In this Humanities Forum talk, Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist Antonia Hylton will read from and discuss her recent book, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. Madness chronicles the 93-year history of Crownsville State Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system.

In this Humanities Forum talk, award-winning author Tommy Orange will converse with community-based visual artist and folklorist Ashley Minner Jones (Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina) about his recent novel, Wandering Stars. A follow-up to his bestselling debut, There There, Wandering Stars traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family.

In this Humanities Forum talk, Nicole R. Fleetwood emerges from her current book project, Between the River and the Railroad Tracks, part memoir and part cultural history of growing up in Hamilton, Ohio. Her exploration of her hometown is a lens to meditate on the cultural life and labor of the Black Midwest through its music, art, and community practices.

Podcasts are the latest in a long list of media formats hailed as "empathy machines," technologies that will, by dint of their reach and affective force, compel us to care about one another. Radio, films, novels, and telegrams have all been previously designated as such. In the United States, public radio has, over the last 60 years, staked out a special claim for its capacity for empathy. This talk will explore the migration of the public radio structure of feeling as it migrated into narrative podcasting over the last two decades.

The Oxford philosopher Toby Ord estimates that there is a one in six chance that humanity will experience an “existential catastrophe” within the next hundred years. By an existential catastrophe he means either the extinction of humanity or some other event, like the irreversible collapse of civilization, that destroys what he calls humanity’s “long-term potential.” If it is true that humanity faces a serious risk of existential catastrophe within the next hundred years, how should we respond? In this talk, Samuel Scheffler will address this question and offer a compelling response to the prospect of existential catastrophe.