Recently released audio

Critic Nicholas Carr talks about how technology-driven trends affect our cultural and personal lives. (56 minutes)

FROM VOL. 48 Gary Cross argues that Americans are uniquely susceptible to the temptation to define ourselves by what we buy. (10 minutes)

FROM VOL. 48 Historian Jon Butler explains how aspects of modernity were already present and at work in colonial American life prior to 1776. (12 minutes)

FROM VOL. 70 Richard Weikart describes evolutionary ethics and examines the ties between national racism and the eugenics movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (16 minutes)

Christine Rosen explores early eugenics support in the early 1900s and current “participatory evolution” practices. (50 minutes)

In this lecture, Matthew Crawford draws a distinction between an orientation toward receiving life as gift and a timid and cramped rationalism that views man as an object to be synthetically remade. (52 minutes)

FROM VOL. 98 Moral philosopher Gilbert Meilaender examines the question of human dignity and its place within political discourse. (25 minutes)

FROM VOL. 27 Robert Kanigel describes the transformation of work due to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s concept of scientific management. (11 minutes)

FROM VOL. 59 Todd Gitlin discusses the effects of media saturation on our mental and emotional lives. (14 minutes)

FROM VOL. 39 John L. Locke discusses the value of personal communication and how technology is displacing it. (12 minutes)

FROM VOL. 25 Douglas Groothuis examines the worldview and mythology behind the creation and marketing of the Internet. (13 minutes)

FROM VOL. 17 Mark Slouka explores the worldview of techno-visionaries who aim to create a new era of human evolution. (11 minutes)

FROM VOL. 7 Ken Myers talks with Jane Metcalfe, the founder of WIRED Magazine, about technology and community. (8 minutes)

FROM VOL. 38 Erik Davis describes his research on how humans’ fascination with technology is permeated with “mythic energy” and gnostic aspirations. (11 minutes)

FROM VOL. 65 George Marsden discusses how Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) understood world history and the American experience. (14 minutes)

FROM VOL. 124 Historian John Fea discusses how American and Protestant individualism continues to influence our orientation toward the past. (22 minutes)

FROM VOL. 85 Professor Christopher Shannon discusses how early twentieth-century social scientists encouraged the American idea that individual identity works against communal membership. (17 minutes)

FROM VOL. 85 Catherine Albanese describes the varieties of “metaphysical religion” popular in early American history and draws connections with the more recent New Age movement. (14 minutes)