Modern Notion

This hour of Modern Notion Daily, our guest Karen Abbott talks about her book, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War (Harper Perennial, paperback September 2015). Abbott explored the lives of four women who contributed to the war effort in unusual ways, from the Confederate spy who bedded countless Union soldiers to…

Our guest on today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily is Casey Schwartz, author of In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis (Pantheon, August 2015). Schwartz completed a graduate program that allowed her to study psychoanalysis at the Anna Freud Centre in London and neuroscience at Yale. She constantly felt like the two disciplines were…

On today’s Modern Notion Daily podcast, our guest is Roger Giner-Sorolla, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent and a member of the team working on the Reproducibility Project for Psychology. The Reproducibility Project tasked psychologists with choosing 100 studies that they could replicate in their own labs as a way of…

Our guest on today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily is Pedro Domingos, a professor of computer science and the author of The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Basic Books, September 2015). Domingos is an expert in machine learning, which is the engine behind much of what happens in our…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is J. Kenji López-Alt, the managing culinary director of Serious Eats and author of the new book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking through Science (W. W. Norton, September 2015). López-Alt takes a scientific approach to cooking—which doesn’t mean he’s necessarily looking for the “perfect” way to make…

Our guest on today’s Modern Notion Daily is Andrew Moore, author of Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit (Chelsea Green, August 2015). Moore discovered the pawpaw, which is native to the United States, five years ago in a grove in Ohio. Despite its addictive taste and aroma (it’s been called a cross between a banana and…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is David Starkey, author of Magna Carta: The Medieval Roots of Modern Politics (Quercus, September 2015). Starkey was less interested in exploring the principles of the Magna Carta, and more interested in the process it took to get the document just right. In the year 1215, when the…

On today’s show, our guest is Robert M. Thorson, author of Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science (Harvard University Press, paperback August 2015). Thorson is a geologist who decided to read Thoreau’s classic literary work for its observations about nature. He argues that Thoreau was as skilled a naturalist as he was a…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Nicholas Carr, a science and technology writer whose most recent book is The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (W. W. Norton, paperback September 2015). Carr thinks that automation has advanced society and the greater good in innumerable ways, but we may have…

On today’s show, we’re talking with Linda Hirshman, a former attorney and author of the new dual biography, Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (Harper, September 2015). Hirshman argues that these first two women to sit on the Supreme Court could…

On this episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Christian Rudder, a co-founder of the online dating service OkCupid and author of Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity—What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves (Broadway Books, paperback September 2015). Rudder gained some attention when he wrote the OkTrends blog for OkCupid,…

On this episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is John Safran, an Australian comedian, documentary maker, and author of the book God’ll Cut You Down: The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, a Murder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi (Riverhead Books, paperback September 2015). As part of his…

Our guest today on Modern Notion Daily is Dick Lehr, coauthor with Gerard O’Neill of the definitive book on Boston’s most notorious gangster, Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal (PublicAffairs, reissued August 2015). Lehr and O’Neill were part of an investigative journalism team at The Boston Globe in the 1980s, covering…

Our guest today is Elijah Wald, author of Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (Dey Street Books, July 2015). Fifty years after the fact, we talk with Wald about the night Bob Dylan first performed with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival, shocking his fans and…

On today’s show, our guest is Val McDermid, author of Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us about Crime (Grove Press, July 2015). McDermid is a crime novelist and tries to make her fiction as close to real life as possible. Writing Forensics, a nonfiction title that explores the science of crime scene investigation, allowed…

Today on Modern Notion Daily: journalist Ari Berman takes us through the history of voting rights and restrictions in the last 50 years, as detailed in his book Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2015). Berman explores why the Voting Rights Act of 1965…

David Neiwert, author of Of Orcas and Men: What Killer Whales Can Teach Us (The Overlook Press, June 2015), joins us to talk orcas on today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily. Neiwert explores the killer whale’s unique intelligence and ability to echolocate, as well as the conditions these animals are subjected to in captivity. We…

Today, on Modern Notion Daily: we get a rare look at the manned space flights of Project Apollo. Our guests are John Bisney and J.L. Pickering, coauthors of Moonshots and Snapshots of Project Apollo: A Rare Photographic Look (September 2015, University of New Mexico Press). For more than four decades, Pickering has been collecting 8″x10″…

This hour, our theme is “sea wars,” and we bring you two very different stories. First, we’re talking with John Boyle, author of Blood Ransom: Stories from the Front Line in the War Against Somali Piracy (Bloomsbury, July 2015). Boyle interviewed prisoners in Somalia who were serving time for alleged pirate activity. Then we’re joined…

On today’s Modern Notion Daily podcast, we’re talking spies and subways cars in the ocean. First we’re in the studio with Alex Kershaw, author of Avenue of Spies: A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family’s Heroic Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Paris (Crown, August 2015). Kershaw tells the story of an American doctor and…