Best Virginia Audio Collective Podcasts (2025)

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Joseph L Graves, "Why Black People Die Sooner: What Medicine Gets Wrong about Race and How to Fix It" (Columbia UP, 2025) 27:59

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14d ago27:59

27:59

Why Black People Die Sooner is a powerful and rigorous examination of the ways racism shapes health and disease. Joseph L. Graves Jr. demonstrates that the medical profession still fails to grasp basic facts about race, tracing how deep-rooted falsehoods have perpetuated the disparity between Black and white lifespans. He equips readers with the to…

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Mark Deuze, "Well-Being and Creative Careers: What Makes You Happy Can Also Make You Sick" (Intellect Books, 2025) 1:06:01

14d ago1:06:01

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The media and creative industries thrive on passion, but that passion often comes at a cost. Behind the glamour of journalism, filmmaking, games, music, advertising, and online content creation lies a growing crisis-one of burnout, anxiety, substance abuse, and exhaustion. Why do so many creative professionals report feeling both deeply fulfilled a…

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Camesia O. Matthews, "The Dental Fitness Advantage: How a Healthy Mouth Enhances Total Body Health and Elevates Performance" (Playbook Scholars, 2025) 47:00

15d ago47:00

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Ready to move beyond routine dental checkups and unlock your body’s full potential? In The Dental Fitness Advantage: How a Healthy Mouth Enhances Total Body Health and Elevates Performance (Playbook Scholars, 2025), Dr. Camesia O. Matthews, a general and sports dentist, introduces the concept of dental fitness, a breakthrough approach that links or…

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René Esparza, "From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS" (UNC Press, 2025) 52:07

17d ago52:07

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Shifting the focus of AIDS history away from the coasts to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, this impressive book uncovers how homonormative political strategies weaponized the AIDS crisis to fuel gentrification. During the height of the epidemic, white gay activists and politicians pursued social acceptance by assimilating to Midwestern…

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Gregory S. Wilson, "Poison Powder: The Kepone Disaster in Virginia and Its Legacy" (U Georgia Press, 2023) 1:09:48

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In 1975 workers at Life Science Products, a small makeshift pesticide factory in Hopewell, Virginia, became ill after exposure to Kepone, the brand name for the pesticide chlordecone. They made the poison under contract for a much larger Hopewell company, Allied Chemical. Life Science workers had been breathing in the dust for more than a year. Ing…

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The Nursing Clio Editorial Collective, "The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice" (Rutgers UP, 2025) 50:31

19d ago50:31

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The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice (Rutgers UP, 2025) brings together essays that examine reproductive health through historical research and personal experience. Featuring both new and classic pieces from the Nursing Clio blog, leading historians of reproductive health, librarians, archivists, public health profes…

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Daniel Skinner et al., "The City and the Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities" (U Chicago Press, 2023) 43:20

24d ago43:20

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The City and the Hospital (Chicago 2023) focuses on an urban paradox: American hospitals are imagined as sites of healing and care, and yet the people who live and work in nearby neighborhoods have some of the worst health outcomes in the nation. One part urban sociology and one part policy analysis, this book reports insights from a collaborative …

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Jonathan S. Jones, "Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis" (UNC Press, 2025) 38:11

26d ago38:11

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During the Civil War, the utility and widespread availability of opium and morphine made opiates essential to wartime medicine. After the war ended, thousands of ailing soldiers became addicted, or “enslaved,” as nineteenth-century Americans phrased it. Veterans, their families, and communities struggled to cope with addiction’s health and social c…

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Deborah Carr, "Aging in America" (U California Press, 2023) 56:03

29d ago56:03

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The aging of America will reshape how we live and will transform nearly every aspect of contemporary society. Renowned life course sociologist Deborah Carr provides a lively, nuanced, and timely portrait of aging in the United States. The US population is older than ever before, raising new challenges for families, caregivers, health care systems, …

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Tom White, "Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster" (Repeater, 2025) 39:40

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Once used extensively in schools, hospitals, and housing, asbestos has taken the lives of millions. Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster (Repeater, 2025) by Tom White traces the international history of the asbestos disaster — from mining operations in apartheid South Africa to the factories and shipyards of the UK – and tells the story of …

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Margaret Grace Myers, "The Fight for Sex Ed: The Century-Long Battle Between Truth and Doctrine" (Beacon Press, 2025) 39:08

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The US has some of the highest rates of STIs and teen pregnancies in the industrialized world. A comprehensive sex education curriculum—which teaches facts on contraception, prophylactics, consent, and STIs—has been available since the 90s. Yet the majority of states require that sex education stress abstinence, and 22 states do not require sex ed …

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David Kieran, "Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military's Mental Health Crisis" (NYU Press, 2019) 50:01

1M ago50:01

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The surprising story of the Army's efforts to combat PTSD and traumatic brain injury The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a tremendous toll on the mental health of our troops. In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama took to the Senate floor to tell his colleagues that "many of our injured soldiers are returning from Iraq with traumatic brain inju…

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Judith L. Pearson, "Radical Sisters: Shirley Temple Black, Rose Kushner, Evelyn Lauder, and the Dawn of the Breast Cancer Movement" (Mayo Clinic Press, 2025) 1:01:56

2M ago1:01:56

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There was a time when women's health was marginalized. There was a time when breast cancer wasn't discussed. There was a time when October wasn't pink. But three women--Shirley Temple Black, Rose Kushner, and Evelyn Lauder--refused to be silenced. Their courage ignited a movement that forever changed the way society addresses breast cancer. When th…

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Shoshana Walter, "Rehab: An American Scandal" (Simon and Schuster, 2025) 40:35

2M ago40:35

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In Rehab: An American Scandal (Simon and Schuster, 2025), Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter exposes the country’s failed response to the opioid crisis, and the malfeasance, corruption, and snake oil which blight the drug rehabilitation industry. Our country’s leaders all seem to agree: People who suffer from addiction need treatment. Today, more pe…

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Andrea Kitta, "The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore" (Utah State UP, 2019) 1:09:41

2M ago1:09:41

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Disease is a social issue and not just a medical one. This is the central tenet underlying The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore (Utah State University Press 2019) by Andrea Kitta, Associate Professor in the English department at East Carolina University, examines the discourses and metaphors of contagion and contamination in ve…

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Carol Mason, "From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary" (U California Press, 2025) 57:21

2M ago57:21

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Antiabortion stories, images, and policies have primed Americans to embrace attitudes and politics once deemed extreme. Abroad, US antiabortion tactics, personnel, and funds have contributed to a global rise of the Right. From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary (University of California Press, 2025) is a schola…

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Muhammad H. Zaman, "Infected: How Power, Politics, and Privilege Use Science Against the World’s Most Vulnerable" (The New Press, 2025) 36:28

2M ago36:28

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In Infected: How Power, Politics, and Privilege Use Science Against the World’s Most Vulnerable (The New Press, 2025), Professor Muhammad H. Zaman reveals the troubling history of how science and public health have been manipulated to serve the interests of power. Moving from the U.S.–Mexico border to Pakistan, from the Tuskegee syphilis trials to …

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Nora Kenworthy, "Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare" (MIT Press, 2024) 44:28

2M ago44:28

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In Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare (MIT Press, 2024), Dr. Nora Kenworthy presents an eye-opening investigation into charitable crowdfunding for healthcare in the United States—and the consequences of allowing healthcare access to be decided by the digital crowd. Over the past decade, charitable crowdfunding has exploded in po…

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Meghan Crnic, "The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores" (U Washington Press, 2025) 45:25

3M ago45:25

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For centuries, the ocean was seen as a place of danger and work, but by the late nineteenth century, northeastern shores of the United States became therapeutic destinations for the sick and weary. Doctors in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other cities began prescribing time at the beach as a remedy for ailments such as tuberculosis, rickets, …

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Katherine J. Parkin, "The Abortion Market: Buying and Selling Access in the Era Before Roe" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) 42:15

3M ago42:15

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The abortion market was a powerful economic force in American life. Before legalization lowered the cost, one million women each year collectively paid upward of $750 million for abortions. In The Abortion Market: Buying and Selling Access in the Era Before Roe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), Dr. Katherine Parkin reveals the strength of a…

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Branka Bogdan, "The New Yugoslav Woman: Reproductive Regulation in Socialist Yugoslavia" (Indiana UP, 2025) 50:47

3M ago50:47

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From 1945 to 1989, the Yugoslav state connected its claims of progressive politics and gender equality to its support of free healthcare, sex education and contraception, and laws that supported reproductive choice. Yugoslav men and women internalized these messages, proclaiming their homeland's superior care for its citizens in comparison to postw…

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Katie Herzog, "Drink Your Way Sober: The Science-Based Method to Break Free from Alcohol" (Simon and Schuster, 2025) 55:06

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After 20 years of fighting and failing to get sober using abstinence-based methods, journalist Katie Herzog found a simple, inexpensive, and effective way to take control over alcohol. Part memoir, part guidebook, Drink Your Way Sober: The Science-Based Method to Break Free from Alcohol (Simon and Schuster, 2025) shares Herzog’s recovery journey as…

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Masaya Llavaneras Blanco and Damien P. Gock eds., "Pandemic Policies and Resistance: Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of Covid-19" (Bloomsbury, 2025) 43:31

3M ago43:31

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Offering Southern feminist assessments of detailed case studies from 12 countries, this open access book Pandemic Policies and Resistance: Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of Covid-19 (Bloomsbury, 2025) provides crucial insights into the gendered repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on macroeconomics, labour, migration and human mobilities, a…

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Susan Erikson, "Investable! When Pandemic Risk Meets Speculative Finance" (MIT Press, 2025) 35:03

3M ago35:03

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Investable! When Pandemic Risk Meets Speculative Finance (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Susan Erikson presents a critical and sobering look at how international bankers and investors turn pandemics into investment opportunities, and what we stand to lose when we rely on “innovative finance.” In a world increasingly defined by crisis, bankers and investor…

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Breanne Pleggenkuhle and Joseph A. Schafer, "Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Responses and Adaptations in the US Criminal Justice System" (Southern Illinois UP, 2025) 24:20

4M ago24:20

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While COVID-19 lockdowns affected nearly everyone worldwide, feelings of anxiety and fear were exacerbated for those already entangled in the criminal justice system. Scholars recognized the unique opportunity to study crime and the justice system’s response during this period, though they soon realized that determining the pandemic’s effects would…

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May Friedman, "Fat Studies: The Basics" (Routledge, 2025) 23:15

4M ago23:15

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Fat Studies: The Basics (Routledge, 2025) introduces the reading of fat bodies and the ways that Fat Studies, as a field, has responded to waves of ideas about fat people, their lives, and choices. Part civil rights discourse and part academic discipline, Fat Studies is a dynamic project that involves contradiction and discussion. In order to under…

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Helen C. Epstein, "Why Live: An Anatomy of Suicide Epidemics" (Columbia Global Reports, 2025) 31:34

4M ago31:34

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What causes suicide epidemics—and how can we prevent them? Many suicides are caused by biological mental illness, but sometimes the suicide rate of a particular group jumps—two-, three-, or even ten-fold—in a short time, behaving like an epidemic. Suicide epidemics unfold more slowly than microbial plagues like flu or malaria, but they happen far t…

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Susan C. Boyd, "Heroin: An Illustrated History" (Fernwood, 2022) 45:23

4M ago45:23

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Dr. Susan Boyd is a scholar/activist and Distinguished Professor emerita at the University of Victoria. Her research examines a variety of topics related to the history of drug prohibition and resistance to it, drug law and policy, including maternal drug use, maternal/state conflicts, film and culture, radio and print media, heroin assisted-treatm…

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Stacia Kalinoski, Racing Uphill: Confronting a Life with Epilepsy (U of Minnesota Press, 2025) 31:01

4M ago31:01

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The book, Racing Uphill: Confronting a Life with Epilepsy (U of Minnesota Press, 2025), is a memoir and an educational resource, which tells the story of an Emmy Award-winning TV news Journalist, Stacia Kalinoski. The author's aim is beyond giving an account of her experience of epilepsy, her goal is to sensitize readers and inspire epileptic patie…

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Manuel Barcia, "The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2020) 48:40

5M ago48:40

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As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020), Manuel Barcia offers a striking rendition of the diseases that swept through the illegal slave trade Atlantic World. In fact, Barcia argues that the h…

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Lewis A. Grossman, "Choose Your Medicine: Freedom of Therapeutic Choice in America" (Oxford UP, 2021) 42:39

5M ago42:39

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Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The country's history is also, however, brimming with social movements that have condemned such restrictions as violations of fundamental American liberties. This fierce conflict is one of the defin…

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Melody Glenn, "Mother of Methadone: A Doctor's Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis" (Beacon Press, 2025) 43:35

5M ago43:35

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Dr. Melody Glenn was a burned-out emergency physician who had grown to resent the large population of opioid dependent patients passing through her ER. While working at a methadone clinic, she realized how effective harm reduction treatments could be and set out to discover why they weren’t used more broadly. That’s when she found Dr. Marie Nyswand…

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Judith Grisel, "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Doubleday, 2019) 1:00:13

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Not a lot of authors go from spending their early twenties homeless and addicted to cocaine to becoming one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuroscience of addiction. But Dr. Judith Grisel, in her new book Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (Doubleday, 2019), uses her personal story to illuminate the ways in which …

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Tricia Starks, "Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia" (Cornell UP, 2018) 1:00:09

5M ago1:00:09

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How and when did Russia become a country of smokers? Why did makhorka and papirosy become ubiquitous products of tobacco consumption? Tricia Starks explores these themes as well as the connections between tobacco, gender, and empire in her latest monograph, Smoking Under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia (Cornell University Press, …

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Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2018) 57:27

5M ago57:27

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Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in 1988, when the American drug war was taking its current shape, he led the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), one of the federal governmen…

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Childhood malnutrition and pneumonia in Timor-Leste 31:52

5M ago31:52

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Dr Nick Fancourt is a Horizon Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Sydney Medical School. He also works as a paediatrician at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead. Nick researches childhood pneumonia, particularly in low and middle income countries. He lived in Timor-Leste from 2018-2020, working with local partners on intitiatives to strengthen commun…

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Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, Brian T. Nguyen eds., "Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics" (NYU Press, 2025) 40:01

5M ago40:01

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In Seminal: On Sperm, Health, and Politics, Rene Almeling, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, and Brian T. Nguyen come together across disciplines to offer a kaleidoscopic view of the relationship between sperm, health, and the intersecting politics of gender, race, and reproduction. Always insightful and often provocative, the essays in this unprecedented col…

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Ela Przybylo, "Ungendering Menstruation" (U Minnesota Press, 2025) 40:35

5M ago40:35

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Ungendering Menstruation by Ela Przybyło discusses why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability. Honing a "cranky" approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstru…

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Ben Westhoff, "Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic" (Grove Press, 2019) 45:03

5M ago45:03

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Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative journalist whose best-selling 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Press, 2019), was one of the first to take fentanyl seriously as both a social phenomenon and a national threat. Since its release, Westhoff has become a policy exper…

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Richard Scheib, "A Viewing Guide to the Pandemic: Depictions of Plague and Pandemic on Film and TV" (Headpress, 2025) 35:23

5M ago35:23

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Richard Scheib's A Viewing Guide to the Pandemic (Headpress, 2025) is a film book like no other. It opens with the author's first-hand account of the Covid-19 pandemic and life in lockdown. His sense of dread, and anxiety about his state of health, were experiences shared with millions of others across the world. For author Richard Scheib, already …

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Dayna Bowen Matthew, "Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America" (NYU Press, 2022) 46:53

5M ago46:53

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In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of the symptoms and results of that inequality. Racial, social, and class inequities and the public health crises in the United States are deeply intertwined, their roots and manifestations continually p…

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Andréa Becker, "Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy" (NYU Press, 2025) 28:59

6M ago28:59

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At least one hysterectomy is performed every minute of the year, making it the most common gynecological surgery worldwide. By the age of sixty-five, one out of five people born with a uterus will have it removed. So, why do we seldom talk about this surgery? Highly performed yet overlooked, examining the paradox of hysterectomy begins to unravel t…

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Marc Sapir, "I'll Fly Away: Stories About Amazing Disabled Elders" (2025) 48:39

6M ago48:39

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We all hope to grow old with dignity and some joyfulness. The intimate narratives of 40 extraordinary elders shared in I'll Fly Away: Stories About Amazing Disabled Elders explore both the challenges of aging and the joys and vibrancy that often persist in the twilight years. Poignant observations of the patients and families by a team of health pr…

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Laura Frances Goffman, "Disorder and Diagnosis: Health and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Arabia" (Stanford UP, 2024) 49:05

6M ago49:05

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Disorder and Diagnosis: Health and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Arabia (Stanford UP, 2024) offers a social and political history of medicine, disease, and public health in the Persian Gulf from the late nineteenth century until the 1973 oil boom. Foregrounding the everyday practices of Gulf residents--hospital patients, quarantined passe…

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Carolyn Wolf-Gould et al., "A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States" (SUNY Press, 2025) 1:03:01

7M ago1:03:01

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A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States (SUNY Press, 2025) takes an empathic approach to an embattled subject. Sweeping in scope and deeply personal in nature, this groundbreaking volume traces the development of transgender medicine across three centuries-centering the voices of transgender individuals, debunking myths about gender-…

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David Zweig, "An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions" (MIT Press, 2025) 57:39

7M ago57:39

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An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions (MIT Press, 2025) is a devastating account of the decision-making process behind one of the worst American policy failures in a century—the extended closures of public schools during the pandemic. In fascinating and meticulously reported detail, David Zweig shows how…

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Jenn Hobbs, "Bodily Fluids, Fluid Bodies and International Politics: Feminist Technoscience, Biopolitics and Security" (Bristol University Press, 2024) 1:00:05

7M ago1:00:05

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In recent years, security actors have become increasingly concerned with health issues. Bodily Fluids, Fluid Bodies and International Politics: Feminist Technoscience, Biopolitics and Security (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jenn Hobbs reveals how understandings of race, sexuality and gender are produced/reproduced through healthcare policy…

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Carol A. Heimer, "Governing the Global Clinic: HIV and the Legal Transformation of Medicine" (University of Chicago Press, 2025) 1:01:30

7M ago1:01:30

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HIV emerged in the world at a time when medicine and healthcare were undergoing two major transformations: globalization and a turn toward legally inflected, rule-based ways of doing things. It accelerated both trends. While pestilence and disease are generally considered the domain of biological sciences and medicine, social arrangements—and law i…

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Joshua Howe and Alexander Lemons "Warbody: A Marine Sniper and the Hidden Violence of Modern Warfare" (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025) 1:06:24

7M ago1:06:24

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A friendship between an environmental historian and a chronically ill US Marine yields a powerful exploration into the toxic effects of war on the human body. Alexander Lemons is a Marine Corps scout sniper who, after serving multiple tours during the Iraq War, returned home seriously and mysteriously ill. Joshua Howe is an environmental historian …

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Nicholas Chesterley, "Future-Generation Government: How to Legislate for the Long Term" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025) 34:28

7M ago34:28

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Our impact on future generations has never been greater, and the challenges we face are increasingly long-term. Future-Generation Government proposes ways that we can reward our governments for making durable policy decisions that anticipate future crises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…