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About Matthew Jordan
My name is Matthew Jordan, and I'm a university instructor, science communicator, and funk musician. My central belief is that everyone should have access to important ideas, presented in a simple and unpretentious way. I teach courses at McMaster University and run Interact, a Fellowship program for young technologists. I spend the rest of my time zooming through audiobooks, doing improv comedy, watching basketball, solving crosswords, playing chess, and doing long bike rides.Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future.
NBN Episodes hosted by Matthew:
July 22, 2024
Arts and Minds
Over the past 300 years, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way ima…
November 2, 2022
"Well, Doc, You're In"
Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)—renowned scientist, visionary, and iconoclast—helped invent modern physics. Not bound by disciplinary divisions, he went on …
March 21, 2022
The Atlas of AI
What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our s…
March 3, 2022
The Power of Us
If you're like most people, you probably believe that your identity is stable. But in fact, your identity is constantly changing—often outside your co…
July 20, 2021
Seeing Silicon Valley
It’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extra…
July 12, 2021
The Social Instinct
Cooperation is the means by which life arose in the first place. It’s how we progressed through scale and complexity, from free-floating strands of ge…
July 9, 2021
Your Computer Is on Fire
This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking …
June 9, 2021
Making Art Work
Artwork as opposed to experiment? Engineer versus artist? We often see two different cultural realms separated by impervious walls. But some fifty yea…
February 24, 2021
The Innovation Delusion
It’s hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether it’s genuinely a new invention or just a new…
October 9, 2020
Rebel Cell
Cancer exists in nearly every animal and has afflicted humans as long as our species has walked the earth. In Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the N…
September 11, 2020
How You Say It
We gravitate toward people like us; it's human nature. Race, class, and gender shape our social identities, and thus who we perceive as "like us" or "…
August 27, 2020
How to Argue With a Racist
Racist pseudoscience has become so commonplace that it can be hard to spot. But its toxic effects on society are plain to see—feeding nationalism, fue…
August 12, 2020
Working in Public
Open source is the once-radical idea that code should be freely available to everyone. Open-source software was once an optimistic model for public co…
August 10, 2020
Science Fictions
So much relies on science. But what if science itself can’t be relied on? In Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science (…
July 29, 2020
The 100% Solution
At age 26, Solomon Goldstein-Rose has already spent more time thinking about climate change than most of us will in our lifetimes. He’s been a climate…
July 21, 2020
The State of Science
New research and innovations in the field of science are leading to life-changing and world-altering discoveries like never before. What does the hori…
July 13, 2020
Quantum Legacies
David Kaiser is a truly unique scholar: he is simultaneously a physics researcher and a historian of science whose writing beautifully melds the past …