Science Friday – in honor of 2025 being the one hundredth anniversary of The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, more popularly known as the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” host Ira Flatow interviews Brenda Wineapple about the history of the trial and her book Keeping the Faith; God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation (Penguin Random House) that examines it and its legacy.

Gone Medieval – host Matt Lewis interviews Nick Jubber about his book Monsterland; A Journey Around the World’s Dark Imagination (Scribe). Lest you wonder what a book about the folklore of monsters is doing in a natural history book review, keep in mind that in the early editions of his Systema Naturae, Linnaeus included such creatures as dragons, hydras, the monoceros, the phoenix, and many others in a section titled “Animalia Paradoxa.” Here in The Well-read Naturalist, a guiding editorial policy is that the history of natural history includes studies of what serious minded people thought were present in the natural world as well as what were able to be shown to be present.

London Review of Books – in an episode titled “Rat Universe,” Thomas Jones interviews Dr. Jon Day, author of Homing (John Murray Press), about Dr. Lee Dugatkin’s book Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery; The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanity (University of Chicago Press) and Rat City; Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun (Penguin Random House) by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden. After listening to this episode, you may, like me, also find yourself wishing to undertake another reading of Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Simon & Schuster).

The HPS Podcast – in the newly released second episode of season five, Thomas Spiteri interviews Dr. Surekha Davies about her new book Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press). I’m sensing that monsters are becoming a growing trend in research as of late.

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