Modern Notion

On today’s show, we’re talking with Sandy Tolan, author of Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land (Bloomsbury, April 2015). Tolan chronicles the life of Ramzi Aburedwan, a Palestinian boy who grew up to become a musician and start music schools in the West Bank. We’re also talking to contributing…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Dr. Eugenia Cheng, author of How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics (Basic Books, May 2015). Cheng’s research is about category theory—which she calls the “mathematics of mathematics.” When teaching category theory, she found it was so abstract that analogies…

This hour we’re talking with two guests: David Shields, author of Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine (University of Chicago Press, March 2015), and Jennifer Jordan, author of Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods (University of Chicago Press, April 2015). Shields is on a mission to bring…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking about plankton! Christian Sardet wrote the upcoming book, Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World (University of Chicago Press, June 2015), which took him around the globe to scour the seas for the many species of plankton. Later in the show, staff writer Josh Hrala joins us…

On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we have two guests: Arnold Thackray and David Brock. Thackray, Brock, and Rachel Jones co-wrote Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary (Basic Books, May 2015). Gordon Moore worked at Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1960s, where he came up with Moore’s Law. He went on…

On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking to documentary filmmaker Marah Strauch. Strauch’s newest film is Sunshine Superman (Magnolia Pictures), which tells the story of the inventor of BASE jumping, Carl Boenish. Boenish was not just a thrill seeker; he was also obsessed with filmmaking, and the possibility of filming humans jumping off…

On today’s Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Mark Adams, author of Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (Dutton, March 2015). Adams spent three years exploring the veracity of Plato’s classic tale of Atlantis. While he encountered some idiosyncratic character and wild theories, the people he found to be…

On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we talk to the two sides of the Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence poker tournament. First, we talk to Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. Sandholm designed the poker-playing computer program, known as Claudico. Then we talk to Jason Les, one of the four poker…

On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking to Bekah Sosland, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. At 25, Sosland has worked with Opportunity, the 11-year-old Mars rover, as a flight director. Staff writer Josh Hrala joins us later in the hour to talk about the Fermi paradox: if the universe is…

This hour, we’re talking to Jeffery Walk, director of science at the Illinois chapter of The Nature Conservancy. Seven months ago, Walk and his team reintroduced bison to the prairie in Illinois, and they animals have thrived in their new home. We also talk to contributing editor Mark Hay about his reasons for thinking Americans…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking to Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (Basic Books, May 2015). Ford argues that robots will soon replace not only blue-collar workers, but also white collar workers, too. We also have contributing editor Mark Hay in…

On this hour of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking to Kristin Ohlson, author of The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet (Rodale, March 2015). Based on interviews with scientists and farmers around the country, Ohlson believes we soil is the key to solving many…

On today’s show, we’re talking to William Rosen, author of The Third Horseman: A Story of Weather, War, and the Famine History Forgot (Penguin Books, May 2014). A seven-year famine is thought to have caused 5-8 million deaths in northern Europe in the 14th century—but Rosen argues that the famine’s severity was exacerbated by the…

This hour we talk to Sydney Padua, author and illustrator of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer (Pantheon, April 2015). In this graphic novel with lengthy, tongue-in-cheek footnotes, Padua reimagines the lives of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, who worked on prototypes for the first “computer”…

On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we talk with guest Caitlin O’Connell, author of Elephant Don: The Politics of a Pachyderm Posse (University of Chicago Press, April 2015). O’Connell shares her observations from 20 years of research on male African elephants, and comes to the conclusion that they’re not unlike the Mafia (hence, the…

On today’s show we talk to Cynthia Barnett, author of Rain: A Natural and Cultural History (Crown, April 2015). Barnett, an environmental journalist, takes us to Texas, India, and everywhere in between to explore how we make sense of the water that falls from the sky. Josh Hrala tells us how filmmakers might be the…

Today on Modern Notion Daily we talk to Beth Shapiro, author of How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction (Princeton University Press, April 2015). Shapiro says the we won’t ever be able to bring back an exact clone of a Dodo or a Woolly Mammoth, but we could use their ancient DNA to…

This hour we talk to Alice Dreger, author of Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science (Penguin Press, March 2015). As both a scientist and activist, Dreger has found herself in the middle of controversies surrounding the intersex movement, transsexual identity, and the biology of rape (among other issues). Contributing…

On today’s show we talk to Kalyanee Mam, the director and producer of the documentary film, “A River Changes Course.” For several years, Mam filmed two Cambodian families—one that subsists on fishing, the other on farming—affected by vast environmental and economic changes in their country. Plus, contributing editor Erin Blakemore tells us how Violet Jessup…

On this episode of Modern Notion Daily we talk to Jenny Price, a writer, artist, and environmental humanities scholar. She thinks that historians and artists bring new questions—and new perspectives—to discussions about the environment and climate change. We talk to contributing editor Mark Hay about Oneida, the cult that gave rise to a popular American…