u6061326 – Tanner Humanities Center

Real Housewives, Real Humanities, with Jordan Rullo, Marcie Young Cancio, and Renato Olmedo-González

Categories: Podcast

In this episode, we discuss the Tanner Humanities Center’s symposium—Receipts, Proof, Timeline: How We Watch The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City—with Jordan Rullo (Department of Psychology and therapist), Marcie Young Cancio (Department of Communication and founder of Amplify Utah), and Renato Olmedo-González (Salt Lake City Arts Council). They explore the underground sophistication of trash […]

May 25, 2026

Scoring systems, games, and value capture, with Thi Nguyen and Scott Black

Categories: Podcast

How can scoring systems make games feel so joyful, fluid, and alive, yet drain the life from public institutions and everyday work? This is one of the central questions of a new book by University of Utah philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. In The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, published this year by […]

April 21, 2026

Camp and criticism at the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City symposium

Categories: News

Camp and criticism at the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City symposium The Salt Lake Tribune Here are 7 ways scholars say ‘The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’ is more than just a reality show Read more Daily Utah Chronicle U Tanner Humanities Center hosts ‘Real Housewives’ symposium Read more KUER These academics gave […]

April 17, 2026

Nora Lange, author of Day Care and Us Fools, with Erin Beeghly

Categories: Podcast

Nora Lange, author of Us Fools (2024), discusses her new collection of short stories, Day Care, with Erin Beeghly (Department of Philosophy). Their conversation touches on female desire, motherhood, mischief, and the strange pressures of contemporary life. They discuss the surreal charge of stories like “Hot Spot,” the autofictional elements of the title story, and Lange’s […]

April 2, 2026

David Wengrow gives 2026 Tanner Lecture on Human Values

Categories: News

The origins of human freedom, as we imagine them, are strange. In the Western tradition, freedom was won by warriors breaking free from the constraints of political rule and domestic conformity. Against the authority of the state and the bonds of kinship and household, the warrior establishes liberty through transgression and conquest. Warriors, like a […]

March 31, 2026

How we watch the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City – Marcie Young-Cancio, Robert Carson, and Scott Black

Categories: Podcast

In anticipation of our symposium on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City on April 10, Marcie Young-Cancio, Robert Carson, and Scott Black discuss the show from a humanities perspective, examining its treatment of faith, femininity, Utah culture, entrepreneurship, fan loyalty, and camp sensibility. Marcie Young-Cancio is Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Communication […]

March 17, 2026

Enshittification, with Cory Doctorow and Matthew Potolsky

Categories: Podcast

In this episode, Matt Potolsky (Professor of English) talks with writer and activist Cory Doctorow about digital privacy, platform decay, and the politics of monopoly. Drawing on his recent book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Doctorow argues that the erosion of privacy is inseparable from the rise of […]

March 5, 2026

Cory Doctorow on enshittification and resistance

Categories: News

A hiring app that draws on workers’ credit reports to offer lower pay to those desperate to get out of debt. A search engine that blurs the line between answers and advertisements. A social media platform that buys its competitors rather than competing with them. These are not isolated failures; they are the outcomes of […]

February 28, 2026

Seeing the body in the world: Environmental storytelling symposium

Categories: News

Narrative is often thought of as a string or sequence of events in time: a linear progression from beginning to end. What this purely temporal conception overlooks, however, is the imaginary space opened up and generated by a story’s narration. Through techniques like detailed description, and a focus on world rather than sequence, narrative may […]

February 23, 2026

Thi Nguyen on gamification, scoring systems, and value capture

Categories: News

“Is this the game you really want to be playing?” This question is at the core of Thi Nguyen’s new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, published this year by Penguin. At the Utah Museum of Fine Arts on February 5, 2026, Nguyen discussed his book with Shelby Moser (Games Division […]

February 10, 2026