The radio extension of ModernNotion.com, a website for the ultra-curious that finds the science behind the story and the truth in every tale. It’s your middlebrow library for highbrow ideas. We tell stories about history, science, technology, culture and life.
On today’s episode of Modern Notion, we visit the salon in New York that originated Brazilian waxing. Jonice Padilha, one of the seven sisters behind Manhattan’s J Sisters salon, speaks to reporter Renee Gross about how the salon came up with the idea of taking it all off. From there, the trend took off—you’ll have…
What if we looked at the human body as a landscape, and mapped its features using a cartographer’s eye? That’s what Dr. Gavin Francis does in his new book, Adventures in Human Being: A Grand Tour from the Cranium to the Calcaneum (Basic Books, October 2015). On this episode of Modern Notion we dive into some…
Our guest on today’s (new! improved! weekly!) Modern Notion is Gordon Edgar, the longtime cheesemonger at Rainbow Cooperative Grocery in San Francisco. Gordon turns his attention to a specific kind of cheese in his new book, Cheddar: A Journey to the Heart of America’s Most Iconic Cheese (Chelsea Green, October 2015). In the midst of a cheese renaissance, Gordon…
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On today’s show, we’re talking with author Simon Read about Winston Churchill—but probably not the Winston Churchill you already know. In his book, Winston Churchill Reporting: Adventures of a Young War Correspondent (Da Capo Press, October 2015), Read explores the five years Churchill spent as a war correspondent, which took him around the world, from Cuba…
On today’s show, our guest is Dave Goulson, a professor of biological sciences and the founder of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust in the UK. Goulson recently wrote a memoir of sorts about a farm he bought in France, called A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm (Picador, April 2015). For the last…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is David Talbot, the former CEO and editor-in-chief of Salon.com. Talbot has written a new book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (Harper, October 2015). Dulles was the director of the CIA until President John F. Kennedy fired him; and…
Jamie Holmes is our guest today, talking about his new book Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing (Crown, October 2015). Holmes argues that embracing ambiguity can help us lead more productive and happier lives. Also on the show, reporter Lila Cherneff visits a zebrafish lab on Mount Desert Island in Maine to learn about the science of…
On today’s show, novelist and English professor Eileen Pollack is discussing her new book, The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club (Beacon Press, September 2015). Pollack graduated from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in physics, but she believes that a lack of encouragement, and even active discouragement, led her to…
On today’s show, our guest is Clint Emerson, author of 100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation (Touchstone, October 2015). Emerson uses his experiences a Navy SEAL to give tips on how to stay ahead of “the bad guys”—mostly by using “bad guy” tactics. He gives detailed…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Wayne Wiegand, author of Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library (Oxford University Press, October 2015). Wiegand argues that libraries are about much more than books: they’re a community meeting place. And to answer the question in the headline: they’re not going anywhere.…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, we’re talking with Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at Kings’ College London and author of The Diet Myth: Why the Secret to Health and Weight Loss Is Already in Your Gut (The Overlook Press, September 2015). Using twin studies, and testing out various diets for himself, Spector has…
The guests on today’s Modern Notion Daily show are Steve Ettlinger and Dwight Eschliman, coauthors of Ingredients: A Visual Exploration of 75 Food Additives and 25 Food Products (Regan Arts, September 2015). Ettlinger, who had previously written about artificial ingredients in his book Twinkie Deconstructed, teamed up with Eschliman, a photographer who has deconstructed food in previous visual…
Our guest on Modern Notion Daily is Susanna Moore, author of Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, September 2015). The book was recently longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award. Moore details the history of the archipelago, first inhabited by humans in the sixth century. We’ll learn about the origin of the…
On today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Sasha Abramsky, author of The House of Twenty Thousand Books (New York Review Books, September 2015). Abramsky recalls his grandparents’ London home, filled with a vast rare book collection—but more importantly, he remembers the ideas discussed among those treasured volumes. Later in the hour, reporter Jessie Wright-Mendoza…
Our guest on today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily is Frances Dinkelspiel, author of Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California (St. Martin’s Press, October 2015). Dinkelspiel was intrigued by the 2005 arson of Wines Central, which destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of wine. But ultimately, her journey…
On today’s show, our guest is Robert Weintraub, author of No Better Friend: One Man, One Dog, and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage and Survival in WWII (Little, Brown and Company, May 2015). This is the story of Judy, a pointer dog who was a Japanese POW. She befriended Frank Williams, a British POW, and the two…
On today’s Modern Notion Daily podcast, our guest is Gillen D’Arcy Wood, author of Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (Princeton University Press, paperback September 2015). In 1815, the Tambora volcano on Sumbawa (part of Indonesia) erupted for three days, producing volcanic ash that was absorbed into the Earth’s atmosphere and stratosphere. People blame this…
Our guest on today’s episode of Modern Notion Daily is Caitlin Doughty, a mortician and author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Stories from the Crematory (W. W. Norton & Co., paperback September 2015). Doughty promotes “death positivity”—which does not mean you should be happy when a loved one dies, but that you should embrace the…
On Modern Notion Daily, our guest is Lillian Faderman, author of The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (Simon & Schuster, September 2015). Faderman starts this detailed account of the treatment of LGBT people and communities in the 1950s, when police raided gay bars and prosecuted people for their sexuality in courts of law. How did we…
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…
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…
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