Best Unnatural Selection Podcasts (2025)

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Robert Chernomas, Gregory Chernomas, and Ian Hudson, "The American Gene: Unnatural Selection Along Class, Race, and Gender Lines" (Routledge, 2025) 26:31

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1d ago26:31

26:31

Biological justification for all forms of inequality has a long history, with the claim that particular groups suffer disproportionately from inherited flaws of ability and character used to explain a remarkably wide variety of inequalities. Providing an important critique of that biodeterminist history and how the Human Genome Project has inspired…

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Trump's TACO Tuesday 1:40:31

3d ago1:40:31

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On this week's episode of the Unnatural Selection Podcast, we discuss: Trump threatens to slap Apple with a 25% tariff on iPhones manufactured abroad. Trump lashes out at viral ‘TACO trade’ meme. What does it stand for? Seriously, What the Fuck are We Doing Here? Google’s Veo 3 AI video generator is a slop monger’s dream. Why glaciologists believe …

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Roger Chickering, "The German Empire, 1871–1918" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 57:06

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Furious economic growth and social change resulted in pervasive civic conflict in Imperial Germany. Roger Chickering presents a wide-ranging history of this fractious period, from German national unification to the close of the First World War. Throughout this time, national unity remained an acute issue. It appeared to be resolved momentarily in t…

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Christoph Schuringa, "Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 51:33

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It is indisputable that Marx began his intellectual trajectory as a philosopher, but it is often thought that he subsequently turned away from philosophy. In Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Christoph Schuringa proposes a radically different reading of Marx's intellectual project and demonstrates tha…

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Anthony Bidulka, "Home Fires Burn" (Stonehouse Publishing, 2025) 1:00:04

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NBN host Hollay Ghadery has a wonderful conversation with many-time award-winning author, Anthony Bidulka. Bidulka’s books have been shortlisted for Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence, Saskatchewan Book Awards, a ReLit award, and Lambda Literary Awards. Flight of Aquavit was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Best Men’s Mystery, making…

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Is Beach Safety Signage Fit For Purpose? 31:08

11m ago31:08

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We often take the meaning of signs for granted but that's far from the case in a linguistically and culturally diverse society. The instruction to "Swim between the flags!" can be interpreted in multiple ways - some of which may actually heighten rather than reduce risk. In this episode of Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Agnes Bodis talks to Dr Ma…

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Sarah Nagaty, "The Collective Dream: Egyptians Longing For A Better Life" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) 36:56

3h ago36:56

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The Collective Dream: Egyptians Longing For A Better Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) links two seminal moments in Egypt’s history – the Revolution of 25th January 2011 and the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser – through various cultural manifestations. It conceives the concept of “collective dreaming” to map out the subliminal feeling that runs deep…

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Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2024) 1:06:26

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When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria. These “displaced persons,” or DPs—Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Sovie…

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Dionne Koller, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport" (U California Press, 2025) 32:52

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Tens of millions of children in the United States participate in youth sport, a pastime widely believed to be part of a good childhood. Yet most children who enter youth sport are driven to quit by the time they enter adolescence, and many more are sidelined by its high financial burdens. Until now, there has been little legal scholarly attention p…

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Talin Suciyan, "Armenians in Turkey after the Second World War: An Archival Reader of USSR Consular Documents" (I. B. Tauris & Company, 2025) 50:03

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This reader brings to light newly discovered archival material compiled by the Soviet Consulate in Istanbul. The book reveals the lives and experience of Armenians in Turkey in the 1940s, with a particular focus on the process of emigration to Soviet Armenia. The accounts, translated for the first time into English, are comprised of Soviet official…

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NIAS Podcast from the University of Tartu Asia Centre China's Psychological Power 40:14

3h ago40:14

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This podcast episode is hosted by Toomas Hanso International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) who is talking to Urmas Hõbepappel. Urmas is an analyst at the University of Tartu Asia Centre and a researcher at the ICDS. His academic work deals with political psychology, collective identity, and history narratives in China, but this episode foc…

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Alfonso Martinez Arias, "The Master Builder: How the New Science of the Cell Is Rewriting the Story of Life" (Basic Books, 2023) 1:01:56

3h ago1:01:56

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What defines who we are? For decades, the answer has seemed obvious: our genes, the “blueprint of life.” In The Master Builder: How the New Science of the Cell Is Rewriting the Story of Life, biologist Alfonso Martinez Arias argues we’ve been missing the bigger picture. It’s not our genes that define who we are, but our cells. While genes are impor…

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Elisabeth Åsbrink "And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain: The Heartbreaking True Story of a Family Torn Apart by War" (Other Press, 2020) 1:05:31

3h ago1:05:31

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Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Notable Translated Book of the Year by World Literature Today Winner of the August Prize, the story of the complicated long-distance relationship between a Jewish child and his forlorn Viennese parents after he was sent to Sweden in 1939, and the unexpected friendship the boy developed with the …

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Andrew Smith, "First People: The Lost History of the Khoisan" (Jonathan Ball, 2022) 1:18:34

11h ago1:18:34

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First people communities are the early groups of hunter gatherers, herders, and the oldest human lineages of Africa, some migrating from as far as East Africa to settle across southern Africa, in countries like Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. In First People: The Lost History of the Khoisan, archaeologist Andrew Smith, who has excavated at some…

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Tobias Brinkmann, "Between Borders: The Great Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe" (Oxford UP, 2924) 1:34:29

1d ago1:34:29

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Between the 1860s and the early 1920s, more than two million Jews moved from Eastern Europe to the United States while smaller groups moved to other destinations, such as Western Europe, Palestine, and South Africa. During and after the First World War hundreds of thousands of Jews were permanently displaced across Eastern Europe. Migration restric…

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Bonnie Yochelson, "Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen" (Fordham UP, 2025) 1:02:25

1d ago1:02:25

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In Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen (Fordham University Press, 2025) by Dr. Bonnie Yochelson, explore Gilded Age New York through the lens of Alice Austen, who captured the social rituals of New York’s leisured class and the bustling streets of the modern city. Celebrated as a queer artist, she was this and muc…

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Agustín Fuentes, "Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary" (Princeton UP, 2025) 45:11

1d ago45:11

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Being human entails an astonishingly complex interplay of biology and culture, and while there are important differences between women and men, there is a lot more variation and overlap than we may realize. Sex Is a Spectrum offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the biology of sex, drawing on the latest science to explain why the binary view…

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Serhii Plokhy, "The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine" (Basic Books, 2015) 1:30:17

1d ago1:30:17

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As Ukraine is embroiled in an ongoing struggle with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence, celebrated historian Serhii Plokhy explains that today's crisis is a case of history repeating itself: the Ukrainian conflict is only the latest in a long history of turmoil over Ukraine's sovereignty. Situated between Centra…

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Simon Stjernholm, "Sensing Islam: Engaging and Contesting the Senses in Muslim Religiosity" (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025) 45:23

1d ago45:23

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Simon Stjernholm's new book Sensing Islam: Engaging and Contesting the Senses in Muslim Religiosity (Bloomsbury Press, 2025) considers specific case studies of embodiment and oratory productions by Muslims in Denmark, Sweden, and Cyprus. In the chapter on approaching God, we learn how rituals such as du‘a (intercessory prayers) or dhikr (remembranc…

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Jeremy Morris, "Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) 1:08:27

1d ago1:08:27

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What do Russians really want? Do they want authoritarianism and are they prepared to go along with a war of conquest and destruction? Or do they want something else? A landmark contribution to the field, Morris is the only social researcher to have carried out fieldwork in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, engaging with communities in Moscow, r…

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Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, "The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq" (Stanford UP, 2021) 1:25:09

1d ago1:25:09

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A new history of Middle East oil and the deep roots of American violence in Iraq. Iraq has been the site of some of the United States' longest and most sustained military campaigns since the Vietnam War. Yet the origins of US involvement in the country remain deeply obscured--cloaked behind platitudes about advancing democracy or vague notions of A…

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Bonnie Yochelson, "Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen" (Fordham UP, 2025) 1:02:25

11h ago1:02:25

1:02:25

In Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen (Fordham University Press, 2025) by Dr. Bonnie Yochelson, explore Gilded Age New York through the lens of Alice Austen, who captured the social rituals of New York’s leisured class and the bustling streets of the modern city. Celebrated as a queer artist, she was this and muc…

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Kathleen Miller, ed., "Doctrine and Disease in the British and Spanish Colonial World" (Penn State UP, 2025) 36:24

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Kathleen Miller talks about her new edited volume, Doctrine and Disease in British and Spanish Colonial World (Penn State University Press, 2025). In the sixteenth century, unprecedented migration caused diseases to take hold in new locales, turning illness and the human body into battlegrounds for competing religious beliefs as well as the colonia…

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Anthony C. Infanti, "The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America" (NYU Press, 2025) 1:06:47

9h ago1:06:47

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The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America (NYU Press, 2025) by Anthony C. Infanti documents how the American colonies used tax law to dehumanize enslaved persons, taxing them alongside valuable commodities upon their forced arrival and then as wealth-generating assets in the hands of slaveholders. Dr. Infanti examines how taxation al…

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Coll Thrush, "Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific" (University of Washington Press, 2025) 32:13

1d ago32:13

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The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place. Unforgiving coastlines, powerful currents, unpredictable weather, and features such as the notorious Columbia River bar have resulted in more than two thousand shipwrecks, earning the coastal areas of Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island the moniker “Graveyard of the Pacific.” Beginni…

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373: Home Is Where It Hides - Chilling Tales for Dark Nights 28:52

1d ago28:52

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We’ve all heard the creaks in the night—the soft clicks in the walls we tell ourselves are just the house settling. But what if they aren’t? What if something else is listening? Watching? Waiting? In this haunting installment, host Steve Taylor guides you through a tale where childhood tragedy leaves a mark too deep to bury, and the line between me…

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Beth Linker on Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America 1:23:53

1d ago1:23:53

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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with historian Beth Linker, Samuel H. Preston Endowed Term Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, about her recent book, Slouch: Postural Panic in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2024). Slouch examines the history of conceptions of “…

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Agustín Fuentes, "Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary" (Princeton UP, 2025) 45:11

2d ago45:11

45:11

Being human entails an astonishingly complex interplay of biology and culture, and while there are important differences between women and men, there is a lot more variation and overlap than we may realize. Sex Is a Spectrum offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the biology of sex, drawing on the latest science to explain why the binary view…

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Yonatan Y. Brafman, "Critique of Halakhic Reason: Divine Commandments and Social Normativity" (Oxford UP, 2024) 1:05:20

2d ago1:05:20

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For centuries, Jewish thinkers have asked two parallel questions. First, what is the reasoning behind an individual commandment and second, why bother heeding a command at all, something Dr. Brafman terms “reasons for” vs “reasons of” the commandments. In his newest book, Critique of Halakhic Reason: Divine Commandments and Social Normativity (Oxfo…