Peculiar Book Club Podcast

Tracing uranium’s past, and how it intersects with our understanding of other radioactive elements, this book aims to disentangle our attitudes and to unpick the atomic mindset. Chain Reactions looks at the fascinating, often-forgotten, stories that can be found throughout the history of the element. Ranging from glassworks to penny stocks; medicines to weapons; something to be feared to a powerful source of energy. This global his...

You asked and we delivered! Pulitzer-prize winning science journalist Deborah Blum—author of The Poisoner’s Handbook—returns to PBC! This time, she comes to us as HOST! Two additional authors will be joining us, picked by Deborah herself: Amit Katwala as author of TREMORS IN THE BLOOD and Patti McCracken for ANGEL MAKERS. Where did lie detectors come from? Are they really accurate? The history isn’t just fascinating, it’s evocative...

Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book A Gentleman and a Thief, we are discussing our own gentleman conman with The Music Man.

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as we take a deep dive into this classic Hollywood (and Broadway) musical to discuss our favorite songs, finding our someone, and seeing the go...

Suave and movie-star handsome, Arthur Barry charmed New York celebrities as he planned and executed some of the most brazen and lucrative heists of the 1920s. Think Cary Grant’s character was clever and slick in the Hitchcock classic To Catch a Thief ? This gentleman thief was smarter, smoother. It sounds like fiction. But it isn’t. Barry was real-life con artist who donned a tuxedo to crash the parties of the rich and famous as he...

Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book Whalefall, we are discussing the greatest tale of Whales ever told, the classic Moby Dick.

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as we take a deep dive into this classic tale of temptation, obsession, was Gregory Peck right for the role of Ahab (he didn't think so)...

Just imagine for a moment—you are swimming in the cold dark of the Pacific Ocean, trying to find the lost remains of your father. But you aren’t alone. There are shapes moving in the gloom, great, dark shapes. Shapes with mouths. That’s what happens to Jay Gardiner in the latest novel by award winning author (and collaborator with Guillermo del Toro) Daniel Kraus. Caught first by a giant squid, then swallowed whole by a Sperm whale...

How much do looks really matter? In society, whether we like it or not, how we look affects how we are treated—and even what opportunities we might have in life. A one-time New York prison commissioner, Henry Solomon, once stated that “physical defects…might conduce to crime” because a man with a poor physical appearance would have an easier time stealing a dollar than getting hired to earn one. That outlook wasn’t new then, and it...

What happens when racism is not a bug in the system—but in fact IS the system? And the Health System, at that. Imagine being a high-achieving person of color, courted by prestigious medical institutions, but then denied the support you needed when you got there? Fighting through burnout and the grueling pace of residency, only to wind up a cog in a bureaucracy that sees patients as broken bits on an assembly line. “With] ninety-nin...

Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book The Computer's Voice, we are discussing maybe the most iconic computer voice in cinema history with Hal 9000 and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as we take a deep dive into this legendary Kubrick film and discuss man's evolution fro...

“Siri, what does it mean to have gender?” We have become very used to the dis-embodied voices that surround us, from the voice answering to ‘Siri’ to the one giving us directions on our GPS apps. But have you ever stopped to wonder why some of these voices are coded “male” and others “female?” The tech isn’t gendered, but the voices are—and it’s true in fiction as well as fact. Consider “Vicki” from I, Robot, or HAL from Space Odys...

Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book We Are Not Alone, we are discussing the legendary alien encounter movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as we take a deep dive into this classic Spielberg movie as we discuss parallels between alien encounters and mental health,...

A.J. Jacobs learned the hard way that donning a tricorne hat and marching around Manhattan with a 1700s musket will earn you a lot of strange looks. In the wake of several controversial rulings by the Supreme Court and the on-going debate about how the Constitution should be interpreted, Jacobs set out to understand what it means to live by the Constitution.

In The Year of Living Constitutionally, A.J. Jacobs tries to get ins...

Ever look up at the night sky and wonder what else is really out there? Or, like me, do you watch shows like Resident Alien with Alan Tudyk and realize you might actually be the extra-terrestrial (I mean, it would SO much sense). Seriously, though, do we just laugh off the X-files and move on? Note: we did have X-files producer Frank Spotnitz on our first season). Are UFOs hogwash? We have all been prepared to say so, at one time o...

Grave yard. Cemetery. These are some of my favorite things! But walking through graveyards isn’t just about getting your goth on. Cemeteries tell our human history—and they tell national history, too. Take central park for instance. In 1857, it was Seneca Village, a “rare haven of Black ownership” stretching from West 82nd to 89th Streets. NY took it over, seizing it for a park. And that means part of the park is also a burial grou...

Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book What's Gotten Into You, we are discussing the 80's science fiction comedy Innerspace.

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as we take a deep dive into this silly yet action packed movie as we discuss believing in yourself, how wacky Martin Short can get, why p...

In this bonus episode of the Peculiar Book Club we got a chance to sit down with author Wendy Moore for a preview conversation of her new book Jack and Eve.

Jack and Eve: Two Women in Love and at War, is published by Atlantic Books in the UK. It tells the story of Vera 'Jack' Holme and Evelina Haverfield, pioneering suffragettes who became lovers. Jack was an actress who specialised in cross-dressing roles. She became...

You know those amazing science document-aries you love so much? National Geo-graphic, Discover, Science, and History Channels? Yeah, you need to thank Dan Levitt—responsible for producing such shows as Unsolved History (2002), Great Transitions: The Origin of Birds (2015) and Naked Science (2004). That one sounds right up our street. Well, now Dan has decided to give us a new kind of scientific candy crunch: WHATS GOT INTO YOU, a b...

Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book Unscientific America, we are discussing the recent dark comedy Don't Look Up.

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as we take a deep dive into this funny yet terrifying look at a possible natural disaster, how science fails to communicate with politicians, the med...

The earth is not flat. Vaccines work and they don’t make you magnetic. Global warming is real. Covid is airborne. But you will hear a great deal to the contrary, too, from vaccine and climate deniers, flat-earthers, and plenty of conspiracy theorists willing to die on the hill of their chosen belief. Why? What happened? I thought it might be interesting to do a little time travel. What if we looked a book arguing for science and th...