2315 Micro-Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
600+ Threads

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Markets of Pain - The wide angle

How does a humble crop, scraped by hand in the fields of central India, connect overdose deaths in America to the development dreams of newly independent states? Following the poppy across the century between empire and epidemic, a historian of agriculture uncovers the people and systems that quietly supplied the world’s pain relief—and the pride of families still producing a drug the world has almost stopped buying.

Benjamin Robert Siegel
Voices in Stone - A close-up

The lives of statues then can take unexpected twists. While some are ready to write the obituary of the public statue, the appearance in many places of new monuments to honour modern-day heroes, whether the leaders of independence struggles or top-flight football players, demonstrates that the genre continues to thrive.

Paul Brummell
Nostalgic Futures - A close-up

It's beyond the scope of any single book to provide a framework for preemptively stopping reactionary activity. But through analyzing the affective economies — the emotions circulating in these controversies — I demonstrate the various ways that looking to the interactions of fans of speculative fiction can enable us, be it scholars or the general public, to really understand these reactionary groups' formation, their communication, and their continuation.

Max Dosser
A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs - A close-up

A celebrated civil-rights drama and the family that grew wealthy from the very apartments it depicts turn out to be tangled together in surprising ways. This close reading resists easy heroes and villains, showing how people working within unjust systems can fund real change while remaining caught in those systems' contradictions.

Amani C. Morrison
Sidewalk Nation – In a nutshell

We walk over it every day without a second thought, yet this thin strip of public space is where fights over commerce, protest, policing, homelessness, free speech, and accessibility all collide. A case for treating an overlooked civic resource as the contested, high-stakes ground it actually is—and for rethinking who should be responsible for it.

Michael Pollack
He Has the People – In a nutshell

We treat some outcomes as inevitable—of course the log-cabin boy became president at the nation's hour of crisis. But what if we took the sheer contingency of the past seriously? A case for narrative history that restores human agency, chance, and the sense that things could have gone very differently.

Jonathan Earle
The Barberini Butchers – In a nutshell

For a few decades in the seventeenth century, Rome was flooded with an astonishing amount of meat—at times a pound of it per person, per day. Why did feeding a city so much lamb and pork become a statement of religious and political power in the age of the Reformation? A story of faith, appetite, and the artisans who moved meat from pasture to table.

Bradford A. Bouley
SimPolitics - A close-up

What are the ways to produce new models and prototypes within the computational imaginary of politics? Mainstream games rarely reflect alternatives. As Jim Gasperini noted when making Hidden Agenda, discussed in the last chapter, "No matter how fantastic the fantasy, no matter how simulated the simulation, the outlines of our familiar reality will always be discernible underneath."

Fenwick McKelvey
Untamed Unicorns - In a nutshell

America's biggest startups are raising trillions in private markets while sidestepping the disclosure rules that once protected investors and the public. This conversation traces how four decades of deregulation shrank the public markets, let companies stay private for decades, and handed founders nearly unchecked power. It asks what that shift means for ordinary people locked out of an insular, network-driven financing system.

Renée M. Jones
Markets of Pain - In a nutshell

The opioid crisis is almost always told as a uniquely American tale of corporate greed. But what if it was really the wreckage of a global system, built over more than a century to supply the world with morphine, codeine, and pain pills? This is the hidden history of legal opium—the crop that moved from hand-scored poppy fields through treaties and monopolies into the medicine cabinets of the West.

Benjamin Robert Siegel
Voices in Stone - The wide angle

Excepting the wondrous creations of the Greek god Hephaestus, and the statue of the murdered Commendatore in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, statues are themselves passive and emotionless participants in their biographies. The lives of statues are really the lives of the humans who interact with them. The book tells their stories.

Paul Brummell
Against Heritage - The wide angle

Why compare fine dining across three continents? Because zooming out reveals that no celebrated chef is truly exceptional — each one recycles the same nostalgic dreams of primitiveness and wildness that writers have leaned on for centuries. Seen from this vantage, even "the local" turns out to be a thoroughly global idea, and the plate becomes a way to think through the entangled political, ecological, and cultural crises of the Anthropocene.

Lily Kelting
To Think Like a Statistician - In a nutshell

Is it a good idea to think like a statistician? A confident Yes here, admittedly by someone who earns his living doing so. We live in a random universe, where truth most often lies hidden beneath a fog of noise. Statistics is the science of peering through the fog and learning from experience, especially experience that arrives in sometimes contradictory pieces: Did the COVID vaccines save or cost lives? Is sugar good or bad for you?

Bradley Efron
SimPolitics - The wide angle

What I hope people take away is both a skepticism that computers can fix politics, and better demands for claims that it will. Especially in the next election cycle, how can we assess accurately the hype. My book helps readers distinguish between what's new and what's just someone who knows the rules of the game, trying to oversell the new tool or piece of software.

Fenwick McKelvey
A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs - The wide angle

What starts as a literary curiosity turns into an archival scavenger hunt across sociology, public-housing records, and — improbably — a health-sciences library. This is the story of chasing a nearly invisible housing form through the archive, and of what history's cycles of segregation, migration, and neglect can teach us about the housing pressures of our own moment.

Amani C. Morrison
THE AGE OF TOMATO - Η ΕΠΟΧΗ ΤΗΣ ΤΟΜΑΤΑΣ

Nineteenth-century theatre thus operated as a densely social and often unruly space, where attention was dispersed and porous. Contemporary "social theatre" extends this condition into a more open and continuous field of exchange, where gestures of approval and disapproval circulate instantaneously. This raises questions of temporality and agency: what is seasonal—the act, the incident, or its reception?

Georgia Kotretsos
Nostalgic Futures - The wide angle

One of the best authors to do this kind of storytelling is Ted Chiang, who writes short stories where there's this technology, this novum, this thing dropped into the world. The story isn't really about that — it's about people interacting with it. He'll present people who are very positive about it and people who are very negative. So they're really these sociological takes on how the world is different because of this technology.

Max Dosser
The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese - A close-up

Told in eight scenes, this close-up follows macaroni and cheese from Juliette Corson's 1877 fifteen-cent dinners for the poor through the anti-Italian cholera panic of the 1880s and the tariff fights of the 1890s. The resolution is pure irony: Americans planted durum wheat at home and, by World War I, were exporting it back to the very countries whose "imported" macaroni still filled their shelves.

Karima Moyer-Nocchi
Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic - A close-up

That small, brilliant joke encapsulates an entire debate that had been raging for years about the "readability" of modern architecture, about the relationship between museums and artworks, and between museums and the city itself. Dunn distilled all of it into a single drawing and a single line.

Gabriele Neri
Against Heritage - In a nutshell

Culinary "heritage" isn't really the past — it's a product, something bought, sold, and traded on in the present. Comparing food revivals from the American South to the New Nordic kitchens of Noma to the traditional ingredients of India, this is a polemical argument that our nostalgia for old foods is bound up with regressive politics and a looming ecological reckoning. What if the truest way to honor the past is to go back more honestly?

Lily Kelting
Voices in Stone - In a nutshell

The genesis of Voices in Stone lay in the realisation that this debate on the destruction of monuments is an unsatisfactory starting point to understand them. It recalls G. K. Chesterton's caution that before deciding to remove a fence, it would be well to ensure that you understand why it was put up in the first place.

Paul Brummell
SimPolitics - In a nutshell

Every election night, the experts ask the same question: what will the voters do? Listen to the grammar. Millions of people, treated as a system you can predict, model, run. Politics was supposed to be the one thing we insisted stayed irreducibly human. Somewhere it quietly became a computation.

Fenwick McKelvey
Cold-Blooded Murder - The wide angle

He wrote me this lovely letter, an actual letter, answering all my questions, and I'm sure he got many letters from kids. I wrote him back, and we had this correspondence that went on for a couple of years. Eventually he would write the answers in the margins of my letters

Craig Stanford
The Sleepless Ape - A close-up

You have to have a big brain for sleep to really matter. Circadian rhythms, though — the first eukaryotes and prokaryotic life on the planet — had to time their behaviors adaptively. So the framing of the book is: why do we do what we do? Why do we experience the kinds of symptoms we do in the modern world? And the answer is a 1.5-billion-year-old answer. It goes back to the first life on this planet

David R. Samson
Ozu and the Ethics of Indeterminacy - A close-up

From a historical and transnational viewpoint, Ozu's ambiguous and mysterious camera movements allow us multi-directional reading, which I think is an example of the ethics of indeterminacy. By way of discussing Ozu films, I want to foster readers' historical awareness and political consciousness.

Daisuke Miyao
A Kitchenette to Fit Your Needs - In a nutshell

How did a single, cramped style of apartment come to reshape an entire city's identity? This conversation traces how mid-century Chicago's subdivided "kitchenette" apartments moved from real estate boards and housing policy into fiction, drama, and the daily lives of Black families arriving during the Great Migration. It's a story about how a building type became a way of understanding a city — and the people priced into its smallest rooms.

Amani C. Morrison
The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese - The wide angle

The hard problem of food history is telling a true story without flattening it into gastromythology. Following macaroni and cheese from Cato's Rome through medieval mobility, English Macaroni Fashion, and the Jefferson–Hemings myth, she uses Restorative History to recover the African American women written out of the dish's American story—right up to the yellow box of Kraft Dinner.

Karima Moyer-Nocchi
How We Think - A close-up

I do indeed talk to everyone—the barista, the salesclerk, the Uber driver (I once almost missed a meeting because the Uber driver, who was from Morocco, and I were having an in-depth chat about Moroccan sheep, and he had photographs to show me). I am drawn to what other people think and do.

Meredith F. Small
Nostalgic Futures - In a nutshell

What I'm looking at is less what the media itself is saying and more how people get attached to it — how they begin to police it and say, this is the way it has to be. When The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power comes out, and there are Black elves and Black dwarfs, and people throw a fit — well, why do you care? What is it about your vision of this imagined world that has you so opposed to the presence of diversity?

Max Dosser
Springsteen Fandom - A close-up

I try to make scenes and experiences like these accessible to readers, even though it's difficult to fully capture the joy and intensity they create in words. But I think it is important because it gives us a chance to challenge the sociological idea that the interaction between artists and fans is merely "parasocial." There are simply too many examples showing that these relationships are experienced as meaningful and real.

Nicolas Pethes

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