“Almost every storyline we’re familiar with suggests that we should banish [darkness] as quickly as possible—because darkness is often presented as a void of doom rather than a force of nature that nourishes lives, including our own.”

According to Dark Sky International, 99% of people in the US live under the influence of skyglow. With each artificial light we install, we grow more unfamiliar with darkness and its riches. But what if darkness, instead of being a source of danger and discomfort, could be the very place where life flourishes in unexpected ways?

In Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark (Algonquin Books, 2024), Leigh Ann Henion invites us to discover the amazing creatures and species that exist within darkness, from fireflies and moths to salamanders and glowworms.

Henion bravely explores the biodiversity of her home region of Appalachia, taking us to a synchronous firefly event in Tennessee, a bat outing in Alabama, and a moth festival in Ohio. In North Carolina, she finds forests alight with bioluminescent mushrooms, neighborhood trees full of screech owls, and valleys teeming with migratory salamanders. Along the way, Henion encounters naturalists, biologists, primitive-skills experts, and others who’ve dedicated their lives to cultivating relationships with darkness.

In an age of increasing artificial light, Night Magic focuses on the profound beauty that still surrounds us after sunset.

Leigh Ann Henion (author) is the New York Times bestselling author of Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark and Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World. Her work has appeared in Smithsonian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Southern Living, Garden & Gun, and a variety of other publications. She is a former Alicia Patterson Fellow, and her work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Henion lives in Boone, North Carolina.

Renee Hale (host) holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and works in R&D for the food and beverage industry. She is the author of The Nightstorm Files, a voracious reader, and enjoys sharing new discoveries with listeners and readers alike.

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In this episode, I talk to Eliot Schrefer about his book Queer Ducks (and Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality (Katherine Tegen Books, 2022).

A quiet revolution has been underway in recent years, with study after study revealing substantial same-sex sexual behavior in animals. Join celebrated author Eliot Schrefer on an exploration of queer behavior in the animal world—from albatrosses to bonobos to clownfish to doodlebugs.

In sharp and witty prose—aided by humorous comics from artist Jules Zuckerberg—Schrefer uses science, history, anthropology, and sociology to illustrate the diversity of sexual behavior in the animal world. Interviews with researchers in the field offer additional insights for readers and aspiring scientists.

Queer behavior in animals is as diverse and complex—and as natural—as it is in our own species. It doesn’t set us apart from animals—it bonds us even closer to our animal selves.

Eliot Schrefer is a New York Times-bestselling author, has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, received the Stonewall Honor for best LGBTQIA+ teen book, and received the Printz Honor for best young adult book from the ALA. His science writing has appeared in Discover, Sierra, USA Today, Nautilus, and The Washington Post Magazine. He has an M.A. in Animal Studies from NYU, is on the faculty of the Hamline MFA for writing for young people, and lives with his husband in New York City.

Kyle Johannsen is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

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Revolutions in technology are fundamentally transforming what it means to be human. Or are they? As Webb Keane points out, before humans consulted ChatGPT, they propitiated oracles. Before they fell in love with robot boyfriends, they ventured into the forest to marry nature spirits. 

In his new book Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination (Princeton UP, 2025) Keane combines anthropology and philosophy to show us what is new and what is not in our current technological moment. Using a broad comparative perspective he shows us how shamans, hunters, priests, and doctors have long responded to the existential questions which drive our current technological obsessions: Where is the line between human and non-human? How do humans find meaning in our interactions with non-humans? By widening our intellectual imagination, Keane shows us how many of our current intellectual dilemmas about technology are not new -- and are far more deep than enduring than we might have previously suspected.

Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

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How to dwell in a forest alongside giants, avoid disturbing a living god, assist an animal with their manners, and help an elephant cross the road. The Presence of Elephants: Sharing Lives and Landscapes in Assam (Routledge, 2024) is an anthropological consideration of coexistence, grounded in people’s everyday interactions with Asian elephants. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Assam, Northeast India, this book examines human-elephant copresence and how minds, tasks, identities, and places are shared between the two species. Sharing lives and landscapes with such formidable beings is a continuously shifting and negotiated exchange inherently composed of tensions, asymmetries, and uncertainties – especially in the Anthropocene when breakdowns in communication increasingly have a violent effect. Developing a multifaceted picture of human-elephant relations in a postcolonial setting, each chapter focuses on a different dimension of encounter, where elephants adapt to human norms, people are subject to elephant projects, and novel interspecies possibilities emerge at the threshold of nature and society. Vulnerability is a common experience intensified in contemporary human-elephant relations, felt through the elephant’s power to disrupt and transform human lives, as well as the risks these endangered animals are exposed to. This book will be of interest to scholars of multispecies ethnography and human-animal relations, environmental humanities, conservation, and South Asian studies.

Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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From deer and beavers to “free range” pigs and goats in and around Seneca Village, what we now know as Central Park has long been home to an abundance of animals. In 1858, the city adopted the Greensward Plan and began the long process of reshaping the 843 acres of land into a park where everything—from the trees to the trails to the inhabitants—would be meticulously planned to benefit New Yorkers and to promote the city as a global metropolis among the likes of London and Paris. But this vision of Central Park embodied white elite European values, and disagreements about which creatures belonged in the park’s waters and green spaces have often perpetuated systems of oppression.

Illuminating the multispecies story of Central Park from the 1850s to the 1970s in Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History (University of Washington Press, 2024), Dr. Dawn Day Biehler examines the vibrant and intimately connected lives of humans and nonhuman animals in the park. She reveals stories of grazing sheep, teeming fish, nesting swans, migrating warblers, and escaped bison as well as human New Yorkers’ attempts to reconfigure their relationships to the land and claim spaces for recreation and leisure. Ultimately, Dr. Biehler shows how Central Park has always been a place where animals and humans alike have vied for power and belonging.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Animals in World History (Routledge, 2024) by Dr. Helen Cowie provides a concise synthesis of human-animal relations over time, charting shifting attitudes towards animals from domestication to the present day. It asks how non-human species have shaped human history, and how humans have reconfigured the animal world.

Humans have had a long and close relationship with animals. They have hunted them, consumed them as food and fashion, exploited them as energy sources, utilised them in warfare, exhibited them in zoos and menageries, and studied them for science. In the process, they have radically changed the way in which many animals live, subjecting them to captivity, altering their diets, constraining their movements and, through selective breeding, reshaping their bodies. The book explores the use of animals for sustenance, labour, companionship and display, and traces the rise of the animal rights movement. It also assesses how humans have impacted the overall biodiversity of the planet, driving some species of animals to extinction and permitting others to colonise new continents.

With case studies on animal astronauts, celebrity kakapos, globetrotting pandas and cocaine hippos, Animals in World History offers a lively and accessible introduction to human-animal relations for students and instructors of animal studies, environmental history, and social and cultural history.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Dogs are our constant companions: models of loyalty and unconditional love for millions around the world. But these beloved animals are much more than just our pets - and our shared history is far richer and more complex than you might assume. 

In Collared: How We Made the Modern Dog (Profile Books, 2024), historian and dog lover Chris Pearson reveals how the shifting fortunes of dogs hold a mirror to our changing society, from the evolution of breeding standards to the fight for animal rights. Wherever humans have gone, dogs have followed, changing size, appearance and even jobs along the way - from the forests of medieval Europe, where greyhounds chased down game for royalty, to the frontlines of twentieth-century conflicts, where dogs carried messages and hauled gun carriages. Despite vast social change, however, the power of the human-canine bond has never diminished. By turns charming, thought-provoking and surprising, Collared reveals the fascinating tale of how we made the modern dog.

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Across Iron Age Central Eurasia, non-sedentary people created, viewed, and considered animal-style imagery, creating designs replete with feline bodies with horse hooves, deer-birds, animals in combat, and other fantastic creatures. Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) focuses on this animal-style imagery, examining the dissemination of this image system. 

Filled with fascinating images carefully chosen from an enormous geographical scope, Petya Andreeva's vivid book explores how communities used animal-style design to create and define status, to bond alliances together, and to showcase steppe know-how and worldliness in sedentary communities. Fantastic Fauna should appeal to those in Eurasian history, East Asian history, art and archeology, and those interested in thinking about steppe art. 

Interested listeners should also check out Petya's chapter on the Golden Hoard (available here), part of an Open-Access UNESCO volume on the Silk Roads.   

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When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (U California Press, 2023) investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other life-forms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation and species classification by late ancient Palestinian rabbis and other thinkers in the Roman Empire, Rafael Rachel Neis shows how rabbis blurred the lines between humans and other beings, even as they were intent on classifying creatures and tracing the contours of what it means to be human. Recognizing that life proliferates by mechanisms beyond sexual copulation between two heterosexual “male” and “female” individuals of the same species, the rabbis proposed intricate alternatives. In parsing a variety of creatures, they considered overlaps and resemblances across seemingly distinct species, upsetting in turn unmitigated claims of human distinctiveness. When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven enters conversations in animal studies, queer theory, trans theory, and feminist science studies to provincialize sacrosanct ideals of reproduction in favor of a broader range that spans generation, kinship, and species. The book thereby offers powerful historical alternatives to the paradigms associated with so-called traditional ideas.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Rafael Rachel Neis is Neis is a scholar, writer, educator, and artist. A Professor of History and Judaic Studies, they are Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History and hold the Jean and Samuel Frankel Chair in Rabbinics.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston.

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Do dogs belong with humans? Scientific accounts of dogs' 'species story,' in which contemporary dog-human relations are naturalised with reference to dogs' evolutionary becoming, suggest that they do. Dog Politics: Species Stories and the Animal Sciences (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Mariam Motamedi Fraser dissects this story.

This book offers a rich empirical analysis and critique of the development and consolidation of dogs' species story in science, asking what evidence exists to support it, and what practical consequences, for dogs, follow from it. It explores how this story is woven into broader scientific shifts in understandings of species, animals, and animal behaviours, and how such shifts were informed by and informed transformative political events, including slavery and colonialism, the Second World War and its aftermath, and the emergence of anti-racist movements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book pays particular attention to how species-thinking bears on 'race,' racism, and individuals.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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