Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs, authors of "How College Works," join the show to talk about their research into the surprising and not-so-surprising factors that create a successful college experience.

Political science professor Jeanne Theoharis, author of "A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History," joins the show to look at the ways we often misrepresent civil rights history and discusses how those misconceptions affect our present.

MIT philosophy professor Kieran Setiya, author of "Midlife: A Philosophical Guide," shares his wisdom for dealing with the questions that surround a midlife crisis.

School lunch has never been just a midday meal. Andrew Ruis, author of Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States, joins us to talk about the social, political, and economic concerns that gave rise to school lunch in its present form.

Unprecedented inequality and slow growth: those are the symptoms of our current economic situation. But what's the disease? Steven Teles and Brink Lindsey, authors of the book The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality, join the show to discuss how seemingly innocuous government regulations have created unfair advantage for those at the top and what we can do to recapture the economy for all.

Kristin Matthews, an English professor at BYU, joins the show to discuss the frenzied culture of reading during the Cold War and other times of national uncertainty.

Adam Bradley, author of The Poetry of Pop, joins us to discuss the lyrical power of popular music and the mechanics of its appeal.

Can we stop catastrophes--nuclear war, financial meltdowns, climate disasters--before they happen? R.P. Eddy, coauthor of "Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes," thinks we can. We just have to find and listen to our modern-day Cassandras.

Is being invulnerable to suffering something we actually want? Definitely not, says Todd May, a philosophy professor at Clemson University. He joins us to discuss the ideas his book, A Fragile Life: Accepting Our Vulnerability.

Marcus Smith speaks with a historian about Benjamin Lay, an eighteenth-century Quaker dwarf who was one of America's first abolitionists.