Time to Eat the Dogs

Time to Eat the Dogs

A podcast about science, history, and exploration. Michael Robinson interviews scientists, journalists, and adventurers about life at the extreme.

Episodes

October 24, 2025 33 mins

17th century traders who traveled the sea routes between India and Southeast Asia were interested in spices, but they were also interested in gemstones, objects of desire, commercial value, and increasingly, scientific fascination. Claire Conklin Sabel talks ...

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Part two of my interview with Julian Togelius, who...

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April 25, 2025 30 mins

In the first of two episodes, Julian Togelius talk...

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April 6, 2025 28 mins

Meredith Small talks about the city of Venice and its importance to the history of travel and exploration. Small is professor emerita at Cornell University. She's the author of Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization

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March 21, 2025 45 mins

Dr. Giada Arney talks about the Habitable Worlds O...

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February 28, 2025 32 mins

In the late 1500s, Dutch navigator William Barrents sailed north in search of a Northeast Passage to Asia. This expedition and a second one both suffered hardships, but they were mild in comparison with the horrors of the third expedition. Andrea Pitzer talks about the Arctic voyages of William Barents and their impact on Europe for centuries to come. Pitzer is a journalist and author of Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the Wor...

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Claire Isabel Webb talks about the Europa Clipper missi...

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February 2, 2025 30 mins

Steven Johnson talks about the British pirate Henry Every and his improbable capture of the Mughal treasure ship, Gunsway. Johnson is the author of twelve books, including Enemy of All Mankind, Farsighted, Where Good Ideas Come From, and The Ghost Map. He's also the host of the PBS series How We Got To Now and the podcast American Innovations.

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Célia Abele talks about Wolfgang von Goethe, the French writer Chateaubriand, and the German physicist Georg Lichtenberg. These writers became fascinated in the Alps and volcanoes such as Vesuvius. Abele is an assistant professor of Fre...

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Ed Armston-Sheret returns to Time to Eat the Dogs to talk about British geographical expeditions and the labor that made them possible, specifically the labor of local peoples that is frequently omitted from explorer accounts. Armston-Sheret is a Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He's the author of Read more

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October 5, 2024 38 mins

David Kaiser talks about the history of twentieth-century physics and the forces that have shaped it as a scientific discipline. Kaiser is a Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is also a Professor of Physics. He's the author of Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World.

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August 29, 2024 32 mins

Dane Kennedy talks about Mungo Park's troubled expeditions in West Africa and the rescue expeditions that set off to find him. Kennedy is an emeritus professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University. He has written e...

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June 25, 2024 29 mins

Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees talk about the voyage of the Vrouw Maria and the long quest to find the ship under the waters of the Archipelago Sea off the coast of Finland. Easter is a professor of history at Boston College. Vorhees is a travel writer for Lonely Planet with an expertise in Russia, New England, and Central America. They are the authors of The Tsarina's Lost Treasure: Catherine the Great, a Golden Age Masterpiece, a...

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May 23, 2024 46 mins

Adam Higginbotham talks about the history of the Space Shuttle program and the decisions that made the Challenger explosion almost inevitable. Higgenbotham is a journalist and contributing writer for the New Yorker, Read more

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Catarina Madruga talks about Portuguese exploration in the nineteenth century as European powers made plans to conquer Africa and colonize its peoples. Madruga is a post-doctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum of Berlin. She's the author of "Expert at a Distance: Barbosa du Bocage and the Production of Scientific Knowledge on Africa,"  Journal for the History of Science and T...

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Historian of science Jeffery Mathias talks about scientific experiments in isolation during the Cold War. Mathias is the author of the Ph.D dissertation, "An Empire of Solitude: Isolation and the Cold War Sciences of the Mind."

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August 20, 2023 28 mins

Alexandre Simon-Ekeland talks about explorers, the Polar Regions, and the French imagination. Simon-Ekeland recently completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Oslo. He is the author of M Read more

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June 29, 2020 33 mins

Erika Fatland talks about her long journey through the Central Asian republics and the legacy of Soviet influence there. Fatland is the author of many books and essays including Sovietistan: A Journey Through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

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June 26, 2020 38 mins

Al Zambone talks with me about American polar exploration, the origin of Time to Eat the Dogs, and the history of science as an academic discipline. Zambone is the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. He's the author of Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life. You can hear an extended version of this interview on the Historically Thinking podcast, available on most podcast platforms as well as online at historicallythinking.org.

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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.

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