Best Strange Pathways Podcasts (2025)

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Exploring All Things Sacred Feminine & Unveiling The Living Temple w/ Sarah Jenks | Ep. 122 1:08:41

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2h ago1:08:41

1:08:41

In this episode, Sarah Jenks and I dive into the Sacred Feminine. This is the season of the witch after all, so if you’re feeling the call to explore all things goddess, priestess, ceremony, temple, and beyond, this is the episode for you. About Sarah: Sarah thought she was destined to have an “in the box” life after going to a top college, working…

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Children's Books with Annie Kelley From Random House Books 41:13

12m ago41:13

41:13

A splendid interview (I'm biased, but so what, it really is splendid) with Annie Kelley, who makes children's books come true at Random House Books. We talk about what she looks for in a manuscript (strong voice and not generic, needs to stand out in some way). She talks about her love for children's books as a child and how she found her dream job…

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Jakub Gortat, "Remembering National Socialism in Austrian Post-war Film" (1945-1955) (Brill, 2025) 39:37

20h ago39:37

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Entrenched in the myth of being victim of the Nazi aggression, Austrian elites pursued a politics of memory that symbolically shook off any responsibility for the emergence, development and consequences of National Socialism. Authors of the vast majority of films produced early after 1945 were not interested in dealing with the recent Nazi past of …

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William Cooper, "The Trial of Donald H. Rumsfeld" (Dlnp, 2025) 23:11

20h ago23:11

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Donald Rumsfeld was a major player in American history. In this riveting alternative history, he's put on trial for his role in the United States 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Trial of Donald H. Rumsfeld (Dlnp, 2025) charts Rumsfeld's rise to fame and power, the fight with President Donald Trump that leads to his prosecution, and his spellbinding tria…

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Theresa Muñoz, "Archivum" (Pavillion Poetry at Liverpool UP, 2025) 39:33

15h ago39:33

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Archivum (Pavillion Poetry at Liverpool UP, 2025) by Dr. Theresa Muñoz is a book – wise, funny and inventive by turn – that explores what it means to look at artefacts in an archive, and how these objects resonate with events in our lives. Imagined as a walk across Edinburgh, landmarks such as the Balmoral clock, National Library of Scotland, Meado…

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Brian Baker, "The Road" (Akashic Books, 2025) 34:07

12m ago34:07

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The Road (Akashic Books, 2025) is an illuminating selection of photographs spanning iconic punk rock guitarist Brian Baker’s many years of global touring with Bad Religion, Dag Nasty, and other bands. The images are intelligent and arresting, reflecting time spent both inside and outside the bubble of backstages and tour buses. While touring is eas…

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Adair Rounthwaite, "This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb" (U Minnesota Press, 2024) 1:01:44

21h ago1:01:44

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This Is Not My World: Art and Public Spaces in Socialist Zagreb (U Minnesota Press, 2024) examines the Group of Six Authors—a collective of young artists who staged provocative art events in the public spaces of socialist Yugoslavia during the 1970s and early 1980s. The book analyses how these spaces, which had long been forums of state ideological…

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Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland, "The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines" (Basic Books, 2025) 2:20:51

20h ago2:20:51

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When we are trying to solve a problem, what happens? We find ourselves weighing arguments, or relying on intuition, then reaching a conscious decision about what to do. What is going on behind the scenes? In The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines (Basic Books, 2025), Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland show that our experience…

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Paula Oppermann, "Thunder Cross: Fascist Antisemitism in Twentieth-Century Latvia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2025) 1:04:54

20h ago1:04:54

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Founded in 1932, the Pērkonkrusts ("Thunder Cross") was the largest and most prominent right-wing political party in Latvia in the early twentieth century. Its motto--"Latvia for Latvians!"--echoed the ultranationalist rhetoric of similar movements throughout Europe at the time. Unlike the Nazis in Germany or the Fascists in Italy, however, the Pēr…

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Xiao Huang et. al, "GeoAI and Human Geography: The Dawn of a New Spatial Intelligence Era" (Springer, 2025) 29:25

21h ago29:25

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GeoAI and Human Geography: The Dawn of a New Spatial Intelligence Era (Springer, 2025) outlines a comprehensive journey into how geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) is reshaping our understanding of people and places. Merging traditional geographic inquiry with AI technologies, it offers a holistic view of digital tools and advanced algorith…

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Elissa Bemporad, "Jews in the Soviet Union: A History: Revolution, Civil War, and New Ways of Life, 1917–1930, Vol. 1" (NYU Press, 2025) 57:04

21h ago57:04

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Chronicles the encounter of one of the largest Jewish communities in the world with war, revolution, and Soviet power from 1917 through 1930 At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world’s three key centers of Jewish populatio…

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Disco's Revenge 59:02

1h ago59:02

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In the wake of Disco Demolition Night in 1979—a cultural bonfire that seemed to signal the end of disco—something unexpected began to rise from Chicago’s underground. This episode traces the story of Frankie Knuckles, the Bronx-born DJ who became known as the “Godfather of House.” After the backlash against disco pushed the genre out of the mainstr…

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Diane Ravitch, "An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else" (Columbia UP, 2025) 1:02:58

1d ago1:02:58

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For many years, Diane Ravitch was among the country’s leading conservative thinkers on education. The cure for what ailed the school system was clear, she believed: high-stakes standardized testing, national standards, accountability, competition, charters, and vouchers. Then Ravitch saw what happened when these ideas were put into practice and rec…

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Kubrick’s Worlds: Power, Paranoia, and the Politics of the Human Condition 1:30:09

2d ago1:30:09

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In this episode of International Horizons, Interim Director Eli Karetny speaks with film scholar Nathan Abrams about the enduring relevance of Stanley Kubrick and what his work can teach us about our current era. From the nuclear absurdities of Dr. Strangelove to the cosmic rebirth of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick’s films expose the fragile line b…

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Democratic Dialogues: Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries 42:09

2d ago42:09

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A podcast from Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy Center on Global Democracy About the Podcast Each week, co-hosts Rachel Beatty Riedl and Esam Boraey bring together leading scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to explore the challenges and possibilities facing democracy around the world. Produced by Cornell’s Center on Global…

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Australia‘s National Indigenous Languages Survey 41:30

34m ago41:30

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Alexandra Grey speaks with Zoe Avery, a Worimi woman and a Research Officer at the Centre for Australian Languages within the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). Zoe and her teammates are preparing the upcoming 4th National Indigenous Languages Sur…

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Democracy After Illiberalism: A Warning from Poland 55:46

1h ago55:46

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Why are illiberal governments able to retain support? How are they defeated at election time? And how do (and should) governments driven by a desire to undo illiberalism proceed? For all interested in elections, democracy, accountability and representation Poland provides much food for thought. We have seen two important elections in the country in…

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Brian Potter, "The Origins of Efficiency" (Stripe Press, 2025) 51:26

1d ago51:26

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Efficiency is the engine that powers human civilization. It's the reason rates of famine have fallen precipitously, literacy has risen, and humans are living longer, healthier lives compared to preindustrial times. But where do improvements in production efficiency come from? In The Origins of Efficiency (Stripe Press, 2025), Brian Potter argues th…

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Sadiqa de Meijer, "In the Field" (Palimpsest Press, 2025) 41:13

1h ago41:13

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Governor General Award-winning author Sadiqa de Meijer about her new essay collection, In the Field (Palimpsest Press, 2025). In The Field, Sadiqa de Meijer's follow up to the Governor General's Award winning alfabet/alphabet, brings us essays that move searchingly through their central questions…

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Edmond Smith, "Ruthless: A New History of Britain’s Rise to Wealth and Power, 1660-1800" (Yale UP, 2025) 57:57

2d ago57:57

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Was Britain’s industrial revolution the result of its machines, which produced goods with miraculous efficiency? Was it the country’s natural abundance, which provided coal for its engines, ores for its furnaces and food for its labourers? Or was it Britain’s colonies, where a brutalized enslaved workforce produced cotton for its factories? In Ruth…

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Joshua Clark Davis, "Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back" (Princeton UP, 2025) 1:25:36

1d ago1:25:36

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Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back (Princeton UP, 2025) shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: thast the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting it. Instead, as Joshua Clark Davis shows, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and…

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Janice Ross "The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design" (Oxford UP, 2025) 56:41

1d ago56:41

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The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design (Oxford UP, 2025) explores how objects and the domestic spaces seep into the aesthetic consciousness of movement-based artists, like dancers and urban designers, significantly shaping their approach to movement invention and chor…

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Amanda Laury Kleintop, "Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025) 1:00:00

3d ago1:00:00

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During the Civil War, the U.S. federal government abolished slavery without reimbursing enslavers, diminishing the white South’s wealth by nearly 50 percent. After the Confederacy’s defeat, white Southerners demanded federal compensation for the financial value of formerly enslaved people and fought for other policies that would recognize abolition…

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Jennifer Barry, "Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination" (U California Press, 2025) 32:14

3d ago32:14

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Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Jennifer Barry confronts the violent ideological frameworks underpinning the early Christian imagination, arguing that gender-based violence is not peripheral but is fundamental to understanding early Christian history. By a…

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Garrett Hardin’s Tragic Environmentalism 1:15:27

6h ago1:15:27

1:15:27

An ecologist in California claimed that the iron laws of nature locked humanity into destroying our environment. This meant that we must take drastic measures to rein in unfettered capitalism and the American habit of overconsumption, lest we deplete our common resources. That argument made Garrett Hardin one of the most influential and celebrated …

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Daniel B. Rood, "The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean" (Oxford UP, 2020) 41:09

3d ago41:09

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The period of the "second slavery" was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil and chronological expansion into the industrial age. As The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford UP, 2020) shows, ambitious planters throughout the G…

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Anthony Tucker-Jones, "The Secret War: Spies, Lies and the Art of Deception in World War II" (Sirius, 2025) 1:41:47

3d ago1:41:47

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Written by British former intelligence officer, Anthony Tucker-Jones, this fascinating, illustrated guide takes a deep dive into the secret operations which shaped World War II. Most of the great military campaigns and breakthroughs of World War II would not have been successful without the efforts of teams of people working unsung and undercover. …