Amusing Ourselves to the Death

1. 3 Episodes On: Summer Fun

2. The Happiest Place on Earth

3. Channel Spotlight: Artificial Intelligence

Listen to Gary Cross discuss his book, Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal, where he explores our conceptions of free time and its use. In his book, he highlights the industrial-era origins of our modern obsession with productivity and historical efforts to liberate time for pleasure and play.

Check out our interview about Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade. In this fascinating book, Gary S. Cross tells the story of the first arcades, the people who made the machines, the rise of video games, and the legislative and economic challenges spurred by public fears of moral decline.

Tune in to Sandra Fox’s conversation about The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America. She discusses the origins of summer camps for Jewish children and their enduring impact on American Jewish life.

Are you heading to a Disney theme park this summer? Or, do you have childhood memories of trekking through one of their 12 parks in the hot sun with pineapple Dole Whip and a pair of Mickey ears? Tune in to the interviews below to learn about Disneyland’s Anaheim origins, automation in the parks, and Walt Disney's last, unfinished project of building a theme park in the mountains.

In Disneyland Politics: How a Medium-Size City and Corporate Giant Coexist, Peter F. Burns, Matthew O. Thomas, and Max R. Bieganski examine the central question when Disney opened in Anaheim: How would the city balance the interests of private investors against those of the citizenry when the two came into conflict?

Did you know that Walt Disney wanted to build a Disneyland mountain resort in Southern California? Learn more about this project and the conflicts with the growing environmentalist movement of the 1960s in this conversation with Greg Glasgow and Kathryn May about Disneyland on the Mountain: Walt, the Environmentalists, and the Ski Resort That Never Was.

Listen to Roland Betancourt discuss his book Disneyland and the Rise of Automation: How Technology Created the Happiest Place on Earth. He tells the story of how the visionary engineers and designers at Disney transformed the technologies of the postwar assembly line into a novel entertainment experience.

Have you checked out our new channel: New Books in Artificial Intelligence? You’ll find great interviews with scholars who explore a range of topics including the origins of AI, ethical dilemmas that arise from this technology, and its impact on everyday life.

Listen to our interview about Powered by Smart: A Prehistory of Everyday AI, where Sarah Murray traces the techno-cultural evolutions that made artificial intelligence feel more familiar than futuristic. She reveals how machine intelligence has already been made ordinary and how the smart ideal was built over time through domesticity, discipline, and desirability.

Tune in to our interview with Pedro Domingos about The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World. He lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning machines that power Google, Amazon, and your smartphone.

In The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines, Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland explore questions fundamental to how both people and machines think. When we try to solve problems, what happens in our minds? We find ourselves weighing arguments— or relying on intuition— then reaching a conscious decision about what to do. What is actually going on behind the scenes?

Check out our interview on AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Rivlin. He brings us into the world of AI development in Silicon Valley to help us understand the latest phase of world-changing discoveries and the minds behind them.

Listen to Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna challenge many common assumptions about AI’s inevitability and neutrality. They discuss how narratives around artificial intelligence often obscure the limitations, risks, and social costs of these systems. In The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, they highlight radical ways individuals, communities, and institutions can resist misleading claims.