Modern Notion

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Taylor Downing, author of Secret Warriors: The Spies, Scientists and Code Breakers of World War I (Pegasus, April 2015). Downing’s book shifts the focus away from the trenches and bloody battlefields to the scientific innovations that made World War I different from any previous war.…

This hour, our guest is Nancy Goldstone, author of The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal That Ignited a Kingdom (Little, Brown and Company, June 2015). These weren’t just any 16th-century queens; these women engaged in love affairs, group sex, killing sprees, and much, much more. Goldstone researched these…

This hour, we’re talking with Philip Ball, author of Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (University of Chicago Press, April 2015). Ball takes a look back at human fascination with invisibility throughout history, from Plato to the present. And it turns out, science is getting closer to solving the invisibility problem—but if we do…

On today’s show, we have two guests. The first is Caitlin Davies, author of Downstream: A History and Celebration of Swimming the River Thames (Aurum Press, June 2015). The River Thames has the same mythic status in England as the Mississippi River has in the United States, and Davies undertook a project to research the…

On today’s show, we’re talking to author Brandon Brown about his new book, Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War (Oxford University Press, June 2015). Max Planck was the German physicist who created quantum physics, and he acted as a mentor to the likes of Albert Einstein and Lise Meitner. But as an elderly man,…

On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking with Adam Benforado, a lawyer and law professor who just published Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice (Crown, June 2015). Benforado uncovers the hidden biases at play within our criminal justice system, which affect everyone from jurors to judges to first responders to lawyers. Music…

On today’s show, our guest is Stephen Witt, author of How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy (Viking, June 2015). Witt traces the lives of three men on all different sides of the music industry: the creator of the mp3, a music…

On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Nick Broomfield, director of the HBO documentary, Tales of the Grim Sleeper (2015). Broomfield and his son, Barney, went to the mostly-black South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles to tell the story of a serial killer dubbed the Grim Sleeper. The Grim Sleeper is accused…

On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we welcome guest Sam Kean, author of The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery (Basic Books, June 2015 paperback). Kean set out to find the boundary between brain and mind, using anecdotes about various…

On today’s show, our guest is Jacky Colliss Harvey, author of Red: A History of the Redhead (Black Dog & Leventhal, June 2015). As a redhead herself, Harvey wanted to research the unique experience of being a ginger, from the science behind it to representations of redhead in art throughout history. In the process, she…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Carmel O’Shannessy, a linguist at the University of Michigan. For more than a decade, O’Shannessy has been researching the genesis of a new language, Light Warlpiri, in Australia’s Northern Territory. We talk with her about why the language is unique, and we even hear a…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking to James Boyce, author of Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World (Counterpoint Press, May 2015). Boyce argues that original sin is the West’s creation story, and it affects all Western peoples, whether we’re aware of it or not. Music this hour:…

This hour, director Frank Pavich joins us to talk about his 2013 documentary, Jodorowsky’s Dune. Alejandro Jodorowsky is an avant-garde filmmaker who planned to make a movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel, Dune, in the early 1970s. He enlisted the likes of Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí to be in his movie, but…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we talk to guest Anthony Powell, director of Antarctica: A Year on Ice. Powell started working in Antarctica as a communications tech. He quickly realized that the true experience of living in Antarctica—particularly in the winter—had never been captured. So, he taught himself to shoot video and time-lapse…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we welcome guest Col. Chris Hadfield, a retired Canadian astronaut. Hadfield was the first Canadian to walk in space and the first Canadian to act as commander of the International Space Station. He talks about how he became an astronaut, the life lessons he’s learned in space, and…

On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking with Reid Mitenbuler, author of Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America’s Whiskey (Viking, May 2015). The history of bourbon collides with major events in America’s past, from the Whiskey Rebellion to Prohibition. And even modern-day bourbon marketing makes ample use of America’s history of…

On today’s show, we talk with guest Mark Vanhoenacker, author of Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot (Knopf, June 2015). After working for years as a consultant, Vanhoenacker decided to pursue his dream of becoming a commercial airline pilot. He now flies Boeing 747s for British Airways, and in his spare time, he wrote this…

On today’s show, our guest is Fredrik Sjöberg, an entomologist and author of The Fly Trap (Pantheon, June 2015). Sjöberg has devoted much of his life to watching, trapping, and studying hoverflies, but he’s tried not to get trapped in his love of the flies. Using literature and details from the life of naturalist René…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we talk with guest Gillian O’Brien. O’Brien’s new book, Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago (University of Chicago Press, March 2015), tells the largely forgotten story of the murder of Dr. P. H. Cronin in the late 19th century. We also visit a taxidermy…

On today’s podcast, we’re talking with guest Helen Castor, author of Joan of Arc: A History (Harper, May 2015). Castor argues that most people see Joan of Arc as an empty vessel—someone to whom they can attach meaning, given the extraordinary nature of her life and accomplishments. Castor does not discount those conversations, but her…