Podcast Intellectuals Podcast Panel #3 with Allison Carruth and Ellen Horne

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**Robert Boynton** (1:31)
Welcome to The New Books Network.
Welcome to the special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities Vault Podcast. I'm Robert Boynton. On May 13th, 2026, Princeton's Center for Human Values hosted a day long conference titled Audio and Ideas, Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting. It was co-sponsored by Princeton's Journalism Program, and the NYU Podcast Initiative. Over the course of four panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research. In the third panel, Allison Carruth and Ellen Horne discussed the relationship between podcasting and science. Carruth is a professor at Princeton's Effron Center for the Study of America and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. She directs the Program in Environmental Studies and needs Blue Lab, an Environmental Media and Storytelling studio. Ellen Horne directs the Podcasting and Audio Reportage Concentration at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Horne was producer of Admissible, Shreds of Evidence, a 13-episode investigative podcast that told the story of shocking misconduct at a Virginia state crime lab.
Horne has been executive editor at Audible and executive producer for WNYC's Radiolab.

**Allison Carruth** (2:59)
Our focus is on environmental research and environmental storytelling, and on the latter in very research-driven but extremely community-based storytelling, art media projects. We started with audio and I'm happy to talk more in conversation about why and we start with audio and what came out of that three-year period. We continue to have audio projects. We now are helmed by Baron and me, are producing a documentary short and a feature-length documentary film.
We've also done other forms of work, long form non-fiction. One of our graduate students had a piece placed in the Atlantic about the New Jersey Meadowlands, public art happenings and engagements, photographic work and photo essays.
We're this multimedia and we're an odd bird here at Princeton, which has a wonderful undergraduate program in journalism, led by Eliza Griswold, but no school of journalism and media, no school of film and television, very different from where I was for 10 years prior, which was UCLA. We have dedicated space in a huge building called Brigger Hall. That's about five minute walk from here. We are the only non-STEM group in the building. It's a building devoted to environmental sciences and at the other end, engineering. I just want to say one last thing before we start to have conversation, which is Barron would have been up here with us, but is actually somewhere north of San Francisco along the coast, working on the documentary film I mentioned for which he's the director. So can't be here today, but we co-founded Blue Lab together. We are a husband and wife team. We have been partners in all things for 23 years and came out here from California as a leap of faith for this adventure.

**Ellen Horne** (4:37)
So we were just sort of talking about audio and audio documentary and what the kind of resources there are available for telling science stories. So kind of like as a point of inspiration for both of us, I don't know, maybe you want to start a little bit talking about kind of audio in particular or even documentary more broadly.