History of Science

July 9, 2026

The Age of Alchemy

The first chemists were Sri Lankan forgers who crafted unimaginably strong steel millennia before it should have been possible. They were alchemists i…

July 4, 2026

Vanished

Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of…

June 28, 2026

How We Disappear

This is the third time I have the great fortune of interviewing Tom Mullaney. I can hardly think of a more worthy ambassador for the history disciplin…

June 27, 2026

Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, children became the focus of unprecedented scientific and professional interest in modernizing societies worldwide, i…

June 23, 2026

Disabled Empire

Disabled Empire: The Colonial Body in First World War Britain (U Chicago Press, 2026) examines how imperial precedents and racial ideologies shaped th…

June 17, 2026

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Frank Stahnisch, Professor of the History of Medicine and Health Care a…

June 13, 2026

When Metaphysics Meets Biology

Central to modern biology and the study of life is the concept of the organism—roughly, a body with interconnected parts that make specific contributi…

June 8, 2026

The Clintons, Tech, and Memory

We were joined by Professor Margaret O’Mara of the University of Washington, who had a front row seat to the Clinton campaign and went on to become an…

June 1, 2026

Picky

Are children naturally picky? It sure seems that way. Yet, amazingly, pickiness used to be almost nonexistent. Well into the 20th century, Americans s…

May 22, 2026

Huge Numbers

What if, every time you wanted to write down 1,000,000, you had to draw a picture of a god? And what if that number were the biggest you had a symbol …

May 16, 2026

A Womb of One's Own

In the well-trod history of the Roman Empire, a pivotal moment has long gone unnoticed: It was in ancient Rome that medical men first set their sights…

May 15, 2026

Empire of Skulls

In Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind (Counterpoint Publishing, 2026), Dr. Pa…

May 13, 2026

What's Real about Race?

Professor Rina Bliss teaches in the sociology department at Rutgers University, and has written on the social significance of genetic studies on intel…

May 11, 2026

The Rise of the Internet

We were joined by Angus Burgin, Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, and talked about how the arrival of the Internet remade li…

April 30, 2026

The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments

The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments (Reaktion, 2026) by Dr. Deirdre Loughridge & Dr. Thomas Patteson is a guided tour through centuries of ins…

April 30, 2026

Empathy Takes Action

Mainstream psychology has long accepted that some people (like those with autism) are naturally more logical and unemotional, while others (like so-ca…

April 28, 2026

The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals

In the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, commerce transformed as merchants shifted from Roman to Indo-Arabic numerals—an alternative that better facil…

April 24, 2026

Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance

Today, I interview Vin Nardizzi, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, about his new monograph Marvellous Vegetables in the Engl…

April 21, 2026

Maladies of Empire

Jim Downs’ most recent book is Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine. Professor Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-Natio…

April 14, 2026

Gold from Newton's Apple Tree

Flowering currant, ivy, Portuguese laurel, and woad might all have grown in a medieval garden, but it would have taken special expertise to extract an…