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  • Daniel Skinner et al., "The City and the Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

    Daniel Skinner et al., "The City and the Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
    2025/12/04
    The City and the Hospital (Chicago 2023) focuses on an urban paradox: American hospitals are imagined as sites of healing and care, and yet the people who live and work in nearby neighborhoods have some of the worst health outcomes in the nation. One part urban sociology and one part policy analysis, this book reports insights from a collaborative research team that investigated three sites (Hartford, Cleveland, Aurora, CO) and conducted more than two hundred interviews for this study. The book explores how collective memory operates, how “anchor institutions” connect with the people living in their midst, and the very meaning of “community” itself. Theoretically rich and empirically insightful, the book will be of interest to scholars, scientists, advocates, and administrators in medical setting and in any powerful organization (universities, museums) that may inadvertently cause harm to those nearest to them in their efforts to do good. This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    43 分
  • Jon Willis, "The Pale Blue Data Point: An Earth-Based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Jon Willis, "The Pale Blue Data Point: An Earth-Based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
    2025/12/03
    A thrilling tour of Earth that shows the search for extraterrestrial life starts in our own backyard.Is there life off Earth? Bound by the limitations of spaceflight, a growing number of astrobiologists investigate the question by studying life on our planet. Astronomer and author Jon Willis shows us how it’s done, allowing readers to envision extraterrestrial landscapes by exploring their closest Earth analogs in The Pale Blue Data Point: An Earth-Based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life (U Chicago Press, 2025). With Willis, we dive into the Pacific Ocean from the submersible-equipped E/V Nautilus to ponder the uncharted seas of Saturn’s and Jupiter’s moons; search the Australian desert for some of Earth’s oldest fossils and consider the prospects for a Martian fossil hunt; visit mountaintop observatories in Chile to search for the telltale twinkle of extrasolar planets; and eavesdrop on dolphins in the Bahamas to imagine alien minds.With investigations ranging from meteorite hunting to exoplanet detection, Willis conjures up alien worlds and unthought-of biological possibilities, speculating what life might look like on other planets by extrapolating from what we can see on Earth, our single “pale blue dot”—as Carl Sagan famously called it—or, in Willis’s reframing, scientists’ “pale blue data point.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 19 分
  • Janice M. McCabe, "Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students’ Networks" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Janice M. McCabe, "Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students’ Networks" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
    2025/11/21
    We’re all familiar with the sentiment that “college is the best time of your life.” Along with a newfound sense of freedom, students have a unique opportunity to forge lifelong friendships at a point in life when friendship is particularly important. Why is it, then, that so many college students are falling victim to what the US Surgeon General termed an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation”? How do different aspects of college life help or hinder students’ ability to form deep connections?In Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students’ Networks (U Chicago Press, 2025), sociologist Janice M. McCabe shows that the way a college is structured—whether students live in dorms or commute, study abroad or stay close to campus, have plentiful common areas for clubs to meet or not—can either encourage or hinder the making of meaningful friendships. Based on interviews with 95 students on three distinct campuses—a small private college (Dartmouth College), a large public university (University of New Hampshire), and a non-residential community college (Manchester Community College)—McCabe captures a wide range of experiences and discovers how features of the campuses make it easier or harder for students to make and keep friends. She shows how and why, across all three institutions, some students thrive in deep and lasting friendships with their peers.As McCabe’s research reveals, we need to look at the structures of students’ networks, the institutions they attend, and the importance of their identities in these places if we are to truly uncover and address the loneliness epidemic facing today’s young adults. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University, where he specializes in the cultural and interpretive study of space, behavior, and identity. His scholarship examines how designed environments shape social interaction, connectedness, and moral life across diverse settings. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His current research projects include ethnographic studies of escape rooms as emotion-structured environments, the use of urban aesthetics in rural downtown districts, and the lived experience of belongingness among college and university students. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website, Google Scholar profile, or connect with him on Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social) or Twitter/X (@ProfessorJohnst). He can also be reached directly by email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 分
  • Ethan W. Ris, "Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

    Ethan W. Ris, "Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
    2025/11/17
    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 generations of elite reformers who have called for sweeping changes in the sector and raised existential questions about its sustainability. When that reform is beneficial, offering major rewards for minor changes, colleges and universities know how to assimilate it. When it is hostile, attacking autonomy or values, they know how to resist it. The result is a sector that has learned to accept top-down reform as part of its existence. In the early twentieth century, the “academic engineers,” a cadre of elite, external reformers from foundations, businesses, and government, worked to reshape and reorganize the vast base of the higher education pyramid. Their reform efforts were largely directed at the lower tiers of higher education, but those efforts fell short, despite the wealth and power of their backers, leaving a legacy of successful resistance that affects every college and university in the United States. Today, another coalition of business leaders, philanthropists, and politicians is again demanding efficiency, accountability, and utility from American higher education. But, as Ris argues, top-down design is not destiny. Drawing on extensive and original archival research, Other People’s Colleges offers an account of higher education that sheds light on today’s reform agenda. Joao Souto-Maior is PhD Student in Sociology of Education at the New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 6 分
  • Caroline Jack, "Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Caroline Jack, "Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    2025/11/13
    Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century, (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games—what Caroline Jack calls “sponsored economic education media.” These items, which were funded by corporations and trade groups who aimed to “sell America to Americans,”found their way into communities, classrooms, and workplaces, and onto the airwaves, where they promoted ideals of “free enterprise” under the cloaks of public service and civic education. They offered an idealized vision of US industrial development as a source of patriotic optimism, framed business management imperatives as economic principles, and conflated the privileges granted to corporations by the law with foundational political rights held by individuals. This rhetoric remains dominant—a harbinger of the power of disinformation that so besets us today. Jack reveals the funding, production, and distribution that together entrenched a particular vision of corporate responsibility—and, in the process, shut out other hierarchies of value and common care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 11 分
  • Lisa Vanhala, "Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Lisa Vanhala, "Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
    2025/11/12
    A searing account of how the international community is trying—and failing—to address the worst effects of climate change and the differential burdens borne by rich and poor countries. Climate change is increasingly accepted as a global emergency creating irrevocable losses for the planet. Yet, each country experiences these losses differently, and reaching even inadequate political agreements is fraught with contestation. Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage (U Chicago Press, 2025) untangles the complex relationship between deteriorating environmental conditions, high politics, and everyday diplomatic practices, focusing on the United Nations’ agreement to address “loss and damage” and subsequent battles over implementation. Lisa Vanhala looks at the differing assumptions and strategic framings that poor and rich countries bring to bear and asks why some norms emerge and diffuse while others fail to do so. Governing the End is based on ethnographic observation of eight years of UN meetings and negotiations and more than one hundred and fifty interviews with diplomats, policymakers, UN secretariat staff, experts, and activists. It explores explicit political contestation, as well as the more clandestine politics that have stymied implementation and substantially reduced the scope of compensation to poor countries. In doing so, Governing the End elucidates the successes and failures of international climate governance, revealing the importance of how ideas are constructed and then institutionally embodied. This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Her research focuses on human mobilities and her new book has just been published (2025, Oxford University Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    50 分
  • Kate Epstein on How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Kate Epstein on How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    2025/10/27
    In this episode I sit down with Kate Epstein, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, as she details her research on the intersection of defense contracting, intellectual property, and government secrecy in Great Britain and the United States. We talk about her process in researching and writing her latest book Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State and how breaking the law, historically speaking, has been important for the emergence of new technologies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 34 分
  • Ladelle McWhorter, "Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Ladelle McWhorter, "Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
    2025/10/20
    How should one live? What should one do? And what do these questions have to do with being a good person? In Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demine of the Modern Moral Self (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Ladelle McWhorter reorients these questions through a genealogy of the concept of personhood. That genealogy is in the service of showing us not only that personhood is historically contingent, but that it is also optional. In unbecoming persons, we can feel relief, vital belonging, and exhilaration. We can also embrace an ethos of active belonging, a mode of living that eschews the trappings of personhood for the possibilities of life together. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 10 分