Gordon talks with Sander Gilman, a Professor of Psychiatry, at Emory University and the author of Are Racists Crazy? 

For years humanities scholars have avoided talking about genes.  But now, in the midst of a social genomics revolution, Professors Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher say it’s time for social scientists to join the conversation.

At Crosstown Clinic, doctors are turning addiction treatment on its head: they’re prescribing heroin-users the very drug they’re addicted to. This is the story of one clinic’s quest to remove the harms of addiction, without removing the addiction itself.

This week we talk to two community organizers who work from within academia. Gordon talks to Matt Hern about his book What a City Is For and Alex talks to Funmilola Fagbamila about Black Lives Matter and being an Activist-in-Residence at UCLA.

In 1927, the Supreme Court of the United States decided certain “undesirables” could be sterilized against their will. And American academics were all for it.

Gordon interviews journalist Adam Cohen about his book Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, which was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Another chapter in the continuing battle between wonks and Christian conservatives, this time in Canada. In 2010, a small but influential group of Catholics forced Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty into scrapping his government’s proposal for updating the sexual education curriculum. In 2015, Premier Kathleen Wynne decided to try again.

This week, Sam and Alex talk Trump, Harper and science muzzling. Sam asks theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss about the difference between a good and a bad public intellectual. Alex talks to science journalist Carl Zimmer about tough choices in science storytelling.

What are numbers? Did we make them, or were we given them? How do they affect us? Are there people who do not have numbers? Gordon interviews Anthropologist Caleb Everett, author of a forthcoming book that gives a sweeping study of numbers and how they radically shape the way we understand our world. 

Cited is a podcast and radio show produced out of the world class Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. It is written, edited, produced and hosted by Sam Fenn, Gordon Katic, Alexander Kim and Josh Gabert-Doyon. If you like the show, please subscribe, rate and review the show on iTunes; follow us on Twitter; like us on Facebook; and send us an email to let us know what you think at [email protected].

The Democrats used to count on the white working class. Now they have to fight to win them back.

Sam interviews Arlie Russel Hochschild about conservatives on the Louisiana Bayou and Alex talks to Katherine J. Cramer about the rural-urban divide in Wisconsin.

It’s the first episode of 2017. Happy new year! Alex interviews Duke University law professor Jedediah Purdy about the political history of nature and its uncertain future.

Anywhere you look on the planet, you will find evidence of human behaviour: metalloids in the soil, greenhouse gases in the air, a vortex of trash in the oceans. That is why some scientists have proposed that we are now living in a new geologic epoch. It’s called the Anthropocene: the age of humans. Now that we are a literal force of nature, what world will we make? Jedediah Purdy wrestles with that question in his book, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Harvard University Press).

Jedediah Purdy in Grayson Highlands State Park, Virginia.