Peculiar Book Club Podcast

Science writer Sadie Dingfelder has always known that she’s a little quirky. But while she’s made some strange mistakes over the years, it’s not until she accosts a stranger in a grocery store (whom she thinks is her husband) that she realizes something is amiss. With a mixture of curiosity and dread, Dingfelder starts contacting neuroscientists and lands herself in scores of studies. In the cours...

Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book Nightfaring, we are reviewing the Japanese animated film Princess Mononoke. Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into this Anime classic. We'll discuss the theme of Rebirth, Redemption, and who exactly are the...

Did you know there’s a man saving the secret ingredient in Japan's 700-year-old original soy sauce recipe? Or that the world’s rarest pasta is made in Italy, and only a few women alive still know the recipe? Or that in India, a family makes a mysterious metal mirror believed to reveal your truest self? These are disappearing secrets, the magical element of culture being precariously preserved...

Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book Nightfaring, we are reviewing the Japanese animated film Princess Mononoke Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive classic Anime film. We'll discuss the theme of rebirth, battling curses, and who exactly are the...

People, plants and animals all depend on the natural night – both its darkness and its starlight – for everything from regulating our sleep cycles to providing the inspiration for myths and legends. But darkness is disappearing, and with it, our view of the stars. The constant glow of streetlights, of headlights streaming down highways, and wasteful glare from skyscrapers left shining all night ha...

In her highly acclaimed debut, distinguished cosmologist and particle physicist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shared with her audience an abiding sense of wonder at the cosmos, while imagining a world without the entrenched injustice that plagues her field. Now, in  The Edge of Space-Time , she embraces that cosmic wonder, taking readers on a mind-altering journey to the boundaries of the universe,...

There is an old Buddhist adage: the teachings are like a finger pointing to the moon. To achieve enlightenment, you are not supposed to look at the finger. You are supposed to look to the celestial light. I am asking you to look at the finger. The finger is also the moon. These words, from Damon Young, ask us to rethink the casual gesture: A tilted head. A finger to the lips. A wave that could mea...

Why would anyone research how elephants pee? Or study worms who tie themselves into a communal knot? Or quantify the squishability of a cockroach? It all sounds pointless, silly, or even disgusting. But NOT TO US! This is going to be a Peculiar fan favorite, I am certain. In The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog, Carly Anne York shows how unappreciated, overlooked, and simply curiosity-driven...

Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book Story of a Murder, we are reviewing the crime thriller film A Perfect Murder. Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into this solid 90's movie. We'll discuss the themes of greed, there's always nuggets...

Since the Mayflower sidled up to Plymouth Rock, cult ideology has been ingrained in the DNA of the United States. It turns out that Puritan doomsday belief never went away; it just went secular and became American culture. From our fascination with cowboys and superheroes to our allegiance to influencers and self-help, susceptibility to advertising, and undying devotion to the self-made man, Ameri...

A journey through human festivity, told through colorful travel narratives set at some of the world's most eye-catching festivals and interweaved with insights from the fields of anthropology, history, psychology, and folklore, examining why we celebrate festivals in the ways we do. Fiesta explores the vibrant tapestry of human festivity, delving into the extraordinary lengths to which we go t...

Dr. Ashely Alker is a self-described death-escapologist--or, in more familiar terms, an emergency medicine doctor. She has seen it all, from flesh-eating bacteria to the work of a serial killer to the more mundane but no less deadly, and her work keeping people from dying (or being unable to) has uniquely prepared her to write this book. 99 Ways to Die and How to Avoid Them is an illuminating, dar...

Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book Rise of the Zombie Bugs, we are reviewing the high school horror film The Faculty. Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into this not a zombie, zombie movie. We'll discuss the themes of the weirdest 90's m...

On February 1, 1910, the vivacious, diamond-adorned music hall performer Belle Elmore suddenly vanished from her home, causing alarm among her friends, the entertainers of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. Their demands for an investigation would lead to the unearthing of a gruesome secret and trigger a fevered international manhunt for Belle’s husband, medical fraudster Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen. Eth...

Lipstick today is as messy—and fascinating—as changing attitudes towards femininity. Mining the experience of women across culture, class, and generation, this book tosses out expired ideas about beauty and power like so many tubes of melted wax. From Max Factor to Glossier, from Marilyn to Chappell Roan, lipstick is as shape-shifting and elusive as femininity itself. Rather than a staid history o...

Have you ever wanted to build your own submarine? I admit, I was a little shocked to find out how many men and women—but mostly men—who feel almost obsessively compelled to sink into the deep sea. Despite the 2023 fatal implosion of Stockton Rush's much more highly funded submarine, Titan, these amateur backyard enthusiasts are willing to take the risk. Why? In SUBMERSED, author Matthew Gavin...

Jessica McCann is an award-winning historical novelist and has worked as a professional writer and journalist for more than 35 years. One of her earliest assignments as a freelance writer was covering a new surgical radiation technique for destroying brain tumors, during which she donned scrubs and observed inside the operating room. Since then, her reporting and creative nonfiction has appeared i...

You’ve seen the movies. But did you know that zombies are in fact all around us? Insect zombies, that is. In Rise of the Zombie Bugs, Mindy Weisberger explores the eerie yet fascinating phenomenon of real-life zombification. The truth is stranger than fiction: these parasites reproduce by rewriting their victims' neurochemistry, transforming them into the "walking dead": armies of ci...

Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book When We Spoke to the Dead, we are reviewing the romance film Ghost. Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into this sexy pottery movie. We'll discuss the themes of the fragility of life, believing in spirituali...

From Sarah Weinman, author of Scoundrel and The Real Lolita, comes an eye-opening story about the first major spousal rape trial in America and urgent questions about women’s rights that would reverberate for decades. In December 1978, Greta Rideout bravely testified that her husband, John, whom she still lived with, had raped her. She was the first woman in United States history to do this, at a...

Ghosts spoke. Women listened. Everything changed. It began with whispers in a dimly lit room. In the 1840s, the Fox Sisters―and the legions of mediums they inspired―ignited the Spiritualist movement that swept through Victorian parlors and presidential campaigns alike. Contacting the dead wasn't merely a parlor trick: It was a political statement, a declaration of self that still echoes. Séanc...

The story of the wildest experiments in early photography and the wild people who undertook them. Today it’s routine to take photos from an airplane window, use a camera underwater, watch a movie, or view an X-ray. But the photographic innovations more than a century ago that made such things possible were experimental, revelatory, and sometimes dangerous—and many of the innovators, entrepreneurs,...

Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book Holy Food, we are reviewing the cooking comedy Julie and Julia. Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into this dual story of chefs. We'll discuss the themes of finding your purpose, the kitchen is for everyone...

Featured : CHRISTINA WARD, Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat — An American HistoryDoes God have a recipe? I know who to ask! Independent food historian Christina Ward’s highly anticipated Holy Food explores the influence of mainstream (and fringe) religious beliefs on modern American food culture. It's the story of true believers and charlatans, of...

New laws limit access to abortion and threaten doctors with prison. Religious zealots and opportunistic politicians team up to ban books about sex and to “protect” children from their “corrupting” influence. Sound familiar? Welcome to America in the late 19th-century under the Comstock Act, a federal law that prohibited the distribution of information about sex, contraception, or abortion through...