My Favorite Lecture

Imagine you’re an environmental studies professor. Every semester you're faced with a roomful of idealistic students. You then have to present to them the grim forecast that climate scientists expect. These students may have known the planet faces challenges - but this is bad.  

And that, says Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, is where things might go sideways.

On this episode of My Favorite Lecture, engineering instructor Lonny Grafman shows how engineers benefit from community engagement.

Overpopulation. Epidemics. Economic recession. Deforestation. Anger toward elites. 

Though the causes of Maya warfare may look straightfoward, piecing together its weaponry, tactics and broader effects is anything but.

"Behavior is difficult to measure directly because we have to rely on what you tell us. You get upset when we try to watch you,” says Humboldt State's Melinda Meyers.

And when researchers base their gender studies using questionable assumptions, as you’re about to learn, that research gets a little dodgy. 

In this lecture, Myers lays out a fun-but-firm critique of sexuality research, and makes clear why it matters. 

What are we getting right when it comes to the science of climate change? What are we getting wrong? In this episode of My Favorite Lecture, Dr. Rich Boone takes you on a fact-based jaunt through one of today's most pressing issues. 

Why would invaders bother sacking a museum? Where's the value in plundering art?

Explore the idea of art looting and destruction over time, and understand the significance of such assaults against culture.  

[Advisory: Some of the content below maybe be considered graphic, bleak, and/or NSFW.]  

In this episode of My Favorite Lecture, Humboldt State history professor Ben Marschke paints a vivid picture of the spiritual, social, and economic factors that surrounded the witch hunts that led to an estimated 100,000 witch trials and 50,000 executions over hundreds of years. 

Demonology and epistemology collide as Marschke explores the "science" of witchcraft in the sixteenth century, placing witchcraft in the context of contemporary anxieties about gender, sexuality, and fertility.

You'll learn about popular handbook Malleus Maleficarum, which was basically the Oxford English Dictionary of how to spot, hunt, and try witches. 

"If we look at what makes up the universe, it's a little disturbing," Humboldt State University physicist CD Hoyle told the standing-room-only audience in Arcata. "It turns that most of the universe is dark energy." And we don't know what that is. "And that's a problem." 

Physics has problems, and nature is hinting at mysteries as big as the universe itself.  There are contradictions among major models of nature that are, in Hoyle's opinion, downright embarrassing.

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