Delving In with Stuart Kelter

Joseph Laycock is an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University, with a focus on the sociology of religion, among other topics, He has written several books on new religious movements and on American religious history, including the recently published second edition of New Religious Movements: The Basics . He is also a co-editor for the journal Nova Religio . He currently s...

Awais Aftab . is a psychiatrist in Cleveland, OH and a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University. He is a member of the executive council of Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry and has been actively involved in initiatives to educate psychiatrists and trainees on the intersection of philosophy and psychiatry. His is the author of Conversations in Critical...

Maiwand Banayee grew up in the 1980s and 90s in war-torn Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets and the civil war that followed. He left for the UK at 22 years old in the opening years of the U.S. war on the Taliban. His recently published memoir, Delusions of Paradise: Escaping the Life of a Taliban Fighter recalls these harrowing years, as well as the next couple of decades after his emi...

Samantha Barbas is a legal and cultural historian and the author of several books on media history and legal history topics, with a focus on journalism, privacy, defamation, and the First Amendment. A Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. Samantha was previously on Delving In three years ago to disc...

Jenny Radesky is a developmental behavioral pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, where she directs the Division of Developmental Pediatrics and runs a research laboratory focused on family media use, digital design, and tech policy. She is also co-medical director of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence on...

Mia Bennett is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, who focuses on the geopolitics of the arctic, the current dramatic transformation the region is undergoing due to climate change, and the interests and power dynamics of both state actors and indigenous groups in or near the region. She is the author of the blog, Cryopolitics and co-author, with Klaus Dobbs,...

Joseph Margulies is an attorney who has worked with death row convicts and prisoners at Guantanamo. His new book, Cast Out: A Call for a Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration , presents poignant case studies of people who were convicted of heinous and brutal crimes. Each endured an extraordinarily difficult childhood, some in a gang-infested neighborhood, most with a dehumanizing level of p...

Lee Kuhnle and Nathan Radke are professors at Humber Polytechnic College in Toronto and authors of the recently published, Uncover Up: How to Think Clearly in an Age of Conspiracies. They are also co-hosts of the Uncover Up podcast, a show dedicated to evidence-based and entertaining analysis of conspiracies and related issues. Recorded 7/27/26.

Ian Bogost is an administrator at Washington University in St. Louis and a professor in multiple disciplines: computer science, engineering, film and media studies, and art and design. He is also an award-winning digital game designer, an internationally-exhibited artist, a contributing editor and frequent writer for The Atlantic since 2013, and the author of eleven books, including Play Anything:...

Jamison Firestone is an American-born attorney, now living in London. In 1991, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, he moved to Russia to establish its first independent foreign law firm, specializing in corporate law, in a newly forming, highly dynamic, extraordinarily lucrative financial environment. He lived in Russia for 18 years, six of them as a member of the Board of Directors of the...

Gaurav Suri is a computational neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at San Francisco State University, where he is the director of the Readiness, Activation, and Decision-Making Laboratory. He is also a visiting professor at Stanford’s Center for Affective Science. He is the coauthor of A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel, which was published in 2007 and won the American Publishers A...

Jacqueline Saper is an award-winning writer, public speaker, commentator, and translator, with columns and essays in national and international publications and interviews in mainstream media in both English and Farsi. We’ll be talking about her memoir, published in 2019, From Miniskirt to Hijab: A Girl in Revolutionary Iran, which chronicles her life from childhood to early adulthood in Iran, whi...

Benjamin Robert Siegel is a history professor at Boston University and former writer for Time Magazine. His writing has appeared in both mainstream media and academic journals, focusing on economic issues that affect everyday life, including food production and drug supplies. His first book, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India, published in 2018, explores the struggle of ne...

Jane Draycott is a lecturer (professor) of Ancient History at the University of Glasgow and co-director of the University of Glasgow’s Games and Gaming Lab, focusing on Roman history and archaeology. In addition to interviews and writing book chapters and articles for academic and mainstream media, she is the author of several books, three on ancient medical practices in Ancient Rome, and two on p...

Manil Suri is a distinguished university professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and is also the author of three internationally acclaimed novels set in his native India: The Death of Vishnu , The Age of Shiva, and The City of Devi, which have been translated into twenty-seven languages and have won multiple literary awards. As a contributing opinion writer at the...

Robert Karen is a clinical psychologist in private practice in New York City and author of numerous articles both in academic journals and mainstream media. His first book, Becoming Attached: Unfolding the Mystery of the Infant-Mother Bond and Its Impact on Later Life , published in 1994, provided a thorough and highly readable history of the ideas and thinkers behind attachment theory, which at t...

Erin Vincent is an author, essayist, journalist, and public speaker. In addition to literary contributions to anthologies and other publications, she has also appeared on national television and radio programs both in her native Australia and in the US. Her memoir, Grief Girl, published in 2008, chronicles her life and emotions following the death of her parents from an automobile accident. It was...

Psychologist Ross Greene is the originator of the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model and the non-profit Lives in the Balance.org . He is the author of several books about how teachers and administrators can help children with challenging behavior. The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children , first published in 199...

Richard Bessel is a professor emeritus of twentieth century history at the University of York and a former member of the editorial boards of German History and History Today . He is a specialist in the social and political history of modern Germany, the aftermath of the two world wars, and the history of policing. He is the author of several books, published between 1984 and 2004, about the Nazi a...

David Sussillo is an internationally recognized neuroscientist, currently working as a senior research manager at Meta Reality Labs, leading a team that is developing brain-machine interfaces for next-generation computer technologies. He is also an adjunct professor in the electrical engineering department at Stanford University, where he conducts research in computational neuroscience and neural...

Michael Boylan is a philosophy professor at Marymount University and a prolific writer who focuses on a wide range of ethical domains, including public health, the environment, medical advances, business practices, technological innovation, foundational philosophical texts from Ancient Greece, and the practice of teaching. He is also a poet and a fiction writer, exploring philosophical issues thro...

Nicholas — or Nick — Jelley, is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Physics and a Fellow of Lincoln College at the University of Oxford, known for his expertise in renewable energy and energy science. He was the UK group leader for the Nobel Prize-winning Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) experiment, a major achieve­ment in particle physics. More recently, he has conducted research on sola...

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is a Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, where he teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Evidence, and a seminar examining police surveillance technologies, privacy, and civil rights. Before becoming a professor, Professor Ferguson worked as a public defender for seven years, representing adults and juveniles, and was also lead counsel in num...

Nathaniel Greenberg is an Associate Professor of Arabic in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University, focusing on the intersection of technology, politics, and culture in the modern Middle East and North Africa. A Comparative Literature scholar by training, he also worked as a freelance journalist and was one of the few Americans to report on the first days of the...

Scott Wallace is an award-winning writer, television producer, and photojournalist, who for over 40 years, has focused on the environment, vanishing cultures, and conflict over land and resources around the world. He has written feature stories for the New York Times and The Smithsonian , among other major publications, and has been a frequent contributor to National Geographic. He is the author o...