This week Jack Reid drops in to talk about how hitchhiking came of age in the United States, interactions between people on the road, and some shocking celebrities who have asked for a ride. Check out his new book, Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation.

This week Dr. Kit Heyem visits from across the Pond to talk about their new book, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender. This was an awesome conversation to talk nonbinary histories through time and why that is relevant today.

About our guest:
Dr Kit Heyam (they/them or he/him) is a Leeds-based freelance writer, heritage practitioner, trans awareness trainer and academic.

You can find them on Blue Sky at: https://bsky.app/profile/krheyam.bsky.social

What are you wearing this fall? Or rather, why are you wearing what you're wearing this fall? Those are the questiond Dr. Rachel Gross and I are pondering in this episode of Reckoning. Dr. Gross joins in to talk about her new book: Shopping All The Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America. We talk about the rise of outfitters as outdoors marketers, and just exactly why I can't decide between Patagonia, L.L. Bean, and Columbia.

About our guest:
Dr. Rachel Gross is an environmental and cultural historian of the modern U.S. and an assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver. In 2019 she was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and a Postdoctoral Teaching, Research, and Mentoring Fellow at the Davidson Honors College of the University of Montana.

For her doctoral research, she wrote about the history of outdoor clothing and gear in the U.S. from the Civil War to the present. The project was awarded the 2018 Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History from the Business History Conference. She works with university and community partners to bring history into the public realm. In 2019, She curated an exhibit at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula on “Outdoor Gear Stories From the Treasure State.” From January – July 2017 she served as the managing editor of Wisconsin 101, a collaborative history project that uses material culture to tell stories about Wisconsin’s past. Read a recent post she edited. In 2016-2017, she also served on the editorial board of Edge Effects, the digital magazine of environmental humanities of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

This week Columbia Business School behavioral economist Dr. Stephan Meier drops in to talk about why businesses will profit by switching to an employee-centric model--and how to do it. We talk about a whole range of aspects of business operations, from remote work to pay scales to Legos. Stephan is absolutely amazing and this conversation goes places I never thought possible.

About our guest:
Stephan Meier is currently the chair of the Management Division and the James P. Gorman Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Zurich, was previously a senior economist at the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision-Making at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and taught courses on strategic interactions and economic policy at Harvard University and the University of Zurich. His research interest is in behavioral strategy. He investigates the impact of psychology and economics on human decision-making and its implications for public policy and firms' strategy. Current research topics include how non-selfish behavior affect organizations or the effect of borrower's decision-making on financial institutions' strategy. His work has been published in the leading academic journals including the American Economic Review and Management Science, and has been profiled by the press such as The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Neue Zuercher Zeitung.

Find his book here: https://amzn.to/3ZnMmvD

This week we talk with marine biologist Dr. David Shiffman about the importance of sharks in our ecosystem, threats to global shark populations, popular misconceptions about sharks, and how to become a shark researcher.

About our guest:
Dr. David Shiffman is an interdisciplinary marine conservation biologist who studies sharks and how to protect them. His work has been cited in endangered species act status reviews, and contributed to Florida changing state laws concerning recreational fishing for endangered hammerhead sharks. He works with a variety of scientific groups and environmental nonprofits to better perform, understand, and use science in creating management plans for marine life of conservation concern. In addition to his scholarship, he is a leader in public science engagement, and has bylines with National Geographic, Scientific American, the Washington Post, and a monthly column in SCUBA diving magazine. He is the author of “Why Sharks Matter,” published in 2022 by Johns Hopkins University Press, and he is one of the most-followed scientists in the world on social media. Follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @WhySharksMatter.

It's safe to say I'm not getting invited to Christmas this year. But I had to say it.

This week astrophysicist Dr. Kelsey Johnson and I talk about how we know what we know, the Big Bang, black holes, and turtles all the way down, all of which can be found in her new book Into the Unknown: The Quest to Understand the Mysteries of the Cosmos. This is a mind blowing conversation with a brilliant and wonderful human.

About our guest:
Dr. Kelsey Johnson teaches students both inside and outside of the classroom, using astronomy as a gateway science to nurture curiosity and support science literacy. As a child, Johnson spent countless nights outside under the stars, where she developed a love for "big picture" questions about the nature of reality and the universe. Johnson's curiosity about the cosmos - and everything in it - has been the primary driver of her career, leading her to devote her life to learning, exploration, and teaching.

She is a professor at the University of Virginia and founding director of the award-winning Dark Skies Bright Kids program. She has won numerous awards for her research, teaching, and promotion of science literacy. Her TED talk on the importance of dark skies has more than 2 million views, and her writing has appeared in nationwide publications, including the New York Times, Scientific American, and Washington Post. Her children’s book Constellations for Kids in consistently in the top 10 children’s astronomy books. Johnson is the past-president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and president-elect of the American Astronomical Society.

She earned her BA in physics from Carleton College, and her MS and PhD in astrophysics from the University of Colorado. She lives in rural Virginia with her family, including three cats and two very large dogs.

Her website: https://www.kelseyjohnson.com/
Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/profkelsey.bsky.social
Her book: https://amzn.to/3Z503zh

Historian Dr. Holly Miowak Guise talks about how Alaska Natives dealt with both American imperialism and World War II.


About our guest:
Holly Miowak Guise (Iñupiaq) is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. Her book, Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II focuses on gender, Unangax̂ (Aleut) relocation and internment camps, Native activism/resistance, and Indigenous military service during the war. Her research methods bridge together archives, tribal archives, community-based research, and oral histories with Alaska Native elders and veterans. She is interested in the colonial/Indigenous relationship during war and social history.

She launched a digital humanities website (ww2alaska.com) that features her YouTube channel (World War II Alaska) with oral history content from Native elders, veterans, and Unangax̂ internment survivors. Since 2022, she has served as an editorial board member for the Alaska History Journal. In partnership with the Alaska Humanities Forum, she has served as the historian for the documentary film Indigenous Resistance: Now and Then (2023) directed by 'Waats'asdiyei Joe Yates (Haida).