What we eat may feel like a matter of personal choice, but our choices are shaped by powerful forces: food companies and their marketing teams, government policy, agricultural subsidies, public health priorities, and an industry whose profits depend on selling us more. In this conversation with Good Food host Evan Kleiman, pioneering food-policy scholar Dr. Marion Nestle will explore how corporate and political power shape the American diet — and, ultimately, our bodies. Drawing on ...

Dr. Edward Anthony Polanco will discuss how Nahua healers used maize to heal the human body in central Mexican communities in the 16th century. Titiçih (Nahua healing specialists) provided maize to patients topically and orally and relied on it for answers about illnesses. Dr. Polanco will also explore how Spanish Catholic authorities viewed these healers and their practices as a threat to settler colonial society and attempted to extirpate them. Audience Q&A and a reception ...

Drawing from her national best-selling book Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment, Rhae Lynn Barnes will explore the complex intersections of disability, presidential power, and racial masquerade. She will examine how minstrelsy and the dark cast of blackface performance functioned both as cultural entertainment and a political prosthetic during the Roosevelt era, masking the physical vulnerability of white children with polio while reinforcing racial hierarchies. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow. Dr. ...

Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the U.S. government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis of American exceptionalism. American reformers successfully pushed for international anti-trafficking agreements that mirrored U.S. laws, calling for states to criminalize commercial sex and restrict migration, ...

Esmé E. Deprez is an investigative reporter whose father was an aid-in-dying patient. In her forthcoming book, she explores assisted death through both a clinical and a personal perspective. She considers assisted death as a social phenomenon, a legal and political movement, and an area of medical practice that has transformed end-of-life health care. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow. Deprez is the author of the forthcoming book Inviting Death In: How I Helped ...