Best Nicholas Hall Podcasts (2025)

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Pelvic Floor Myths and Real Sexual Health Fixes with Dr. Rena Malik 35:27

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42m ago35:27

35:27

How can you tell whether your pelvic floor is tight, weak, or simply not functioning properly? In this episode, Dr. Rena Malik and I break down the misunderstood world of pelvic floor dysfunction, from tightness and weakness to bladder issues, constipation, sexual pain, and the enormous impact of hormone changes after 40. You’ll hear practical, dai…

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Tim Seiter, "Wrangling Pelicans: Military Life in Texas Presidios" (U Texas Press, 2025) 39:50

2h ago39:50

39:50

A richly detailed history of daily life for colonial Spanish soldiers surviving on the eighteenth-century Texas Gulf Coast. In 1775, Spanish King Carlos III ordered the capture of American pelicans for his wildlife park in Madrid. The command went to the only Spanish fort on the Texas coast—Presidio Nuestra Señora de Loreto de la Bahía in present-d…

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Christina Jerne, "Opposition by Imitation: The Economics of Italian Anti-Mafia Activism" (U Minnesota Press, 2025) 56:40

2h ago56:40

56:40

For more than 150 years, Italy has been home to a resilient and evolving resistance against the pervasive influence of mafias. While these criminal organizations are renowned for their vast international business enterprises, the collective actions taken to oppose them are less known. In Opposition by Imitation: The Economics of Italian Anti-Mafia …

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Yehudah Halper, "Averroes on Pathways to Divine Knowledge" (Academic Studies Press, 2025) 42:31

2h ago42:31

42:31

Today we will be talking to Yehudah Halper about his new book, Averroes on Pathways to Divine Knowledge (Academic Studies Press, 2025). The twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Averroes sought to understand the divine in a way independent of religious theology, by turning to the philosophical works of Aristotle and, to a lesser extent, Plato. In …

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Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025) 54:29

2h ago54:29

54:29

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 today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced econo…

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Nicholas Buccola, "One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle Over an American Ideal" (Princeton UP, 2025) 1:15:40

2h ago1:15:40

1:15:40

From the acclaimed author of The Fire Is upon Us, the dramatic untold story of Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr.'s decade-long clash over the meaning of freedom--and how their conflicting visions still divide American politics In the mid-1950s, Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the leaders of two diametrically opposed f…

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Dustin Condren, "An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film" (Cornell UP, 2024) 1:07:57

2h ago1:07:57

1:07:57

An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film (Cornell UP, 2024) explores the unfinished cinematic projects developed and abandoned by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein between 1927 and 1937. Centred on seven major film concepts, the book examines what it means for a work of art—particularly a film—to remain unfinished or unrealis…

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Zoe Dubno, "Happiness and Love" (Scribner, 2025) 40:57

2h ago40:57

40:57

Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friends—an artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stands for everything she detests—Happiness and Love (Scribner, 2025) is a piercing debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careeri…

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Emily Winderman, "Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History (JHU Press, 2025) 32:57

2h ago32:57

32:57

How did three words come to carry the weight of America's abortion debates? In Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History (JHU Press, 2025), Dr. Emily Winderman examines how this phrase shaped American reproductive politics and health care standards across generations. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book traces the unexpected origins of…

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Mark Kaplan and Mason Donovan, "The Parenthood Advantage: Building Corporate Cultures That Value Working Parents" (Dg Press, 2025) 51:02

2h ago51:02

51:02

Traditionally, parenthood has been seen as a career disruption-especially for mothers. But what if becoming a parent could be one of the greatest leadership incubators of all? The Parenthood Advantage: Building Corporate Cultures That Value Working Parents (Dg Press, 2025) challenges the outdated narrative that working parents are a burden to manag…

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Sharon White, "If the Owl Calls" (WTAW Press, 2025) 25:02

2h ago25:02

25:02

As the Sami community (Norway) struggles to protect ancestral lands from the building of a damn in 1979, Oslo detective Hans Sorensen arrives in the north of the country to investigate sabotage on a damn. Then a body is discovered, and Sorensen has to delve into his own past and heritage. He is Sami but no longer immersed in the culture, and Sorens…

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322. Oliver Burkeman: Meditations for Mortals 1:13:19

14h ago1:13:19

1:13:19

You know that phrase, "We compare our insides to other people's outsides"? We're bombarded with others' achievements but see less of the steps – internal and external – it took to get there. These days, we feel an increased pressure to achieve, to pursue greatness. We reach for this mythical, impossible standard. Drawing from his book, Meditations …

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Episode 630: Old-School Hospitality in a Smartphone World: The Story of the Legendary Halls Chophouse 1:10:57

16h ago1:10:57

1:10:57

The episode features brothers Billy and Tommy Hall of Halls Chophouse, sharing how their late father’s “service before self” philosophy, honed in luxury hotels, became the backbone of a family-run steakhouse that launched in 2009 on a rough stretch of King Street in Charleston during the Great Recession and slowly grew into a 10-restaurant hospital…

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Carlo Rotella, "What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics" (U California Press, 2025) 47:16

1d ago47:16

47:16

At a time when college students and their parents often question the "return on investment" from humanities courses, accomplished feature writer and English professor Carlo Rotella invites us into the minds of a group of skeptical first-year students who are ultimately transformed by a required literature class. In What Can I Get Out of This?: Teac…

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Henry H. Sapoznik, "The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City" (SUNY Press, 2025) 47:40

1d ago47:40

47:40

The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY Press, 2025) by Henry H. Sapoznik explores a century of Yiddish popular culture in New York City. Sapoznik--the author of Klezmer! Jewish Music fro0m Old World to Our World and a Peabody Award-winning coproducer of NPR's Yiddish Radio Project--tells his story through chapters on eating, archit…

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David Boyk, "Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 1:25:06

1d ago1:25:06

1:25:06

Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge UP, 2025) tells the story of Patna, in the north Indian region of Bihar, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A century and more earlier, Patna had been an important and populous city, but it came to be seen by many-and is still seen today-as merel…

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On Democracy and Bullshit with Hélène Landemore 1:06:15

7h ago1:06:15

1:06:15

Today I’m speaking with Hélène Landemore, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, about Democracy and Bullshit, with a special focus on her 2020 book, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2020). Bullshit is a feature of both democracies and dictatorships alike, but it takes di…

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Wendy I. Zierler, "Going Out with Knots: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry" (Jewish Publication Society, 2025) 43:29

1d ago43:29

43:29

Interweaving memoir with Hebrew poetry, Going Out with Knots: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry (Jewish Publication Society, 2025) illluminates author Wendy I. Zierler’s literary and personal Jewish mourning journey in the aftermath of unremitting personal loss. She begins with her story: the death of both her parents in one year; the challen…

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Heath Pearson, "Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town" (Duke UP, 2024) 1:05:01

1d ago1:05:01

1:05:01

In Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town (Duke UP, 2024), Heath Pearson showcases dynamic, interdependent community as the best hope for undoing the systems of confinement that reproduce capital in Cumberland County, New Jersey—a place that is home to three state prisons, one federal prison, and the regional jail. Pea…

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Max Adams and Colm O’Brien, "Northumbria AD 367-867: Earth Hall, Ring Gift and Heaven’s Field" (Birlinn, 2025) 1:08:27

24h ago1:08:27

1:08:27

The story of the lands between the Forth and Humber from the end of the Roman period to the Viking kingdom of York is one of the most richly fascinating in British history. This the age of Lindisfarne and of Bede; of the dramatic hills, valleys and ancient routeways that link the Irish Sea and the North Sea; of names that resonate even now: Edwin, …

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Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov, "Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation" (PublicAffairs, 2025) 1:02:34

1d ago1:02:34

1:02:34

1991 ushered in a new epoch of hope as Russia marched toward democracy and prosperity on the ruins of the Soviet Union. In 2025 those hopes for a thriving, democratic Russia have not panned out. Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov lived it as journalists in Russia from the start of Putin’s reign. Specialists in documenting Russia’s secret services, t…

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Vanessa S. Williamson, "The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History" (Basic Books, 2025) 53:49

1d ago53:49

53:49

Americans have always fought over the meaning of freedom and equality. What is not commonly recognized is that the battles most pivotal in defining our democracy, from the framing of the Constitution to the decades-long backlash to the civil rights movement, hinged on one issue—taxes. In The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation i…

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Dorie Greenspan, "Dorie's Anytime Cakes" (Harvest, 2025) 54:34

1d ago54:34

54:34

Beloved baker and five-time James Beard Award winner Dorie Greenspan joins the New Books Network to discuss her new cookbook, Dorie’s Anytime Cakes (Harvest, 2025), a warm, inviting collection designed to slip easily into everyday life. From celebration-worthy showstoppers to simple loaves meant for sharing over coffee, Greenspan’s latest book dist…

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FULL PLAN to Lose 10 lbs of Fat and Maintain Muscle for Women 40+ 35:46

2d ago35:46

35:46

What’s the most effective way for women over 40 to lose fat without losing muscle? In this episode, I’m walking you through my complete plan for losing 10 pounds of fat while maintaining—or even building—muscle for women over 40. As our hormones shift, the old “eat less and do more cardio” advice just doesn’t work anymore. I share exactly how to tr…

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Thomas Piketty, "A Brief History of Equality" (Harvard UP, 2022) 28:56

2d ago28:56

28:56

It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the ce…

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Steven W. Ramey, "Hinduism in Five Minutes" (Equinox, 2022) 38:54

2d ago38:54

38:54

Hinduism in Five Minutes (Equinox Publishing, 2022) is an accessible and lively introduction to common questions about the practices, ideas, and narratives often identified as Hindu. Suitable for beginning students and the general reader. Steven W. Ramey is a Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, where he also directs the Asi…

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Michelle McSweeney, "OK" (Bloomsbury, 2023) 39:56

2d ago39:56

39:56

"OK" as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an object, however, tells a story of how technology writes itself into language, permanently altering communication. OK (Bloomsbury, 2023), by Dr. Michelle McSweeney and published by Bloomsbury…

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Ethan W. Ris, "Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform" (U Chicago Press, 2022) 1:06:07

2d ago1:06:07

1:06:07

For well over one hundred years, people have been attempting to make American colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable. Indeed, Ethan Ris argues in Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform (U Chicago Press, 2022), the reform impulse is baked into American higher education, the result of generatio…

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Philip Nash, "Clare Boothe Luce: American Renaissance Woman" (Routledge, 2022) 1:04:56

2d ago1:04:56

1:04:56

Philip Nash's book Clare Boothe Luce: American Renaissance Woman (Routledge, 2022) is a concise and highly readable political biography that examines the life of one of the most accomplished American women of the 20th century. Wife and mother, author, editor, playwright, political activist, war journalist, Congresswoman, ambassador, pundit, and fem…

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Cory Doctorow on Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It 1:36:34

2d ago1:36:34

1:36:34

In this special livestream edition of Peoples & Things, host Lee Vinsel and very special guest host, danah boyd, formerly of Microsoft Research, presently Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University, chat with writer and activist, Cory Doctorow, about his new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do Abo…