Victor Buchli on Life in Low-Earth Orbit

A key insight social anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee had while observing electoral behavior in a Bengali village was that -- at least in the India of that moment -- elections were sacred. This was not a religious epiphany but a cultural one; at the center was not a figure, relig ...  Show more

In 2016 psychologist Paul Bloom wrote a book titled Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (a naming decision he still wrestles with). In the book, as in his career and in this Social Science Bites podcast, Bloom deconstructs what is popularly meant by empathy. "Everyb ...  Show more

Theresa Marteau is a British health psychologist, professor, and director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge. Her initial research concerned communicating risk information and found out that people usually don’t change their behaviours des ...

Drug-related deaths are at their highest levels in England and Wales since records began 30 years ago.Scotland has had the highest number of drug deaths in Europe for at least seven years. And the UK has even seen opioid-related deaths surpass the number of people dying in road t ...  Show more

The phrase "racial capitalism" was used by Cedric Robinson to describe an economy of wealth accumulation extracted from cheap labor, organized by racial hierarchy, and justified through white supremacist logics. Now, in the twenty-first century, the biotech industry is the new ca ...  Show more

Benjamin Y. Fong is author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, which was just released in July, 2023 by Verso Books. Ben is an honors faculty fellow and associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State Un ...  Show more