Modern Notion

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Siobhan Roberts, author of Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway (Bloomsbury USA, July 2015). Roberts spent seven years writing this biography of one of the most famous contemporary mathematicians and creator of the Game of Life. The magnitude of Conway’s genius is matched…

On today’s Modern Notion Daily show, our guest is Matthew Cobb, a zoology professor and author of Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code (Basic Books, July 2015). Cobb traces the history of genetic discoveries from Mendel and his predecessors (yes, he stood on the shoulders of other early geneticists) to CRISPR…

On today’s Modern Notion Daily podcast, our guest is Arissa H. Oh, author of To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Stanford University Press, June 2015). During the Korean War and the rise of “war orphans,” Americans began adopting Korean children in large numbers; that trend spiked in the…

This hour, our guest is Michael Knox Beran, author of Murder by Candlelight: The Gruesome Crimes Behind Our Romance with the Macabre (Pegasus, August 2015). Beran explores three murders from the 19th century that showcase people’s changing attitudes toward the macabre at that time. Music this hour: “Miri’s Magic Dance” by Kevin MacLeod, from the…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Deborah Davis, author of The Trip: Andy Warhol’s Plastic Fantastic Cross-Country Adventure (Atria Books, July 2015). Based on Warhol’s trove of receipts and other ephemera, Davis recreated his 1963 road trip from New York to Hollywood, where a friend was throwing him a party. That…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Matthew Battles, author of Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word (W. W. Norton & Co., July 2015). Battles explores the trajectory of writing, from the forms it takes (cuneiform, pictographs, letters, characters, emojis) to the way it’s been produced (on clay tablets, on parchment,…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Rinker Buck, author of The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey (Simon & Schuster, June 2015). After coming across an Oregon Trail marker in Kansas, and then reading that it had been decades since anyone traversed it, Buck decided it was his turn. It took…

On today’s Modern Notion Daily podcast, author Guy Lawson joins us to talk about his new book, Arms and the Dudes: How Three Stoners from Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History (Simon & Schuster, June 2015). It could only have happened in the internet age, argues Lawson: three kids from Miami Beach…

On today’s show our guest is James McGrath Morris, author of Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press (Amistad/HarperCollins, February 2015). Payne was one of the first African-American women journalists, and her heyday was in the 1950s and 1960s. Before she even got into journalism professionally, Payne was an…

On today’s show our guest is John Sweeney, author of North Korea Undercover: Inside the World’s Most Secret State (Pegasus, July 2015). Sweeney, a journalist, posed as a professor taking students on a tour in order to get into North Korea. While there, he wasn’t able to see much—but even the absence of certain fundamentals…

On today’s episode of the Modern Notion Daily podcast, we’re talking with Ardis Cameron, author of Unbuttoning America: A Biography of ‘Peyton Place‘ (Cornell University Press, May 2015). Cameron knew the book as a symbol of illicit love affairs and drama, but didn’t actually read the novel until she was in her fifties. When she…

On today’s Modern Notion Daily podcast, we’re talking with Michael Hiltzik, author of Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex (Simon & Schuster, July 2015). Hiltzik chronicles the life of Lawrence and his machine, the cyclotron (also known as the proton accelerator). This invention, Hiltzik argues, was the beginning of…

This hour we’re talking to Fred Minnick, author of two books about whiskey: Whiskey Women (Potomac Books, October 2013) and Bourbon Curious (Zenith Press, August 2015). After covering a women’s military unit in Iraq as a journalist, Minnick was inspired to report on more stories about women’s history. In Whiskey Women, he recounts women’s roles…

On today’s show, our guest is Anthony J. Martin, author of Dinosaurs Without Bones: Dinosaur Lives Revealed by Their Trace Fossils (Pegasus, paperback March 2015). Martin is an ichnologist, which means he studies the traces of animals in conjunction with fossils of the animals themselves. This could mean tracks or it could mean puke—and ichnology…

Today on Modern Notion Daily, our guests are Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden, authors of Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (Crown, July 2015). Al-Khalili, a quantum physicist, and McFadden, a molecular biologist, have teamed up to write the first book on the burgeoning field of quantum biology. The quantum…

This hour of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Thomas Trautmann, author of Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Trautmann looks at the fascinating history behind how and why elephants were first tamed for use in battle, from more than two thousand years ago until the Vietnam War. Later in…

On today’s show, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matt Richtel joins us to talk about his book, A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, the Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age (William Morrow, June 2015 paperback). Richtel followed the case of Reggie Shaw, who was texting while driving, when he swerved and hit an…

On today’s show, award-winning journalist Pamela Newkirk talks about her new book, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (Amistad/HarperCollins, June 2015). Ota Benga was a young man from the Congo, kidnapped and put on display at the St. Louis World’s Fair and the Bronx Zoo at the dawn of the 20th century. Newkirk explores…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Peter Moore, author of The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2015). Before any concerted study of the weather, people didn’t understand that it was a global system; it seemed more like random, individual events controlled…

On today’s show we have two guests. The first is Janet Stephens, a hairdresser turned Roman hairstyle archaeologist. Stephens was inspired when she walked into a museum in Baltimore—it was the first time she’d really examined the backs of Roman statues’ heads. That set her on a quest to figure out how to recreate those…