Podcasts by New Books in Public Policy

Border Lines: Refugees and the International Order from 2023-02-02T09:00

Climate change and war have flung millions of people on the move, who often seek safe harbor in the very countries responsible for their displacement. But despite the lofty ideals and supposed simp...

Virtually Violent: Are Online Attacks "Violence?" from 2023-01-26T09:00

During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, vulnerable communities have been hit especially hard by disruptive online attacks. But calling these attacks "violent" could jeopardize the future of disruptiv...

Shifting Blame: What Should You "Own" and What Shouldn't You? from 2023-01-18T09:00

We claim to judge people for what they intentionally do, but accidents often influence our judgments. In our justice systems, people can be harshly and unfairly blamed for bad luck—but in our perso...

Demeritocracy: Should We Still Believe in Meritocracy? from 2023-01-10T09:00

Total faith in meritocracy leads to the dangerous belief that all social winners and losers are wholly deserving. Instead, we need an economy of grace. GuestsVictor Tan Chen, assistant professor of...

(In)efficiency: Should Efficiency be a Moral Value? from 2023-01-05T09:00

Efficiency has moved from a technique for measuring machines to a widely held moral value. But at what cost? GuestsJennifer Alexander, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota and author ...

(In)efficiency: Should Efficiency be a Moral Value? from 2023-01-05T09:00

Efficiency has moved from a technique for measuring machines to a widely held moral value. But at what cost? GuestsJennifer Alexander, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota and author ...

Howard Friedman, "Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Howard Friedman's new book Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life (University of California Press, 2020) should be required reading for anyone sitting down to watch the evening news. The Covid-...

Rense Nieuwenhuis and Laurie C. Maldonado, “The Triple Bind of Single-Parent Families” (Policy Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What kind of barriers and risks do single parents face? In their new book, The Triple Bind of Single-Parent Families: Resources, Employment and Policies to Improve Well-Being (Policy Press, 2018), ...

MK Czerwiec, et al., “Graphic Medicine Manifesto” (Penn State UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Physician/author Ian Williams coined the term “graphic medicine” to “denote the role that comics can play in the study and delivery of healthcare.” The robust emerging graphic medicine community ca...

Patrick M. Condon, "Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities" (Island Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How we design our cities over the next four decades will be critical for our planet. If we continue to spill excessive greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we will run out of time to keep our global...

Jason Linkins, “Schoolhouse Wreck: The Betsy DeVos Story” (Strong Arm Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Schoolhouse Wreck: The Betsy DeVos Story (Strong Arm Press, 2018), Jason Linkins delivers a searing critique of controversial Trump administration Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The book tr...

William Elliott III and Melinda Lewis, “Real College Debt Crisis” (Praeger, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. William Elliott III, associate professor in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas, and Melinda Lewis, associate professor of practice in the School of Social Welfare at the U...

Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...

Caitlin DeSilvey, “Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving” (U Minnesota Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), geographer Caitlin DeSilvey offers a set of alternatives to those who would assign a misplaced solidity to historic b...

Winnifred F. Sullivan, “A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care and the Law” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As patterns of religiosity have changed in the United States, chaplains have come to occupy an increasingly important place in the nation’s public institutions, especially its prisons, hospitals an...

Great Books: Melissa Schwartzberg on Rousseau's "The Social Contract" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The opening sentence of 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Roussau's The Social Contract poses a central question for all of us. Why do we liv...

B.J. Mendelson, “Privacy: And How to Get It Back” (Curious Reads, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The use of our data and the privacy, or lack thereof, that we have when we go online has become a topic of increasing importance as technology becomes ubiquitous and more sophisticated. Governments...

Julian E. Zelizer, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society” (Penguin, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Julian E. Zelizer is the author of The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (Penguin Press, 2015). Zelizer is the Malcom Stevenson Forbes, Class of ...

Lloyd B. Minor, "Discovering Precision Health" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today's guest is scientist, surgeon, and dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, Dr. Lloyd B. Minor. Previously he served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Th...

Christy Ford Chapin, “Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christy Ford Chapin, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has written a history of the funding of America’s health care system: Ensuring America’s Heal...

Nicholas R. Parrillo, “Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780-1940” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this podcast I discuss Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780-1940 (Yale University Press, 2013) with author Nicholas R. Parrillo, professor of law at Yale University....

K. Aronoff, et al., "A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal" (Verso, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In early 2019, freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Ed Markey proposed a bold new piece of legislation, now very well known as the Green New Deal. Intended as a means of com...

Aimi Hamraie, “Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability” (U Minnesota Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Americans with Disability Act passed in 1990, but it was just one moment in ongoing efforts to craft the meaning and practice of “good design” that put people with disabilities at the center. I...

Beatrix Hoffman, “Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930” (U of Chicago, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Disputes over the definitions or legality of ‘rights’ and ‘rationing’ in their various guises have animated much of the debate around the United States Affordable Care Act. Many legislators and voc...

Kristian Ly Serena, "Age-Inclusive Public Space" (Hatje Cantz, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Public spaces tend to over-represent facilities and spatial design for the young and the middle-aged, whereas elderly citizens are all too often neglected by contemporary urban design practice. Dom...

Greg Berman and Julian Adler, “Start Here: A Roadmap to Reducing Mass Incarceration” (The New Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The United States leads the world in incarceration. That’s a problem, especially the disproportionate impact of “mass incarceration” on low-income men of color. In their new book Start Here: A Road...

Jon L. Mills, “Privacy in the New Media Age” (University Press of Florida, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

That privacy in the digital age is an important concept to be discussed is axiomatic. Cameras in mobile phones make it easy to record events and post them on the web. Consumers post an enormous amo...

Jonathan Barnett, "Designing the Megaregion: Meeting Urban Challenges at a New Scale" (Island Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The US population is estimated to grow by more than 110 million people by 2050, and much of this growth will take place where cities and their suburbs are expanding to meet the suburbs of neighbori...

Jenny Reardon, “The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after the Genome” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do we create meaning after the genome? Such a profound question is at the center of the recently published book by Jenny Reardon, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after ...

Todd Meyers, “The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy” (U of Washington Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Todd Meyers‘ The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy (University of Washington Press, 2013) is many things, all of them compelling and fully realized. Most di...

Travis Lupick, "Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction" (Arsenal, 2108) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

North America is in the grips of a drug epidemic; with the introduction of fentanyl, the chances of a fatal overdose are greater than ever, prompting many to rethink the war on drugs. Public opinio...

Samuel Harrington, “At Peace: Choosing a Good Death After a Long Life” (Grand Central Life & Style, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most people say they would like to die quietly at home. But overly aggressive medical advice, coupled with an unrealistic sense of invincibility or overconfidence in our health-care system, results...

Julian E. Zelizer, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society” (Penguin Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In recent decades, as Democrats and Republicans have grown more and more polarized ideologically, and gridlock has becoming increasingly standard in Congress, there has been a noticeable pining for...

Anna Arstein-Kerslake, "Restoring Voice to People with Cognitive Disabilities: Realizing the Right to Equal Recognition Before the Law" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The right to decision making is important for all people. It allows us to choose how to we our lives – both on a daily basis, and also in terms of how we wish to express ourselves, to live in accor...

Jonathan Engel, “Unaffordable: American Healthcare from Johnson to Trump” (U Wisconsin Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Earlier this year, Jamila Michener visited the podcast to talk about her new book, Fragmented Democracy, about Medicaid and the state-based structure that results in very different experiences of M...

Lee Drutman, “The Business of America is Lobbying” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lee Drutman is the author of The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate (Oxford UP 2015). Drutman is a senior fellow at New America....

Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...

John Krinsky and Maud Simonet, “Who Cleans the Park? Public Works and Urban Governance in New York City” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is possible that you did not know that you need a comprehensive labor market analysis of the New York City Parks Department, but John Krinsky and Maud Simonet, in their new book, Who Cleans the ...

J. Bronsteen, C. Buccafusco, and J. S. Masur, “Happiness and the Law” (U Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In their new book Happiness and the Law (University of Chicago Press 2014), John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, and Jonathan S. Masur argue through the use of hedonic psychological data that we...

Andrew Leigh, "Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From the unending quest to turn metal into gold to the major discoveries that reveal how the universe works, experiments have always been a critical part of the hard sciences. In recent decades soc...

Alison B. Hirsch, “City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America” (U Minnesota Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lawrence Halprin, one of the central figures in twentieth-century American landscape architecture, is well known to city-watchers for his work on San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, Seattle’s Freew...

Finis Dunaway, “Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images” ( from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Oil-soaked birds in Prince William Sound. The “crying Indian” in a 1970s anti-littering ad. A lonely polar bear on an Arctic ice floe. Such environmental images have proliferated over the past half...

Sara Hughes, "Repowering Cities: Governing Climate Change Mitigation in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scholars like Ben Barber have suggested that cities provide the democratic culture to pragmatically problem-solve challenging policy issues – such as climate change. Many North American cities have...

Alexandra Cox, “Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People” (Rutgers UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does the juvenile justice system impact the lives of the young people that go through it? In her new book, Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People (Rutgers Universit...

Kevin Dougherty and Rebecca Natow, “The Politics of Performance Funding for Higher Education” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Funding for higher education in the U.S. is an increasingly divisive issue. Some states have turned to policies that tie institutional performance to funding appropriations so to have great account...

Elizabeth A. Wheeler, "HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth" (U Michigan Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Throughout her new book, HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth (University of Michigan Press 2019), Elizabeth A. Wheeler uses a fictional place called HandiLand as a yardstick for measuring how fa...

Anna Zeide, “Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry” (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most everything Americans eat today comes out of cans. Some of it emerges from the iconic steel cylinders and much of the rest from the mammoth processed food empire the canning industry pioneered....

Louis DeSipio and Rodolfo de la Garza, “U.S. Immigration in the Twenty-First Century” (Westview Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this week’s podcast, we hear from an author and an editor. First, Louis DeSipio and Rodolfo de la Garza are authors of U.S. Immigration in the Twenty-First Century: Making Americans, Remaking Am...

Diane Jones Allen, "Lost in the Transit Desert: Race, Transit Access, and Suburban Form" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Increased redevelopment, the dismantling of public housing, and increasing housing costs are forcing a shift in migration of lower income and transit dependent populations to the suburbs. These sub...

Allison Varzally, “Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Allison Varzally documents the history of Vietnamese adoption in the U...

Kimberly Phillips-Fein, “Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal” (W. W. Norton, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we’ll focus on the history of resistance to the New Deal. In her book Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (W. W. Norton,2010), Kimberly Phillips-Fein details how m...

Josh Seim, "Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the role of the ambulance in the American city? The prevailing narrative provides a rather simple answer: saving and transporting the critically ill and injured. This is not an incorrect de...

Natasha Zaretsky, “Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if modern conservatism is less a reaction to environmentalism than a mutation of it? Historian Natasha Zaretsky’s latest book, Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformat...

Pasi Sahlberg, “Finnish Lessons 2.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?” (Teachers College Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In late 2001 Finland became the darling of the education and policy communities, as its students toped the reading literacy, mathematics, and science PISA test rankings. While these results were so...

Sandro Galea, "Well: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Well: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health (Oxford University Press, 2019), physician Sandro Galea examines what Americans miss when they fixate on healthcare: health. Americans ...

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, “Politics at Work: How Companies Turn Their Workers into Lobbyists” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is the author of Politics at Work: How Companies Turn Their Workers into Lobbyists (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is an assistant professor of political science at C...

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, “Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture” (Oxford University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The intersection between Spanish-bilingual education and sex education might not be immediately apparent. Yet, as Natalia Mehlman Petrzela shows in her new book, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and ...

Jennifer E. Gaddis, "The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There’s a problem with school lunch in America. Big Food companies have largely replaced the nation’s school cooks by supplying cafeterias with cheap, precooked hamburger patties and chicken nugget...

Halee Fischer-Wright, “Back to Balance: The Art, Science, and Business of Medicine” (Disruption Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this highly engaging, thoroughly persuasive book, Dr. Halee Fischer-Wright presents a unique prescription for fixing America’s health care woes, based on her thirty years of experience as a phys...

Christina Dunbar-Hester, “Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For the past few decades a major focus has been how the Internet, and Internet associated new media, allows for greater social and political participation globally. There is no disputing that the I...

Lana Dee Povitz, ?"Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice" ?(UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, government cutbacks, stagnating wages, AIDS, and gentrification pushed ever more people into poverty, and hunger reached levels unseen since the ...

David Pilling, “The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations” (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What’s not to like about economic growth, you might ask? Well, quite a lot, it turns out, once we begin to examine how GDP and other measures of the economy are constructed, and once we see what th...

Robert Putnam, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” (Simon and Schuster, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Putnam is the author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon and Schuster, 2015). Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. He has writ...

Steven Higashide, "Better Buses, Better Cities : How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit" (Island Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Buses can and should be the cornerstone of urban transportation. They offer affordable mobility and can connect citizens with every aspect of their lives. But in the US, they have long been an afte...

Timothy Neale, “Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia” (U Hawaii Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), Tim Neale examines the controversy over the 2005 Wild Rivers Act in the Cape York P...

James A. Holstein, Richard S. Jones, George Koonce, Jr., “Is There Life After Football? Surviving the NFL” (New York UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The health of former NFL players has received plenty of attention in recent years. The suicides of Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, along with stories of retired players in only their 40s and 50s affe...

Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...

Martijn Konings, “Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason” (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I was joined by Martijn Konings from Australia where he is Associate Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. We had a conversation on his most recent book Capital and Time...

Thomas Leitch, “Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wikipedia is one of the most popular resources on the web, with its massive collection of articles on an incredible number of topics. Yet, its user written and edited model makes it controversial i...

Daniel Skinner, "Medical Necessity: Health Care Access and the Politics of Decision Making" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The definition of medical necessity has morphed over the years, from a singular physician’s determination to a complex and dynamic political contest involving patients, medical companies, insurance...

Joshua Zeitz, “Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House” (Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did President Lyndon Johnson engineer one of the biggest bursts of liberal legislation in American history? And did his vision of a Great Society successfully alleviate poverty and reduce inequ...

Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy, “The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Contemporary American political culture is arguably more divisive than ever before. Blue states are bluer, red states are redder, and purple states are becoming harder and harder to find. Because o...

Steve Suitts, "Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement" (NewSouth Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

School choice, widely touted as a system that would ensure underprivileged youth have an equal opportunity in education, has grown in popularity in the past fifteen years. The strategies and rhetor...

Robert Pearl, “Mistreated: Why We Think Were Getting Good Health Care and Why We’re Usually Wrong” (PublicAffairs, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The biggest problem in American health care is us. Do you know how to tell good health care from bad health care? Guess again. As patients, we wrongly assume the best care is dependent mainly on t...

Joseph M. Gabriel, “Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry” (U Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Commercial interests are often understood as impinging upon the ethical norms of medicine. In his new book, Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutic...

Virginia Eubanks, "Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor" (St. Martin's, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years?because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In L...

Domingo Morel, “Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When the state takes over, can local democracy survive? Over 100 school districts have been taken over by state governments since the late 1980s. In doing so, state officials relieve local official...

Emilie Cloatre, “Pills for the Poorest: An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa” (Palgrave, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emilie Cloatre‘s award-winning book, Pills for the Poorest:An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave, 2013), locates the effects–and ineffectualness–of a land...

Caitlin Frances Bruce, "Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter" (Temple UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Public art is a form of communication that enables spaces for encounters across difference. These encounters may be routine, repeated, or rare, but all take place in urban spaces infused with emoti...

Jesse Rhodes, “Ballot Blocked: The Political Erosion of the Voting Rights Act” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Voting rights are always in the news in American politics, and recent court decisions and an upcoming election in 2018 make this especially true today. Most discussions come back to the Voting Righ...

Elena Conis, “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization” (University of Chicago, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 1960s marked a “new era of vaccination,” when Americans eagerly exposed their arms and hind ends for shots that would prevent a range of everyday illnesses–not only prevent the lurking killers,...

Robert Frank, "Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Psychologists have long understood that social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. But social influence is a two-way street?our environments a...

Jonathan D. Quick, “The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It” (St. Martin’s Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A leading doctor offers answers on the one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we prevent the next global pandemic? The 2014 Ebola epidemic in Liberia terrified the world?and revealed...

Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, “The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America ( U Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones are the authors of The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Baumgartne...

Jodie Adams Kirshner, "Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promise" (St. Martin's Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promise (St. Martin's Press, 2019), Jodie Adams Kirshner tells the story of the people of Detroit before, during, and after its ba...

Christina Twomey, “The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia” (NewSouth Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia (NewSouth Books, 2018), Christina Twomey, Professor of History at Monash University, explores the “battle within,” the individual and c...

Kenneth Prewitt, “What Is Your Race?: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans” (Princeton University Press 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The US Census has been an important American institution for over 220 years. Since 1790, the US population has been counted and compiled, important figures when tabulating representation and electo...

Kate Lockwood Harris, "Beyond the Rapist: Title IX and Sexual Violence on US Campuses" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Kate Lockwood Harris (s...

Jamila Michener, “Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Medicaid provides health care for around 1 in 5 Americans. Despite the large number served, the programs administration by state and local governments means very different things in different place...

Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford, “The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance” (Jossey-Bass, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Without a doubt, the paramount duty of a municipality, of any size, is the delivery services to its constituents. These services range from the seasonal-think snow removal, to the daily-ensuring tr...

T. Mose "The Playdate" (NYU Press, 2016) and L. Crehan "Cleverlands" (Random House, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode we consider vital role of play, and what it does to expand a child’s creativity and resilience. Urban sociologist Tamara Mose is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College, and auth...

Nic Cheeseman, “Institutions and Democracy in Africa” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Institutions and Democracy in Africa: How the Rules of the Game Shape Political Developments (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the contributors challenge the argument that African states lack ...

Jeff Smith, “Ferguson in Black and White” (Kindle Single, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jeff Smith is the author of Ferguson in Black and White (Kindle Single, 2014). Smith is assistant professor of political science at The New School’s Milano Graduate School. Smith writes this book ...

David S. Cohen and Carole Joffe, "Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America" (UC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seems unthinkable that citizens of one of the most powerful nations in the world must risk their lives and livelihoods in the search for access to necessary health care. And yet it is no surpris...

Hans Hassell, “The Party’s Primary: Control of Congressional Nominations” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When first enacted at the start of the twentieth century, primaries were to decrease the power of party bosses to dominate the choice of who ran for office. Primaries were a feature of the progress...

Robert Hewison, “Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain” (Verso, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did a golden age of cultural funding in UK turn to lead? This is the subject of a new cultural history by Robert Hewison. Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (Verso, 2014) ...

Russell A. Newman, "The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Three years after the withdrawal of the Open Internet Order – then-President Barack Obama’s attempt at codifying network neutrality by prohibiting internet service providers from discriminating bet...

Betsy DiSalvo, et al., “Participatory Design for Learning: Perspectives from Practice and Research” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Betsy DiSalvo, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, joins us in this episode to discuss the recently published co-edited volume entitled, P...

Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Lubienski, “The Public School Advantage” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Conventional thinking tells us that private school education is better than public schooling in the US. Why else would parents pay the hefty price tag often associate with private education, especi...

SpearIt, “American Prisons: A Critical Primer on Culture and Conversion to Islam” (First Edition Design, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

America has the largest incarcerated population in the world. This staggering and troubling fact has driven a great deal of scholarship. Much of this research has shown that mass incarceration in A...

Saladin Ambar, “American Cicero: Mario Cuomo and the Defense of American Liberalism” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American Cicero: Mario Cuomo and the Defense of American Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a compelling exploration of the political life of Governor Mario Cuomo as well as the concepts...

Janet K. Shim, “Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease” (NYU Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Janet K. Shim‘s new book juxtaposes the accounts of epidemiologists and lay people to consider the roles of race, class, and gender (among other things) in health and illness. Heart-Sick: The Polit...

K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...

Shiri Noy, “Banking on Health: The World Bank and Health Sector Reform in Latin America” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What role has the World Bank played in influencing health sector reform in Latin America? In her new book, Banking on Health: The World Bank and Health Sector Reform in Latin America (Palgrave Macm...

Jeremy A. Greene, “Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is there any such thing as a generic drug? Jeremy A, Greene‘s new book Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) treats its subject matter with a learned ske...

Michael Menser, "We Decide!: Theories and Cases in Participatory Democracy" (Temple UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Participatory democracy calls for the creation and proliferation of practices and institutions that enable individuals and groups to better determine the conditions in which they act and relate to ...

Christopher Witko and William Franko, “The New Economic Populism: How States Respond to Economic Inequality” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the last few weeks, minimum wage workers in 18 states saw their wages go up; in Maine a full dollar increase. Why states have taken the lead on raising the minimum wage is the topic of the new b...

Paul Loeb, “The Impossible Will Take a Little While” (Basic Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paul Loeb is well known in sociology as the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in Challenging Times, and for the previous edition of the book reviewed here. His books are used in c...

Leah Stokes, "Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do even successful clean energy policies fail to create momentum for more renewable energy? In her new book Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate...

Jerry Flores, “Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wrap-Around Incarceration” (U California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What are the lives of young incarcerated Latinas like? And what were their lives like before and after their incarceration? In his new book, Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wrap-Around Incarcer...

Alon Peled, “Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-11 attacks in New York City, Washington D.C., an...

Daniel Denvir, "All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It" (Verso, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is often said that with the election of Donald Trump nativism was raised from the dead. After all, here was a president who organized his campaign around a rhetoric of unvarnished racism and xen...

Daphna Hacker, “Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As debates on globalization rage in the twenty-first century, many countries and the people within them have been challenged socially, economically, and legally. At the same time, our world is now ...

Darrell M. West, “Billionaires: Reflection on the Upper Crust” (Brookings Institution Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

So how many billionaires are there in the world? And what do they have to do with politics? Darrell  M. West has answered those questions in Billionaires: Reflection on the Upper Crust (Brookings 2...

Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For years, drug overdose was unmentionable in polite society. OD was understood to be something that took place in dark alleys?an ugly death awaiting social deviants?neither scientifically nor clin...

Douglas Kriner and Eric Schickler, “Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (Princeton University Press, 2016) is an important analysis of both congressional and presidential power, and how these two b...

Kara W. Swanson, “Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did we come to think of spaces for the storage and circulation of body parts as “banks,” and what are the consequences of that history for the way we think about human bodies as property today?...

Ian Wray, "No Little Plans: How Government Built America’s Wealth and Infrastructure" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is planning for America anathema to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness? Is it true, as thinkers such as Friedrich Von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand have claimed, that planning leads ...

Daniel Fridman, “Freedom From Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Freedom From Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2017), Daniel Fridman explores what it means to be an economic subject in what di...

Matthew Huber, “Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital” (U of Minnesota Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth...

Nicci Gerrard, "The Last Ocean: A Journey Through Memory and Forgetting" (Penguin, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dementia provokes profound moral questions about our society and the meaning of life itself. How much are we connected to one another? In what ways are we distant and separated? What does it mean t...

Douglas Hartman, “Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy” (U Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The concept of late-night basketball gained prominence in the late 1980s when G. Van Standifer founded Midnight Basketball League as a vehicle upon which citizens, businesses, and institutions can ...

Anthony Santaro, “Exile & Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourses on the Death Penalty” (Northeastern UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The death penalty is a subject that can easily inflame emotions. However, in his book, Exile & Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourses on the Death Penalty (Northeastern University Press, 2013),...

Maria Dimova-Cookson, "Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Maria Dimova-Cookson's new book Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty (Routledge, 2019) offers an analysis of the distinction between positive and negative freedom building on the work of Consta...

J. Mark Souther, “Believing in Cleveland: Managing Decline in ‘The Best Location in the Nation'” (Temple UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Like many cities, Cleveland has gone through periods of decline and renewal, yet the process there has followed a process where these periods were not always obvious and often failed because of a l...

Andrea Louise Campbell, “Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle” (University of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrea Louise Campbell is the author of Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Campbell is professor of political science at the Massachusetts I...

Ben Green, "The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The “smart city,” presented as the ideal, efficient, and effective for meting out services, has capture the imaginations of policymakers, scholars, and urban-dweller. But what are the possible draw...

Claire Schmidt, “If You Don’t Laugh, You’ll Cry: The Occupational Humor of White Wisconsin Prison Workers” (U Wisconsin Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Claire Schmidt is not a prison worker, rather she is a folklorist and an Assistant Professor at Missouri Valley College. However, many members of her extended family in her home state of Wisconsin ...

Ajay K. Mehrotra, “Making the Modern American Fiscal State” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Prior to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, the United States did not have a national system of taxation–it had a regional system, a system linked to political parties, and a system that, in m...

Wendy Bottero, "A Sense of Inequality" (Roman and Littlefield, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How should we understand inequality? In A Sense of Inequality (Roman and Littlefield, 2020), Wendy Bottero, a Reader in Sociology at the University of Manchester offers a detailed and challenging n...

Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther, “The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters” (Wharton Digital Press, 2017)) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters (Wharton Digital Press, 2017), Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther summarize six major cognitive biases that explain why humans fail to adeq...

Heather Menzies, “Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto” (New Society Publishers, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Canadian author and scholar, Heather Menzies, has written a book about the journey she took to the highlands of Scotland in search of her ancestral roots. In Reclaiming the Commons for the Co...

Rachel Louise Moran, "Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique" (U Penn Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did the modern, American body come into being? According to Rachel Louise Moran this is a story to be told through the lens of the advisory state. In her book, Governing Bodies: American Politi...

Kim Yi Dionne, “Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

AIDS is one of the primary causes of death in Africa. Of the more than 24 million Africans infected with HIV, only about 54% have access to the treatment that they need. Despite the progress made i...

Robert J. Pekkanen et al., “Nonprofits and Advocacy” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert J. Pekkanen, Steven Rathgeb Smith, and Yutaka Tsujinaka are the authors of Nonprofits and Advocacy: Engaging Community and Government in an Era of Retrenchment (Johns Hopkins University Pres...

Joseph Blocher and Darrell A.H. Miller, "The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Positive Second Amendment: Rights, Regulation, and the Future of Heller (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Joseph Blocher and Darrell A.H. Miller insist that the Second Amendment is widely ...

Andrew Keen, “How To Fix The Future” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a historian I find myself constantly asking the question “Is that really new, or is it rather something that looks new but isn’t?” If you read the headlines, particularly those concerning the on...

Philip Kretsedemas, “Migrants and Race in the US: Territorial Racism and the Alien/Outside” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Philip Kretsedemas is the author of Migrants and Race in the US: Territorial Racism and the Alien/Outside (Routledge, 2014). Kretsedemas is associate professor of sociology at University of Massach...

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, "Banned: Immigration Enforcement in the Time of Trump" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Immigration is one of the most complex issues of our time in the United States and around the world. Enforcing immigration law in the U.S. involves a mix of courts and executive agencies with lots ...

Lisa King, “Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums” (Oregon State UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums (Oregon State University Press, 2017), Lisa King explores the ways in which rhetoric is used to represent Indigenous...

Mark Carnes, “Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“All classes are sorta boring” (p. 19). This statement is one that college students might believe, along with many of their professors, but not Dr. Mark Carnes, author of Minds on Fire: How Role-Im...

Matt Grossmann, "Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his book Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Matt Grossmann examines, first, the watershed event of Republican takeovers of...

Erika Dyck and Alex Deighton, “Managing Madness” (U Manitoba Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Embracing a multi-perspectival authorial voice, Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2017), tells the story ...

Jonathan Swarts, “Constructing Neoliberalism: Economic Transformation in Anglo-American Democracies” (University of Toronto Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The new book, Constructing Neoliberalism: Economic Transformation in Anglo-American Democracies (University of Toronto Press, 2013) shows how political elites in Britain, New Zealand, Australia ...

David Pettinicchio, "Politics of Empowerment: Disability Rights and the Cycle of American Policy Reform" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Pettinicchio has written Politics of Empowerment: Disability Rights and the Cycle of American Policy Reform (Stanford University Press, 2019). He is assistant professor of sociology at the Un...

Franklin Obeng-Odoom, “Reconstructing Urban Economics: Towards a Political Economy of the Built Environment” (Zed Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this interview, Carlo D’Ippoliti and Andrea Bernardi interview Franklin Obeng-Odoom who teaches urban economics and political economy in the School of Built Environment at the University of Tech...

Shaazka Beyerle, “Curtailing Corruption: People Power for Accountability and Justice” (Lynne Rienner, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shaazka Beyerle is the author of the new book, Curtailing Corruption: People Power for Accountability and Justice (Lynne Rienner 2014). Beyerle is senior adviser at the International Center on Nonv...

Darius Sollohub, "Millennials in Architecture: Generations, Disruption, and the Legacy of a Profession" (U Texas Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Much has been written about Millennials, but until now their growing presence in the field of architecture has not been examined in depth. In an era of significant challenges stemming from explosiv...

Joseph Nathan Cohen, “Financial Crisis in American Households” (Praeger, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are iPhones or homes bankrupting Americans? Joe Cohen‘s new book, Financial Crisis in American Households: The Basic Expenses That Bankrupt the Middle Class (Praeger, 2017), presents data and discu...

Leslie Grant, “West Meets East: Best Practices from Expert Teachers in the United States and China” (ASCD, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Teachers have recently become a target in the educational reform debate. Most would agree that great teachers are crucial for education. However, there is no singular formula for a great teacher. S...

Taylor Pendergrass, "Six by Ten: Stories from Solitary" (Haymarket Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Long-term solitary confinement meets the legal definition of torture, and yet solitary confinement is used in every state in the United States. People are placed in solitary confinement for a varie...

Zoe Wool, “After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zoe Wool‘s ethnography of rehabilitation After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed (Duke University Press, 2015) describes how soldiers injured in the war on terror are pulled towards a normal a...

Richard Starr, “Equal As Citizens: The Tumultuous and Troubled History of a Great Canadian Idea” (Formac, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“We are not half a dozen provinces. We are one great Dominion,” Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald proudly declared. More than a century later, Canada has 10 provinces and three north...

David Brooks, "The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life" (Random House, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Colleges and universities can play a virtual role in the moral, intellectual and spiritual development of a student’s life. But there is a growing mismatch between the culture of many campuses, and...

Vicki Bier, “Risk in Extreme Environments: Preparing, Avoiding, Mitigating, and Managing” (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Risk in Extreme Environments: Preparing, Avoiding, Mitigating, and Managing (Routledge, 2018), edited by Vicki Bier, is a series of multidisciplinary approaches to analysis of rare, severe risks. T...

Michael S. Roth, “Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters” (Yale University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With a new focus on vocational and work ready education, the notion of a liberal education is becoming less valued in American society. Though, there are still defenders of this well-rounded and cl...

Louis Hyman, "Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream became Temporary" (Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It has become a truism that work has become less secure and more precarious for a widening swath of American workers. Why and how this has happened, and what workers can and should do about it, is ...

Samuel Totten, “Sudan’s Nuba Mountains People Under Siege” (McFarland, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This podcast is usually devoted to book written about the past. The authors may be historians, or political scientists, or anthropologists, or even a member of the human rights community. But we’re...

Staci Zavattaro, “Cities for Sale: Municipalities as Public Relations and Marketing Firms” (SUNY Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Staci Zavattaro is the author of the new book Cities for Sale: Municipalities as Public Relations and Marketing Firms (SUNY Press, 2013). Zavattaro is assistant professor of public administration a...

Chris Arnade, "Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America" (Sentinel, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A lot of politicians like to say that there are “two Americas,” but do any of them know what life is really like for the marginalized poor? We speak with journalist and photographer, Chris Arnade, ...

Chris Zepeda-Millan, “Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Prior to the wave of protests in 2017 supporting immigrants in the US, there were the protests of 2006. That spring, millions of Latinos and other immigrants across the country opposed Congressiona...

Matt Grossmann, “Artists of the Possible: Governing Networks and American Policy Change Since 1945” (Oxford University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Matt Grossmann is back on the podcast with his newest book, Artists of the Possible: Governing Networks and American Policy Change Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2014). Grossmann is associate...

A. R. Ruis, "Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States" (Rutgers UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with A.R. Ruis about the 2017 book Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States – published in 2017 by Rutgers ...

Alexandra Dellios, “Histories of Controversy: Bonegilla Migrant Centre” (Melbourne UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Histories of Controversy: Bonegilla Migrant Centre (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), Alexandra Dellios, a Lecturer in Heritage Studies at the Australian National University,...

William Deresiewicz, “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life” (Free Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.”  This was the headline of a recent New Republic article that reverberated across the internet recently, going viral as it was shared over 160 thousands time...

Vicky Pryce, "Women vs. Capitalism: Why We Can't Have It All in a Free Market Economy" (Hurst, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Free market capitalism has failed women, and even the recent progress that had been made in closing the gender wage gap has leveled off in many rich democracies. Vicky Pryce helps us understand the...

Brian McCammack, “Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can we learn about African American life between the world wars if we center our attention on the parks and pleasuring grounds of the urban North? That is what historian Brian McCammack endeav...

Marianne Constable, “Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts” (Stanford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford UP, 2014), by UC Berkeley Professor of Rhetoric Marianne Constable, impels its readers to reassess the dominant methods of considering what is ...

Philip M. Napoli, "Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Philip M. Napoli has been thinking about algorithmic news and social media feed curation for quite some time, as he acknowledges in his new book, Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulat...

Malcolm Harris, “Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials” (Little, Brown and Co, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every young generation inspires a host of comparisons—usually negative ones—with older generations. Whether preceding a criticism or punctuating one, “kids these days” is a common utterance. Perhap...

John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen, The National Origins of Policy Ideas: ” (Princeton UP 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen are the authors of The National Origins of Policy Ideas: Knowledge Regimes in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark (Princeton University Press, 2014)...

William D. Lopez, "Separated: Family & Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What happens to families and communities after immigration raids? William D. Lopez answers this question and more in his new book Separated: Family & Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Ra...

Josh Lerner, “Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Josh Lerner is the author of Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics (MIT Press, 2014). Lerner earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from The New School fo...

Michael R. Boswell, "Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities" (Island Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities (Island Press, 2019) is designed to help planners, municipal staff and officials, citizens and others working at local...

Seth Barrett Tillman on the Foreign Emoluments Clause and President Trump from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Seth Barrett Tillman, an instructor in the Department of Law at Maynooth University in Ireland, is one of the few scholars to have researched and written about the history of the Foreign Emoluments...

Judith Kelley, “Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works, and Why It Often Fails” (Princeton UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Judith Kelley is the author of Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works, and Why It Often Fails (Princeton University  Press, 2012). Kelley is associate professor of publ...

Daniel T. Kirsch, "Sold My Soul for a Student Loan" (ABC-CLIO, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With free college in the national conversation, there’s been no better time for Daniel T. Kirsch’s new book Sold My Soul for a Student Loan: Higher Education and the Political Economy of the Future...

Thomas A. Bryer, “Higher Education Beyond Job Creation: Universities, Citizenship, and Community” (Lexington Books 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas A. Bryer joins the podcast to discuss his book Higher Education Beyond Job Creation: Universities, Citizenship, and Community (Lexington Books 2014). Dr. Bryer is the director of the Center ...

Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...

Judith Schindler and Judy Seldin-Cohen, “Recharging Judaism” (CCAR, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In their new book Recharging Judaism: How Civic Engagement is Good For Synagogues, Jews and America (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2017), Rabbi Judith Schindler and Judy Seldin-Cohen argue...

Darren Halpin, “The Organization of Political Interest Groups: Designing Advocacy” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Darren Halpin is the author of The Organization of Political Interest Groups: Designing Advocacy (Routledge 2014). Halpin is associate professor and reader in Policy Studies, and the Head of School...

Sarah Marie Wiebe, "Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley" (UBC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a foreword to Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), the public philosopher James Tully wr...

Suzanne Mettler, “Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream” (Basic Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From 1945 to the mid-1970s, the rate at which Americans went to and graduate from college rose steadily. Then, however, the rate of college going and completion stagnated. In 1980, a quarter of adu...

Paul Reville, "Broader, Bolder, Better: How Schools and Communities Help Students Overcome the Disadvantages of Poverty" (Harvard Ed Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If we want children from poor families and communities to succeed in school, then we must pay attention to more than merely what happens in school. With twelve case studies highlighting an array of...

Alice Echols, “Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse and a Hidden History of American Banking” (New Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alice Echols is a professor of history and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. In her book Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Colla...

Nick Smith, “Justice through Apologies: Remorse, Reform, and Punishment” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most people say “I’m sorry” a lot. After all, we make a lot of mistakes, most of them minor, so we don’t mind apologizing and expect our apologies to be accepted or at least acknowledged. But how m...

Amy Offner, "Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The neoliberal 1980s of austerity and privatization may appear as a break with the past—perhaps a model of government drawn up by libertarian economists. Not so, says Amy Offner in her spectacular ...

Patrick Burkart, “Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Contests” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The mid-’00s saw the rise of a political movement in Europe concerned with technocratic impositions on the ideals of free culture, privacy, government transparency and other technology policy issue...

Jonathan Rothwell, "A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Inequality in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the past decades -- on that there is agreement. There is less agreement on the causes of that inequality, the consequences of it, and, perhaps...

Mark Fenster, “The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (Stanford University Press, 2017) dispels the myth that transparency of information will result in a perfect governme...

David C. Berliner, Gene V. Glass et al., “50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools” (Teachers College Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David C. Berliner, Gene V. Glass, and associates are the authors of 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools: The Real Crisis in Education (Teachers College Press, 2014). Dr. Berlin...

Ruha Benjamin, "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. In Race Aft...

Austin Sarat, “Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty” (Stanford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we discuss the death penalty we usually ask two questions: 1) should the state be in the business of killing criminals?; and 2) if so, how should the state put their lives to an end? As Austin...

Mary Anne Franks, “The Cult of the Constitution” (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We Americans are defined by our Constitution and we cherish especially the First and Second Amendments. But like all texts, the Constitution can be read to empower and protect our individual rights...

Chelsea Schelly, “Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in America” (Rutgers UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Technology is a form of material culture and is a human activity. The way in which humans view technology is a social construction in which people use social processes of interpretation and negotia...

Douglas M. Thompson, “The Quest for the Golden Trout: Environmental Loss and America’s Iconic Fish” (University Press of New England, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Earlier this spring, I drove to a small beaver pond near my home in Colorado, snapped together my fishing rod, and cast a silver lure into the pond’s crystalline waters. Within twenty minutes, I’d ...

Johanna Taylor, "The Art Museum Redefined: Power, Opportunity, and Community Engagement" (Palgrave, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the future of the museum? In The Art Museum Redefined: Power, Opportunity, and Community Engagement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Johanna Taylor, an assistant professor at the Herberger Insti...

Olivier Zunz, “Philanthropy in America: A History” (Princeton UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Olivier Zunz is the author of Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton University Press 2014). The paperback addition of the book has recently been published with a new preface from the author...

William P. Hustwit, "Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode of Talking Legal History, Siobhan talks with William P. Hustwit about his book Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education (UNC Press, 2019). Hustwit is t...

New Books in Political Science Year-End Round Up, 2017 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We end the year by remembering our favorite authors, books, and some of the titles. There were so many great books written this year that we had the fun of reading and talking to a few of the autho...

Jane Maienschein, “Embryos Under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do we study the history of science? Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also help us to understand the foundations and assumption...

Bert A. Rockman and Andrew Rudalevige, "The Obama Legacy" (UP of Kansas, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Presidency scholars Bert A. Rockman and Andrew Rudalevige have compiled an excellent array of authors and essays in their edited volume, The Obama Legacy (University Press of Kansas, 2019). This bo...

Morris B. Hoffman, “The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do we feel guilty–and sometimes hurt ourselves–when we harm someone? Why do we become angry–and sometimes violent–when we see other people being harmed? Why do we forgive ourselves and others a...

Serin D. Houston, "Imagining Seattle: Social Values in Urban Governance" (U Nebraska Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Imagining Seattle: Social Values in Urban Governance (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), the geographer Serin Houston complicates Seattle’s liberal and progressive reputation through a close e...

Emery Roe, “Making the Most of Mess” (Duke UP 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emery Roe is the author of Making the Most of Mess: Reliability and Policy in Today’s Management Challenges (Duke UP 2014). Roe is senior associate with the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management ...

Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...

Frank Baumgartner, et al., “Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was constitutional if it complied with certain provisions designed to ensure that it was reserved for the ‘worst of th...

Marci A. Hamilton, “God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The constitution guarantees Americans freedom of religious practice and freedom from government interference in the same same. But what does religious liberty mean in practice? Does it mean that th...

Eileen Boris, "Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nati...

Amy Stambach, “Confucius and Crisis in American Universities” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Amy Stambach is the author of Confucius and Crisis in American Universities: Culture, Capital, and Diplomacy in U.S. Public Higher Education (Routledge, 2014). Dr. Stambach is a lecturer in Com...

Lynne Pettinger, "What’s Wrong with Work?" (Policy Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How should we understand work? In What’s Wrong with Work? (Policy Press, 2019), Lynn Pettinger, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, explores how work is organised, interc...

Melanee Thomas and Amanda Bittner, eds. “Mothers and Others: The Role of Parenthood in Politics” (UBC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Melanee Thomas and Amanda Bittner have assembled a fascinating and important exploration of the role, understanding, and perceptions of mothers and motherhood within the realm of politics. Mothers ...

Kevin J. Dougherty and Vikash Reddy, “Performance Funding for Higher Education” (Jossey-Bass, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kevin Dougherty and Vikash Reddy are the authors of Performance Funding for Higher Education: What Are the Mechanisms What Are the Impacts (Jossey-Bass, 2013). Dr. Dougherty is Associate Professor ...

Zoltan Hajnal, "Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Zoltan Hajnal examines the political impact of the two most...

Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger, “Robert Love’s Warnings” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

  In early America, the practice of “warning out” was unique to New England, a way for the community to regulate those who might fall into poverty and need assistance from the town or province. Ro...

Gary J. Adler, Jr., "Empathy Beyond US Borders: The Challenges of Transnational Civic Engagement" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Do immersion trips really transform those who participate and how so? In his new book Empathy Beyond US Borders: The Challenges of Transnational Civic Engagement (Cambridge University Press, 2019),...

James W. Russell, “Social Insecurity: 401(k)s and the Retirement Crisis” (Beacon Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jim Russell is a sociologist and it was his encounter with the hidden realities of his own 401(k) retirement plan that touched off his crusade to demystify for himself, and then others, just what w...

J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...

Kevan Harris, “A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran” (U. Cal Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kevan Harris is the author of A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran (University of California Press, 2017). Harris is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Cal...

Sharon K. Farber, “Hunger for Ecstasy: Trauma, the Brain, and the Influence of the Sixties” (Aronson, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It may seem silly to ask why we seek ecstasy. We seek it, of course, because it’s ECSTASY. We are evolved to want it. It’s our brain’s way of saying “Do this again and as often as possible.” But th...

Steven White, "World War II and American Racial Politics: Public Opinion, the Presidency, and Civil Rights Advocacy" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

World War II played an important role in the trajectory of race and American political development, but the War's effects were much more complex than many assume. In order to unpack these complexit...

Denise Brennan, “Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Denise Brennan‘s second book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States (Duke University Press, 2014), examines how individuals who were trafficked into forced labor go a...

Melanie Simms, "What Do We Know and What Should We Do About the Future of Work?" (Sage, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the future of work? In What Do We Know and What Should We Do About the Future of Work? (Sage, 2019), Melanie Simms, a Professor of Work and Employment at the University of Glasgow offers an...

Benjamin Radcliff, “The Political Economy of Happiness” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Americans are very politically divided. Democrats say we need a more powerful welfare state while Republicans say we need to maintain the free market. The struggle, we are constantly informed, is o...

David Farber, "Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A shattering account of the crack cocaine years from award-winning American historian David Farber, Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed (Cambridge University Press, 2019...

Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider, “The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Volatility. Instability. Insecurity. Precarity. There’s a burgeoning lexicon seeking to capture the grim economic state of more and more Americans. Join us as Jonathan Morduch describes what he and...

Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” (Henry Holt, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The paleontologist Michael Benton describes a mass extinction event as a time when “vast swaths of the tree of life are cut short, as if by crazed, axe wielding madmen.” Elizabeth Kolbert‘s new boo...

Elizabeth F. Cohen and Cyril Ghosh, "Citizenship" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Political Theorists Elizabeth F. Cohen and Cyril Ghosh have written a sharp, concise, and complex analysis of the concept of citizenship, the theoretical origins of the term and idea, and they have...

Miriam Kingsberg, “Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History” (University of California Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Miriam Kingsberg‘s fascinating new book offers both a political and social history of modern Japan and a global history of narcotics in the modern world. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in...

Wendy Brown, "In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Neoliberalism is one of those fuzzy words that can mean something different to everyone. Wendy Brown is one of the world’s leading scholars on neoliberalism and argue that a generation of neolibera...

Jennifer Randles, “Proposing Prosperity? Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Marriage is the foundation of a successful society,” proclaimed the Clinton-era welfare reform bill. Since then, national and state governments have spent nearly a billion dollars on programs desi...

Adam Thierer, “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom” (Mercatus Center, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Much of the progress in technology today has come about as a result of innovators who did not seek prior approval from regulatory bodies and such. Yet, even with the beneficial results from innovat...

T. L. Bunyasi and C. W. Smith, "Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith have written an accessible and important book about the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and broader considerations of, essentially, how we got to where...

Nicholas Carnes, “White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas Carnes is the author of White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Carnes is an assistant professor of public policy i...

Lucas Richert, “Strange Trips: Science, Culture, and the Regulation of Drugs” (McGill-Queens UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Strange Trips isn’t only the title of Dr. Lucas Richert’s new book; it’s also a good description of the journey substances take from the black market to the doctor’s black bag—and, sometimes, back ...

Sandra F. Sperino and Suja A. Thomas, “Unequal: How American Courts Undermine Discrimination Law” (Oxford University Press, 2017 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The recent spate of revelations about high-profile sexual predators who have been harassing and assaulting women, sometimes for decades, along with the #MeToo campaign, have drawn renewed attention...

Arica L. Coleman, “That the Blood Stay Pure” (Indiana UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Arica Coleman did not start out to write a legal history of “the one-drop rule,” but as she began exploring the relationship between African American and Native peoples of Virginia, she unraveled t...

Andrew Sidman, "Pork Barrel Politics: How Government Spending Determines Elections in a Polarized Era" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

n Andrew Sidman, Pork Barrel Politics: How Government Spending Determines Elections in a Polarized Era (Columbia University Press, 2019), offers a systematic explanation for how political polarizat...

Odette Lienau, “Rethinking Sovereign Debt” (Harvard UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1927 Russian-American legal theorist Alexander Sack introduced the doctrine of “odious debt.” Sack argued that a state’s debt is “odious” and should not be transferable to successor governments ...

Bryan Jones, "The Great Broadening: How the Vast Expansion of the Policymaking Agenda Transformed American Politics" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bryan Jones, Sean Theriault, and Michelle Whyman are out with a big book on with a provocative thesis. In The Great Broadening: How the Vast Expansion of the Policymaking Agenda Transformed America...

Carlo C. DiClemente, “Substance Abuse Treatment and the Stages of Change: Selecting and Planning Interventions” (Guilford Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I talk with Carlo C. DiClemente, a Presidential Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland- Baltimore County, about his co-authored book, Subs...

Mark Winne, "Food Town USA: Seven Unlikely Cities that are Changing the Way We Eat" (Island Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cities are extremely complex institutions to understand and are continually changing. A central place to make sense of the complexities of a city is the food that is grown and sold in these areas. ...

James Forman Jr., “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this podcast I talk with James Forman Jr. about his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). Mass incarceration and the carceral state ar...

Constance DeVereaux and Martin Griffin, “Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy” (Ashgate, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (Ashgate, 2013), a new book by Constance DeVereaux (Colorado State University) and Martin Griffin (Uni...

Harriet Washington, "A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind" (Little, Brown Spark, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Environmental racism is visible not only as cancer clusters or the location of grocery stores. It is responsible for the reported gap in IQ scores between white Americans and Black, Latinx, and Nat...

Sara Bannerman, “The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842-1971” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842-1971, Sara Bannerman narrates the complex story of Canada’s copyright policy since the mid-19th century. The book detai...

Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, "Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America" (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1970s America, politicians began "getting tough" on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's s...

Bryant Simon, “The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives” (The New Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On September 3, 1991, a fire erupted at the Imperial Foods factory in the small town of Hamlet, North Carolina. Twenty-five people died behind the factory’s locked doors that morning. Most of the v...

Karen G. Weiss, “Party School: Crime, Campus, and Community” (Northeastern UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I sit down with Karen G. Weiss, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University, to talk about her book, Party School: Crime, Campus...

Celeste Watkins-Hayes, "Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do women -- especially poor and low-income women with histories of childhood sexual trauma and drug addiction -- respond to and deal with an HIV/AIDS diagnosis? How do some manage to not merely...

Patrick Weil, “The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Patrick Weil is the author of The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He is a visiting Professor of Law at Yale La...

Sarah Halpern-Meekin, "Social Poverty: Low-Income Parents and the Struggle for Family and Community Ties" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Does a person’s well-being go well beyond how much money they have in their bank account? In Social Poverty: Low-Income Parents and the Struggle for Family and Community Ties (NYU Press, 2019), Dr....

Robert Darnton, “On the Future of Libraries” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Darnton, author of books, articles, and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard. Darnton joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss the future ...

Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind, "Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Small is beautiful, right? Isn't that what we've all been taught? From Jeffersonian politics to the hallowed family farm, from craft breweries to tech start ups in the garage. Small business is the...

Alfred Moore, “Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Problem of Expertise” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to a challenge going back to Plato, democracy is unacceptable as a mode of political organization, because it distributes political power equally among those who are unequal in wisdom. Pl...

Patrick Burkart, “Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Conflicts” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Patrick Burkart‘s Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Conflicts (MIT Press, 2014) considers the democratic potential and theoretical significance of groups espousing radical perspectives on...

Anthony Ryan Hatch, "Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over the past forty years, U.S. prisons and jails have used various psychotropic drugs. In this interview, Anthony Ryan Hatch discusses the need to think deeply about mass incarceration, pharmaceut...

James E. Fleming and Linda C. McClain, “Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues” (Harvard UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many have argued in recent years that the U.S. constitutional system exalts individual rights over responsibilities, virtues, and the common good. Answering the charges against liberal theories of ...

Eric Blanc, "Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics" (Verso, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Blanc is the author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics(Verso, 2019). Blanc is a former teacher, journalist, and doctoral student in sociology at New York...

Heath Fogg Davis, “Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?” (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do we have sex-segregated restrooms? Are they necessary? What about your drivers license? Have you thought of why your designated sex category is listed, despite your picture and all other rele...

Tom Sorell, “Emergencies and Politics: A Sober Hobbesian Approach” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Emergencies and Politics: A Sober Hobbesian Approach (Cambridge UP, 2013), Tom Sorell argues that emergencies can justify types of action that would normally be regarded as wrong. Beginning with...

Caitlyn Collins, "Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Where in the world do working moms have it best? In her new book, Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (Princeton University Press, 2019), Caitlyn Collins explores how wo...

Frances Moore Lappe and Adam Eichen, “Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want” (Beacon Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is right about democracy? In Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want (Beacon Press, 2017), Frances Moore Lappe and Adam Eichen seek out an answer. La...

Brian Allen Drake, “Loving Nature, Fearing the State” (University of Washington Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do Barry Goldwater, Edward Abbey, and Henry David Thoreau have in common? On the surface, they would seem to be at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. As Brian Allen Drake shows, howeve...

Hye-Kyung Lee, "Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why does Korean cultural policy matter? In Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State (Routledge, 2018), Hye-Kyung Lee, a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at Kings...

Jamin Creed Rowan, “The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition” (U. Penn Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jamin Creed Rowan is an assistant professor of English and American Studies at Brigham Young University. His book The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition (University of Pennsylvania P...

Gayle Kaufman, “Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Family in the 21st Century” (NYU Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pretty much every day you can read an article–usually somewhat intemperate–about how women can or can’t “have it all.” Rarely, however, do you read anything about the way in which men try to balanc...

David Karol, "Red, Green, and Blue: The Partisan Divide on Environmental Issues" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Karol’s new book, Red, Green, and Blue: The Partisan Divide on Environmental Issues (Cambridge University Press, 2019), examines the history of environmental policy within American political ...

Allison Perlman, “Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over U.S. Television” (Rutgers UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since its infancy, television has played an important role in shaping U.S. values and the American sense of self. Social activists recognized this power immediately and, consequently, set about try...

Mark A. Largent, “Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Children born in the 1970s and 1980s received just a handful of vaccinations: measles, rubella, and a few others. Beginning the 1990s, the numbers of mandated vaccines exploded, so that today a ful...

Marisol LeBrón, "Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marisol LeBrón’s new book, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019), examines the rise of and resistance to punitive governance ...

Gareth M. Thomas, “Down’s Syndrome Screening and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Drawing on an ethnography of Down’s syndrome screening in two UK clinics, Gareth M. Thomas‘ Down’s Syndrome and Reproductive Politics: Care, Choice, and Disability in the Prenatal Clinic (Routledge...

Virginia Gray et al., “Interest Group$ and Health Care Reform Across the United State$” (Georgetown UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Virginia Gray, David Lowery, and Jennifer Benz are the authors of Interest Group$ and Health Care Reform Across the United State$ (Georgetown University Press, 2013). Gray is Distinguished Professo...

Ben Merriman, "Conservative Innovators: How States Are Challenging Federal Power" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Expansion of federal power has typically come with the consent of states, often eager to receive the funding tied to new policy priorities. Not so any more, as some states have famously rejected fu...

Timothy LaPira, “Revolving Door Lobbying: Public Service, Private Influence, and the Unequal Representation of Interests” (U Press of Kansas, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Timothy LaPira and Herschel Thomas are the authors of Revolving Door Lobbying: Public Service, Private Influence, and the Unequal Representation of Interests (University Press of Kansas, 2017). LaP...

Gregory Heller, “Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gregory Heller is the author of Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Heller is Senior Advisor at Econsult Solutions, Inc. ...

Clare Daniel, "Mediating Morality: The Politics of Teen Pregnancy in the Post-Welfare Era" (U Massachusetts Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Clare Daniel (she/hers)--Administrative Assistan...

Ilana Gershon, “Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today” (U. Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Labor markets are not what they used to be, as Ilana Gershon argues in Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Job seekers a...

Thom Brooks, “Punishment” (Routledge, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Social stability and justice requires that we live together according to rules. And this in turn means that the rules must be enforced. Accordingly, we sometimes see fit to punish those who break t...

Joseph C. Sternberg, "The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future" (PublicAffairs, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joseph C. Sternberg's book The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future (PublicAffairs, 2019) is an analysis of the economic condition of the Millennial genera...

Heather Silber Mohamed, “The New Americans? Immigration, Protest, and The Politics of Latino Identity” (U Press of Kansas, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The New Americans? Immigration, Protest, and The Politics of Latino Identity (University Press of Kansas, 2017) by Heather Silber Mohamed weaves together a number of different strands within the di...

Jonathan V. Last, “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Crisis” (Encounter Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most people who listen to this podcast will know that places like Japan, Italy, and Germany are in the midst of a demographic crisis. The trouble is that people in those countries are not having en...

Alexander Garvin, "The Heart of the City: Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Century" (Island Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Downtowns are more than economic engines: they are repositories of knowledge and culture and generators of new ideas, technology, and ventures. They are the heart of the city that drives its future...

Justin Gest, “The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In our era of economic instability, rising inequality, and widespread immigration, complaints about fairness and life chances are coming from an interesting source: white people, specifically membe...

John O. McGinnis, “Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology” (Princeton UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The advent of very powerful computers and the Internet have not “changed everything,” but it has created a new communications context within which almost everything we do will be somewhat changed. ...

Matt Guardino, "Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in US Public Policy" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Neoliberal policies have been a primary feature of American political economy for decades. In Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in US Public Policy (Oxford Uni...

Claire D. Clark, “The Recovery Revolution” (Columbia UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Before the 1960s, doctors were generally in control of the treatment of drug addicts. And that made a certain sense, because drug addicts had something that looked a lot like a disease or mental il...

Colin Gordon, “Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality” (Institute for Policy Studies, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Americans seem to be more concerned about economic inequality today than they have been in living memory. The Occupy Movement (“We are the 99%”) is only the most visible sign of this growing unease...

Annalee Good, "Teachers at the Table: Voice, Agency, and Advocacy in Educational Policymaking" (Lexington Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Annalee Good, an evaluator and researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, joins us in this episode to discuss her recently published book, T...

Victor Tan Chen, “Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy” (U. California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are nearly a decade removed from the start of the Great Recession, and many indicators show that the economy is doing relatively well. But during this economic catastrophe, a significant number ...

Marc Mauer, “Race to Incarcerate” (New Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The American penitentiary model began as not merely a physical construct, but as a philosophical and religious one. Prisoners were to use their time in silence and isolation to contemplate their cr...

Brian A. Jackson, "Practical Terrorism Prevention" (RAND Corporation, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Practical Terrorism Prevention: Reexamining U.S. National Approaches to Addressing the Threat of Ideologically Motivated Violence (RAND Corporation, 2019), examines past countering-violent-extremis...

Anita Hannig, “Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (U. Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anita Hannig‘s first book, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is an in-depth, ethnography of two fistula repair and rehabilit...

Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick, “Reducing Gun Violence in America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all heard the saying that when arguing we should ‘disagree without being disagreeable’ but, when it comes to guns, we often find ourselves disagreeing without actually disagreeing. Most Ameri...

A. Harkins and M. McCarroll, "Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (West Virginia University Press, 2019) is a retort, at turn rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow J.D. Vance’s Hillb...

Melvin R. Adams, “Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation” (Washington State University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In May, a tunnel filled with radioactive waste collapsed at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, making international news. This incident highlighted the costs and challenges of cle...

Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich, “The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich are authors of the provocative new book, The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies (Rowman and Littlefield 2013). Dr. Tienken is an assistant professo...

David Bissell, "Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What kind of time do we endure on our daily commutes? What kind of space do we occupy? What new sorts of urbanites do we thereby become? In Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities (M...

Daniel P. Keating, “Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity” (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anxiety has become a social epidemic. People feel anxious all the time about nearly everything: their work, families, and even survival. However, research shows that some of us are more prone to ch...

Steven Hill, “Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age” (University of California Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What can the United States learn from Europe? One good answer, says Steven Hill, is social capitalism, a form of economic management that is responsive to markets and productive of broadly-shared p...

J. Dyck and E. Lascher, "Initiatives without Engagement: A Realistic Appraisal of Direct Democracy’s Secondary Effects" (U Michigan Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ballot initiatives offer voters the chance to directly determine the outcome of state policy change. Do Americans who vote on initiatives grow in political efficacy and participate more in the futu...

“Latino City Part II: An Interview with Llana Barber.” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Latino City: Immigration and Urban Crisis in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1945-2000 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Dr. Llana Barber explores the transformation of Lawrence into New Engla...

Kathleen J. Frydl, “The War on Drugs in America, 1940-1973” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs.” We are still fighting that war today. According to many people, we’ve lost but don’t know it. Rates of drug use in the US remain, by hist...

Diane Tober, "Romancing the Sperm: Shifting Biopolitics and the Making of Modern Families" (Rutgers UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The development of a whole suite of new reproductive technologies in recent decades has contributed to broad cultural conversations and controversies over the meaning of family in the United States...

Jordan Lacey, “Sonic Rupture: A Practice-led Approach to Urban Soundscape Design” (Bloomsbury, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sonic Rupture: A Practice-led Approach to Urban Soundscape Design (Bloomsbury 2016) by Jordan Lacey offers a practice-led alternative approach to urban soundscape design. Rather than understanding ...

Thane Rosenbaum, “Payback: The Case for Revenge” (Chicago UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

All humans have an emotionally-driven sense of fairness. We get treated unfairly and we get mad. It’s no wonder, then, that our laws–and those of almost everyone else–are intended to assure that pe...

David Courtwright, "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are living in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and binge eating to pornography and opioid abuse. Today I talked with historian David Courtwright about the global nature of pleasure, v...

Tom Adam Davies, “Mainstreaming Black Power” (U. Cal Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is Black Power? Does it still exist in the so-called post-racial 21st Century? How does Black Power relate to similar movements, like Black Lives Matter? There as so many questions, but there ...

Paul Barrett, “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun” (Broadway, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

History is in many respects the story of humanity’s quest for transcendence: to control life and death, time and space, loss and memory. When inventors or companies effectively tap into these needs...

Carrie Baker, "Fighting the US Youth Sex Trade: Gender, Race, and Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Campaigns against prostitution of young people in the United States have surged and ebbed multiple times over the last fifty years. Carrie Baker's Fighting the US Youth Sex Trade: Gender, Race, and...

Oscar Fernandez, “The Calculus of Happiness” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The book discussed here is entitled The Calculus of Happiness: How a Mathematical Approach to Life Adds Up to Health, Wealth, and Love (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Oscar Fernandez. If the ...

Steven J. Harper, “The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis” (Basic Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A friend of mine who had just graduated from law school said “Law school is great. The trouble is that when you are done you’re a lawyer.” Steven J. Harper would, after a fashion, agree (though he...

Lindsey N. Kingston, "Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lindsey N. Kingston’s new book, Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights (Oxford University Press, 2019) interrogates the idea of citizenship itself, what it means, how it works, how it is ...

Peter John Chen, “Animal Welfare in Australia: Politics and Policy” (Sydney UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Animal Welfare in Australia: Politics and Policy (Sydney University Press, 2016), Peter John Chen, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Sydney, explores the issue of anima...

Jared Diamond, “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?” (Viking, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s pretty common–and has long been–for people to think that the “way it used to be” is better than the way it is. This tendency to idealize an (imagined) past is particularly strong today among c...

Jeanne Theoharis, "The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this New Books Network/Gotham Center for NYC History podcast, guest host Beth Harpaz, editor of the City University of New York website SUM, interviews Jeanne Theoharis, distinguished professor ...

Mary E. Adkins, “Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution” (University Press of Florida, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mary E. Adkins has written Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution (University Press of Florida, 2016), an account of the reformation of the Florida state co...

Andrew Koppelman, “The Tough Luck Constitution and the Assault on Health Care Reform” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every hundred years or so, the Supreme Court decides a question with truly vast economic implications. In 2012 such a decision was handed down, in a case that had the potential to affect the econom...

Jessica A. J. Rich, "State-Sponsored Activism: Bureaucrats and Social Movements in Democratic Brazil" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Rich’s new book, State-Sponsored Activism: Bureaucrats and Social Movements in Democratic Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is a fascinating and important examination of civil-state...

Christopher Mele, “Race and the Politics of Deception: The Making of an American City” (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Urban sociologists typically use a few grand narratives to explain the path of the American city through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. These include industrialization, mass immig...

Stephen T. Asma, “Against Fairness” (University of Chicago, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Modern liberalism is built on the principle of equality and its corollary, the principle of fairness (treating equals equally). But have we taken the one and the other too far? Are we deceiving our...

Michael A. Cohen, "Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We are fed a steady stream of doom and gloom—terrorist attacks, erosion of democracy, robots taking our jobs. But Michael A. Cohen and his co-author Mich Zenko argue in Clear and Present Safety: Th...

Lee Trepanier, ed. “Why the Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education” (Lexington Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lee Trepanier, Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, edited this important analysis of why the humanities matter, especially within higher education. Trepan...

Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky, “How Much is Enough: Money and the Good Life” (Other Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do we work so hard, and should we? These are the questions that Robert and Edward Skidelsky explore in their thought provoking book How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life (Other Press, 20...

Jonathan Marks, "The Perils of Partnership: Industry Influence, Institutional Integrity, and Public Health" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is an article of faith in many circles that the most effective and efficient way to solve a broad range of local and national problems is through public-private partnerships. What’s not to like?...

David Garland, “The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is a welfare state? What is it for? Does the U.S. have one? Does it work at cross-purposes to a free-market economy or is it, in fact, essential to the functioning of modern, post-industrial s...

Matthew Wisnioski, “Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his compelling and fascinating account of how engineers navigated new landscapes of technology and its discontents in 1960s America, Matthew Wisnioski takes us into the personal and professional...

Mollie Gerver, "The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation" (U Edinburgh Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Moral and political theorists have paid a healthy amount of attention to states’ rights to determine who may reside within their territory.  Accordingly, there’s a large literature on immigration, ...

B. Harrison and M. Michelson, “Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian F. Harrison and Melissa R. Michelson‘s, Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a broad interrogation of the way that public opin...

Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help” (Basic Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In their book Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It (Basic Books, 2012), Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. present the fol...

Abraham A. Singer, "The Form of the Firm: A Normative Political Theory of the Corporation" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Form of the Firm: A Normative Political Theory of the Corporation (Oxford University Press, 2018), Abraham Singer essentially marries together two disciplinary schools of thought and approac...

Lotta Bjorklund Larsen,”Shaping Taxpayers: Values in Action at the Swedish Tax Agency” (Berghahn Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do you make taxpayers comply? Lotta Bjorklund Larsen‘s ethnography, Shaping Taxpayers: Values in Action at the Swedish Tax Agency (Berghahn Books, 2017) offers a vivid, yet nuanced account of ...

John Wood, “Creating Room to Read” (Viking Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope in the Battle for Global Literacy (Viking Press, 2013), John Wood presents this big idea: you can change the world if want to. The nice thing about John’s...

Nancy Tomes, "Remaking the American Patient" (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a work that spans the twentieth century, Nancy Tomes questions the popular--and largely unexamined--idea that in order to get good health care, people must learn to shop for it. Remaking the Ame...

Stafanie Deluca, et.al. “Coming of Age in the Other America” (Russell Sage Foundation, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Do you think that what poor people most need to escape poverty is grit? Join us as we speak with Stefanie Deluca, co-author, along with Susan Clampet-Lundquist and Kathryn Edin, of Coming of Age in...

Scott Melzer, “Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War” (NYU Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scott Melzer is the author of Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War (New York University Press, 2012). Scott earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside and now is an associate pro...

William Gale, "Fiscal Therapy: Curing America's Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The US government is laboring under an enormous debt burden, one that will impact the living standards of future generations of Americans by limiting investment in people and infrastructure. In his...

Rosemary Corbett, “Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Controversy” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Among the most powerful and equally insidious aspects of the new global politics of religion is the discourse of religious moderation that seeks to produce moderate religious subjects at ease with ...

Amy Lonetree, “Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums” (University of North Carolina, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Museums can be very painful sites for Native peoples,” writes Amy Lonetree, associate professor of history at UC-Santa Cruz and a citizen of the Ho Chunk Nation, “as they are intimately tied to th...

Christof Spieler, "Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit" (Island Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christof Spieler, PE, LEED AP, is a Vice President and Director of Planning at Huitt-Zollars and a lecturer in Architecture and Engineering at Rice University. He was a member of the board of direc...

John Hudak, “Marijuana: A Short History” (Brookings, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Hudak‘s book Marijuana: A Short History (Brookings Institutions Press, 2016) is an accessible and informative dive into marijuana on a number of levels and from a variety of perspectives. Huda...

John Lauritz Larson, “The Market Revolution: Liberty, Ambition and the Eclipse of the Common Good” (Cambridge UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The mass industrial democracy that is the modern United States bears little resemblance to the simple agrarian republic that gave it birth. The market revolution is the reason for this dramatic an...

Jill Stauffer, "Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard" (Columbia UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard (Columbia University Press 2015, paperback 2018), Jill Stauffer argues that survivors of unjust treatment and dehumanization can experience f...

Benjamin Hale, “The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many environmentalists approach the problem of motivating environmentally friendly behavior from the perspective that nature is good and that we ought to act so as to maximize the good environmenta...

David Chura, “I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup” (Beacon Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is easy to dismiss juveniles in prison as “bad seeds”, as people with which we have nothing in common, and of which we want only distance. David Chura, however, did not maintain his distance, an...

Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World (MIT Press, 2018), Dr. Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about the Anthropocene ...

Timothy D. Walker, “Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms” (W. W. Norton, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I speak with Tim Walker, the author of Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017). This book stems from recent interest in Finlan...

Isaac Campos, “Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs” (UNC Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Isaac Campos is the author of Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Campos is an assistant professor of history at the Universit...

Andra Gillespie, "Race and the Obama Administration: Substance, Symbols, and Hope" (Manchester UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Scholars and pundits have been busy trying to assess the legacy of President Barack Obama. Few have done so with the nuance and comparative approach of Andra Gillespie. In her new book Race and the...

Eugene Raikhel, “Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic” (Cornell UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alcoholism is a strange thing. That it exists, no one seriously doubts. But it’s not entirely clear (diagnostically speaking) what it is, who has it, how they get it, or how to treat it. The answer...

Jesse Rhodes, “An Education in Politics: The Origin and Evolution of No Child Left Behind” (Cornell UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jesse Rhodes‘ book An Education in Politics: The Origin and Evolution of No Child Left Behind (Cornell University Press, 2012). The book synthesizes nearly forty years of US political history. It...

Emily Dawson, "Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who is excluded from science? What is the role of museums in this exclusion? In Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups (Routledge, 2019), Dr Emily Da...

Michael Diamond, “Discovering Organizational Identity: Dynamics of Relational Attachment” (U. of Missouri, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Psychological and psychoanalytic principles are often associated with individuals and therapist-client pairs, though they have plenty to bear on understanding and helping organizations in trouble. ...

Barry Schwartz, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less – How the Culture of Abundance Robs Us of Satisfaction” (Harper Perennial, 2003) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is there such a thing as too much choice? In The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less – How the Culture of Abundance Robs Us of Satisfaction (Harper Perennial, 2005), author Barry Schwartz answers w...

Jamila Lee-Johnson, and Ashley Gaskew, "Critical Theory and Qualitative Data Analysis in Education" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jamila Lee-Johnson and Ashley Gaskew, doctoral students in education at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, join us in this episode to discuss their recently published co-edited volume entitled,...

Michael A. McCarthy, “Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal” (Cornell UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over half of Americans approaching retirement age report having no money saved for retirement, but how did we get here as a nation? In his book, Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and Amer...

David Linen, “The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good” (Viking, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What happens in our brains when we do things that feel good, such as drinking a glass of wine, exercising, or gambling? How and why do we become addicted to certain foods, chemicals and behaviors? ...

Anthony Nownes, "Organizing for Transgender Rights: Collective Action, Group Development, and the Rise of a New Social Movement" (SUNY Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hard won transgender rights have been under attack by the Trump administration. Officials across government have sought to overturn decisions made by the Obama administration to expand rights to tr...

Cristina Bicchieri, “Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Humans engage in a wide variety of collective behaviors, ranging from simple customs like wearing a heavy coat in winter to more complex group actions, as when an audience gives applause at the clo...

Elizabeth Brake, “Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From the time we are children, we are encouraged to see our lives as in large measure aimed at finding a spouse. In popular media, the unmarried adult is seen as suspicious, unhealthy, and pitiable...

Max Felker-Kantor, "Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In recent years, the treatment of African Americans by police departments around the country has come under increased public scrutiny. As any student of the longer historical relationship between l...

Michaela DeSoucey, “Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A heritage food in France, and a high-priced obscurity in the United States. But in both countries, foie gras, the specially fattened liver of a duck or goose, has the power to stir a remarkable ar...

Sally Pipes, “The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare” (Regnery Publishing, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare (Regnery Publishing, 2012), Sally C. Pipes, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Pacific Research Instit...

Allison Schrager, "An Economist Walks Into A Brothel And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk" (Portfolio, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Whether you are a commuter weighing options of taking the bus vs walking to get you to work on time or a military general leading troops into war, risk is something we deal with every day. Even the...

Pat Farenga on John Holt’s “Freedom and Beyond” (HoltGWS LLC, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I speak with Pat Farenga about the new edition of John Holt’s Freedom and Beyond (HoltGWS LLC, 2017). This book offers a broad critique of traditional schooling and its capacity fo...

Lynn Stout, “Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People” (Princeton UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lynn Stout‘s pathbreaking book Cultivating Conscience:How Good Laws Make Good People (Princeton University Press, 2010) represents a much-needed update to the discipline of law and economics. Using...

Sarah Reckhow, "Outside Money in School Board Elections: The Nationalization of Education Politics" (Harvard Education Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who funds local school board elections? Local residents or major donors living elsewhere? Jeffrey R. Henig, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Sarah Reckhow seek to answer this question in Outside Money in Scho...

Daniel Immerwahr, “Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Modernization dominates development’s historiography. Historians characterize moments in development’s history–from the Tennessee Valley Authority to US-led “nation-building”in the Third World–as h...

Naomi Schaefer Riley, “The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For” (Ivan R. Dee, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Pay For (Ivan R. Dee, 2011), Naomi Schaefer Riley, former Wall Street Journal editor and affiliat...

John Komlos, "Foundations of Real-World Economics: What Every Economics Student Needs to Know" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I met with John Komlos, an American economic historian of Hungarian descent and former holder of the Chair of Economic History at the University of Munich. We spoke about his latest book, Foundatio...

Joan Maya Mazelis, “Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor” (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A number of recent events (the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign) have brought inequality and poverty into national conversation. In an age of economic u...

David Feith, “Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education” (Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2011), David Feith, Chairman of the Civic Education Initiative and assistant editor at The Wall Stre...

Kevin T. Smiley, "Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of Our Urban Future" (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are market cities better than people cities? Does the satisfaction that residents take in their city vary from market city to people city? In Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of Our Urban Fu...

Travis Linnemann, “Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power” (NYU Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If all you knew about methamphetamines came from popular culture (“Breaking Bad”) or government anti-drug campaigns (“Faces of Meth”), then you’d probably think that the typical meth user was a une...

David Horowitz, “A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in this Life and the Next” (Regnery Publishing, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next (Regnery Publishing, 2011), David Horowitz, long ago editor of Ramparts magazine and creator of the Center for ...

Vivian Percy, "Saving Jenny: Rescuing Our Youth from America's Opioid and Suicide Epidemic" (Radius Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Normal turned to PTSD and a substance abuse nightmare for Jenny the instant a taxi struck her, catapulting her twenty feet across a busy New York City street. Jenny is one of the lucky ones to have...

Veronica Herrera, “Water and Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico” (U. Michigan Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Veronica Herrera has written Water & Politics: Clientelism and Reform in Urban Mexico (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Herrera is assistant professor of political science at the University of ...

Ron Christie, “Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new bookActing White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), former White House aide Ron Christie recounts the history of the pejorative term “acting white.” He tra...

Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr., "Reading Politics with Machiavelli" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr., in his new book, Reading Politics with Machiavelli(Oxford University Press, 2018), puts himself and the reader into conversation with Machiavelli, exploring Machiavelli’s th...

Randy Stoecker, “Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement” (Temple UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s common for colleges in the U.S. to have service learning programs of one kind or another. These are sometimes criticized as being liberal or even radical endeavors — especially if “social just...

Samuel Zipp, “Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’ve ever lived in New York City, you know exactly what a “pre-war building” is. First and foremost, it’s better than a “post-war building.” Why, you might ask, is that so? Well part of the r...

Linda K. Wertheimer, "Faith Ed: Teaching About Religion in an Age of Intolerance" (Beacon Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Faith Ed: Teaching About Religion in an Age of Intolerance (Beacon Press, 2017) by Linda K. Wertheimer profiles the beauty and difficulty of teaching about religion in public schools. Teaching abou...

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy” (The New Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How might we account for the rapid rise of for-profit educational institutions over the past few decades, who are the students who attend them, how can we evaluate what those schools do and why, an...

Alan Jacobs, “The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press, 2011), Alan Jacobs, Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English at Wheaton College, discusses the state of...

Tom Wheeler, "From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future" (Brookings, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It's easy to get sidetracked while writing a book. But imagine being interrupted by the President of the United States. That happened to Tom Wheeler, who was in the midst of writing a history of co...

Amy Brown, “A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School (U. Minnesota Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There has been much talk in the news recently about funding for public education, the emergence of charter schools, and the potential of school vouchers. How much does competition for financing in ...

Mikaila Lemonik Arthur, “Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education” (Ashgate, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Colleges and universities have a reputation for being radical places where tenured radicals teach radical ideas. Don’t believe it. Consider this: the set of academic departments that one finds in ...

Candis Watts Smith, "Black Politics in Transition: Immigration, Suburbanization, and Gentrification" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Candis Watts Smith and Christina Greer are the editors of Black Politics in Transition: Immigration, Suburbanization, and Gentrification (Routledge, 2019). Smith is assistant professor of public po...

Kathleen Dolan, “When Does Gender Matter? Women Candidates and Gender Stereotypes in American Elections” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Does sex play a determinative role in political contests? Recognising the dual political realities of voters holding gender stereotypes and female candidates achieving electoral success, Kathleen D...

Mara Hvistendahl, “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men” (PublicAffairs, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The students in my undergraduate class on gender, sexuality, and human rights are a pretty tough bunch. They know they’re in for some unpleasant topics: sex trafficking, domestic violence, mass rap...

I. Gould Ellen and J. Steil, "The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates about Housing, Segregation, and Opportunity" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do people live where they do? What explains the persistence of residential segregation? Why is it complicated to address residential segregation? Please join me as I meet with Dr. Ingrid Gould ...

Harris Beider, “White Working-Class Voices: Multiculturalism, Community-Building, and Change” (Policy Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Harris Beider is the author of White Working-Class Voices: Multiculturalism, Community-Building, and Change (Policy Press, 2015). Beider is chair in Community Cohesion at the Center for Trust, Peac...

Ben Shapiro, “Primetime Propaganda: The True Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV” (Broadside Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV (Broadside Books, 2011), Ben Shapiro, who is the youngest person ever to get a nationally syndicate...

Tina Sikka, "Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable" (Springer, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can feminist theory help address the climate crisis? In Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable (Springer Verlag, 2019), Tina Sikka, a lecturer in media and cu...

Mical Raz, “What’s Wrong with the Poor: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty” (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In What’s Wrong with the Poor: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Mical Raz offers a deep dive into the theoretical roots of the Head Start program...

Elaine Sciolino, “La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life” (Times Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life(Times Books, 2011), Elaine Sciolino, Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, explores the role of seduction in the French way o...

Richa Kaul Padte, "Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography" (Penguin Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Parents, teachers, feminists, conservatives, lawyers, the concerned citizen – pornography raises everyone's hackles. Author Richa Kaul Padte approaches pornography with a combination of light-heart...

Ellen Hazelkorn, “The Civic University: The Policy and Leadership Challenges” (Edward Elgar, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ellen Hazelkorn, Policy Advisor to the Higher Education Authority (HEA), and Director, Higher Education Policy Research Unit (HEPRU), Dublin Institute of Technology, joins the New Books Network to ...

Max Singer, “History of the Future: The Shape of the World to Come Is Visible Today” (Lexington Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, History of the Future: The Shape of the World to Come Is Visible Today (Lexington Books, 2011), Max Singer, Senior Fellow and co-founder of the Hudson Institute, argues that the hu...

Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...

Justin Parkhurst, “The Politics of Evidence: From Evidence-Based Policy to the Good Governance of Evidence” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the role of evidence in the policy process? In The Politics of Evidence: From Evidence-Based Policy to the Good Governance of Evidence (Routledge, 2016), Justin Parkhurst, Associate Profess...

Tamara Metz, “Untying the Knot: Marriage, the State, and the Case for Their Divorce” (Princeton UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marriage is at the center of some of our fiercest political debates. Here are some recent developments regarding marriage in the United States. Earlier this year, the Justice Department announced t...

Joseph Jarvis, "The Purple World: Healing the Harm in American Health Care" (Scrivener Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American’s pay double what every other developed nation in the world pays for healthcare. Does that mean that we are the healthiest? No. In fact, we are the worst of them all. American healthcare i...

Karen J. Greenberg, “Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State” (Crown Publishers, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 9/11 attacks revealed a breakdown in American intelligence and there was a demand for individuals and institutions to find out what went wrong, correct it, and prevent another catastrophe like ...

Kimbrew McLeod and Peter DiCola, “Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling” (Duke University Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One hallmark of important art, in any medium, is a thoughtful relation with artistic precursors. Every artist reckons with heroes and rivals, influences and nemeses, and the old work becomes a part...

Pat Garofalo, "The Billionaire Boondoggle: How Our Politicians Let Corporations and Bigwigs Steal Our Money and Jobs" (Thomas Dunne, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Politicians love to woo entertainment corporations to their states and cities through subsidies and tax cities. But Pat Garofalo argues that such incentives waste taxpayer money in The Billionaire ...

K. Sabeel Rahman, “Democracy Against Domination” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sabeel Rahman is the author of Democracy Against Domination (Oxford University Press, 2016). Rahman is assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School. Combining perspectives from legal studies, ...

Scott Cleland with Ira Brodsky, “Search and Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google” (Telescope Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In their new book Search and Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google (Telescope Books, 2011), Scott Cleland, President of Precursor LLC, and Ira Brodsky, founder of Datacomm Research, aim to expose the...

David Colander and Craig Freedman, "Where Economics Went Wrong: Chicago's Abandonment of Classical Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you are reading this, you have probably run into the "Chicago" model at some point or another, in terms of public policy, orthodox modern finance, macro or micro economics, or any other arena wh...

Andrew Scull, “Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The wish to understand mental suffering is universal and requires an appreciation for its history. Since Biblical times, humans have understood madness, or other deviations from normal mental funct...

Eric C. Schneider, “Smack: Heroin and the American City” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I arrived at college in the early 1980s, drugs were cool, music was cool, and drug-music was especially cool. The coolest of the cool drug-music bands was The Velvet Underground. They were fro...

Darren Barany, "The New Welfare Consensus: Ideological, Political and Social Origins" (SUNY Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The 1996 repeal of Aid to Families with Dependent Children -- the New Deal-era relief program for poor women with children -- was a seminal moment in the modern history of the US welfare state. Tha...

Alan J. Levinovitz, “The Limits of Religious Tolerance” (Amherst College Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Pope said that Donald Trump wasn’t much of a Christian if all he can think about is building walls. Trump replied that it was “disgraceful” for a any leader, even the Pope, “to question another...

William Damon, “Failing Liberty 101: How We Are Leaving Young Americans Unprepared for Citizenship in a Free Society” (Hoover Institution, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his new book, Failing Liberty 101: How We Are Leaving Young Americans Unprepared for Citizenship in a Free Society, (Hoover Institution Press, 2011) William Damon, a senior fellow at the Hoover ...

Rick Van Noy, "Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As climate change politics abound, Dr. Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South (University of Georgia Press, 2019) cuts through it all to get to the core. Wha...

Joshua Howe, “Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming” (U. Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has h...

Walter Olson, “Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America” (Encounter Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What kind of education are students at top American law schools getting? And how does that education influence their activities upon graduation? In Walter Olson‘s Schools for Misrule: Legal Academi...

Farhana Shaikh, "From Imposter to Impact: Arts Leadership in the 21st Century" (Dahlia Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What are the characteristics of the 21st Century arts leader? In From Imposter to Impact: Arts Leadership in the 21st Century (Dahlia Publishing, 2019), Farhana Shaikh, a writer, publisher, and jou...

Rebecca S. Natow, “Higher Education Rulemaking: The Politics of Creating Regulatory Policy” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rebecca S. Natow, Senior Research Associate with the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, joins New Books Network to discuss her recently published book, enti...

Elizabeth Pisani, “The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS” (Norton, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When in medical school, I found myself drawn to the study of infectious diseases in large part because of the mixture of science and anthropology – infectious diseases are always about the way we i...

Janis Powers, "Health Care: Meet The American Dream" (River Grove Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American health care is the most expensive in the world, yet it produces some of the worst outcomes among developed nations. Many people offer unrealistic ideas or hot buzz words for how to fix it ...

Jen Manion, “Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America” (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jen Manion is an associate professor of history at Amherst College. Her book Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) offers a detailed examin...

Paul Offit, “Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All” (Basic Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If a parent decides not to vaccinate their children, is that an individual choice, or is it a serious threat to the public health? In Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All ...

David Ray Papke, "Containment and Condemnation: Law and the Oppression of the Urban Poor" (Michigan State UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The law does things, writes David Ray Papke, and it says things, and if we are talking about poor Americans, especially those living in big cities, what it does and says combine to function as powe...

Marc Sageman, “Misunderstanding Terrorism” (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Misunderstanding Terrorism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Marc Sageman provides an important reassessment of the global neojihadi threat to the West. He argues that inaccurate evaluati...

Brandon L. Garrett, “Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong” (Harvard UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wrongful conviction is, both morally and practically, the worst mistake that society can inflict on an individual. From Franz Kafka to Errol Morris, from Arthur Koestler to Harper Lee, Western cult...

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, "State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States and the Nation" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Back on the podcast for the second time in two years is Alex Hertel-Fernandez. You might recall his last book Politics at Work which examined the way employers are increasingly recruiting their wor...

Paul Benneworth et al., “The Impact and Future of Arts and Humanities Research” (Palgrave, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the future for Arts and Humanities in Europe? The podcast discusses these questions with Paul Benneworth, one of the authors, along with Magnus Gulbrandsen and Ellen Hazelkorn, of The Impac...

Teresa Gowan, “Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders-Homeless in San Francisco” (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why do people become homeless? Is it because some people have made bad decisions in their lives or can’t hold onto a stable job? Or is homelessness the result of a depilating mental illness or chem...

Debra Thompson, "The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Debra Thompson, in her award-winning* book The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016), explores the complexities of the politics ...

Jessica van Horssen, “A Town Called Asbestos” (UBC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2012, Canada stopped mining and exporting asbestos. Once considered a miracle mineral for its fireproof qualities, asbestos came to be better known as a carcinogenic, hazardous material banned i...

Robert Goldberg, “Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit” (Simon & Schuster, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This week New Books in Public Policy interviews Bob Goldberg about his new book Tabloid Medicine: How the Internet Is Being Used to Hijack Medical Science for Fear and Profit (Simon & Schuster, 201...

Nathan Holmes, "Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination" (SUNY Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The so-called Urban Crisis of the 1970s continues to loom large in narratives of US urban politics and history, but what can we learn about the period from movies? In Welcome to Fear City: Crime Fi...

Jean-Germain Gros, “Healthcare Policy in Africa” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Healthcare Policy In Africa: Institutions and Politics from Colonialism to the Present (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Jean-Germain Gros argues that healthcare policy should be the black box rat...

Beth Bailey, “America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force” (Harvard UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The United States Army is a product of our society and its values (for better and for worse), but it also makes claims to shape our society – and of course to defend it. What is the relationship be...

Peter Hotez, "Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Peter Hotez is a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases affecting the worlds poor. He is also the father of a daughter who was diagnosed with autism. The a...

Karen Tani, “States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights and American Governance, 1935-1972” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What new can there be to say about the New Deal? Perhaps more than you think. Join us as Karen Tani talks about her new book, States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights and American Governance, 1935-197...

James Fleming, “Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control” (Columbia UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the summer of 2008 the Chinese were worried about rain. They were set to host the Summer Olympics that year, and they wanted clear skies. Surely clear skies, they must have thought, would show t...

Danyel Reiche, "Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games" (Routedge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Danyel Reiche, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the American University of Beirut, and the author of Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games (Rout...

Vicki Lens, “Poor Justice: How the Poor Fare in Court” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s been said that for poor and low-income Americans, the law is all over. Join us for a conversation with Vicki Lens, who, in Poor Justice: How the Poor Fare in Court (Oxford University Press, 20...

Nick Reding, “Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town” (Bloomsbury, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1980 I left Kansas to go to college in Iowa. A lot of things caught my attention about Iowa, for example, that the people really are very nice. I also noticed that there were a lot of drugs. One...

Leigh Goodmark, "Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thanks to the efforts of activists concerned that the problem of “battered women” was being ignored -- and treated as a private, family matter rather than a broader social problem -- since the 1980...

Christopher Faricy, “Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher Faricy makes a return visit to New Books Network for Part II of a conversation about Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge Un...

Colin Gordon, “Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This week we have Professor Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa on the show talking about his new book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Pr...

Steven Attewell, "People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan" (U Penn Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There’s lot of talk these days, at least in some circles on the left, of a Universal Basic Income. There’s also talk in many of the same circles of a jobs guarantee. Join us as we speak with Steven...

Daniel Hatcher, “The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens” (NYU Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American social welfare programs are rife with fraud — but its not the kind of fraud most people think of. Daniel Hatcher, Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore, in The Poverty Industry: ...

George R. Boyer, "The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The creation of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain did not represent the logical progression of governmental policy over a period of generations. As George R. Boyer details in The Winding R...

Susan Greenbaum, “Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty” (Rutgers UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Patrick Moynihan’s Report on the Negro Family was a seminal document in Great Society-era racial politics and public policy. Join us as we talk with Susan Greenbaum about her new book, Blaming the ...

Hidetaka Hirota, "Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy" (Oxford UP, 2018)  from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hidetaka Hirota is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Advanced Study at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. Prior to his current position, he was a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of ...

Heather Ann Thompson, “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy” (Pantheon, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1971, prisoners took over Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The uprising followed a wave of protests in prisons and jails across the state and nation. Prisoners sought to draw pu...

Dave Chase, "The Opioid Crisis Wake Up Call: Health Care is Stealing the American Dream. Here is How We Take It Back" (Health Rosetta Media, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The opioid crisis in America is considered by many to be the worst national public health crisis in the last 100 years. In his new book, The Opioid Crisis Wake Up Call: Health Care is Stealing the ...

Kate Merkel-Hess, “The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China” (U. Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kate Merkel-Hess‘s new book looks closely at a loose group of rural reformers in 1920s and 1930s China who were trying to create a rural alternative to urban modernity. Focusing on the Rural Recons...

Rodrigo Zeidan, "Economics of Global Business" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I spoke with Professor Rodrigo Zeidan of New York University, Shanghai. He has just published Economics of Global Business (MIT Press, 2018), a great book with innovative real-world macroeconomic a...

James D. Boys, “Hillary Rising: The Politics, Persona, and Policies of a New American Dynasty” (Biteback Publishing, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James D. Boys is the author of Hillary Rising: The Politics, Persona, and Policies of a New American Dynasty (Biteback Publishing, 2016). Boys is an associate professor of international political s...

Clarence Taylor, "Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City" (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his most new book Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (NYU Press, 2018), Clarence Taylor, dean of the history of the civil rights movemen...

Suja A. Thomas, “The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Fundamental Constitutional Role of the Criminal, Civil, and Grand Juries” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Suja A. Thomas, a professor of law at the University of Illinois College of Law, has written The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Fundamental Constitutional Role of the Criminal, Civil, and Gra...

Alexander S. Dawson, "The Peyote Effect: From the Inquisition to the War on Drugs" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peyote occupies a curious place in the United States and Mexico: though prohibited by law, its use remains permissible in both countries for ceremonial practices in certain religions. As Alexander ...

Michael Copperman, “Teacher: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta” (U. Press of Mississippi, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anyone who has spent time in a school as an adult probably knows how hard it is for teachers to leave their work when they come home every night. There always seems to be more work for them to do, ...

Kathleen Day, "Broken Bargain: Bankers, Bailouts, and the Struggle to Tame Wall Street" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Think that today's debates about the role of the Federal Reserve Bank, financial regulation, "too big to fail", etc. are new?  Think again. Who should control banks, who should regulate banks, what...

Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham, “Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of the Law” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can children grow to realize their inherent rights and respect the rights of others? In Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law (Oxford University Press, 201...

Judith Eve Lipton and David P. Barash, "Strength through Peace: How Demilitarization Led to Peace and Happiness in Costa Rica" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Costa Rica is the only full-fledged and totally independent country to be entirely demilitarized. Its military was abolished in 1948, with the keys to the armory handed to the Department of Educati...

Nicholson Baker, “Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids” (Blue Rider Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Parents often wonder what their children do at school all day. How different is it from what they remember years ago? Teachers often hear similar questions from their friends. Is it like what they ...

Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan, "Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means" (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan are authors of Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2019). Herd is a Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy a...

Patricia Strach, “Hiding Politics in Plain Sight: Cause Marketing, Corporate Influence, and Breast Cancer Policymaking” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we hear from Patricia Strach, the author of Hiding Politics in Plain Sight: Cause Marketing, Corporate Influence, and Breast Cancer Policymaking (Oxford Universit...

Megan Finn, "Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Megan Finn's Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters (MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating examination of how information infrastructures shape the ways that surviv...

Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore, “Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism” (U. of Minnesota Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do new policies move from one city or country to another, and is there something distinct about how those transfers work in our perpetually accelerating and ever-more interconnected world? Join...

William D. Green, "The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black Opportunity in Minnesota, 1860–1876" (U Minnesota Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At a speech before the unveiling of the Freedman’s Monument in 1876, Fredrick Douglass stated, “You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are only at best his step-children; children by adoption,...

John Owens, “Confessions of a Bad Teacher: The Shocking Truth from the Frontline of American Public Education” (Sourcebooks, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you spend more time working in one role, organization, or field, it can become easy to lose perspective on how your work is similar or different from that being done by people in other positions...

Robert Chiles, "The Revolution of ’28: Al Smith, American Progressivism, and the Coming of the New Deal" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Traditionally Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign is remembered mainly for being the first time a Catholic was nominated as the candidate for a major political party. As Robert Chiles demonstrate...

Adam Benforado, “Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice” (Penguin Random House, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why is our criminal justice system so unfair? How do innocent men and women end up serving long sentences while the guilty roam free? According to law professor and scholar Adam Benforado, our syst...

New Books in Political Science Year in Review: 2018 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To wrap up the year and look ahead to 2019, we talked about the books we loved. There were so many great books in 2018, that we had the chance to mention just a few. Lilly reviewed her interview wi...

Daniel Amsterdam, “Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State” (Penn Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On the podcast this week is Daniel Amsterdam, author of Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State (Penn Press, 2016). He is assistant professor in the School of History a...

Lindsay Farmer, "Making the Modern Criminal Law: Criminalization and Civil Order" (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his latest book, Professor Lindsay Farmer offers a historical and conceptual analysis of theories of criminalization. The book shows how criminalization is inextricably linked to the making of t...

Ashley Jardina, "White Identity Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the themes of the era of Donald Trump is whiteness and white identity. From his first steps into the public eye, Trump used race to frame his positions and relevance. His presidency has been...

Milton Chen, “Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools” (Jossey Bass, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It feels like schools are in the midst of unprecedented change — sometimes more in different places and sometimes more in different ways. Many people are thinking about education differently than t...

Kevin Leo Nadal, "Queering Law and Order: LGBTQ Communities and the Criminal Justice System" (Lexington Book, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Throughout US history, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have been pathologized, victimized, and criminalized. Reports of lynching, burning, or murdering of LGBTQ people...

George Lakey, "How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning" (Melville House, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“One-off” protests don’t change the world; sustained direct action campaigns do. That’s one of the many insights from George Lakey in his new book, How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action C...

James Waller, “Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today is the third of our occasional series on the question of how to respond to mass atrocities. Earlier this summer I talked with Scott Straus and Bridget Conley-Zilkic. Later in September I’ll t...

Kathryn A. Mariner, "Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States (University of California Press, 2019) offers an ethnography of adoption processes in the United States through the inner ...

Laura McEnaney, "Postwar: Waging Peace in Chicago" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When World War II ended, Americans celebrated a military victory abroad, but the meaning of peace at home was yet to be defined. From roughly 1943 onward, building a postwar society became the new ...

Katherine Turk, “Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace” (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Katherine Turk is assistant professor of history at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her book Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (University of Pennsylv...

Thomas Abt, "Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do we promote peace in the streets? In his new book Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence--and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets (Basic Books, 2019), Thomas Abt ex...

Joshua Eyler, "How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching" (West Virginia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is learning? There is a robust body of literature that seeks to tell us what the most effective classroom techniques and strategies are, but Joshua Eyler goes further. In his new book How Huma...

Megan Tompkins Stange, “Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence” (Harvard Education Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Megan Tompkins-Stange is the author of Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence (Harvard Education Press, 2016). She is assistant professor at the Gerald Ford S...

Doug Specht, "Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping" (U London Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the...

McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...

Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “America Abroad: The United States’ Role in the 21st Century” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A decade and a half of exhausting wars, punishing economic setbacks, and fast-rising rivals has called into question America’s fundamental position and purpose in world politics. Will the US contin...

M. Newhart and W. Dolphin, "The Medicalization of Marijuana: Legitimacy, Stigma, and the Patient Experience" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Medical marijuana laws have spread across the U.S. to all but a handful of states. Yet, eighty years of social stigma and federal prohibition creates dilemmas for patients who participate in state ...

Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian and Tully Barnett, "What Matters?: Talking Value in Australian Culture" (Monash UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How should we value culture? In What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture (Monash University Press, 2018), Professors Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian and Tully Barnett, from Flinders Univer...

Barbara Hahn and Bruce Baker, “The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With the recent economic collapse and rising income inequality, lessons drawn from turn-of-the century capitalism have become frequent. Pundits, policymakers, and others have looked to the era to f...

Janet Jakobsen, "The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why are Americans, and American politicians more specifically, obsessed with sex? Why, in the words of Janet Jakobsen, are gender and sexuality such riveting public policy concerns the United State...

Rob Reich, "Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How it Can Do Better" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How political are private foundations? Are they good or bad for democracy? Such are the big questions taken up by Rob Reich in his new book Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and Ho...

Holly Allen, “Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives” (Cornell UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives (Cornell University Press, 2015), Holly Allen offers a fascinating analysis of how notions of race, gender, sexuality...

Why are Blacks Democrats?: An Interview with Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Black Americans are by far the most unified racial group in American electoral politics, with 80 to 90 percent identifying as Democrats—a surprising figure given that nearly a third now also identi...

Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland, "Urgency in the Anthropocene" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene(MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas that motivate current political responses to global...

Darian M. Parker, “Sartre and New Child Left Behind: An Existential Psychoanalytic Anthropology of Urban Schooling” (Lexington, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Darian M. Parker joins the New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, Sartre and No Child Left Behind: An Existential Psychoanalytic Anthropology of Urban Schooling (Lexington Books,...

Oli Mould, "Against Creativity" (Verso, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Can every aspect of society be 'creative'? In Against Creativity (Verso, 2018), Oli Mould, a lecturer in geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, explains the need to resist and recast th...

Donald Kettl, “Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America’s Lost Competence” (Brookings Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Donald Kettl is the author of Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America’s Lost Competence (Brookings Press, 2016). Kettl is professor of public policy in the School of Public Policy at t...

Adam Auerbach, "Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Good Provision in India’s Urban Slums" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

India’s urban slums exhibit dramatic variation in their access to basic public goods and services—paved roads, piped water, trash removal, sewers, and streetlights. Why are some vulnerable communit...

Keisha Lindsay, "In a Classroom of Their Own: The Intersection of Race and Feminist Politics in All-Black Male Schools" (U Illinois Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to most experts, boys have more trouble in schools than girls. Further, African-American boys have even more trouble than, say, white boys. What to do? According to some, one possible sol...

Sam Quinones, “Dreamland: The True Tale of American’s Opiate Epidemic” (Bloomsbury Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the early 2000s, the press–at least in Boston, where I was living at the time–was full of shrill stories about drug-crazed addicts breaking into area pharmacies in search of something called “Ox...

John Whysner, "The Alchemy of Disease" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since the dawn of the industrial age, we have unleashed a bewildering number of potentially harmful chemicals. But out of this vast array, how do we identify the actual threats? What does it take t...

Sohini Kar, "Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is microfinance the magic bullet that will end global poverty or is it yet another a form of predatory lending to the poor? In her new book Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfin...

Prerna Singh, “How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Prerna Singh has written How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Singh is the Mahatma Gandhi Assistant Professor of Poli...

Hannah L. Walker, "Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hannah Walker’s new book, Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race (Oxford UP, 2020), brings together the political science and criminal justice disciplin...

Julie L. Rose, “Free Time” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though early American labor organizers agitated for the eight-hour workday on the grounds that they were entitled to “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will,” ...

Nicole Nguyen, “A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland Security in US Public Schools” (U. of Minnesota Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It can be tempting to generalize certain attributes of schools as either being good or bad. Magnet and charter schools are often characterized as being inherently good. They usually offer special p...

Jennifer Lisa Koslow, "Exhibiting Health: Public Health Displays in the Progressive Era" (Rutgers UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the early twentieth century, public health reformers approached the task of ameliorating unsanitary conditions and preventing epidemic diseases with optimism. Using exhibits, they believed they ...

Shobita Parthasarathy, “Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Shobita Parthasarathy takes us through a thirty year history of...

Grant Lichtman, “#EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education” (Jossey-Bass, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Whatever your role — teacher, principal, or superintendent — when you work in a school system, you experience tensions between your reasons for going into education and how you actually spend your ...

Serena Parekh, "No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Discourse in wealthy Western countries about refugees tends to follow a familiar script. How many refugees is a country morally required to accept? What kinds of care and support are host countries...

Randy Shaw, “Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America?” (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why is housing so expensive in so many cities, and what can be done about it? Join us as we speak with long-time San Francisco housing activist Randy Shaw about his book Generation Priced Out: Who ...

Matt Renwick, “Digital Student Portfolios: A Whole School Approach to Connected Learning and Continuous Assessment” (Theory and Practice, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most of the time, school performance is not like performance in other arenas. In music, we want people to play something for us. In sports, we want people to show us our skills. Performance in scho...

Michele Goodwin, "Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (Cambridge University Press, 2020) a brilliant but shocking account of the criminalization of all aspects of reproduction, p...

Bryan Caplan, “The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pretty much everyone knows that the American healthcare system is, well, very inefficient. We don’t, so critics say, get as much healthcare bang for our buck as we should. According to Bryan Caplan...

Campbell F. Scribner, “The Fight for Local Control: Schools, Suburbs, and American Democracy” (Cornell UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Battles over school politics from curriculum to funding to voucher systems are key and contentious features of the political landscape today. Many of these familiar fights started in the 1970s. How...

Gene Ludwig, "The Vanishing American Dream" (Disruption Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gene Ludwig cares. The former banker, government regulator, and serial entrepreneur cares deeply about the hollowing out of the American middle class over the past several decades, not least of all...

James M. Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg, “The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It wasn’t always this way. From the Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership on natural resource conservation to Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ronald Reagan’s singing o...

Samantha Barbas, “Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America” (Stanford Law Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America (Stanford Law Books, 2016), Samantha Barbas provides a history of Americans’ use of law to manage their public image. She approaches...

Wendy Wood, "Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick" (FSG, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today's guest is psychologist and behavioral scientist, Wendy Wood. She is currently a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, and a visiting professor at the...

Andrew C. A. Elliott, “Is That a Big Number?” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrew C. A. Elliott‘s Is That a Big Number? (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a book that those of us who feast on numbers will absolutely adore, but will also tease the palates of those for whom...

Ron Berger, et. al. “Learning that Lasts: Challenging, Engaging, and Empowering Students with Deeper Instruction” (Jossey-Bass, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The school structures we present to teachers can sometimes resemble two extremes. In the first set of circumstances, teachers have enormous autonomy over what they teach, when they teach it, and ho...

G. Smulewicz-Zucker and M. Thompson, "An Inheritance for Our Times: Principles and Politics of Democratic Socialism" (OR Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Democratic socialism is on the lips of activists and politicians from both the left and the right. Some call it extremism; some call it common sense. What are we talking about? At a time when the c...

Andrew L. Yarrow, “Man Out: Men on the Sidelines of American Life” (Brookings Institution Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the era of #MeToo, Brett Kavanaugh, and Donald Trump, masculinity and the harmful effects that follow certain versions of masculinity have become national conversations. Now, like many other tim...

Kelly Lytle Hernandez, “Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol” (UC Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As evidenced by many of the conversations featured on this podcast, scholarship on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands composes a significant and influential genre within the field of U.S. Western History ...

Diana Greene Foster, "The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion" (Scribner, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What happens when a woman seeking an abortion is turned away? Diana Greene Foster, PhD, decided to find out. With a team of scientists—psychologists, epidemiologists, demographers, nursing scholars...

Kristina C. Miler, “Poor Representation: Congress and the Politics of Poverty in the United States” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s been an article of faith among scholars and activists alike that poor Americans are ignored in national politics. But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong, and poor people, at least rheto...

Jason Stahl, “Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture since 1945” (U. of North Carolina Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jason Stahl is the author of Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture since 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Stahl is an historian and lecturer in the ...

Christopher Marquis, "Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism" (Yale UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I spoke with Prof. Christopher Marquis, Samuel C. Johnson Professor in Global Sustainable Enterprise and Professor of Management at Cornell University. His latest research book tells the story of a...

Mike Ananny, “Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear” (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear (MIT Press, 2018), journalism professor Mike Ananny provides a new framework for thinking about the media at a time o...

Zachary Roth, “The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy” (Crown, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This week we feature two new books on the podcast, both about corporate power. First, Zachary Roth has written The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on ...

Christopher Robertson, "Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance is Incomplete and What can be Done About" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today's guest is Christopher Robertson, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation and Professor of Law at the University of Arizona. His background and research interests overlap several academic ...

Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, “Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The vast chasm between classical economics and the humanities is widely known and accepted. They are profoundly different disciplines with little to say to one another. Such is the accepted wisdom....

Ingrid Piller, “Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to the blurb, Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics (Oxford University Press, 2016) “explores the ways in which linguistic diversity mediate...

Alexander Keyssar, "Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The title of Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar,’s new book poses the question that comes up every presidential election cycle: Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? (Harvard University Pres...

J. Obert, A. Poe, A. Sarat, eds., “The Lives of Guns” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What if guns “are not merely carriers of action, but also actors themselves?” That’s the question that animates and unites Jonathan Obert‘s and Andrew Poe‘s, and Austin Sarat‘s unique collection of...

Eric Schickler, “Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric Schickler is the author of Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965 (Princeton University Press, 2016). Schickler is the Jeffrey and Ashley McDermott Professor ...

Jean Jackson, "Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia (Stanford University Press) Jean Jackson narrates her remarkable journey as an anthropologist in Colombia for over ...

Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, “Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics” (Naval Institute Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics (Naval Institute Press, 2018), edited by Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, is a collection of essays examining milit...

John Mollenkopf and Manuel Pastor, eds. “Unsettled Americans: Metropolitan Context and Civic Leadership for Immigrant Integration” (Cornell UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Mollenkopf and Manuel Pastor are the editors of Unsettled Americans: Metropolitan Context and Civic Leadership for Immigrant Integration (Cornell University Press, 2016). Mollenkopf is Disting...

Ben Burgis, "Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left" (Zero Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Logic, the study of how certain arguments either succeed or fail to support their conclusions, is one of the most important topics in philosophy, its importance illustrated by the common assumption...

Adam Reich and Peter Bearman, “Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we hear about the “future of work” today we tend to think about different forms of automation and artificial intelligence—technological innovations that will make some jobs easier and others o...

Robert Boatright, ed. “The Deregulatory Moment? A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws” (U. of Michigan Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Boatright, associate professor of political science at Clark University, is the editor of The Deregulatory Moment? A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws (University of ...

Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, "The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On a cold March day in 1893, 26-year-old nurse Lillian Wald rushed through the poverty-stricken streets of New York’s Lower East Side to a squalid bedroom where a young mother lay dying—abandoned b...

Pamela Woolner, ed., “School Design Together” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pamela Woolner, senior lecturer in education at Newcastle University, joins us in this episode to discuss her edited volume, School Design Together (Routledge, 2014). Pam is an expert in understand...

William Resh, “Rethinking the Administrative Presidency: Trust, Intellectual Capital, and Appointee-Careerist Relations in the George W. Bush Administration” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

William Resh is the author of Rethinking the Administrative Presidency: Trust, Intellectual Capital, and Appointee-Careerist Relations in the George W. Bush Administration (Johns Hopkins University...

R. Pollin and N. Chomsky, "Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet" (Verso, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is there a consensus on the best response to global warming? Not even close. Left and right both bring their own tools, math, and, most notably, agendas--climate related and non-climate related--to...

Chloe Thurston, “At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Earlier this year, we heard from Suzanne Mettler and her book on the politics of policies hidden from view. Mettler explained that most Americans are benefiting from numerous public policies, but o...

Lance deHaven-Smith, “Conspiracy Theory in America” (U of Texas Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lance deHaven-Smith‘s Conspiracy Theory in America (University of Texas Press, 2014) investigates how the Founders’ hard-nosed realism about the likelihood of elite political misconduct articulated...

Postscript: A Discussion of Race, Anger and Citizenship in the USA from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do we have a serious conversation about race that moves beyond the brevity of Twitter or an op-ed? In this episode of Post-Script (a New Books in Political Science series from Lilly Goren and S...

Stella M. Rouse and Ashley D. Ross, “The Politics of Millennials: Political Beliefs and Policy Preferences of America’s Most Diverse Generation” (U Michigan Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Millenial generation, those born between the early 1980s and late 1990s, are the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in US history. They also grew up during the birth of the digital...

Mark Navin, “Values and Vaccine Refusal: Hard Questions in Epistemology, Ethics, and Health Care” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Communities of parents who refuse, delay, or selectively decline to vaccinate their children pose familiar moral and political questions concerning public health, safety, risk, and immunity. But ad...

Mariana Mogilevich, "The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay's New York" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As suburbanization, racial conflict, and the consequences of urban renewal threatened New York City with “urban crisis,” the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay (1966–1973) experimented with a ...

Charlotte Greenhalgh, “Aging in Twentieth-Century Britain” (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What role did elderly Britons have in shaping the twentieth-century welfare state? In her new book, Aging in Twentieth-Century Britain (University of California Press, 2018), Charlotte Greenhalgh o...

Emily Schmitt and Lashawn Richburg-Hayes, “Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The application of behavioral science inside government has gained steam over the past few years with the creation of so-called “Nudge units” popping up in countries around the world. Their goals a...

Gerald Posner, "Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America" (Simon and Schuster, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today’s guest is investigative journalist and author, Gerald Posner. His new book, Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (Simon and Schuster), explores the fascinating and complex histo...

Daniel E. Ponder, “Presidential Leverage: Presidents, Approval, and the American State” (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dan Ponder’s new book, Presidential Leverage: Presidents, Approval, and the American State (Stanford University Press, 2018), is an important and thoughtful exploration of the concept of presidenti...

Roger Daniels, “Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939” (U Illinois Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For all that has been written about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, many misconceptions about the man and his achievements continue to persist. Roger Daniels seeks to correct these in a new two-volume b...

Edward C. Valandra, "Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities" (Living Justice Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities (Living Justice Press, 2020) consists of stories that have arisen from the lived experiences of a broad range of seasoned, loving restorative j...

Bill Ivey, “Rebuilding an Enlightened World: Folklorizing America” (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bill Ivey’s Rebuilding an Enlightened World: Folklorizing America (Indiana University Press, 2018) advances the idea that we are entering a post-enlightenment world increasingly characterized by al...

Daniel E. Dawes, “150 Years of ObamaCare” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel E. Dawes has written 150 Years of ObamaCare (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Dawes is the executive director of health policy and external affairs at Morehouse School of Medicine and ...

Albena Azmanova, "Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Utopia or Crisis" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Capitalism seems to many to be in a sort of constant crisis, leaving many struggling to make ends meet. This desperation was intensified in 2008, and for many never went away in spite of claims of ...

Candice Delmas, “A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

According to a long tradition in political philosophy, there are certain conditions under which citizens may rightly disobey a law enacted by a legitimate political authority.  That is, it is commo...

Katie Gentile, ed., “The Business of Being Made” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this interview, Dr. Katie Gentile discusses the research, writing and creative thinking about compulsory parenthood and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (or ARTs) that animate the essays appea...

Federico R. Waitoller, "Excluded by Choice: Urban Students with Disabilities in the Education Marketplace" (Teachers College Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I speak with Federico R. Waitoller about his book, Excluded by Choice: Urban Students with Disabilities in the Education Marketplace (Teachers College Press). This book highlights ...

Nicholas Carnes, “The Cash Ceiling: Why Only the Rich Run for Office and What We Can Do About It” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 2018, much attention has been drawn to candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Randy Bryce: candidates for Congress who’ve made a living doing working class jobs. They are unusual because C...

Ira Lit, “The Bus Kids: Children’s Experiences with Voluntary Desegregation” (Yale UP, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many of us are familiar with the court-mandated bussing programs created in an effort to achieve school desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s. Far fewer of us realize there were also voluntary trans...

Jessica Whyte, "Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism" (Verso, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, in Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso), Jessica Whyte uncover...

Ken Ilguas, “This Land is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back” (Plume, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Author, journalist and sometime park ranger Ken Ilgunas has written an argument in favor a “right to roam.”  This concept, unfamiliar to most Americans, is one of an ability to traverse public and ...

Nicole Rudolph, “At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort” (Berghahn Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicole Rudolph‘s At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort (Berghahn Books, 2015) contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the three decades after 1945 known as...

Charles Allan McCoy, "Diseased States: Epidemic Control in Britain and the United States" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, MERS, and pandemic influenza are brutal reminders of the dangers of infectious disease. Comparing the development of disease control in Britain and the United States, from...

Elana Buch, “Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care” (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are the vulnerabilities of older adults in need of care and their care workers intertwined? In Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care (New York University Press,...

Bernard Harcourt, “Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The landscape described in Bernard Harcourt‘s new book is a dystopia saturated by pleasure. We do not live in a drab Orwellian world, he writes. We live in a beautiful, colorful, stimulating, digit...

Paul Offit, "Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far" (HarperCollins, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why Do Unnecessary and Often Counter-Productive Medical Interventions Happen So Often? Today I talked to Paul Offit about his book Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far (HarperCollins, 2020)...

Joshua Sharfstein, “The Public Health Crisis Survival Guide: Leadership and Management in Trying Times” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein has learned a lot as from his years of experience as a public health leader. He has dealt with everything from a rabid raccoon, to protestors, to potentially losing refrigerat...

Malcolm James, “Urban Multiculture: Youth, Politics and Transformations in a Global City” (Palgrave, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How is youth culture changing in a globalised city? In Urban Multiculture: Youth, Politics and Transformations in a Global City Malcolm James, a lecturer at the University of Sussex, introduces the...

Matthew D. Wright, "A Vindication of Politics: On the Common Good and Human Flourishing" (UP of Kansas, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rancor reigns in American politics. It is possible these days to regard politics as an arena that enriches and ennobles? Matthew D. Wright responds with a resounding yes in his 2019 book, A Vindica...

Alyshia Gálvez, “Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico” (U. California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The North American Free Trade Agreement—or NAFTA, as we Americans call it—is very much in the news of late, primarily because President Trump has decided to make good on what he famously called “th...

Gabriel Thompson, “America’s Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century” (U of California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire.” This axiom encapsulates both the approach and dedication exhibited by Fred Ross during the five decades he spent orga...

Sara Mayeux, "Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sara Mayeux is the author of Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Free Justice explores the rise...

Freeden Blume Oeur, “Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools” (U Minnesota Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do schools empower but also potentially emasculate young black men? In his new book, Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools (University of Minnesota Press...

Pedro Garcia de Leon, “Data Source: Education GPS” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pedro Garcia de Leon, Policy Analyst for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), joins New Books in Education to discuss the organizations new data website, gpseducation.oecd...

Nicole Hassoun, "Global Health Impact: Expanding Access to Essential Medicines" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every year nine million people are diagnosed with tuberculosis, every day over 13,400 people are infected with AIDs, and every thirty seconds malaria kills a child. For most of the world, critical ...

J. Lester, C. Lochmiller, and R. Gabriel, “Discursive Perspectives on Education Policy and Implementation” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The study of education policy is a scholarly field that sheds light on important debates and controversies revolving around education policy and its implementation. In this episode, we will be talk...

Linsey McGoey, “No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy” (Verso, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (Verso Books, 2015), Linsey McGoey proposes a new way of discussing philanthropy and, in doing so, revives associ...

Nathalie Peutz, "Islands of Heritage Conservation and Transformation in Yemen" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Soqotra, the largest island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, is one of the most uniquely diverse places in the world. A UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, the island is home not only to birds, rept...

Spencer Piston, “Class Attitudes in American Politics: Sympathy for the Poor, Resentment of the Rich, and Political Implications” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It has long been a truism that Americans’ disdain for poor people–our collective sense that if they only worked harder or behaved more responsibly they would do well in this land of opportunity–exp...

Peter K. Enns, “Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter K. Enns is the author of Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Enns is Associate Professor in the Dep...

Mary Augusta Brazelton, "Mass Vaccination: Citizens' Bodies and State Power in Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mass Vaccination. Citizens' Bodies and State Powe...

Michelle Perro and Vincanne Adams, “What’s Making Our Children Sick?” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pediatrician and integrative medicine practitioner Michelle Perro, MD, has been treating an increasing number of children with complex chronic illnesses that do not fit into our usual diagnostic bo...

Kathleen Holscher, “Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In New Mexico, before World War Two, Catholic sisters in full habits routinely taught in public schools. In her fascinating new book, Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Cr...

Joy Knoblauch, "The Architecture of Good Behavior" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influen...

Devin Fergus, “Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Politicians, economists, and the media have put forth no shortage of explanations for the mounting problem of wealth inequality – a loss of working class jobs, a rise in finance-driven speculative ...

Mark Schuller, “Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti” (Rutgers UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The earthquake that shook Haiti on January 12, 2010 killed and destroyed the homes of hundreds of thousands of people. Mark Schuller‘s book Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti (Rutgers University Pr...

Andrea Benjamin, "Racial Coalition Building in Local Elections: Elite Cues and Cross-Ethnic Voting" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What explains voting behavior in local elections? More specifically, what explains how ethnic and racial blocs vote in local elections, especially when the candidate may be of a different race or e...

Richard S. Hopkins, “Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris” (LSU Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Beginning in the mid-1800s, Paris experienced an unprecedented growth in the development of parks, squares, and gardens. This greenspace was part of Napoleon III’s plan for a new, modern Paris and ...

Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King, “Fed Power: How Finance Wins” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lawrence Jacobs and Desmond King are the authors of Fed Power: How Finance Wins (Oxford UP, 2016). Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies and Director of the Center fo...

Christopher Newfield, "The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Christopher Newfield diagnoses what he sees as a crisis in American public h...

Ana Raquel Minian, “Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the 1970s, the Mexican government acted to alleviate rural unemployment by supporting the migration of able-bodied men. Millions crossed into the United States to find work that would help them ...

David Grazian, “American Zoo: A Sociological Safari” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Urban zoos are both popular and imperiled. They are sites of contestation, but what are those contests about? In his new book, American Zoo: A Sociological Safari(Princeton, 2015), ethnographer Dav...

LaDale Winling, "Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century" (U Penn Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Universities have become state-like entities, possessing their own hospitals, police forces, and real estate companies. To become such behemoths, higher education institutions relied on the state f...

Beth Macy, “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America” (Little, Brown & Company, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Appalachia was among the first places where the malaise of opioid pills hit the nation in the mid-1990s, ensnaring coal miners, loggers, furniture makers, and their kids.” This is how journalist B...

Keenanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” (Haymarket Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Few social justice struggles have captivated recent political history like the broad Black Lives Matter movement. From the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore to campaign rally interruptions of leadi...

Costas Lapavitsas, "The Left Case Against the EU" (Polity, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight f...

Lessie B. Branch, “Optimism at All Costs: Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama’s America” (U Massachusetts Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Optimism at All Costs: Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama’s America (University of  Massachusetts Press, 2018) takes as its point of departure and central preoccupation the notion ...

Thomas G. Weiss, “Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action” (Polity Press, 2016 ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect changing in the current international political scene? In Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (3rd ed., Polity Press, 2016...

Lesly-Marie Buer, "RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky" (Haymarket, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Using the narratives of women who use(d) drugs, this account challenges popular understandings of Appalachia spread by such pundits as JD Vance by documenting how women, families, and communities c...

Paul Offit, “Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

You should never trust celebrities, politicians, or activists for health information. Why? Because they are not scientists! Scientists often cannot compete with celebrities when it comes to charm o...

Jefferson Cowie, “The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jefferson Cowie is the James G. Stahlman professor of history at Vanderbilt University. His book The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2...

Melissa J. Wilde, "Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Although it has largely been erased from the collective memory of American Christianity, the debate over eugenics was a major factor in the history of 20th-century religious movements, with many ch...

Matthew T. Hora, “Beyond the Skills Gap: Preparing College Students for Life and Work” (Harvard Education Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can educators ensure that young people who attain a postsecondary credential are adequately prepared for the future? Matthew T. Hora and his co-authors, Ross Benbow and Amanda Oleson, explain t...

Eben Kirksey, “Emergent Ecologies” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eben Kirksey new book asks and explores a series of timely, important, and fascinating questions: How do certain plants, animals, and fungi move among worlds, navigate shifting circumstances, and f...

Michael A. Olivas, "Perchance to DREAM: A Legal and Political History of the DREAM Act and DACA" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why did the DREAM Act (for the Development, Relief, and Education of Alien Minors) never pass Congress – even though it was popular with Republicans and Democrats? What does the political and legal...

Julie A. Cohn, “The Grid: Biography of an American Technology” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though usually a background concern, the aging U.S. electric grid has lately been on the minds of both legislators and consumers. Congress wants to ensure the technological security of this importa...

Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman, “Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy” (Bloomsbury, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman are the authors of Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2016). Potter is a former health insurance executive, is the author of Dead...

Saqib Iqbal Qureshi, "The Broken Contract: Making Our Democracies Accountable, Representative, and Less Wasteful" (Lioncrest, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A democracy should reflect the views of its citizens and offer a direct connection between government and those it serves. So why, more than ever, does it seem as if our government exists in its ow...

Steven Alvarez, “Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies” (SUNY Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I speak with Steven Alvarez about his book, Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies (SUNY Press, 2017). This book highlights a grassroots l...

Lenz, Wells and Kingston, “Transforming Schools: Using Project-Based Learning, Performance Assessment, and Common Core Standards” (Jossey-Bass 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

All of us are familiar with multiple-choice tests. They may be the one thing that you can find in kindergarten classrooms, college courses, and workplace training programs. But why are they so comm...

Aya Gruber, "The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Aya Gruber, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, has written a history of how the women’s movement in America has shaped the law on domestic violence and sexual assault. In ...

Thomas Mulligan, “Justice and the Meritocratic State” (Routledge Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Thomas Mulligan’s new book, Justice and the Meritocratic State (Routledge Press, 2018), posits a theory of justice that is based on the allocation of valuable goods (jobs and appropriate income) ac...

Howard P. Chudacoff, “Changing the Playbook: How Power, Profit, and Politics Transformed College Sports” (U of Illinois Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

March Madness is big business. Each year the NCAA collects $700 million for television rights to the men’s college basketball tournament, under the terms of a 14-year, $10.8 billion contract with C...

David A. Harris, "A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations" (Anthem Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do we move police forces from a warrior culture to connecting better with communities they serve? Today I talked to David A. Harris about his new book A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in ...

Jacob Levine, “Cannabis Discourse: Facts and Opinions in Context” (Jacob Levine, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is the landscape of our cannabis knowledge? In his new book Jacob Levine author of the Cannabis Discourse: Facts and Opinions in Context (Jacob Levine, 2018) gives readers an overview of the p...

Benjamin Castleman, “The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve Education” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Teenagers live in their phones. As an educator you can try to pull them away or meet them where they are. The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve ...

Solomon Goldstein-Rose, "The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change" (Melville House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At age 26, Solomon Goldstein-Rose has already spent more time thinking about climate change than most of us will in our lifetimes. He’s been a climate activist since age 11, studied engineering and...

Timothy J. Lombardo, “Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

President Donald Trump is not sui generis. Populist impulses and political actors have been pulsating in the American soul since the nation’s founding. Timothy J.  Lombardo’s excellent book, Blue-C...

Erika Christakis, “The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups” (Viking, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Everyone hates being underestimated. We want to feel included without others showing us condescension. At the same time, no one wants to be overestimated. We want to feel challenged without others ...

Amity Shlaes, "Great Society: A New History" (Harper, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

National concern about income inequalities. Race relations at a boiling point. Riots in the streets. Cries on the left for massive allocations of federal money for housing and poverty reduction pro...

Suzanne Mettler, “The Government-Citizen Disconnect” (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the paradoxes of US politics today is the widely dispersed benefits, but overall distrust, of government. Citizens enjoy many types of social policy, yet reject the process that provides for...

Mike Lanza, “Playborhood: Turn Your Neighborhood into a Place for Play” (Free Play Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When adults today look back on their time as children, many of their memories may come from moments when they were engaged in free play with kids in their neighborhood — exploring creeks, riding bi...

M. C. Stevenson et al. (eds.), "The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law and Public Policy" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When children become entangled with the law, their lives can be disrupted irrevocably. When those children are underrepresented minorities, the potential for disruption is even greater. The Legacy ...

Annie Lowrey, “Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World” (Crown, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can we end the scourge of poverty? How we can sustain ourselves once robots eliminate the need for many jobs? Annie Lowrey offers an answer in the title of her book, Give People Money: How a Un...

John M. Chamberlain, “Medical Regulation, Fitness to Practice and Revalidation: A Critical Introduction” (Policy Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How is the medical profession regulated in a ‘risk society’. This is the core question of John M. Chamberlain‘s Medical Regulation, Fitness to Practice and Revalidation: A Critical Introduction (Po...

Jan Doering, "Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integr...

Heather Schoenfeld, “Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How did prisons become a tool of racial inequality? Using historical data, Heather Schoenfeld’s new book Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicag...

Nadim Bakhshov, “Against Capitalist Education: What is Education for?” (Zero Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nadim Bakhshov joins the New Books in Network to discuss his book Against Capitalist Education: What is Education for? (Zero Books, 2015). The book posits new alternatives to educational thought an...

Verónica Martínez-Matsuda, "Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.S. Farm Labor Camp Program" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Verónica Martínez-Matsuda about her book Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.S. Farm Labor Camp Program (University of Pennsylvania Press). Migrant Citizenship exams the Farm Sec...

Robert N. Gross, “Public vs. Private: The Early History of School Choice in America” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are numerous political debates about education policy today, but some of the most heated surround vouchers, charter schools, and other questions about public funding and oversight of private ...

Geoffrey Baker, “El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

El Sistema, the massive Venezuelan youth orchestra program, has been hailed in some quarters as the next big idea in music education (if not as the savior of classical music itself). Any who have f...

Kathleen Bachynski, "No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Kathleen Bachynski, Assistant Professor of Public Health at Muhlenberg College, and author of No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Pub...

Simone Wesner, “Artists’ Voices in Cultural Policy: Careers, Myths and the Creative Profession after German Unification” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Why is the artist’s voice missing from cultural policy? In Artists’ Voices in Cultural Policy: Careers, Myths and the Creative Profession after German Unification (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Dr. Si...

Adam Seth Levine, “American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Adam Seth Levine has written American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction (Princeton University Press, 2015). Levine teaches in the Department of Government at Cornell Uni...

Sasha Costanza-Chock, "Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020), Sasha Costanza-Chock, an associate professor of Civic Media at MIT, builds the case for designers and resea...

Katherine Benton-Cohen, “Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts—women...

Nicola Rollock et al. “The Colour of Class: The Educational Strategies of the Black Middle Classes” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The experience of the African American middle class has been an important area of research in the USA. However, the British experience has, by comparison, not been subject to the same amount of att...

Patricia Zavella, "The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism (NYU Press, 2020), Pat Zavella shows how reproductive justice organizations' collaborative work across ra...

Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik, “Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It” (Penguin, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How can we learn from large system failures? In their new book Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It (Penguin Press, 2018), Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik explore system f...

Nikhil Goyal, “Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Education Malpractice” (Doubleday, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is no shortage of talk about our public schools being broken. Some critics say we need to embrace a reform agenda that includes more standardized testing and a longer school day for students ...

John B. Holbein, "Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Action" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the United States, each election cycle reminds us that younger voters vote at much lower rates than their older counterparts. This discrepancy is often chalked up to apathy or lack of interest i...

Edward Khantzian, “Treating Addiction: Beyond the Pain” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Treatment of addiction often focuses on abstinence or ‘harm reduction.’ While many people benefit greatly from such approaches, the underlying pain and heartache often go untreated, leaving individ...

Jessica Martucci, “Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Martucci‘s fascinating new book traces the emergence, rise, and continued practice of breastfeeding in America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Back to the Breast: Natural Mothe...

Sandra Postel, "Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity" (Island Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity (Island Press), Sandra Postel acknowledges society’s past mishaps with managing water and emphasizes our future is contingent upon rehabilit...

David Peter Stroh, “Systems Thinking For Social Change” (Chelsea Green, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While Systems Thinking has enjoyed an increasing amount of societal influence through work of such practitioner/authors as Peter Senge, it is also true that the vast majority of the popular literat...

Dale Jamieson, “Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are we to think and live with climate change? In Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dale J...

Mia Birdsong, "How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community" (Hachette, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After almost every presentation activist and writer Mia Birdsong gives to executives, think tanks, and policy makers, one of those leaders quietly confesses how much they long for the profound comm...

Eric Winsberg, “Philosophy and Climate Science” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activity, with an expected increase in global temperat...

William C. Smith, ed., “The Global Testing Culture: Shaping Education Policy, Perceptions, and Practice” (Symposium Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

William C. Smith (ed.), senior associate with RESULTS Educational Fund, joins New Books in Education to discuss The Global Testing Culture: Shaping Education Policy, Perceptions, and Practice (Symp...

Xueli Wang, "On My Own: The Challenge and Promise of Building Equitable STEM Transfer Pathways" (Harvard Education Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Xueli Wang from the University of Wisconsin-Madison on her new book, “On My Own: The Challenge and Promise of Building Equitable STEM Transfer Pathways (Harvard Ed...

Stephen C. Yeazell, “Lawsuits in a Market Economy: The Evolution of Civil Litigation” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen C. Yeazell‘s Lawsuits in a Market Economy: The Evolution of Civil Litigation (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an in-depth look at the development and current situation of civil litiga...

Christopher Faricy, “Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States” (Cambridge UP 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher Faricy has written Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Faricy is an assistant professor of politic...

Luke Messac, "No More to Spend: Neglect and the Construction of Scarcity in Malawi's History of Health Care" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dismal spending on government health services is often considered a necessary consequence of a low per-capita GDP, but are poor patients in poor countries really fated to be denied the fruits of mo...

Warren Treadgold, “The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education” (Encounter Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though many Americans, Republicans especially, regard universities as heavily disposed to the political left, few people understand how much this matters, how it happened, how deeply ideologically ...

S. Matthew Liao, “The Right to be Loved” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seems obvious that children need to be loved, that having a loving home and upbringing is essential to a child’s emotional and cognitive development. It is also obvious that, under typical circu...

Jeremy Gans, "The Ouija Board Jurors: Mystery, Mischief and Misery in the Jury System" (Waterside Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Juries are a cornerstone of the criminal trial, but what happens when the jury engages in its own kind of mischief? In this book, Jeremy Gans delves into the case of R v Young, where a newly marrie...

Frank R. Baumgartner, “Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We recently marked the 50th Anniversary of Terry vs. Ohio, the US Supreme Court case that dramatically expanded the scope under which agents of the state could stop people and search them. Taking a...

Jennifer Mittelstadt, “The Rise of the Military Welfare State” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Have you seen those Facebook memes floating around, arguing that we shouldn’t support a 15-dollar -per-hour minimum wage for service sector workers because the military doesn’t earn a living wage? ...

Sally Nuamah, "How Girls Achieve" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What does it take for all girls to achieve? What will it take to remove the seen and unseen barriers-- some a matter of policy and others cultural practice--to more girls achieving the equitable ed...

Linda Ross Meyer, “Sentencing in Time” (Amherst College Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you look at the history of punishment (at least in the West), what you’ll see is that we’ve gone from a penal regime that used (inter alia) physical violence—whipping, beating, branding, amputat...

Robert Stoker, et al., “Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Stoker is the co-author (with Clarence Stone, John Betancur, Susan Clarke, Marilyn Dantico, Martin Horak, Karen Mossberger, Juliet Musso, Jeffrey Sellers, Ellen Shiau, Harold Wolman, and Don...

Philip M. Plotch, "Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ever since New York City built one of the world’s great subway systems, no promise has been more tantalizing than the proposal to build a new subway line under Second Avenue in Manhattan. Yet the S...

Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey, “Waste of a Nation: Growth and Garbage in India” (Harvard UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is India facing a waste crisis? As its population, cities and consumption grow what are the implications for the health, well being and everyday lives of Indians? In Waste of a Nation: Growth and G...

Garret Keizer, “Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher” (Metropolitan Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Whatever its current prestige in our society, teaching is undoubtedly complex work. Like physicians and therapists, teachers work with people, rather than things. They try to help their students to...

Gerald Epstein, “What's Wrong with Modern Money Theory? A Policy Critique” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since the last-but-one financial crisis abated and governments responded to better times by clawing back their stimulus packages, a once-obscure economic philosophy has been gaining a growing follo...

Adam Tanner, “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records” (Beacon Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and...

Sara Bronin and Ryan Rowberry, “Historic Preservation in a Nutshell” (West Academic Publishing, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historic Preservation in a Nutshell (West Academic Publishing, 2014), co-authored by Sara Bronin and Ryan Rowberry provides the first-ever in-depth summary of historic preservation law within its l...

Melissa K. Merry, "Warped Narratives: Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy" (U Michigan Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If gun violence kills so many Americans, why don’t we see more effective solutions? How much does the way we frame an issue impact how we feel about it? How often are hot button issues deeply polar...

Steven Alvarez, “Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning From Bilingual After-School Programs” (NCTE, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I speak with Steven Alvarez about his book, Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning From Bilingual After-School Programs (National Council of Teachers of English, 2017). This b...

Lisa Tessman, “Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Moral theories are often focused almost exclusively on answering the question, “What ought I do?” Typically, theories presuppose that for any particular agent under any given circumstance, there in...

Peter J. Boettke, "Public Governance and the Classical-Liberal Perspective" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I spoke with Professor Peter J. Boettke, co-author of Public Governance and the Classical-Liberal Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2019) with Paul Dragos Aligica and Vlad Tarko. Dr Boett...

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, “Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration” (Columbia UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who benefits from mass incarceration in the U.S.? In her new book Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Columbia University Press, 2017), Lauren-Brooke Eisen...

Daniel Geary, “Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott Associate Professor in U.S. History at Trinity College Dublin. His book Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 20...

A. P. Carnevale, "The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America" (The New Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Colleges fiercely defend America’s higher education system, arguing that it rewards bright kids who have worked hard. But it doesn’t actually work this way. As the recent bribery scandal demonstrat...

Amanda Huron, “Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C.” (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Is modern capitalism too far advanced in the U.S. to create common property regimes? Are there models for what an Urban Commons might look like? Join us as we speak with Amanda Huron, author of Car...

Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, “Performing Policy” (Palgrave, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How has American cultural and artistic policy changed over the last 25 years? Performing Policy: How Contemporary Politics and Cultural Programmes Redefined US Artists for the Twenty-First Century ...

Pepper Glass, "Misplacing Ogden, Utah" (U Utah Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pepper Glass’s?new book Misplacing Ogden, Utah: Race, Class, Immigration, and the Construction of Urban Reputation?(University of Utah Press, 2020) evaluates the widely held assumption that divisio...

Gordon C. C. Douglas, “The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The built environment around us seems almost natural, as in beyond our control to alter or shape. Indeed, we have reached a point in history when cities—the largest and most complex of our settleme...

Miriam Solomon, “Making Medical Knowledge” (Oxford, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How are scientific discoveries transmitted to medical clinical practice? When the science is new, controversial, or simply unclear, how should a doctor advise his or her patients? How should inform...

Pavlina Tcherneva, "The Case for a Job Guarantee" (Polity, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One of the most enduring ideas in economics is that unemployment is both unavoidable and necessary for the smooth functioning of the economy. This assumption has provided cover for the devastating ...

Ben Clift, “The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis by Ben Clift” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I was joined in Oxford by Ben Clift, Professor of Political Economy, Deputy Head of Department and Director of Research at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the University of ...

Dana Suskind, “Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We may disagree about whether phonics or whole language is the better approach to reading instruction or whether bilingual education or English immersion is the better way to support English langua...

Michael Goldfield, "The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The golden key to understanding the last 75 years of American political development, the eminent labor relations scholar Michael Goldfield argues, lies in the contests between labor and capital in ...

Stephen Klasko, “Bless This Mess: A Picture Story of Healthcare in America” (Lulu Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our neighbors on other planets look with puzzlement at the United States, located on the beautiful planet Earth. Despite amazing knowledge, discovery, and skill, healthcare delivery in this country...

Ron Berger, “Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools Through Student-Engaged Assessment” (Jossey-Bass, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many of us went through school not fully knowing what we were supposed to be learning or how our teachers were measuring our progress. These priorities and processes were largely hidden to us as st...

Robert T. Chase, "We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Robert T. Chase about his book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2020). In the early twenti...

Steven Lubar, “Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Steven Lubar’s latest book Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present (Harvard University Press, 2017), Steven gets to the heart of what makes museums so interesting to both appreciate a...

Joseph M. Reagle, “Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do we know about the individuals who make comments on online news stories, blogs, videos and other media? What kind of people take the time to post all manner of information and context to mat...

Natalie Kimball, "An Open Secret: The History of Unwanted Pregnancy and Abortion in Modern Bolivia" (Rutgers UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Natalie Kimball is the author of An Open Secret: The History of Unwanted Pregnancy and Abortion in Modern Bolivia, out this year from Rutgers University Press. An Open Secret argues that, despite s...

Melanie A. Kiechle, “Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America” (U Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Melanie Kiechle‘s Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America (University of Washington Press, 2017) takes us into the cellars, rivers, gutters and similar smelly rec...

Stephen Macedo, “Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage” (Princeton University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There has been a lot of talk in the United States recently about same-sex marriage. One obvious question is sociological: What are the implications of marriage equality for the longstanding social ...

Laura A. Dean, "Diffusing Human Trafficking Policy in Eurasia" (Policy Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Laura A. Dean (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Millikin University and director of the Human Trafficking Research Lab) has spent many years investigating the urgent human rights issue o...

Yasemin Besen-Cassino, “The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap” (Temple UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With the rise of the #MeToo movement following dozens of high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault by professional men against women colleagues, gender equality has become a popular topic...

Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, “Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jessica Baldwin-Philippi is the author of Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2015). She is an assistant professo...

Micol Seigel, "Violence Work: State Violence and the Limits of Police" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Recent calls for the defunding or abolition of police raise important questions about the legitimacy of state violence and the functions that police are supposed to serve. Criticism of the militari...

Peter Allen, “The Political Class: Why It Matters Who Our Politicians Are” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who is in charge? In The Political Class: Why It Matters Who Our Politicians Are (Oxford University Press, 2018), Peter Allen, a Reader in Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics, Langua...

Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee, “Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Valuation is a central question in contemporary social science. Indeed the question of value has a range of academic projects associated with it, whether in terms of specific questions or in terms ...

Paige Glotzer, "How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960" (Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paige Glotzer is the author of How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960, published by Columbia University Press in 2020. How the Suburbs Were ...

Larry Cuban, “The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning” (Harvard Education Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning (Harvard Education Press, 2018), Larry Cuban looks at the uses and effects of digital techn...

Leonard Cassuto, “The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The discontented graduate student is something of a cultural fixture in the U.S. Indeed theirs is a sorry lot. They work very hard, earn very little, and have very poor prospects. Nearly all of the...

Kathleen Hale and Mitchell Brown, "How We Vote: Innovation in American Elections" (Georgetown UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The idea of voting is simple, but the administration of elections in ways that ensure access and integrity is complex. In How We Vote: Innovation in American Elections (Georgetown University Press,...

Patrick Lopez-Aguado, “Stick Together and Come Back Home: Racial Sorting and the Spillover of Carceral Identity” (U California Press) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do systems of incarceration influence racial sorting inside and outside of prisons? And how do the social structures within prisons spill out into neighborhoods? In his new book, Stick Together...

Ronald P. Formisano, “Plutocracy in America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ronald P. Formisano has written Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015). Formisano is the William T. Bryan Chair of...

Phil Harvey, "Welfare For The Rich" (Post Hill Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In today’s ultra-polarized and highly partisan political environment, Welfare for the Rich: How Your Tax Dollars End Up in Millionaires' Pockets?And What You Can Do About It (Post Hill Press, 2020)...

David Faris, “It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics” (Melville House, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roosevelt University political science professor David Faris counsels Democrats to disregard procedural precedents and niceties, and pugnaciously wield power in his book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty: ...

Suzanna Reiss, “We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of U.S. Empire” (University of California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though the conventional history of the U.S.-led “War on Drugs” locates the origins of this conflict in a reaction to the domestic culture of excess of the 1960s, a new book argues that internationa...

Michele Wakin, "Hobo Jungle: A Homeless Community in Paradise" (Lynne Rienner, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michele Wakin’s new book Hobo Jungle: A Homeless Community in Paradise (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020) is an up-close exploration of the evolution that has taken place with unsheltered homelessnes...

Matthew R. Pembleton, “Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America’s Global Drug Wars” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s common to place the start of the War on Drugs with the Nixon or Reagan Administrations, but as Matthew Pembleton tells us, those are only phases II and III of a much longer drug war that began...

Eric Nadelstern, “Ten Lessons from New York City Schools: What Really Works to Improve Education” (Teachers College Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

With 40 years of public school experience, from teacher to high-ranking official of one of the largest school systems in the US, Eric Nadelstern has a deep perspective and nuanced understanding of ...

Gilda R. Daniels, "Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Are we asleep at the (common)wheel? Civil rights attorney and law professor Gilda R. Daniels insists that contemporary voter ID laws, voter deception, voter purges, and disenfranchisement of felons...

Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, “Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy” (The New Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A book that strikes at the source of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts‘ Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery ...

Justin S. Vaughn and Jose D. Villalobos, “Czars in the White House: The Rise of Policy Czars as Presidential Management Tools” (U of Michigan Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Justin S. Vaughn and Jose D. Villalobos have written Czars in the White House: The Rise of Policy Czars as Presidential Management Tools (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Vaughn is Associate Pr...

Arlie Loughnan, "Self, Others and the State: Relations of Criminal Responsibility" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Criminal responsibility is a key-organizing concept of the criminal law, but Arlie Loughnan argues that it needs re-examination. Focusing on the Australian experience, Self, Others and the State: R...

Jon D. Michaels, “Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jon D. Michaels, a professor of law at UCLA Law School, has written an argument in favor of the administrative state and against recent efforts to shift government functions to private contractors....

Alec Patton, “Work That Matters: The Teacher’s Guide to Project-Based Learning” (Paul Hamlyn Foundation, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every year, thousands of teachers visit San Diego to understand project-based learning and find inspiration in the work done by students at High Tech High. Their multimedia presentations have been ...

Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...

Toby Cosgrove, “The Cleveland Clinic Way: Lessons in Excellence from One of the World’s Leading Health Care Organizations” (McGraw-Hill Education, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

American healthcare is in crisis. It doesn’t have to be. Dr. Toby Cosgrove‘s The Cleveland Clinic Way: Lessons in Excellence from One of the World’s Leading Health Care Organizations (McGraw-Hill E...

Natalia Molina, “How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts” (University of California Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393