Emmanuel Iduma talks about his experiences traveling through Africa and his quest to find a new language of travel. Iduma is a writer and lecturer at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His stories and essays have been published in Best American Travel Writing 2020 and the New York Review of Books. He is the author of A Stranger's Pose, which was a finalist for the Ondaatje Prize in 2019.

Lachlan Fleetwood talks about debates about altitude sickness in the Himalaya and the ways these debates became tied up with ideas about the physiology of Europeans and Himalayans in the 1800s. Fleetwood is the author of "Bodies in High Places: Exploration, Altitude Sickness, and the Problem of Bodily Comparison in the Himalaya, 1800-50," published in the journal Itinerario 43, no. 3 (2019): 489-515.

Alexander Rose talks about the history of airplanes and airships at the turn of the century, a time when the direction of aviation remained unclear. Rose is the author of Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel to Rule the World.

Kate Hollander talks about Bertolt Brecht's life and work. She also talks about the community of artists who were his friends, lovers, and collaborators. Hollander is a historian of modern Europe. She's also the author of a book of poems, My German Dictionary, which was awarded the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize by USA Poet Laureate Charles Wright.

Emma Kowal talks about the history of biospecimen collection among the aboriginal peoples of Australia. Kowal is a cultural and medical anthropologist at Deakin University. She's the co-author, along with Joanna Radin, of "Indigenous Biospecimen Collections and the Cryopolitics of Frozen Life," published in the Journal of Sociology.

Bathsheba Demuth talks about the history and exploration of the Bering Strait, from the early 1800s to the present day. Demuth is Assistant Professor of History & Environment and Society at Brown University. She's the author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait.

Eric Zuelow talks about the origins of tourism from the era of the European Grand Tour through the twenty-first century where is has become – until the current pandemic at least – the largest service sector industry in the world. Zuelow is a professor of European History at the University of New England. He's the author of A History of Modern Tourism.

Rebecca Priestley talks about her journeys to Antarctica and the process of bringing them to life in her writing. Priestley is an associate professor at the Centre for Science in Society at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She is the author of Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica which was recently longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Eric Berger talks about the sudden departure of Doug Loverro, the head of human space flight at NASA, only days before the agency sends astronauts into space after almost a decade. Berger is the Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica.

Paige Madison talks about recent discoveries at the Liang Bua cave where researchers are trying to understand the complicated story of the hominin Homo Floresiensis. Madison is a PhD candidate in the history of science at Arizona State University where she also works with The Center for Biology and Society and the Institute of Human Origins. She writes about paleoanthropology at the blog Fossil History. She recently wrote about her trip for National Geographic and Scientific American.