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Context with Brad Harris

Dec 12, 2018

Today, I’m speaking with Bryan Ward-Perkins, author of The Fall of Rome, and the End of Civilization

It has become fashionable to argue that Roman civilization never collapsed, but was merely transformed by Germanic culture. Although this counter-narrative can illuminate intellectual developments of Late Antiquity,...


Nov 21, 2018

The Two Cultures by C. P. Snow was one of the most influential lectures of the 20th century, triggering an intense epistemological debate within higher education regarding the status of science that has persisted to this day. The main theme of Snow's lecture was to raise alarm about the growing knowledge gap...


Oct 30, 2018

Merchants of Doubt is not just a book about how illusions of scientific controversy have been constructed, it’s also about the people who constructed them, and its most shocking revelation is that the very same people used the very same strategy to prevent regulation on cigarette smoking, acid rain, the ozone hole,...


Oct 8, 2018

If civilization collapsed, and our descendants could rediscover a single work to get humanity back on track scientifically and technologically, Peter Atkins’ Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science, would be a contender.

If there are miracles, Atkins would argue that they are not found in the surreal...


Sep 17, 2018

In this episode, we're shifting gears and I'll read an article that I published in 2013 in the journal American Scientist called "Evolution's Other Narrative." Here is a link to the article: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/evolutions-other-narrative

Given our conversation last time about the importance of...