Into the Zone

Into the Zone is a podcast about opposites, and how borders are never as clear as we think. With a novelist’s eye for the unexpected, host Hari Kunzru takes the listener around the world, meeting philosophers and punk musicians, New Age gurus and space explorers, to investigate the gray zone between life and death, public and private, black and white, and more.iHeartMedia is the exclusive podcast partner of Pushkin Industries. 

Society & Culture
Philosophy
1
A Literary Kickback with Well-Read Black Girl
Sharing a new show from Pushkin, the team behind Into the Zone. On Well-Read Black Girl, host Glory Edim has deep, honest conversations with authors of color about the art, craft and power of the written word. Luminaries like Tarana Burke, Gabrielle Union, Anita Hill, and more, discuss how they found their voices, honed their crafts, navigated the wild world of publishing, and showed up in the world.
4 min
2
Pushkin Honors Juneteenth
At Pushkin, we think of Juneteenth as an opportunity to reflect on the past and think about the future: How do we build a more just and equitable society?
27 min
3
Into the Zone Presents: Hi-Phi Nation
Hosted by Barry Lam of Vassar College, Hi-Phi Nation is philosophy in story-form, integrating narrative journalism with big ideas. The show look at stories from everyday life, law, science, popular culture, and strange corners of human experiences that raise thought-provoking questions about things like justice, knowledge, the self, morality, and existence. Here’s a fascinating episode from the very first season of Hi-Phi Nation, about a dead chocolate mogul and the richest orphanage in the world.
47 min
4
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?
45 min
5
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.
42 min
6
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 own ways to find a voice within the static.
39 min
7
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.
49 min
8
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 complain about.
46 min
9
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 spirituality.
46 min
10
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 nationalist thinking.
49 min
11
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 insidious separation of “Black” and “white” culture.
42 min
12
Introducing Into the Zone
2 min