Dead or Alive

Life’s final border might not be so final after all. From tardigrades to viruses, some things are both dead and alive. Or neither. How do we draw the line between the living and the dead? And how does that line blur in places like in a time capsule buried in ice, or a library on the moon? Learn m…

When We Were Cyber

Cyborgs, cyberspace, mind-melting techno. In the mid-’90s, the future had arrived. To find out what happened to it, Hari pays a visit to philosopher Manuel DeLanda, and to the legendary artist ORLAN, who he first encountered at an academic conference like no other. Learn more about your ad-choice…

The Ghost in the Codec

At the dawn of the digital era, a group of engineers tasked with audio compression had to decide what information to keep, and what to leave behind. What was signal, and what was noise? Fast forward two decades, to our much noisier world. Hari finds a writer and a musician who’ve discovered their o…

Never Mind the Stasi

East Berlin, 1983. A teenage punk rocker finds himself in a Stasi interrogation cell. The choice is simple: inform on his friends, or go to prison. Hari travels to Berlin to meet the punks and spies whose cat and mouse game in the last years of the GDR predicted the privacy wars of today. Learn m…

It’s Always Sunny in the Dialectic

Look on the bright side! In a country obsessed with positivity, Hari traces the path of exiled German intellectual Theodor Adorno to sunny California, where he gets stuck in traffic with the British writer Geoff Dyer. How this positivity relates to church and state? Turns out there’s a lot to compl…

The Guru of Ojai

In the 1920s, a messianic visitor to Hari's family home unveils the connection between Indian Independence movement and the astral plane. Nearly a century later, Hari travels to the orange groves of Southern California, where the guru made his home, to examine the globetrotting legacy of New Age sp…

That Ain't Country

Country? Rap? Lil Nas X’s chart-topping “Old Town Road” revived a long debate about borders and boundaries in American popular music. To sort out this strange history, Hari heads down to the foothills of Virginia, where a legendary collection of blues records holds the key to understanding the insi…

Druid Like Me

Hari’s visit to Stonehenge on the solstice prompts an investigation into the gray zone between being a native and a migrant, and his memories of growing up in Essex during the Thatcher years. He also tracks down an old friend, whose work with Harvard geneticist David Reich overturns centuries of na…

Introducing Into the Zone

Hosted by novelist Hari Kunzru, Into the Zone is a new podcast about opposites, and how borders are never as clear as we think. Coming September 3, 2020 from Pushkin Industries. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com