking his fans and…
On today’s show, our guest is Val McDermid, author of Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us about Crime (Grove Press, July 2015). McDermid is a crime novelist and tries to make her fiction as close to real life as possible. Writing Forensics, a nonfiction title that explores the science of crime scene investigation, allowed…
Today on Modern Notion Daily: journalist Ari Berman takes us through the history of voting rights and restrictions in the last 50 years, as detailed in his book Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2015). Berman explores why the Voting Rights Act of 1965…
David Neiwert, author of Of Orcas and Men: What Killer Whales Can Teach Us (The Overlook Press, June 2015), joins us to talk orcas on today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily. Neiwert explores the killer whale’s unique intelligence and ability to echolocate, as well as the conditions these animals are subjected to in captivity. We…
Today, on Modern Notion Daily: we get a rare look at the manned space flights of Project Apollo. Our guests are John Bisney and J.L. Pickering, coauthors of Moonshots and Snapshots of Project Apollo: A Rare Photographic Look (September 2015, University of New Mexico Press). For more than four decades, Pickering has been collecting 8″x10″…
This hour, our theme is “sea wars,” and we bring you two very different stories. First, we’re talking with John Boyle, author of Blood Ransom: Stories from the Front Line in the War Against Somali Piracy (Bloomsbury, July 2015). Boyle interviewed prisoners in Somalia who were serving time for alleged pirate activity. Then we’re joined…
On today’s Modern Notion Daily podcast, we’re talking spies and subways cars in the ocean. First we’re in the studio with Alex Kershaw, author of Avenue of Spies: A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family’s Heroic Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Paris (Crown, August 2015). Kershaw tells the story of an American doctor and…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Siobhan Roberts, author of Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway (Bloomsbury USA, July 2015). Roberts spent seven years writing this biography of one of the most famous contemporary mathematicians and creator of the Game of Life. The magnitude of Conway’s genius is matched…
On today’s Modern Notion Daily show, our guest is Matthew Cobb, a zoology professor and author of Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code (Basic Books, July 2015). Cobb traces the history of genetic discoveries from Mendel and his predecessors (yes, he stood on the shoulders of other early geneticists) to CRISPR…
On today’s Modern Notion Daily podcast, our guest is Arissa H. Oh, author of To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Stanford University Press, June 2015). During the Korean War and the rise of “war orphans,” Americans began adopting Korean children in large numbers; that trend spiked in the…
This hour, our guest is Michael Knox Beran, author of Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Crimes Behind Our Romance with the Macabre (Pegasus, August 2015). Beran explores three murders from the 19th century that showcase people’s changing attitudes toward the macabre at that time. Music this hour: “Miri’s Magic Dance” by Kevin MacLeod, from the…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Deborah Davis, author of The Trip: Andy Warhol’s Plastic Fantastic Cross-Country Adventure (Atria Books, July 2015). Based on Warhol’s trove of receipts and other ephemera, Davis recreated his 1963 road trip from New York to Hollywood, where a friend was throwing him a party. That…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Matthew Battles, author of Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word (W. W. Norton & Co., July 2015). Battles explores the trajectory of writing, from the forms it takes (cuneiform, pictographs, letters, characters, emojis) to the way it’s been produced (on clay tablets, on parchment,…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Rinker Buck, author of The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey (Simon & Schuster, June 2015). After coming across an Oregon Trail marker in Kansas, and then reading that it had been decades since anyone traversed it, Buck decided it was his turn. It took…
On today’s Modern Notion Daily podcast, author Guy Lawson joins us to talk about his new book, Arms and the Dudes: How Three Stoners from Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History (Simon & Schuster, June 2015). It could only have happened in the internet age, argues Lawson: three kids from Miami Beach…
On today’s show our guest is James McGrath Morris, author of Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press (Amistad/HarperCollins, February 2015). Payne was one of the first African-American women journalists, and her heyday was in the 1950s and 1960s. Before she even got into journalism professionally, Payne was an…
On today’s show our guest is John Sweeney, author of North Korea Undercover: Inside the World’s Most Secret State (Pegasus, July 2015). Sweeney, a journalist, posed as a professor taking students on a tour in order to get into North Korea. While there, he wasn’t able to see much—but even the absence of certain fundamentals…
On today’s episode of the Modern Notion Daily podcast, we’re talking with Ardis Cameron, author of Unbuttoning America: A Biography of ‘Peyton Place‘ (Cornell University Press, May 2015). Cameron knew the book as a symbol of illicit love affairs and drama, but didn’t actually read the novel until she was in her fifties. When she…
On today’s Modern Notion Daily podcast, we’re talking with Michael Hiltzik, author of Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex (Simon & Schuster, July 2015). Hiltzik chronicles the life of Lawrence and his machine, the cyclotron (also known as the proton accelerator). This invention, Hiltzik argues, was the beginning of…
This hour we’re talking to Fred Minnick, author of two books about whiskey: Whiskey Women (Potomac Books, October 2013) and Bourbon Curious (Zenith Press, August 2015). After covering a women’s military unit in Iraq as a journalist, Minnick was inspired to report on more stories about women’s history. In Whiskey Women, he recounts women’s roles…
On today’s show, our guest is Anthony J. Martin, author of Dinosaurs Without Bones: Dinosaur Lives Revealed by Their Trace Fossils (Pegasus, paperback March 2015). Martin is an ichnologist, which means he studies the traces of animals in conjunction with fossils of the animals themselves. This could mean tracks or it could mean puke—and ichnology…
Today on Modern Notion Daily, our guests are Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden, authors of Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (Crown, July 2015). Al-Khalili, a quantum physicist, and McFadden, a molecular biologist, have teamed up to write the first book on the burgeoning field of quantum biology. The quantum…
This hour of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Thomas Trautmann, author of Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Trautmann looks at the fascinating history behind how and why elephants were first tamed for use in battle, from more than two thousand years ago until the Vietnam War. Later in…
On today’s show, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matt Richtel joins us to talk about his book, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, the Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age (William Morrow, June 2015 paperback). Richtel followed the case of Reggie Shaw, who was texting while driving, when he swerved and hit an…
On today’s show, award-winning journalist Pamela Newkirk talks about her new book, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (Amistad/HarperCollins, June 2015). Ota Benga was a young man from the Congo, kidnapped and put on display at the St. Louis World’s Fair and the Bronx Zoo at the dawn of the 20th century. Newkirk explores…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Peter Moore, author of The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2015). Before any concerted study of the weather, people didn’t understand that it was a global system; it seemed more like random, individual events controlled…
On today’s show we have two guests. The first is Janet Stephens, a hairdresser turned Roman hairstyle archaeologist. Stephens was inspired when she walked into a museum in Baltimore—it was the first time she’d really examined the backs of Roman statues’ heads. That set her on a quest to figure out how to recreate those…
On today’s show Dr. Philip Zimbardo joins us to talk about his famous Stanford Prison Experiment from 1971. Zimbardo, a psychologist, designed an experiment in which 24 college-aged men lived in a prison simulation for two weeks. Twelve played the role of guard, while the other 12 were the prisoners. Zimbardo planned to observe how…
Retired Lt. Col. Dan Hampton joins us on today’s podcast to talk about his new book, The Hunter Killers: The Extraordinary Story of the First Wild Weasels, the Band of Maverick Aviators Who Flew the Most Dangerous Missions of the Vietnam War (William Morrow, June 2015). Wild Weasels are known for their deadly air missions, and…
On today’s Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Helen Scales, author of Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (Bloomsbury, July 2015). A marine biologist, Scales decided to explore the science of shells (they’re made from calcium carbonate) and their symbolism throughout human history. Music this hour: “Soldiertype (militarised)” by Ketsa,…
On today’s show, we’re talking with Blake J. Harris, author of Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation (Dey Street Books, June 2015). Harris explores the tense competition between Sega and Nintendo, two Japanese video game companies, in the early 1990s. Nintendo dominated the market so thoroughly in 1990 that no…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Brian Murphy, author of 81 Days Below Zero: The Incredible Survival Story of a World War II Pilot in Alaska’s Frozen Wilderness (Da Capo Press, June 2015). Leon Crane was a test pilot in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, stationed at Ladd…
Author Janice Nimura joins us on today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily to talk about her latest book, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back (W. W. Norton & Co., May 2015). In the 1870s, Japan was in the midst of the Meiji Era—a time of great change, when the…
When it comes to octopus adventures, Sy Montgomery has seen it all! She joins us today on Modern Notion Daily to talk about her new book, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Explanation into the Wonder of Consciousness (Atria Books, May 2015). Montgomery talks about the proper plural of “octopus” (hint: it’s not “octopi”)…
Author and palliative care physician David Casarett joins us on today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily to discuss his new book, Stoned: A Doctor’s Case for Medical Marijuana (Current, July 2015). When a patient with advanced cancer asked Casarett about the effects of medical marijuana (positive or negative), he realized that he actually didn’t know…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Mark Haskell Smith, author of Naked at Lunch: A Reluctant Nudist’s Adventures in the Clothing-Optional World (Grove Press, June 2015). Haskell Smith decided to take on the role of gonzo journalist and find what nudism was all about, from the inside. His research took him…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Kristen Green, author of Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle (Harper, June 2015). Green grew up in Farmville, Virginia, where the school district refused to desegregate for five years after they were ordered to…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, historian Emily Bingham joins us to talk about her new book chronicling the life of her great-aunt, Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2015). Henrietta Bingham was a formidable woman who came of age during the 1920s. Born in Louisville, Kentucky,…
On today’s show, our guest is Alexandra Witze, co-author of Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Covered a Continent in Darkness (Pegasus, January 2015), with her husband Jeff Kanipe. The book traces the history of the 1783 eruption of the Laki volcano on Iceland. Beyond its immediate effects on Iceland…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking with Dan Eatherley, author of Bushmaster: Raymond Ditmars and the Hunt for the World’s Largest Viper (Arcade Publishing, June 2015). When he was working on various nature films and TV shows, Eatherley discovered Raymond Ditmars, an amateur herpetologist who went on to work for the Bronx…
On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Wendell Wallach, an ethicist, consultant, and scholar at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, and the author of A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control (Basic Books, June 2015). Wallach thinks that technology, if it goes unchecked, could pose serious…
This hour we’re talking with Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, author of the biography Jonas Salk: A Life (Oxford University Press, May 2015). Salk is best known for creating the polio vaccine that paved the way to eradicating the disease in the United States. Jacobs explores the extraordinary story of how Salk ran trials for the vaccine,…
On today’s show our guest is Steve Jones, a renowned British geneticist and author of The Serpent’s Promise: The Bible Interpreted Through Modern Science (Pegasus, paperback June 2015). Jones is an atheist—he even won “Secularist of the Year”—but he thinks the Bible has some historical information to offer us. He doesn’t buy that the Bible…
Today we have a bicycle theme on Modern Notion Daily. Our guest is Tim Moore, who recreated one of the worst bicycle races in history and wrote about it in his new book, Gironimo! The Very Terrible 1914 Tour of Italy (Pegasus, May 2015). Moore fashioned a bicycle that would resemble the wooden-wheeled vehicles of…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Henry Hemming, author of The Ingenious Mr. Pyke: Inventor, Fugitive, Spy (Public Affairs, May 2015). Hemming discovered Pyke when he was reading a volume about English eccentrics—and Pyke certainly falls into that category. His crowning achievements include sneaking into and out of Germany during World…
This hour, we examine the experience of having bed bugs with Brooke Borel, author of Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World (University of Chicago Press, April 2015). Borel wanted to know why bed bugs became so prevalent in the last decade, and she found plenty of people to…
On today’s show, Lisa Appignanesi, author of Trials of Passion: Crimes Committed in the Name of Love and Madness (Pegasus, July 2015), talks about the intersection of law and psychiatry. She studied several trials, between the years 1870 and 1914, to find out how “mind doctors” came to play a significant role in how justice…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Taylor Downing, author of Secret Warriors: The Spies, Scientists and Code Breakers of World War I (Pegasus, April 2015). Downing’s book shifts the focus away from the trenches and bloody battlefields to the scientific innovations that made World War I different from any previous war.…
This hour, our guest is Nancy Goldstone, author of The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal That Ignited a Kingdom (Little, Brown and Company, June 2015). These weren’t just any 16th-century queens; these women engaged in love affairs, group sex, killing sprees, and much, much more. Goldstone researched these…
This hour, we’re talking with Philip Ball, author of Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (University of Chicago Press, April 2015). Ball takes a look back at human fascination with invisibility throughout history, from Plato to the present. And it turns out, science is getting closer to solving the invisibility problem—but if we do…
On today’s show, we have two guests. The first is Caitlin Davies, author of Downstream: A History and Celebration of Swimming the River Thames (Aurum Press, June 2015). The River Thames has the same mythic status in England as the Mississippi River has in the United States, and Davies undertook a project to research the…
On today’s show, we’re talking to author Brandon Brown about his new book, Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War (Oxford University Press, June 2015). Max Planck was the German physicist who created quantum physics, and he acted as a mentor to the likes of Albert Einstein and Lise Meitner. But as an elderly man,…
On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking with Adam Benforado, a lawyer and law professor who just published Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice (Crown, June 2015). Benforado uncovers the hidden biases at play within our criminal justice system, which affect everyone from jurors to judges to first responders to lawyers. Music…
On today’s show, our guest is Stephen Witt, author of How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy (Viking, June 2015). Witt traces the lives of three men on all different sides of the music industry: the creator of the mp3, a music…
On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Nick Broomfield, director of the HBO documentary, Tales of the Grim Sleeper (2015). Broomfield and his son, Barney, went to the mostly-black South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles to tell the story of a serial killer dubbed the Grim Sleeper. The Grim Sleeper is accused…
On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we welcome guest Sam Kean, author of The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery (Basic Books, June 2015 paperback). Kean set out to find the boundary between brain and mind, using anecdotes about various…
On today’s show, our guest is Jacky Colliss Harvey, author of Red: A History of the Redhead (Black Dog & Leventhal, June 2015). As a redhead herself, Harvey wanted to research the unique experience of being a ginger, from the science behind it to representations of redhead in art throughout history. In the process, she…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Carmel O’Shannessy, a linguist at the University of Michigan. For more than a decade, O’Shannessy has been researching the genesis of a new language, Light Warlpiri, in Australia’s Northern Territory. We talk with her about why the language is unique, and we even hear a…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking to James Boyce, author of Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World (Counterpoint Press, May 2015). Boyce argues that original sin is the West’s creation story, and it affects all Western peoples, whether we’re aware of it or not. Music this hour:…
This hour, director Frank Pavich joins us to talk about his 2013 documentary, Jodorowsky’s Dune. Alejandro Jodorowsky is an avant-garde filmmaker who planned to make a movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel, Dune, in the early 1970s. He enlisted the likes of Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí to be in his movie, but…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we talk to guest Anthony Powell, director of Antarctica: A Year on Ice. Powell started working in Antarctica as a communications tech. He quickly realized that the true experience of living in Antarctica—particularly in the winter—had never been captured. So, he taught himself to shoot video and time-lapse…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we welcome guest Col. Chris Hadfield, a retired Canadian astronaut. Hadfield was the first Canadian to walk in space and the first Canadian to act as commander of the International Space Station. He talks about how he became an astronaut, the life lessons he’s learned in space, and…
On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking with Reid Mitenbuler, author of Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America’s Whiskey (Viking, May 2015). The history of bourbon collides with major events in America’s past, from the Whiskey Rebellion to Prohibition. And even modern-day bourbon marketing makes ample use of America’s history of…
On today’s show, we talk with guest Mark Vanhoenacker, author of Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot (Knopf, June 2015). After working for years as a consultant, Vanhoenacker decided to pursue his dream of becoming a commercial airline pilot. He now flies Boeing 747s for British Airways, and in his spare time, he wrote this…
On today’s show, our guest is Fredrik Sjöberg, an entomologist and author of The Fly Trap (Pantheon, June 2015). Sjöberg has devoted much of his life to watching, trapping, and studying hoverflies, but he’s tried not to get trapped in his love of the flies. Using literature and details from the life of naturalist René…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we talk with guest Gillian O’Brien. O’Brien’s new book, Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago (University of Chicago Press, March 2015), tells the largely forgotten story of the murder of Dr. P. H. Cronin in the late 19th century. We also visit a taxidermy…
On today’s podcast, we’re talking with guest Helen Castor, author of Joan of Arc: A History (Harper, May 2015). Castor argues that most people see Joan of Arc as an empty vessel—someone to whom they can attach meaning, given the extraordinary nature of her life and accomplishments. Castor does not discount those conversations, but her…
On today’s show, we’re talking with Sandy Tolan, author of Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land (Bloomsbury, April 2015). Tolan chronicles the life of Ramzi Aburedwan, a Palestinian boy who grew up to become a musician and start music schools in the West Bank. We’re also talking to contributing…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Dr. Eugenia Cheng, author of How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics (Basic Books, May 2015). Cheng’s research is about category theory—which she calls the “mathematics of mathematics.” When teaching category theory, she found it was so abstract that analogies…
This hour we’re talking with two guests: David Shields, author of Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine (University of Chicago Press, March 2015), and Jennifer Jordan, author of Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods (University of Chicago Press, April 2015). Shields is on a mission to bring…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking about plankton! Christian Sardet wrote the upcoming book, Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World (University of Chicago Press, June 2015), which took him around the globe to scour the seas for the many species of plankton. Later in the show, staff writer Josh Hrala joins us…
On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we have two guests: Arnold Thackray and David Brock. Thackray, Brock, and Rachel Jones co-wrote Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary (Basic Books, May 2015). Gordon Moore worked at Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1960s, where he came up with Moore’s Law. He went on…
On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking to documentary filmmaker Marah Strauch. Strauch’s newest film is Sunshine Superman (Magnolia Pictures), which tells the story of the inventor of BASE jumping, Carl Boenish. Boenish was not just a thrill seeker; he was also obsessed with filmmaking, and the possibility of filming humans jumping off…
On today’s Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Mark Adams, author of Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (Dutton, March 2015). Adams spent three years exploring the veracity of Plato’s classic tale of Atlantis. While he encountered some idiosyncratic character and wild theories, the people he found to be…
On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we talk to the two sides of the Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence poker tournament. First, we talk to Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. Sandholm designed the poker-playing computer program, known as Claudico. Then we talk to Jason Les, one of the four poker…
On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking to Bekah Sosland, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. At 25, Sosland has worked with Opportunity, the 11-year-old Mars rover, as a flight director. Staff writer Josh Hrala joins us later in the hour to talk about the Fermi paradox: if the universe is…
This hour, we’re talking to Jeffery Walk, director of science at the Illinois chapter of The Nature Conservancy. Seven months ago, Walk and his team reintroduced bison to the prairie in Illinois, and they animals have thrived in their new home. We also talk to contributing editor Mark Hay about his reasons for thinking Americans…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking to Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (Basic Books, May 2015). Ford argues that robots will soon replace not only blue-collar workers, but also white collar workers, too. We also have contributing editor Mark Hay in…
On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking to Kristin Ohlson, author of The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet (Rodale, March 2015). Based on interviews with scientists and farmers around the country, Ohlson believes we soil is the key to solving many…
On today’s show, we’re talking to William Rosen, author of The Third Horseman: A Story of Weather, War, and the Famine History Forgot (Penguin Books, May 2014). A seven-year famine is thought to have caused 5-8 million deaths in northern Europe in the 14th century—but Rosen argues that the famine’s severity was exacerbated by the…
This hour we talk to Sydney Padua, author and illustrator of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer (Pantheon, April 2015). In this graphic novel with lengthy, tongue-in-cheek footnotes, Padua reimagines the lives of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, who worked on prototypes for the first “computer”…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we talk with guest Caitlin O’Connell, author of Elephant Don: The Politics of a Pachyderm Posse (University of Chicago Press, April 2015). O’Connell shares her observations from 20 years of research on male African elephants, and comes to the conclusion that they’re not unlike the Mafia (hence, the…
On today’s show we talk to Cynthia Barnett, author of Rain: A Natural and Cultural History (Crown, April 2015). Barnett, an environmental journalist, takes us to Texas, India, and everywhere in between to explore how we make sense of the water that falls from the sky. Josh Hrala tells us how filmmakers might be the…
Today on Modern Notion Daily we talk to Beth Shapiro, author of How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction (Princeton University Press, April 2015). Shapiro says the we won’t ever be able to bring back an exact clone of a Dodo or a Woolly Mammoth, but we could use their ancient DNA to…
This hour we talk to Alice Dreger, author of Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science (Penguin Press, March 2015). As both a scientist and activist, Dreger has found herself in the middle of controversies surrounding the intersex movement, transsexual identity, and the biology of rape (among other issues). Contributing…
On today’s show we talk to Kalyanee Mam, the director and producer of the documentary film, “A River Changes Course.” For several years, Mam filmed two Cambodian families—one that subsists on fishing, the other on farming—affected by vast environmental and economic changes in their country. Plus, contributing editor Erin Blakemore tells us how Violet Jessup…
On this episode of Modern Notion Daily we talk to Jenny Price, a writer, artist, and environmental humanities scholar. She thinks that historians and artists bring new questions—and new perspectives—to discussions about the environment and climate change. We talk to contributing editor Mark Hay about Oneida, the cult that gave rise to a popular American…
This hour we talk to Joe Navarro, author of Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People (Rodale Books, October 2014). Navarro takes us through the four personality types we should watch out for—and assuages any fears that the Modern Notion staff is riddled with narcissists. Contributing editor…
We talk with filmmaker Linda Matchan about her new documentary from Northern Light Productions, Circus without Borders, which tells the true story of two circuses from remote corners of the world—an Inuit village in Canada, and Guinea in West Africa. We also hear about the side of historical presidential assassinations that doesn’t get talked about: what happened to the first wives?…
This hour we’ll about two vastly differently, but equally fierce groups of warriors: the Nepalese Gurkhas and the women pilots of World War II. We’ll also hear from Freedom Riders and learn about the man who’s credited with the successful invasion of Normandy—and we’re not talking about Eisenhower. Finally, we’ll hop into the present with Marnie…
Today we have a little bit of a different show for you. We talked to author Tom Burgis about his new book The Looting Machine, and because it was just so complex and speaks to a lot of current issues, we decided to do a whole show that centers on it. So make sure your…
This hour, host Kristen Majewski talks to Dr. Daniel Rubens, a pediatric anesthesiologist at Seattle Children’s and cofounder of the SIDS Research Guild, about his groundbreaking research on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. He thinks SIDS is in some way connected with inner ear damage, and he and his team are researching the cause, mechanism, and…
This hour we talk to Josh Lambert, author of Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (NYU Press, 2013). Lambert says that there have been many studies of obscenity in America, but almost no scholarship explores how it relates to Jewishness—even though many of the prominent figures were Jewish. Producer Eleanor Stanford sends us an…
We talk to Dr. John Launer, author of Sex vs. Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein (Overlook Press, February 2015). Launer wants to bring Spielrein’s contributions to psychoanalysis to light, rather than dwelling on her brief erotic relationship with Carl Jung. We present our latest “People Are Strange”: Washington Irving Bishop, the mentalist…
Deborah Cadbury talks about her book, Princes at War (Public Affairs, April 2015), a deep exploration of the four British royal brothers before, during, and after World War II. She fills in the details of Wallis Simpson’s connection to the Nazis and shows how the three younger brothers stepped up in wartime, in a way…
This hour we talk to Amir Aczel, author of Why Science Does Not Disprove God (William Morrow, April 2015 paperback), a response to the New Atheist claim that God was not necessary for creation. Aczel uses the history of science and religion to, in his words, defend the integrity of science. We also hear the…
On the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln’s assassination, we talk to Terry Alford about Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth. Alford wrote the definitive biography of Booth, out today from Oxford University Press. We also learn about the daughter of Marie Curie, who was a Nobel Prize winner herself, and we hear the curious origins of…
This hour we talk to author Zoe Cormier about her book, Sex, Drugs, + Rock and Roll: The Science of Hedonism and the Hedonism of Science. She tells us why humans are special in the ways we have sex, do drugs, and derive pleasure from music. We’re also in the studio with Modern Notion contributor…
We talk with Harriet Brown, author of How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight–and What We Can Do About It (Da Capo Press, March 2015). Brown argues that focusing on weight as a measure of health is misguided and dangerous. Mark Hay, contributing editor to Modern Notion, joins us in the studio…
We talk with author and retired anthropology professor Pat Shipman about her book, The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction (Harvard University Press, March 2015). Shipman theorizes that the combination of early humans and wolf-dogs was an unstoppable force. We hear about the Cardiff Giant hoax in central New York and…
This hour host Dara Katz talks to Will Storr, author of The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (Overlook Books, March 2015). Storr spent time with creationists, past life regression analysts, and Holocaust deniers to find out why they believe what they do, despite all evidence to the contrary. We sit down with Erin…
We talk with Blaine Harden about his book The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom. We also hear how never-before-seen Mary Pickford films were uncovered in a New Hampshire barn, and we talk with Mark…
We talk with Carl Hoffman about his book, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art. We also learn about the checkered past of the cyclotron, or proton accelerator, and we have the latest installment of People Are Strange.