Mia Bennett is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, who focuses on the geopolitics of the arctic, the current dramatic transformation the region is undergoing due to climate change, and the interests and power dynamics of both state actors and indigenous groups in or near the region. She is the author of the blog, Cryopolitics and co-author, with Klaus Dobbs, of a recent book-length treatment of the subject, Unfrozen: the Fight for the Future of the Arctic, published in December of 2025.

Recorded 8/24/26.

Joseph Margulies is an attorney who has worked with death row convicts and prisoners at Guantanamo. His new book, Cast Out: A Call for a Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration, presents poignant case studies of people who were convicted of heinous and brutal crimes. Each endured an extraordinarily difficult childhood, some in a gang-infested neighborhood, most with a dehumanizing level of poverty, all of them survivors of physical or sexual abuse – circumstances, that in his view don’t exonerate them, but should call for our empathy and understanding, rather than the more typical response of demonizing them as irredeemable monsters. Margulies sums up his personal philosophy – which clearly guides his professional life – to eight words: “There is no them, there is only us.”

This episode includes graphic descriptions of child abuse. Listener discretion is advised.

Recorded 8/18/26.

Lee Kuhnle and Nathan Radke are professors at Humber Polytechnic College in Toronto and authors of the recently published, Uncover Up: How to Think Clearly in an Age of Conspiracies. They are also co-hosts of the Uncover Up podcast, a show dedicated to evidence-based and entertaining analysis of conspiracies and related issues.

Recorded 7/27/26.

Ian Bogost is an administrator at Washington University in St. Louis and a professor in multiple disciplines: computer science, engineering, film and media studies, and art and design. He is also an award-winning digital game designer, an internationally-exhibited artist, a contributing editor and frequent writer for The Atlantic since 2013, and the author of eleven books, including Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games, published in 2016. Today’s interview will focus on his latest book, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life, published earlier this month.

Recorded 7/21/26.

Jamison Firestone is an American-born attorney, now living in London. In 1991, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, he moved to Russia to establish its first independent foreign law firm, specializing in corporate law, in a newly forming, highly dynamic, extraordinarily lucrative financial environment. He lived in Russia for 18 years, six of them as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia. Firestone was in the front lines, not only as a witness but also as a major actor in the unfolding events in Russia, as it started to transform itself into a free market economy, only to see it hijacked by corruption, violence, and organized crime. He is the co-founder, along with Sir William Browder, of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, which was named for Firestone’s employee, Sergei Magnitsky, an auditor who was investigating high level corruption when he was arrested on false charges, imprisoned in harsh conditions, and a year later murdered in prison. Firestone was also a friend and ally of Alexei Navalny, who was similarly murdered for challenging state-sponsored corruption in Russia. Today’s interview will focus on Firestone’s recently published memoir, Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin’s Russia.

Recorded 7/14/26.

Gaurav Suri is a computational neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at San Francisco State University, where he is the director of the Readiness, Activation, and Decision-Making Laboratory. He is also a visiting professor at Stanford’s Center for Affective Science. He is the coauthor of A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel, which was published in 2007 and won the American Publishers Award. Gaurav is the coauthor and a protégé of Jay McClelland, a leader in the conceptualization of neural networks to explain cognitive phenomena, such as recognition of both written and spoken words. This interview will focus on their recently published book, The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines.

Recorded 7/8

Jacqueline Saper is an award-winning writer, public speaker, commentator, and translator, with columns and essays in national and international publications and interviews in mainstream media in both English and Farsi. We’ll be talking about her memoir, published in 2019, From Miniskirt to Hijab: A Girl in Revolutionary Iran, which chronicles her life from childhood to early adulthood in Iran, which spans the last 16 years of the rule of the Shah, as well as the first ten years following the Islamic Revolution. The book ends, at age 26, with her emigration to the United States with her husband and two children. The memoir provides a highly personalized account of what it was like to grow up in Iran in tumultuous times, a multifaceted story informed by multiple ethnic identities.

Recorded 6/23/26.

Benjamin Robert Siegel is a history professor at Boston University and former writer for Time Magazine. His writing has appeared in both mainstream media and academic journals, focusing on economic issues that affect everyday life, including food production and drug supplies. His first book, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India, published in 2018, explores the struggle of newly independent India to overcome famine and malnutrition. His second book, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers, published two months ago, tells the story of opium, its cultivation and trade, both legal and illegal, and its role in the building of empires and the fomenting of international conflicts. Siegel’s next book will be about the the price of protein, i.e., its political and environmental costs. This interview will focus primary on his most recent book, Markets of Pain.

Recorded 5/26/26.