Best J and Kai Podcasts (2025)

1
Jonathan Fisher and Nina Wilén, "African Peacekeeping" (Cambridge UP, 2022) 53:56

3h ago53:56

53:56

In African Peacekeeping (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Dr. Jonathan Fisher and Dr. Nina Wilén explore the story of Africa's contemporary history and politics through the lens of peacekeeping. This concise and accessible book, based on over a decade of research across ten countries, focuses not on peacekeeping in Africa but, rather, peacekeepin…

1
Grace C. Huang, "Chiang Kai-Shek's Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China" (Harvard UP, 2021) 47:09

6h ago47:09

47:09

Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history. In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Sha…

1
Lewis A. Grossman, "Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America" (Oxford UP, 2021) 42:39

2h ago42:39

42:39

Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The country's history is also, however, brimming with social movements that have condemned such restrictions as violations of fundamental American liberties. This fierce conflict is one of the defin…

1
Amy Moore, "The Baker's Dozen" (Sleeping Bear Press, 2025) 41:15

6h ago41:15

41:15

In our charming interview, Amy Moore celebrates two new picture books, The Bakers Dozen (illustrated by Andrea Stegmaier) published by Sleeping Bear Press in May. 2025, and Humpty's Great Fall (illustrated by Josh Cleland) published this month by Two Lions. Amy Moore has been writing since childhood. After earning a degree in Journalism from the Un…

1
Manuel Barcia, "The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2020) 48:40

3h ago48:40

48:40

As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020), Manuel Barcia offers a striking rendition of the diseases that swept through the illegal slave trade Atlantic World. In fact, Barcia argues that the h…

1
Paul Thagard, "Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart?" (MIT Press, 2021) 59:54

6h ago59:54

59:54

Octopuses can open jars to get food, and chimpanzees can plan for the future. An IBM computer named Watson won on Jeopardy! and Alexa knows our favorite songs. But do animals and smart machines really have intelligence comparable to that of humans? In Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart? (MIT Press, 2021), Paul Thagard l…

1
Stephanie McCurry, "Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War" (Harvard UP, 2019) 1:12:50

6h ago1:12:50

1:12:50

In Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War (Harvard UP, 2019), the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning challenges the idea that women are outside of war, through a trio of dramatic stories revealing women's transformative role in the American Civil War. We think of war as a man's world, but women have always played active roles …

1
Alan McPherson, "Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice" (UNC Press, 2019) 1:08:42

3h ago1:08:42

1:08:42

On September 21, 1976, a car bomb exploded in Washington DC, killing a former Chilean diplomat named Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt. The assassination was a cruel and brazen attempt by the Chilean government to silence a critic of the Pinochet regime. And it proved to be a major strategic error––Pinochet himself used the …

1
Benjamin J. Segal, "Kohelet's Pursuit of Truth: A New Reading of Ecclesiastes" (Gefen, 2016) 37:14

2h ago37:14

37:14

The Song of Songs, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes—full of poetry and enigmatic imagery, these are among the most challenging books of the Bible to understand. Well take heart, because we have some help coming your way! Tune in as we speak with Rabbi Benjamin Segal about his Gefen publications on the Ketuvim. We’ll talk with Rabbi Segal about his transl…

1
Meredith McCarroll, "Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film" (U Georgia Press, 2018) 1:02:14

3h ago1:02:14

1:02:14

If you mention Appalachia to many people, they may immediately respond with the "Deliverance" dueling banjos theme. Unfortunately, this is an example of how the region is stereotyped and misunderstood, particularly in films. In her book, Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film(University of Georgia Press, 2018), Meredith McCarroll, Director of Writing …

1
Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community" (Harvard UP, 2022) 1:04:55

6h ago1:04:55

1:04:55

In The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Megan Brown details the surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today’s European Union. On their face, the mid-1950s …

1
Grace C. Huang, "Chiang Kai-Shek's Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China" (Harvard UP, 2021) 47:09

6h ago47:09

47:09

Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history. In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Sha…

1
Eli Zaretsky, “Political Freud: A History” (Columbia UP, 2015) 56:53

4h ago56:53

56:53

Back in the early 70s, Eli Zaretsky wrote for a socialist newspaper and was engaged to review a recently released book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism by Juliet Mitchell. First, he decided, he’d better read some Freud. This started a life-long engagement with psychoanalysis and leftist politics, and his new book Political Freud: A History (Columbia Un…

1
YUNG RALPH in the Trap! | 85 South Show Podcast 1:16:49

5h ago1:16:49

1:16:49

YUNG RALPH is in the Trap on this episode of the 85 South Show! || 85 SOUTH App: www.channeleightyfive.com || Twitter/IG: @85SouthShow || Our Website: www.85southshow.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.By The Black Effect and iHeartPodcasts

1
Irvin Weathersby Jr., "In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space" (Viking, 2025) 1:08:53

16h ago1:08:53

1:08:53

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable spe…

1
Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018) 1:12:16

1d ago1:12:16

1:12:16

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one t…

1
Michael Geheran, "Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler" (Cornell UP, 2020) 1:13:02

6h ago1:13:02

1:13:02

What claims could Jewish veterans make on the Nazi state by virtue of their having fought for Germany? How often did Germans treat Jewish veterans differently from Jewish men without military experience during the Weimar and Nazi periods? How did perceptions of masculinity and of Germanness intersect to shape attitudes and behaviors of Jewish veter…

1
Stuck at Home: Pandemic Immobilities in the Nation of Emigration 25:39

2h ago25:39

25:39

In this episode, we are joined by Dr Yasmin Ortiga, Associate Professor of Sociology at Singapore Management University, to speak to us about her latest book, Stuck at Home: Pandemic Immobilities in the Nation of Emigration, published by Stanford University Press. Yasmin is mainly interested in how changing ideas about desirable “skill” shape where…

1
Yorai Linenberg, "Jewish Soldiers in Nazi Captivity: American and British Prisoners of War During the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2024) 1:27:54

6h ago1:27:54

1:27:54

This book explores the extraordinary story of Jewish POWs in German captivity during the Second World War - extraordinary because of the contrast between Germany's genocidal policy towards Jews on one hand, and its relatively non-discriminatory treatment of Jewish POWs from western countries on the other. The radicalisation of Germany's anti-Semiti…

1
Athena Aktipis, "The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer" (Princeton UP, 2020) 57:38

6h ago57:38

57:38

When we think of the forces driving cancer, we don’t necessarily think of evolution. But evolution and cancer are closely linked because the historical processes that created life also created cancer. The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer (Princeton UP, 2020) delves into this extraordinary relationship, and shows tha…

1
Liza Black, "Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960" (U Nebraska Press, 2020) 39:09

16h ago39:09

39:09

Behind the braided wigs, buckskins, and excess bronzer that typified the mid-century "filmic Indian" lies a far richer, deeper history of Indigenous labor, survival, and agency. This history takes center stage in historian Liza Black's new book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which looks…

1
Nathan Wainstein, "Grant Us Eyes: The Art of Paradox in Bloodborne" (2025) 24:13

1d ago24:13

24:13

Grant Us Eyes is a book-length close reading of Bloodborne by literary critic Nathan Wainstein (LA Review of Books, Cartridge Lit, American Book Review). Grant Us Eyes situates the game’s oft-discussed difficulty in relation to a much longer tradition of difficult art – surrealist painting, the modernist novel, etc. Wainstein probes the difficulty …

1
Emilio Elizalde, "The True Story of Modern Cosmology: Origins, Main Actors and Breakthroughs" (Springer, 2021) 1:28:20

2h ago1:28:20

1:28:20

This book tells the story of how, over the past century, dedicated observers and pioneering scientists achieved our current understanding of the universe. It was in antiquity that humankind first attempted to explain the universe often with the help of myths and legends. This book, however, focuses on the time when cosmology finally became a true s…

1
Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018) 1:12:16

9h ago1:12:16

1:12:16

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one t…

1
Eiko Maruko Siniawer, "Ten Moments that Shaped Tokyo" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 49:03

2d ago49:03

49:03

How did Tokyo—Japan’s capital, global city, tourist hotspot and financial center—get to where it is today? Tokyo–or then, Edo–had a rather unglamorous start, as a backwater on Japan’s eastern coast before Tokugawa decided to make it his de facto capital. Eiko Maruko Siniawer picks ten distinct moments in Edo’s, and then Tokyo’s, history to show how…

1
Kit W. Myers, "The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States"(U California Press, 2025) 1:17:50

1d ago1:17:50

1:17:50

This episode features Dr. Kit W. Myers, associate professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced, discussing his book The Violence of Love: Race, Family and Adoption in the United States, which was published by the University of California Press in January 2025. The Violence of Love challenges the …

1
Navijivan Rastogi, "Kalikrama and Abhinavagupta: The Epistemological Ethics of a Tantric Tradition" (Nalanda, 2022) 27:58

2d ago27:58

27:58

The Krama School of the Trika Saivism of Kashmir, more familiar as Kalikrama in the contemporary parlance, has turned out to be the most crucial among the monistic Saiva traditions of medieval Kashmir after the Pratyabhijna school, a scenario people could hardly envisage six decades back when it first came to the notice of modern scholarship. The d…

1
Nezar AlSayyad and Heba Safey Eldeen, "Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Urban Modernity from Reel to Real" (American U in Cairo Press, 2022) 1:08:10

2d ago1:08:10

1:08:10

The relationship between the city and cinema is formidable. The images and sounds of the city found in movies are perhaps the only experience that many people will have of cities they may never visit. Films influence the way we construct images of the world, and accordingly, in many instances, how we operate within it. Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Urb…

1
154 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson 46:23

2d ago46:23

46:23

With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California. All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for the Future, his 2020 v…

Podcasts Worth a Listen

J And Kai Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Quick Reference Guide