It has been quite a physically and emotionally challenging month. Please forgive my not keeping up with at least a fortnightly update of recent interesting podcast episodes that take up books on natural history subjects as their respective topics. That said, here is a list of particularly noteworthy episodes I’ve made note of thus far in October.
As the Season Turns: host Lia Leendertz introduces the month of October with apples, conkers, nightshade, folk music, and reminders of events both terrestrial and astronomical that are to be expected during the month.
Absolute Units: hosts Joe Vaughan and Ollie Douglas continue their previous conversation with Prof. Katrina Navickas about “the history of the commons: the shared resources that communities depended upon for their livelihoods.” Prof. Navickas’ new book
Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England will be published by Reaktion Books in November 2025 and distributed by University of Chicago Press in January 202
After Dark: Dr. Kathleen Walker-Meikle is interviewed by hosts Dr. Maddy Pelling and Dr. Anthony Delaney in the evocatively titled episode A Day in the Life of a Black Death Rat. Dr. Walker-Meikle is the author of a number of books taking the history of domestic and other human-associated animals in the Middle Ages as their subjects, including Dogs in Medieval Manuscripts, Cats in Medieval Manuscripts, and Medieval Pets.
The HPS Podcast: in the new episode Steven Shapin on the Social Life of Scientific Knowledge, Dr. Shapin expounds upon a number of topics, including revisiting his co-authored modern classic Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life.
The Plodcast: in the recent episode titled Secrets of the darkness on a night walk with Andy Flack, Dr. Flack takes a night-time ramble with Annabel Ross and discusses a number of nocturnal topics as well as his forthcoming book Dark Natures: Finding Life in the Shadows.
The London Review of Books Podcast: in Extinction, Fast and Slow, Lorraine Daston and Thomas Jones, discuss Ms. Daston’s recent review of Vanished; An Unnatural History of Extinction by Prof. Sadiah Qureshi.
Mongabay Podcast: in New book unearths environmental crime’s psychological roots, host Mike DiGirolamo interviews psychologist and true crime presenter Dr. Julia Shaw about her forthcoming book Green Crime; Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet, and How to Stop Them.
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