Indoor Voices

In part two of our exciting season finale, we continue our conversation with Stephanie and Jennifer, but allow the interview to degenerate into guilty TV pleasures and the addicting nature of social media.

In our exciting, surprise two-part season finale, we interview Professors Stephanie Margolin (Hunter) and Jennifer Poggiali (Lehman) about their workaround academic libraries and bathrooms. While the topic lends itself to fairly easy jokes, it's fascinating and important, speaking to everything from student success to the human experience.

Anna Gotlib is a faculty in the Brooklyn College philosophy department and editor of The Moral Psychology of Sadness (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). The volume celebrates the rich opportunities for intellectual exploration within this complex and overlooked emotion. In this episode, Gotlib shares her reasons for choosing the topic and makes a strong case for allowing space – philosophical as well as social – for sadness, especially in American culture where frank discussions of sadness are generally frowned upon. Sadness can foster self-learning, give one's life fuller meaning and quiet what Buddhists call the chattering monkey mind.

Barbara Gray is writing a biography of 19th century grifter-turned-philanthropist, Sophie Lyons. She talks about the genesis of the project, her research process and gives us a sneak peak of Sophie's fascinating life. She also gives us a glimpse into her work with students in her role as the director of the Research Center at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

I first met Dana Weinberg when I was a graduate student in the Queens College Applied Social Research program. She was, as you'll soon hear for yourself, an incredible teacher. Her work at the time was around the sociology of nursing and we read Code Green: Money-Driven Hospitals and the Dismantling of Nursing, an amazing book which I often give to nursing students. It's beautiful, both in terms of its prose and its ideas.

I was very interested to learn Dana is now working on the sociology of digital publishing. Her article, "Comparing gender discrimination and inequality in indie and traditional publishing" (with her collaborator, Adam Kapelner), examines the impact of gendered names on publishing, finding that books written by male-sounding names sell for higher prices than female – across independent and traditional publishing (sorry Kathleen!).

Dana also studies digital publishing from the inside as novelistDB Shuster. Her latest book, To Catch a Traitor is a is a Cold War spy novel. I was moved by Dana's thoughts on DB Shuster helping her to finder herself.

Also, in the spirit of correcting/clarifying, Dana correctly remembered that Art Worlds is by Howard Becker.

Linda Villarosa is a journalist and director of the journalism program at City College of New York.

Steve and Kathleen shoot the breeze on this guest-free episode.

Richard Lieberman is the head of the La Guardia and Wagner Archives, which just happens to be housed at LaGuardia Community College, my home campus. In this interview, we touch on a lot of great topics, ranging from the importance of faculty-led projects, to Wikipedia, to Ed Koch's mayorship. If these seem like disparate strands, then you've never met Richard, who masterfully ties together the strands of history.

Micki Kaufman, a doctoral student in history at the CUNY Graduate Center, talks about her dissertation, "Everything on Paper Will Be Used Against Me:' Quantifying Kissinger." She uses computational text analysis and visualization techniques to work with material from the Digital National Security Archive's Kissinger collections.