Humanities (Audio)

As chatbots trained on Large Language Models become more sophisticated, their responses can sometimes seem uncanny, as if they come from a source that is mysterious, inexplicable, or even divine. Webb Keane, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, examines what happens when people treat artificial intelligence as a kind of “metahuman.” He explains how this reflects a broader human...

Rome survived for 2,000 years. Edward Watts explores the long history of the Roman state and the lessons it offers for the modern world. From its beginnings as a small Italian city-state to its transformation into a Christian empire centered in Constantinople, Rome maintained a remarkable sense of political continuity across centuries of cultural and religious change. Watts examines how Roman inst...

In an age obsessed with expertise, certainty, and endless self-optimization, author and journalist Simone Stolzoff invites audiences to rediscover the power of curiosity, humility, and not having all the answers. His new book, How to Not Know, challenges the cultural pressure to define ourselves by what we do or what we know—and instead celebrates the richness of uncertainty as a pathway to creati...

What does it mean to rethink religion from the ground up? University of Colorado's religious studies professor Sam Gill draws on biology, philosophy, and decades of research and dance practice to argue that we are moving, whole organisms before we are divided into mind and body. Gill proposes that humans possess a biologically enabled capacity to hold together what we know to be different as if it...

Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben has helped shape how the world understands climate change. In this conversation with Marco Werman, host of The World, McKibben offers a clear-eyed look at the climate crisis and the solutions that could help reduce the damage of a warming planet. As part of the Burke Lectureship at UC San Diego, McKibben also explores the moral and spiritual questions at t...

Privacy-preserving computation can help hospitals and researchers use sensitive health data without exposing it. Farinaz Koushanfar, Ph. D., UC San Diego, explains how secure computation and distributed learning make it possible to collaborate on medical data while protecting patient privacy. Koushanfar examines secure multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proofs, and federated and split learnin...

Carol Gilligan, professor at New York University, received the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, specifically in the field of Thought and Ethics, for pioneering a new horizon for the “ethic of care” while pointing out the distortions and limitations of conventional psychological theories pertaining to women’s thoughts and behaviors. By offering research-based insights into women’s moral reasonin...

Bias in health AI can shape who gets care, how fairly risk is measured, and whether automation helps or harms patients. Karandeep Singh, M.D., M.M.S.C. explains that predictive AI can reflect historical, representation, measurement, learning, evaluation, and deployment bias, especially when models are trained on limited populations or use flawed proxies for illness and access to care. Singh also d...

New York Times bestselling author George Saunders is an American writer who won the Booker Prize for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders is known for his sharp wit, moral insight, and inventive storytelling. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and a creative writing professor at Syracuse University, Saunders is admired for exploring kindness, consumerism, and the human condition with hum...

Embodiment affects how we understand personhood, moral status, and whether this life is our only life. Mark Johnston, Henry Putnam University Professor, Princeton University, explains how competing theories of mind and matter shape the question of whether a will could have an embodiment other than its present one. Johnston examines the failures of functionalism, reductive and non-reductive materia...

AI in healthcare raises urgent questions about bias, privacy, and power. Safiya U. Noble, Ph. D., examines how AI systems can reproduce social and racial inequities when they rely on incomplete data, hidden assumptions, and proxies such as healthcare spending. Noble points to problems in search engines, image generation, facial recognition, and medical algorithms, including cases where systems mis...

Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American writer known for her vivid, poetic prose and exploration of themes like colonialism, family, identity, and the legacy of the Caribbean. Her deeply personal and reflective style has made her one of the most influential voices in contemporary literature. Born Elaine Potter Richardson on May 25, 1949, in St. John’s, Antigua, she moved to the United States as a...

Widely regarded as one of the most respected figures in American broadcast journalism, Judy Woodruff is known for her decades-long career covering politics and current events. She is also the author of the book, This Is Judy Woodruff at the White House. Renowned for her calm, balanced reporting and commitment to journalistic integrity, Woodruff has covered every U.S. presidential election since 19...

A common model of AI suggests that there is a single measure of intelligence, often called AGI, and that AI systems are agents who can possess more or less of this intelligence. Cognitive science, in contrast, suggests that there are multiple forms of intelligence and that these intelligences trade-off against each other and have a distinctive developmental profile and evolutionary history. Exploi...

How are Indigenous communities in the U.S. facing challenges to their ways of life in the current political moment? Focusing on questions concerning repatriation, land access, education, and diverse forms of sovereignty, our panelists explore the intersection of Indigenous religious traditions and law. The discussion begins at the regional level, with specific reference to Chumash contexts, and th...

Poetry becomes more approachable when it reflects everyday language, humor, and lived experience. San Diego Poet Laureate Paola Capó-García explores how graduate study, mentorship, and workshops shape her writing and sense of voice. Capó-García describes building poems through experimentation, including physically cutting and rearranging pages, and links her work to family stories and identity. As...

Rudeness is not just annoying. John O’Brien, psychologist and author of "Rudeness Rehab," links everyday rudeness to stress and even broader health outcomes, including differences in life expectancy. Series: "Osher UC San Diego Distinguished Lecture Series" [Health and Medicine] [Humanities] [Show ID: 41296]

Espiritismo traces its roots to the sacred knowledge of West and Central African peoples carried into the Americas by enslaved ancestors between the 15th and 19th centuries. Marta Moreno Vega, Ph. D., scholar and co-founder of Corredor Afro, explores how these traditions—sustained in Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Puerto Rico, other Caribbean islands, and U.S. urban centers—function as systems of memory, su...

Peter Godfrey-Smith, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, explores the evolutionary roots of consciousness by surveying animal evolution and the emergence of felt experience in several lineages. He examines two central philosophical questions: how such experience might arise gradually, existing in partial forms, and whether it represents a single unified feat...

If you feel like there's more rudeness in the world, you're not alone. According to John O'Brien, psychologist and author of "Rudeness Rehab," there's a pandemic of incivility. O'Brien says we're seeing bad behavior everywhere, from the streets to the workplace to even the operating room. As part of our Osher Author Talk series, host Henry DeVries talks with O'Brien about the physical and mental t...

Writer R.F. Kuang has quickly become one of today’s most daring and original voices in fiction, blending sharp social critique with rich storytelling. Her most recent novel, Katabasis, takes readers on a darkly witty descent into the underworld, where academia, ambition, and myth collide. Known for tackling power, politics, and the human cost of ambition, Kuang first captivated audiences with The...

Peter Bolland, professor of philosophy and humanities at Southwestern College, explores the lasting influence of Augustine of Hippo. Born in North Africa in 354, Augustine—now known as Saint Augustine—is remembered as one of Christianity’s most important thinkers. He shaped core beliefs like the doctrine of original sin and wrote The City of God, a work meant to comfort Christians after Rome fell...

Artist and filmmaker Tom Kalin joins moderator Bhaskar Sarkar (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a discussion of his 1992 film Swoon. Kalin discusses the historical background of the film (the famous 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case), how he reimagined the case through the lens of queer desire, and how he conducted archival research into the central figures of the murder. Kalin also discusses how...

Film producer Liz Yale Marsh and mustang wrangler West Taylor join moderator and co-producer Wendy Eley Jackson to discuss their work on the documentary Facing the Falls, which follows disability rights advocate Cara Elizabeth Yar Khan and her twelve-day expedition through the Grand Canyon. They explore how Yar Khan’s muscle disease provided a unique challenge to navigating the Grand Canyon, as we...

Filmmakers Natasha Merkulova and Alexey Chupov join moderator Sasha Razor (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) to discuss their film Captain Volkonogov Escaped. Merkulova and Chupov share how they work as a film making team, how they researched the period of Stalinist purges in the 1930s, and how they sought to make the period of the film feel contemporary. They go on to discuss their experience working...