New Books in Big Ideas

Justin Bailey, "An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture" (2026)

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In a culture saturated by speed, safety protocols, and mediated fear, what might we rediscover by walking or hiking slowly into the unknown?

In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Justin S. Bailey, author of An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture, published by Those Who Wonder Press in 2026. Drawing on his Appalachian Trail journey, Bailey offers a wide‑ranging reflection on wandering as an ancient human practice, one tied to resilience, trust, and the shaping of perspective.

Our conversation explores how fear is culturally produced and amplified, particularly through media and information overload, and how embodied experiences of movement can recalibrate our sense of risk. Bailey also reflects on the social world of long‑distance hiking, where shared hardship fosters community, vulnerability, and unexpected forms of solidarity.

At the same time, the interview raises broader ethical and structural questions, who is able to move freely, whose mobility is celebrated, and whose is constrained or scrutinized. We discuss migration, gendered safety, and the responsibilities that come with movement through landscapes shaped by inequalities.

This episode will be of interest to listeners working in anthropology, sociology, migration studies, psychology, archeology, religious studies, and anyone reflecting on fear, movement, and what it means to live well in an uncertain world.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Liz Bucar, "Beyond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us" (Penguin, 2026)

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Liz Bucar is a religious ethicist and professor of religion at Northeastern University, as well as a certified intenSati and Kripalu yoga instructor. Her popular writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal, and she is the author of four books, including the award-winning Stealing My Religion and Pious Fashion. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. For more about how religion shapes us all, even if we don’t believe, subscribe to Liz’s newsletter at LizBucar.com.

In the chaos of today’s world, we’re all searching for meaning. The wellness industry has sold us a promise that we can find it if we just buy the right products, attend the right retreats, and follow the right celebrity gurus. But is this true? Or are we picking and choosing from a self-care salad bar in ways that satisfy our hunger but don’t truly nourish us?
When we approach practices like yoga and ayahuasca as fitness routines and life hacks, we miss out on the sacred wisdom they have to offer us. But by digging into the real and often ancient religious traditions behind these practices, from Buddhism to Christianity and beyond, we can make them more meaningful, ethical, and effective—without the often unpleasant baggage of joining an organized religion.
In this engaging and deeply personal book, award-winning scholar and writer Liz Bucar embarks on a quest to get to the heart of “spiritual but not religious” activities from detox diets to sound baths. As she tries out each practice for herself, she asks how we can get more out of it by tuning out the hype and taking the religious meaning behind it seriously—with emotionally profound and often surprising results. Whether it’s as simple as setting an intention for a yoga asana or as complex as reevaluating what a “higher power” is, it’s time to understand, experience, and simply get more out of our spiritual practices. It’s time to dig deeper with Beyond Wellness.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Adam Zeman, "The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

A compelling insight into how our imagination works, based on the latest scientific research.

People often think of imagination as something used only in creative endeavours. In fact, we use imagination constantly as we reminisce, anticipate, plan, daydream, read, create imagined worlds. The truth is we live in the here and now much less than we tend to think. Imagination isn't the exception in our daily lives; it's our default setting. Yet only now are we beginning to understand exactly how it works.
From hallucination to sleepwalking, from REM sleep to delusions, neurologist Adam Zeman brilliantly guides us through the latest scientific studies in the world of the imagination. In The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2025), he draws on research in neuroscience, the study of human origins and child development to show how the human brain is above all else a creative, imaginative organ – and that we have evolved to share what we imagine.
Our brains behave in strikingly similar ways when we observe, remember, imagine or act. Imagine looking at a cube and your eye will trace the contours of the cube as if you were actually seeing it. Yet it turns out that people differ hugely in their imaginative experience. Some people lack sensory imagery altogether – they would be unable to picture their family if asked to – but still lead fulfilling, even highly creative, lives.
From how we visualise to how we understand the minds of others, from the benefits of play to mental disorders, The Shape of Things Unseen dazzles and delights. It is an essential guide to the latest discoveries about the workings of the human mind.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Melissa Butcher, "The Trouble with Freedom: Love, Hate and America’s Future" (Manchester UP, 2026)

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

As Melissa Butcher puts it in her book The Trouble with Freedom: Love, Hate and America’s Future (Manchester UP, 2026) when asked to rank the importance of freedom to them most Americans would put it as an 11 out of 10. So, what happens when the idea of freedom becomes not something that unites Americans but rather, through its different interpretations, ideals and priorities becomes something that polarises Americans? Based upon extensive fieldwork and interviews with Americans across the states, Butcher is able to explore not just the different conceptions of freedom of America across realms such as justice, COVID, the rural/urban divide and religion, but also gives us an insight into how Americans think about America and how, especially at the local level, there are areas of hope which confound the claims we hear at the national level.

In our conversation we discuss issues such as how she identified her places to visit and people to speak to, the daily experiences of crossing the US/Mexico border at El Paso, Texas, the important conversations that can come from speaking to people as people rather than labels and why, precisely, so many Americans bring up postmodernism at the same time that Universities no longer teach it.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) along with other texts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Douglas H. Erwin, "The Origins of the New: Novelty and Innovation in the History of Life, Culture, and Technology" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The Origins of the New (Princeton University Press, 2026) presents a revolutionary approach to evolutionary success in all realms of life. In this groundbreaking book, Douglas Erwin takes readers on a dazzling excursion across science and history to explore how evolution generates new and enduring features in biology, culture, and technology.
Erwin begins by tracing how thinkers from Darwin’s time to the present day have sought to discover the driving mechanisms of evolutionary novelty. He then lays out compelling empirical evidence for separating novelty from innovation, showing that novelty involves the emergence of unique characteristics, while innovation concerns the success of those characteristics over time. Erwin develops a unifying conceptual framework for these powerful dynamics, demonstrating how they have shaped everything from the evolution of avian feathers and flight to the creation of human language and the breathtaking advances in digital computing we’re witnessing today.
A landmark work that redefines our understanding of the changes happening all around us, The Origins of the New reveals how the forces of novelty and innovation are the same across nature and culture, continually producing new forms and refashioning the world as we know it.

Our guest is doctor Doug Erwin, who is an independent researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, after retiring as Senior Scientist and Curator of Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ben Collier on Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and guest host, Paula Bialski, Associate Professor of Digital Sociology at University of St. Gallen, talk to Ben Collier, Senior Lecturer in Digital Methods in the Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies department at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, about his book, _Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy_, as well as some of his other work. The book examines one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of the digital age, Tor, the overlay network that allows for anonymous communication, best known as the infrastructure underpinning the so-called Dark Web. Collier takes a community-centered approach and examines the many different reasons and motivations people become involved in using and maintaining the platform. The trio also talk about various other projects and themes, including Collier’s current project on the visual and aesthetic standardization of public security infrastructure, like barriers and bollards.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

On Our Continuing Age of Oil with Journalist Stanley Reed

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Stanley Reed has been covering energy and the Middle East from London for more than three decades, most recently for The New York Times. With the war in Iran and its threat to global energy supplies as backdrop, we have a wide-ranging conversation about the Age of Oil. Despite longstanding predictions of Peak Oil, this era is by no means over, Reed tells me. Big Oil is used to political risk, as in the Persian Gulf region. Even now, the oil majors are busy exploring for deposits in Namibia. Venezuela could become a major producer again. The fundamental determinant, Reed says, is not the supply of fossil fuels but the demand for their use. The global Age of Oil, which began in the 19th century with commercial extractions in the United States and Caspian Sea region, huffs and puffs its way along in the 21st century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

On Trump as a “World Historical Individual” with author John B. Judis

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel “viewed history as consisting of stages punctuated by times of upheaval,” the author John B. Judis wrote in a recent essay for NOTUS, and “assigned to what he called ‘world-historical individuals’ a special role in spurring the transition from one era to another.” Trump, Judis posited, “is exactly such an individual,” comparable in this respect to Alexander the Great, Caesar and Napoleon. In our conversation, we discuss this proposition—including the forces that brought Trump to this role and the bleak destiny that typically greets “world-historical individuals.” Judis is the author of a number of books, including The Populist Explosion (Columbia Global Reports, 2016).

John B. Judis is an author and American journalist, a contributing editor at Talking Points Memo, a former senior writer at the National Journal, and a former senior editor at The New Republic

Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. His companion Substack newsletter, America and Beyond,” offers commentary and insights on the podcast. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His most recent book is Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports, 2024).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Philosophy of Hope: On Immanence and Transcendence with R.J. Snell

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In this third episode of Season 5, I interview Dr. R.J. Snell, a visiting instructor at Princeton University, the director of academic programs at the Witherspoon Institute, and the editor-in-chief of Public Discourse.

Drawing on his book, Lost in the Chaos (2023), we discuss modern disenchantment, recent attempts at re-enchantment, and the virtue of hope from its pale imitators to its authentic examples, from Anglo-Saxon warriors to Soviet dissidents.

Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on our new Substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gist Books: How Print on Demand Creates New Possibilities for the Publishing Industry

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Ramona Liberoff and Liz Fried, cofounders of the new publisher, Gist Books. Gist allows readers to pick the topics they want, creating a unique and up-to-date collection of topics in a personalized volume. Gist is positioning itself to change the nature of books, offering a wikipedia like experience in physical form.

Learn more at Gist's website.

Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

César A. Hidalgo, "The Infinite Alphabet: And the Laws of Knowledge" (Allen Lane, 2026)

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

We all understand that knowledge shapes the fate of business and the growth of nations, but few of us are aware of the principles that govern its motion. The Infinite Alphabet: And the Laws of Knowledge (Allen Lane, 2026) unravels the laws describing the growth and diffusion of knowledge by taking you from a failed attempt to build a city of knowledge in Ecuador to the growth of China's innovation economy. Through dozens of stories, you will learn why aircraft manufacturers in Italy began manufacturing scooters after the Second World War and how migrants like Samuel Slater shaped the industrial fabric of the United States. Knowledge is the secret to the wealth of nations. But to understand it, we must accept that it is not a single thing, but an ever-growing tapestry of unique ideas, experiences and received wisdom. An Infinite Alphabet that we are only beginning to fathom. César A. Hidalgo, a world-renowned scholar for his work on economic complexity, will walk you through the "three laws" and the many principles that govern how knowledge grows, moves, and decays. By the end of this journey, you will understand why knowledge grows exponentially in the electronics industry and what mechanisms govern its diffusion across geographic borders, social networks, and professional boundaries. Together these principles will teach you how knowledge shapes the world.

César A. Hidalgo is a physicist, professor, and author known for pioneering work in economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence. For nine years he led MIT's Collective Learning Group before moving to France to found the Center for Collective Learning (CCL), an international research laboratory with offices at the Toulouse School of Economics and Corvinus University of Budapest.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John Oakes, "The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without" (Avid Reader, 2024)

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

With fasting at an all-time high in popularity, here is an enlightening exploration into the history, science, and philosophy behind the practice—essential to many religions and wellness routines. Whether for philosophical, political, or health-related reasons, fasting marks a departure from daily routine. Based on extensive historical, scientific, and cultural research and reporting, John Oakes The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and the Promise of Doing Without (Avid Reader Press, 2024) illuminates the numerous facets of this act of self-deprivation. John interviews doctors, spiritual leaders, activists, and others who guide him through this practice—and embarks on fasts of his own—to deliver a book that supplies anyone curious about fasting with profound new understanding, appreciation, and inspiration. In recent years, fasting has become increasingly popular for a variety of reasons—from weight loss to detoxing, to the faithful who fast in prayer, to seekers pursuing mindfulness, to activists using hunger strikes as protest. Notable fasters include Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Gandhi, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Cesar Chavez, and a long list of others who have drawn on its power over the ages and across borders and cultures. The Fast looks at the complex science behind the jaw-dropping biological changes that occur inside the body when we fast. Metabolic switching can prompt repair and renewal down to the molecular level, providing benefits for those suffering from obesity and diabetes, cancer, epilepsy, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disorders, and more. Longer fasts can both reinvigorate the immune system and protect it against damage. Beyond the physical experience, fasting can be a great collective unifier, and it has been adopted by religions and political movements all over the world for millennia. Fasting is central to holy seasons and days such as Lent (Christianity), Ramadan (Islam), Yom Kippur (Judaism), Uposatha (Buddhism), and Ekadashi (Hinduism). On an individual level, devout ascetics who master self-deprivation to an extreme are believed to be closer to the divine, ascending to enlightenment or even sainthood. Fasting reminds us of the virtues of holding back, of not consuming all that we can. “Broad in scope and rich in insight” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), this book shows us that fasting is about much more than food: it is about taking control of your life in new and empowering ways and reconsidering your place in the world.

John Oakes is the publisher of The Evergreen Review and the editor at large of OR Books. The Fast is his first book.

Saman Nasser holds an M.A. in World History from James Madison University, where he currently works as an administrative staff.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Bryan Caplan's Case Against Education

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with economist Bryan Caplan about education and bullshit, with a particular focus on his book, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton University Press, 2018).

In our modern economy, possessing a college degree feels like a necessity for professional advancement. The age of good jobs for college dropouts is largely gone as more people spend more time in the classroom, writing papers, taking tests, and, of course, goofing off. On the one hand, policymakers celebrate the additional degrees attained by more people. Surely a more educated society means a more intelligent and productive one. It’s no secret that college grads make more money than dropouts, and high school grads make more than those who didn’t complete 12th grade.

Why is this the case? Does more education truly endow students with the skills necessary to succeed in the working world, or does education merely serve to certify that an individual has the intelligence and people skills needed to succeed? If the primary value of education is to signal conformity to employers’ expectations, then education as we know it is a waste of time, energy, and money.

Degrees range in practicality, but most—like economics—hardly spend time teaching the kinds of skills that translate to the jobs most graduates actually take. As Bryan puts it, “As far as I can tell, the only marketable skill I teach is how to be an economics professor.” The world certainly needs some economics professors, but the sentiment behind the point reflects an undeniable dirty little secret. Professors, by and large, teach students about their favorite subjects, not skills for career success.

For years, I’ve trumpeted the line that the purpose of higher education is not to teach skills but rather to teach students how to think. The Case Against Education deflates this argument with statistics and great humor. As the type of student who loved taking Russian literature, political philosophy, and economic history, I’m thrilled to speak with Bryan Caplan about bullshit and education.

Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Josh Milburn, "Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

How would we eat if animals had rights? A standard assumption is that our food systems would be plant-based. But maybe we should reject this assumption. Indeed, this book argues that a future non-vegan food system would be permissible on an animal rights view. It might even be desirable.

In Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (Oxford University Press, 2023), Josh Milburn questions if the vegan food system risks cutting off many people's pursuit of the 'good life', risks exacerbating food injustices, and risks negative outcomes for animals. If so, then maybe non-vegan food systems would be preferable to vegan food systems, if they could respect animal rights.

Could they? The author provides a rigorous analysis of the ethics of farming invertebrates, producing plant-based meats, developing cultivated animal products, and co-working with animals on genuinely humane farms, arguing that these possibilities offer the chance for a food system that is non-vegan, but nonetheless respects animals' rights. He argues that there is a way for us to have our cake, and eat it too, because we can have our cow, and eat her too.

Josh Milburn is a British philosopher and a Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Loughborough University. He has previously worked at the University of Sheffield, the University of York, and Queen's University (in Canada), before which he studied at Queen's University Belfast and Lancaster University. He is the author of Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022), and the regular host of the animal studies podcast Knowing Animals.

Kyle Johannsen is a philosophy instructor at Trent University and Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nina Bandelj, "Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Parents are exhausted. When did raising children become such all-consuming, never-ending, incredibly expensive, and emotionally absorbing effort? In this eye-opening book, Nina Bandelj explains how we got to this point--how we turned children into financial and emotional investments and child-rearing into laborious work. At the turn of the twentieth century, children went from being economically useful, often working to support families, to being seen by their parents as vulnerable and emotionally priceless. In the new millennium, however, parents have become overinvested in the emotional economy of parenting.

Analyzing in-depth interviews with parents, national financial datasets, and decades of child-rearing books, Bandelj reveals how parents today spend, save, and even go into debt for the sake of children. They take on parenting as the hardest but most important job, and commit their entire selves to being a good parent.

The economization and emotionalization of society work together to drive parental overinvestment, offering a dizzying array of products and platforms to turn children into human capital--from financial instruments to extracurricular programs to therapeutic parenting advice. And yet, Bandelj warns, the privatization of child-rearing and devotion of parents' monies, emotions, and souls ultimately hurt the well-being of children, parents, and society. Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting (Princeton UP, 2026) offers a compelling argument that we should reimagine children and what it means to raise them.

Nina Bandelj is Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and past president of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gregory T. Chin and Kevin P. Gallagher, "China and the Global Economic Order" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

China and the Global Economic Order (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines China's evolving relations with the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs), specifically the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group from the 1980s through 2025. Using a combination of new qualitative findings and quantitative datasets, the authors observe that China has taken an evolving approach to the BWIs in order to achieve its multiple agendas, acting largely as a 'rule-taker' during its first two decades as a member, but, over time, also becoming a 'rule-shaker' inside the BWIs, and ultimately a new 'rule-maker' outside of the BWIs. The analysis highlights China's exercise of 'two-way countervailing power' with one foot inside the BWIs, and another outside, and pushing for changes in both directions. China's interventions have resulted in BWs reforms and the gradual transformation of the global order, while also generating counter-reactions especially from the United States.

Gregory Chin is an Associate Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Politics, and Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University (Canada), with a focus on the political economy of international money and development finance, China, Asia, the BRICS, and global governance.

Nomeh Anthony Kanayo, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, with research interest in Africa's diaspora relations, African-China relations, great power rivalry and IR theories.

Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nick Romeo, "The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy" (PublicAffairs, 2024)

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Winners Take All meets Nickel and Dimed: a provocative debunking of accepted wisdom, providing the pathway to a sustainable, survivable economy.

Confronted by the terrifying trends of the early twenty-first century - widening inequality, environmental destruction, and the immiseration of millions of workers around the world - many economists and business leaders still preach dogmas that lack evidence and create political catastrophe: Private markets are always more efficient than public ones; investment capital flows efficiently to necessary projects; massive inequality is the unavoidable side effect of economic growth; people are selfish and will only behave well with the right incentives.

But a growing number of people - academic economists, business owners, policy entrepreneurs, and ordinary people - are rejecting these myths and reshaping economies around the world to reflect ethical and social values. Though they differ in approach, all share a vision of the economy as a place of moral action and accountability. Journalist Nick Romeo has spent years covering the world's most innovative economic and policy ideas for The New Yorker. In The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy (PublicAffairs, 2024), Romeo takes us on an extraordinary journey through the unforgettable stories and successes of people working to build economies that are more equal, just, and livable.

Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Justin Gregg, "If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity" (Little, Brown, 2022)

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

What if human intelligence is actually more of a liability than a gift? After all, the animal kingdom, in all its diversity, gets by just fine without it. At first glance, human history is full of remarkable feats of intelligence, yet human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination, and the creation of a world teetering towards climate catastrophe. What if human exceptionalism is more of a curse than a blessing?

As Dr. Justin Gregg puts it in his book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity (Little, Brown (US), 2022, Hodder (UK), 2023), there’s an evolutionary reason why human intelligence isn’t more prevalent in the animal kingdom. Simply put, non-human animals don’t need it to be successful. And, miraculously, their success arrives without the added baggage of destroying themselves and the planet in the process.

In seven mind-bending and hilarious chapters, Dr. Gregg highlights features seemingly unique to humans – our use of language, our rationality, our moral systems, our so-called sophisticated consciousness – and compares them to our animal brethren. What emerges is both demystifying and remarkable, and will change how you look at animals, humans, and the meaning of life itself.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sean Mathews, "The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East" (Hurst, 2025)

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Where does Greece belong? Many look at the ancient Greek ruins of Athens, and see the cradle of Western civilization. But much of Greece’s history actually looks eastward to the rest of the Mediterranean: to Turkey, Egypt, Israel and Palestine. In his book The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East (Hurst: 2025), Sean Mathews argues that it’s best to think about Greece as belonging to the “Near East”—and doubly so with today’s more complicated geopolitics.

Sean Mathews is a Greek-American journalist who has covered a wide swath of the Middle East. He is a correspondent with Middle East Eye, and has also written for The Economist and Al-Monitor, among others.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The New Byzantines. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Tomer Persico, "In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea" (NYU Press, 2025)

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Tomer Persico is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Rubinstein Fellow at Reichman University, and a Senior Research Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His fields of expertise include contemporary spirituality, Jewish modern identity, Jewish renewal, and forms of secularization and religiosity in Israel.

In God’s Image, Persico examines the central role that the idea that all people were created in the image of God played in the development of Western civilization. Focusing on five themes―selfhood, freedom, conscience, equality, and meaning―the book guides the reader through a cultural history of the West, from ancient times through modernity. It explains how each of these ideals was profoundly influenced by the central biblical conception of humanity’s creation in God’s image, embracing an essential equality among all people, while also emphasizing each human life’s singularity and significance.

The book argues that the West, and particularly Protestant Christianity, grew out of ideas rooted deeply in this notion, and that it played a core role in the development of individualism, liberalism, human rights discourse, and indeed the secularization process. Making the case for a cultural understanding of history, the volume focuses on ideas as agents of change and challenges the common scholarly emphasis on material conditions. Offering an innovative perspective on the shaping of global modernity, In God’s Image examines the relationship between faith and society and posits the fundamental role of the idea of the image of God in the making of the moral ideals and social institutions we hold dear today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold History" (Knopf, 2023)

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The Earth Transformed. An Untold History (Knopf, 2023) is a captivating and informative book that reveals how climate change has been a driving force behind the development and decline of civilizations across the centuries. The author, Peter Frankopan, takes readers on a journey through history, showcasing how natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, El Niño, and solar flare activity have shaped the course of human events. Frankopan's extensive research, coupled with his accessible writing style, makes for an engaging read that reframes our understanding of the world and our place in it.

One of the strengths of The Earth Transformed is the way in which Frankopan connects seemingly disparate events to highlight the far-reaching impact of climate change. For example, he explains how the Vikings emerged as a result of catastrophic crop failure, and how the collapse of cotton prices due to unusual climate patterns led to regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad. Through such connections, Frankopan demonstrates how past empires that failed to act sustainably were met with catastrophe, providing valuable lessons for our current environmental crisis.

Overall, The Earth Transformed is a timely and important book that sheds light on the enduring relationship between humans and the natural world. It challenges readers to reckon with our species' impact on the environment and to consider how we can act sustainably to prevent further harm. Frankopan's interdisciplinary approach, combining historical research with scientific insights, makes for a compelling and thought-provoking read that will leave readers with a new perspective on the world around us.

Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mike Jay, "Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind" (Yale UP, 2023)

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Mike Jay's Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale UP, 2023) is a provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind.

Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments--in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals. But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear. From Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism. Today, as we embrace novel cognitive enhancers and psychedelics, the experiments of the original psychonauts reveal the deep influence of mind-altering drugs on Western science, philosophy, and culture.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Richard Wolin, "Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology" (Yale UP, 2023)

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century's most important philosopher? Martin Heidegger's sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement's philosophical preceptor, "to lead the leader." Yet for years, Heidegger's defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger's "Black Notebooks," it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough.

The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger's philosophy was suffused with it. In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (Yale University Press, 2022), Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas--and why his legacy remains radically compromised.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Kevin J. Mitchell, "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency--or free will--is an illusion. In Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton UP, 2023), leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose.

Traversing billions of years of evolution, Mitchell tells the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice arose from lifeless matter. He explains how the emergence of nervous systems provided a means to learn about the world, granting sentient animals the capacity to model, predict, and simulate. Mitchell reveals how these faculties reached their peak in humans with our abilities to imagine and to be introspective, to reason in the moment, and to shape our possible futures through the exercise of our individual agency. Mitchell's argument has important implications--for how we understand decision making, for how our individual agency can be enhanced or infringed, for how we think about collective agency in the face of global crises, and for how we consider the limitations and future of artificial intelligence.

An astonishing journey of discovery, Free Agents offers a new framework for understanding how, across a billion years of Earth history, life evolved the power to choose, and why it matters.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society.

Scholars of science, technology, medicine, and law have all tended to emphasize knowledge as the sum of human understanding, and its ownership as possession by law. Breaking with traditional discourse on knowledge property as something that concerns mainly words and intellectual history, or science and law, Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi, and Marius Buning propose technology as a central heuristic for studying the many implications of knowledge ownership.

Toward this end, they focus on the notions of knowledge and ownership in courtrooms, workshops, policy, and research practices, while also shedding light on scholarship itself as a powerful tool for making explicit the politics inherent in knowledge practices and social order. The book presents case studies showing how diverse knowledge economies are created and how inequalities arise from them. Unlike scholars who have fragmented this discourse across the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and history, the editors highlight recent developments in the emerging field of the global history of knowledge—as science, as economy, and as culture. The case studies reveal how notions of knowing and owning emerge because they reciprocally produce and determine each other's limits and possibilities; that is, how we know inevitably affects how we can own what we know; and how we own always impacts how and what we are able to know.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Philippe Huneman, "Why?: The Philosophy Behind the Question" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Why did triceratops have horns? Why did World War I occur? Why does Romeo love Juliet? And, most importantly, why ask why? In Why?: The Philosophy Behind the Question (Stanford UP, 2023), philosopher Philippe Huneman describes the different meanings of "why," and how those meanings can, and should (or should not), be conflated.

As Huneman outlines, there are three basic meanings of why: the cause of an event, the reason of a belief, and the reason why I do what I do (the purpose). Each of these meanings, in turn, impacts how we approach knowledge in a wide array of disciplines: science, history, psychology, and metaphysics. Exhibiting a rare combination of conversational ease and intellectual rigor, Huneman teases out the hidden dimensions of questions as seemingly simple as "Why did Mickey Mouse open the refrigerator?" or as seemingly unanswerable as "Why am I me?" In doing so, he provides an extraordinary tour of canonical and contemporary philosophical thought, from Plato and Aristotle, through Descartes and Spinoza, to Elizabeth Anscombe and Ruth Millikan, and beyond.

Of course, no proper reckoning with the question "why?" can afford not to acknowledge its limits, which are the limits, and the ends, of reason itself. Huneman thus concludes with a provocative elaboration of what Kant called the "natural need for metaphysics," the unallayed instinct we have to ask the question even when we know there can be no unequivocal answer.

Philippe Huneman is Research Director at the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, CNRS/ Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne and the author of several books in French and English, including Philosophical Sketches of Death in Biology: An Historical and Analytic Investigation (2022).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Graham Harman, "Waves and Stones: The Continuous and the Discontinuous in Human Thought" (Allen Lane, 2025)

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world’s most influential philosophers.
How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?
In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction – the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world – permeates every area of human life. What’s more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself. In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter.
To explore the relationship between the continuous and the discrete, Harman shows, is to consider the very fabric of reality. With this dazzling new book, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the bewilderingly complex world in which we live.
Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Reading the Bible with AI?: A Conversation with John Kaag, Philosopher and Co-Founder of Rebind AI

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Rebind combines reading with AI-chat to deepen learning and simulate the experience of conversing with some of the greatest scholars and thinkers. With Rebind, you can read A Tale of Two Cities with Margaret Atwood, Huck Finn with Marlon James, and Candide with Salman Rushdie. John and his team have recently launched the Rebind Study Bible, an interactive way to read, listen, and interpret the Bible with insight from scholars. As we head further into a world augmented by AI tools, Rebind is on the frontlines of embracing AI without destroying the art of deep, contemplative engagement. To give so insight into how Rebind is marrying scholarship with AI tools, I’m thrilled today to have John Kaag on the podcast.

For a free 7-day trial, visit this link

John Kaag is an American philosopher and chair and professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is co-founder of Rebind Publishing.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies--the United States and China--have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change.

By examining key historical moments--from the rise of the steam engine to the dawn of AI--Frey shows why technological shifts have shaped, and sometimes destabilized, entire civilizations. He explores why some leading technological powers of the past--such as Song China, the Dutch Republic, and Victorian Britain--ultimately lost their innovative edge, why some modern nations such as Japan had periods of rapid growth followed by stagnation, and why planned economies like the Soviet Union collapsed after brief surges of progress. Frey uncovers a recurring tension in history: while decentralization fosters the exploration of new technologies, bureaucracy is crucial for scaling them. When institutions fail to adapt to technological change, stagnation inevitably follows. Only by carefully balancing decentralization and bureaucracy can nations innovate and grow over the long term--findings that have worrying implications for the United States, Europe, China, and other economies today.

Through a rich narrative that weaves together history, economics, and technology, How Progress Ends reveals that managing the future requires us to draw the right lessons from the past.

Carl Benedikt Frey is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

On Democracy and Bullshit with Hélène Landemore

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Hélène Landemore, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, about Democracy and Bullshit, with a special focus on her 2020 book, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Bullshit is a feature of both democracies and dictatorships alike, but it takes different forms. In democracies, while citizens enjoy the freedom of speech and the right to vote, a range of forces often conspire to limit their real power in favor of competing elites. The political and economic elite’s toolkit includes the art of bullshit—the persuasive use of language without regard for truth. Whether meritocratic or populist, elites alike have mastered this form of manipulation, amplified by modern tools of dissemination and authority.

To help us understand the challenges that bullshit poses to democratic citizens, I’m pleased to welcome Hélène Landemore.

Hélène Landemore is a professor of political science at Yale University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Technological Soul: Alex Priou on Modernity, Ideology, and the Limits of Reason

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI acting director Eli Karetny speaks with Alex Priou, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Austin, about how technology and ideology shape the modern soul. From Machiavelli’s “dikes and dams” to Odysseus’s struggle against the Sirens, Priou traces how modernity’s drive for control has left us materially fulfilled yet spiritually impoverished. The conversation explores liberalism’s crises, the moral stakes of AI, the American “technological republic,” and why revisiting Homer and Plato may be key to recovering wisdom and restraint in an age of restless innovation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

brian bean, "Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition" (Haymarket, 2025)

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Where do cops come from and what do they do? How did “modern policing” as we know it today come to be? What about the capitalist state necessitates policing? In this clear and comprehensive account of why and how the police—the linchpin of capitalism—function and exist, organizer and author brian bean presents a clear case for the abolition of policing and capitalism.

Their End Is Our Beginning traces the roots and development of policing in global capitalism through colonial rule, racist enslavement, and class oppression, along the way arguing how police power can be challenged and, ultimately, abolished. bean draws from extensive interviews with activists from Mexico to Ireland to Egypt, all of whom share compelling and knowledgeable perspectives on what it takes to—even if temporarily—take down the cops and build a thriving community-organized society, free from the police. The lessons they offer bring nuance to the meaning of “solidarity” and clarity to what “abolition” and “revolution” look like in practice.

Featuring illustrations by Chicago-based artist Charlie Aleck, Their End Is Our Beginning is an incendiary book that offers a socialist analysis of policing and the capitalist state, a vital discussion of the contours of abolition at large, and the revolutionary logic needed for liberation.

Guest: brian bean is a Chicago-based socialist organizer, writer, and agitator originally from North Carolina. They are one of the founding editors of Rampant magazine. Their work has been published in Truthout, Jacobin, Tempest, Spectre, Red Flag, New Politics, Socialist Worker, International Viewpoint, and more. In addition to Their End Is Our Beginning, brian coedited and contributed to the book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, also published by Haymarket Books.

Host: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jane G. Goldberg, "Wired for Why: How We Think, Feel, and Make Meaning" (2025)

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

WIRED FOR WHY: How We Think, Feel and Make Meaning. (Self-Published 2025) spans eighteen chapters exploring everything from how we manage to stay alive against all odds, to why language separates us from other species, to whether death might be a metaphor. It's a journey through neuroscience, psychoanalysis, history, and philosophy that challenges readers to reconsider their most basic assumptions about human experience.

In WIRED FOR WHY, Dr. Jane Goldberg dismantles fundamental assumptions about human consciousness, memory, and experience. Humans have no "now"—we're perpetually living in the past as our brains lag behind reality, processing what has already happened. Memory, Goldberg argues, is an illusion, an unreliable collection of patterns distributed throughout our bodies rather than faithful recordings of our lives. This challenges everything we believe about identity and selfhood. The book explores how beer created civilization, why coffee shaped the Industrial Revolution, why "B" students often outperform "A" students, and why the brain is the only entity on Earth that named itself—a fact that reveals something profound about human self-awareness.

Beyond neuroscience, Goldberg tackles pressing cultural questions: why one in six Americans takes psychiatric medication and children Google "how to completely kill all my emotions." She argues we're medicating away normal human experiences at great cost to our emotional intelligence. Against our productivity-obsessed culture, she makes the counterintuitive case that spacing out and daydreaming fuel creativity, that intelligence is fundamentally a team sport requiring connection rather than isolation, and that our minds and bodies continuously eavesdrop on each other in ways we barely understand. The book doesn't offer simple life hacks but instead provides a more honest reckoning with what it means to live inside brains that lie to us, confabulate truth, and imagine reality on a non-stop basis—and suggests we need humility, openness to being wrong, and peace with our beautifully flawed human nature.

Christopher Russell is a psychoanalyst working with individuals and groups. He is a member of the faculty at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies; a licensure qualifying institute in New York. CMPS is also the New York campus for the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; the only accredited, independent graduate school of psychoanalysis in the country.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship" (MIT Press, 2025)

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

AI is changing democracy. We still get to decide how.
AI’s impact on democracy will go far beyond headline-grabbing political deepfakes and automated misinformation. Everywhere it will be used, it will create risks and opportunities to shake up long-standing power structures.
In this highly readable and advisedly optimistic book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (MIT Press, 2025), security technologist Bruce Schneier and data scientist Nathan Sanders cut through the AI hype and examine the myriad ways that AI is transforming every aspect of democracy—for both good and ill.
The authors describe how the sophistication of AI will fulfill demands from lawmakers for more complex legislation, reducing deference to the executive branch and altering the balance of power between lawmakers and administrators. They show how the scale and scope of AI is enhancing civil servants’ ability to shape private-sector behavior, automating either the enforcement or neglect of industry regulations. They also explain how both lawyers and judges will leverage the speed of AI, upending how we think about law enforcement, litigation, and dispute resolution.
Whether these outcomes enhance or degrade democracy depends on how we shape the development and use of AI technologies. Powerful players in private industry and public life are already using AI to increase their influence, and AIs built by corporations don’t deliver the fairness and trust required by democratic governance. But, steered in the right direction, AI’s broad capabilities can augment democratic processes and help citizens build consensus, express their voice, and shake up long-standing power structures.
Democracy is facing new challenges worldwide, and AI has become a part of that. It can inform, empower, and engage citizens. It can also disinform, disempower, and disengage them. The choice is up to us. Schneier and Sanders blaze the path forward, showing us how we can use AI to make democracy stronger and more participatory.

Nathan E. Sanders is a data scientist focused on making policymaking more participatory. His research spans machine learning, astrophysics, public health, environmental justice, and more. He has served in fellowships at the Massachusetts legislature and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ron Broglio, "Animal Revolution" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Animals are staging a revolution—they’re just not telling us. From radioactive boar invading towns to jellyfish disarming battleships, Animal Revolution (U Minnesota Press, 2022) threads together news accounts and more in a powerful and timely work of creative, speculative nonfiction that imagines a revolution stirring and asks how humans can be a part of it. If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we should pay attention to how we bump up against animal worlds and how animals will push back. Animal Revolution is a passionate, provocative, cogent call for us to do so.

Ron Broglio reveals how fur and claw and feather and fin are jamming the gears of our social machine. We can try to frame such disruptions as environmental intervention or through the lens of philosophy or biopolitics, but regardless the animals persist beyond our comprehension in reminding us that we too are part of an animal world. Animals see our technologies and machines as invasive beings and, in a nonlinguistic but nonetheless intensive mode of communicating with us, resist our attempts to control them and diminish their habitats. In doing so, they expose the environmental injustices and vulnerabilities in our systems.

A witty, informative, and captivating work—at the juncture of posthumanism, animal studies, phenomenology, and environmental studies—Broglio reminds us of our inadequacy as humans, not our exceptionalism.

Ron Broglio is professor of English, director of Desert Humanities, and associate director of the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University. He is author or editor of several books, including Beasts of Burden: Biopolitics, Labor, and Animal Life and Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art.

Callie Smith is a poet and a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

What is Free Speech with Fara Dabhoiwala

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The speech debates have not abated, and it’s clear that invoking the First Amendment, and the importance of free speech for democracy, does not settle these debates but provokes more questions. We have lost our way, it seems, since people on all sides invoke free speech and then try to silence those they disagree with. Historian Fara Dabhoiwala of Princeton University reminds us that free speech has always been contested, and that it became a political and social value only recently. We invited him to discuss his new book What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea.

Dabhoiwala examines how free speech started as a risky and radical concept, and how it evolved through centuries of political battles to become central to democracy only at a certain point in history. As Professor Dabhoiwala explains, speech rights have come and gone long before campus protests, debates over what talk show hosts can say, and whether there ought to be limits to speech that’s defined as dangerous, offensive, or unpatriotic. If we hope to find a way out of our current predicament, we should study this history carefully – with Professor Dahhoiwala as the perfect guide.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Richard Duncan, "The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century" (John Wiley & Sons, 2022)

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century, economist and bestselling author Richard Duncan lays out a farsighted strategy to maximize the United States' unmatched financial and technological potential. In compelling fashion, the author shows that the United States can and should invest in the industries and technologies of the future on an unprecedented scale in order to ignite a new technological revolution that would cement the country’s geopolitical preeminence, greatly enhance human wellbeing, and create unimaginable wealth. This book also features a history of the Federal Reserve.

Richard Duncan has served as Global Head of Investment Strategy at ABN AMRO Asset Management in London, worked as a financial sector specialist for the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and headed equity research departments for James Capel Securities and Salomon Brothers in Bangkok, Thailand. He is now the publisher of Macro Watch, a video-newsletter that analyzes the forces driving the global economy in the 21st Century.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sasha Davis, "Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A practical call to action against oppression. Across the globe, millions of people have participated in protests and marches, donated to political groups, or lobbied their representatives with the aim of creating lasting social change, overturning repressive laws, or limiting environmental destruction. Yet very little seems to improve for those affected by rapacious governments. Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail (U Minnesota Press, 2025) brings new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have found success by unconventional, and more direct, means. Sasha Davis, an activist and scholar of radical environmental advocacy, focuses on the strategies of movements, many of them Indigenous, that have occupied contested sites and demonstrated their effectiveness at managing or governing them. Including case studies of resistance to development on Indigenous lands in Hawai'i, nuclear testing in the Nevada desert, and the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa, he offers insight and direction for activists, students, academics, and others dedicated to protecting and improving the well-being of their communities and beyond. It would be easy to succumb to pessimism and political apathy in the face of governing institutions that are increasingly unresponsive to calls for change and repressive in response to protest, even as they violate human rights, ignore existential climate catastrophes, and concentrate power into fewer and fewer hands. Instead, Davis finds inspiration for genuine political change through social movements that are successfully "replacing the state" and taking over the day-to-day governance of threatened places. From contesting environmental abuse to reasserting Indigenous sovereignty, these social movements demonstrate how people can collectively wrest control over their communities from oppressive governments and manage them with a more egalitarian ethics of care.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Cass R. Sunstein, "Imperfect Oracle: What AI Can and Cannot Do" (APS Press, 2025)

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Imperfect Oracle is about the promise and limits of artificial intelligence. The promise is that in important ways AI is better than we are at making judgments. Its limits are evidenced by the fact that AI cannot always make accurate predictions--not today, not tomorrow, and not the day after, either.

Natural intelligence is a marvel, but human beings blunder because we are biased. We are biased in the sense that our judgments tend to go systematically wrong in predictable ways, like a scale that always shows people as heavier than they are, or like an archer who always misses the target to the right. Biases can lead us to buy products that do us no good or to make foolish investments. They can lead us to run unreasonable risks, and to refuse to run reasonable risks. They can shorten our lives. They can make us miserable.

Biases present one kind of problem; noise is another. People are noisy not in the sense that we are loud, though we might be, but in the sense that our judgments show unwanted variability. On Monday, we might make a very different judgment from the judgment we make on Friday. When we are sad, we might make a different judgment from the one we would make when we are happy. Bias and noise can produce exceedingly serious mistakes.

AI promises to avoid both bias and noise. For institutions that want to avoid mistakes it is now a great boon. AI will also help investors who want to make money and consumers who don't want to buy products that they will end up hating. Still, the world is full of surprises, and AI cannot spoil those surprises because some of the most important forms of knowledge involve an appreciation of what we cannot know and why we cannot know it. Written in clear, jargon-free English and grounded in deep understanding, Imperfect Oracle provides a distinctly useful perspective on this complex debate.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jon Mills, "End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Jon Mills, has had an impressive career as practicing professional, researcher, educator and writer in the psychology and psychoanalytic field.

His work bounds the world of philosophy and psychology, focusing upon both individual human behavior and the manifestation of the collective behavior in the social context.

He is the author and/or editor of over 30 books in psychoanalysis, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies

He is Emeritus Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis at the Adler Graduate Professional School in Toronto, Canada and has had appointments as Honorary Professor, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK; Faculty member in the Postgraduate Programs in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University, NY and the New School for Existential Psychoanalysis, CA

Jon has received numerous awards for his scholarship including 4 Gradiva Awards, for his work that advances the field of psychoanalysis.

And in 2015 he was given the Otto Weininger Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Canadian Psychological Association.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Peter Lamont, "Radical Thinking: How to See the Bigger Picture" (Swift Press, 2024)

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Radical Thinking: How to See the Bigger Picture (Swift Press, 2024) is a book about how you view the world. It's about the things that shape your thoughts, from what you notice and how you interpret it, to what you assume, believe and want. It's also about how, if you think in a radical way, you can look beyond your limited view of the world to see the bigger picture.
This isn't one of those books that points out why you get things wrong, or offers you a set of rules to get it 'right'. Instead, Peter Lamont (a former magician, now Professor of History and Theory of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh) takes us on a curious tour. As he looks at the things around him, he reveals how we look at everything. He discovers – in nearby streets and buildings, and quirky local history (about Sherlock Holmes, the birth of Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the original self-help book) – the things that shape how we view the world.
He shows how, from a local point of view, we create a worldview. No wonder that we disagree. However, if you're curious, then you can see the bigger picture. And, in a world of urgent noise and competing truths, you can make sense of anything.

Peter Lamont is Professor of History and Theory of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Who Needs College Anymore: Imagining A Future Where Degrees Don’t Matter

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this optimistic yet practical assessment of how postsecondary education can evolve to meet the needs of next-generation learners, Kathleen deLaski reimagines what higher education might offer and whom it should serve. In the wake of declining enrollment and declining confidence in the value of a college degree, she urges a mindset shift regarding the learning routes and credentials that best prepare students for post-high-school success. Who Needs College Anymore draws on a decade of research from the Education Design Lab, and interviews of educational experts, college and career counselors, teachers, employers, and learners.

Kathleen deLaski applies human-centered design to higher education reform. She highlights ten top principles based on user feedback and considers how well they are being enacted by colleges. She urges institutions to better attend to the needs of new-majority learners, including people from low- or moderate-income backgrounds, people of color, first-generation students, veterans, single mothers, rural students, part-time attendees, and neurodivergent students. She finds ample opportunity for colleges to support learners via alternative pathways to marketable knowledge, including skills-based learning, apprenticeships, career training, and other types of workplace learning.

Our guest is: Kathleen deLaski, who spent twenty years as a journalist, including time as ABC News White House correspondent. In the second half of her career, she has focused on education reform, cofounding or founding nonprofits including the Education Design Lab. She is a senior advisor to the Project on Workforce at Harvard University, and is an adjunct professor at George Mason University.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a developmental editor for humanities scholars and social scientists at all stages of their careers. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the Academic Life newsletter, found here

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Madness & Acute Religious Experiences, with Richard Saville-Smith

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Host Pierce Salguero sits down with Richard Saville-Smith, an independent scholar of madness, religion, and psychiatry. We discuss Richard’s book Acute Religious Experiences (2023), which argues that frameworks from Mad Studies can get us out from under the academy’s current habit of either pathologizing or sanitizing religious experiences. Along the way, we talk about the power struggle between psychiatry & the humanities, the influence of Queer Studies on Richard’s work, and his reinterpretation of Jesus as a madman.

If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. Also check out our members-only benefits on Substack.com to see what our guests have shared with you. Enjoy the show!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies (2023)

Become a paid subscriber on blackberyl.substack.com to unlock our members-only benefits, including PDFs of some of these resources.

Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Anthony Bonato, "Dots and Lines: Hidden Networks in Social Media, AI, and Nature" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Can networks unlock secrets of AI or make sense of a social media mess? A behind-the-scenes look at how networks reveal reality.

According to mathematician Anthony Bonato, the hidden world of networks permeates our lives in astounding ways. From Bitcoin transactions to neural connections, Dots and Lines: Hidden Networks in Social Media, AI, and Nature (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025) explains how networks shape everything from political landscapes to climate patterns and how deceptively simple dots and lines can unveil the wonders of technology, society, and even nature.

From a fresh and startling look at the true impact of clever keywords in politicians' social media posts to a fun breakdown of survival strategies in reality TV shows, Bonato shows us how network theory operates everywhere. Each chapter focuses on a unique aspect of networks to reveal how they provide a captivating lens for bringing diverse phenomena into clearer focus.

The book offers an accessible snapshot of networks for anyone curious about what makes the modern world tick. Bonato's insights will give readers a deeper appreciation and understanding of networks and their relevance to our everyday lives.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David Edmonds, "Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Imagine this: You’re walking past a shallow pond and spot a toddler thrashing around in the water, in obvious danger of drowning. You look around for her parents, but nobody is there. You’re the only person who can save her and you must act immediately. But as you approach the pond you remember that you’re wearing your most expensive shoes. Wading into the water will ruin them—and might make you late for a meeting. Should you let the child drown? The philosopher Peter Singer published this thought experiment in 1972, arguing that allowing people in the developing world to die, when we could easily help them by giving money to charity, is as morally reprehensible as saving our shoes instead of the drowning child. Can this possibly be true? In Death in a Shallow Pond, David Edmonds tells the remarkable story of Singer and his controversial idea, tracing how it radically changed the way many think about poverty—but also how it has provoked scathing criticisms.
Death in a Shallow Pond describes the experiences and world events that led Singer to make his radical case and how it moved some young philosophers to establish the Effective Altruism movement, which tries to optimize philanthropy. The book also explores the reactions of critics who argue that the Shallow Pond and Effective Altruism are unrealistic, misguided, and counterproductive, neglecting the causes of—and therefore perpetuating—poverty. Ultimately, however, Edmonds argues that the Shallow Pond retains the power to shape how we live in a world in which terrible and unnecessary suffering persists.

David Edmonds is the bestselling author of many critically acclaimed and popular books on philosophy, including Wittgenstein’s Poker (with John Eidinow). His other books include Parfit, The Murder of Professor Schlick, and Would You Kill the Fat Man? (all Princeton). A Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Uehiro Oxford Institute and a former BBC radio journalist, Edmonds hosts, with Nigel Warburton, the Philosophy Bites podcast, which has been downloaded nearly 50 million times.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mark L. Haas, "The Geriatric Peace: Population Aging and the Decline of War" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The vast majority of the world's countries are experiencing a demographic revolution: dramatic, sustained, and likely irreversible population aging. States' median ages are steadily increasing as the number of people ages 65 and older skyrockets. Analysts and policymakers frequently decry population aging's domestic costs, especially likely slowing economic growth and massive new public expenditures for elderly welfare. But aging has a major yet largely unrecognized international benefit: it significantly reduces the likelihood of international war. Although wars continue to rage in parts of the world, almost none involve aged countries. This book provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking argument why population aging will be a powerful force for peace.

Aging will significantly reduce states' military capabilities available for war while also boosting leaders’ and citizens' preferences for peaceful foreign policies. At the same time, the effects of aging will help prevent the emergence of a power transition between the United States and China, which would be a development that is particularly likely to devolve into armed hostilities. If an aged country does initiate war, the effects of aging will create major barriers to military success. The more aging reduces the probability of victory, the greater the disincentives to aggressing. Detailed case studies show how aging has affected the capabilities and preferences in Japan, China, the United States, and Russia.

Guest: Mark L. Haas is a Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University. He is the author of The Geriatric Peace: Population Aging and the Decline of War (Oxford University Press, 2025); Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally (Cornell University Press, 2022); The Clash of Ideologies: Middle Eastern Politics and American Security (Oxford University Press, 2012); The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 1789-1989 (Cornell University Press, 2005), and co-editor of Ideologies and International Relations (Routledge Press); The Middle East and the United States: History, Politics, and Ideologies (Routledge, 2018, sixth edition) and The Arab Spring: The Hope and Reality of the Uprisings (Routledge, 2017).

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Donald G. Nieman, "The Path to Paralysis: How American Politics Became Nasty, Dysfunctional, and a Threat to the Republic" (Anthem Press, 2024)

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Much has been written about political polarisation in the United States, but no one has examined it through the lens of recent U.S. history. There is nothing deterministic about how we became polarised, and it happened more recently than many think. To fully understand the problem, we must take the long view, the perspective provided by history, with its attention to change over time and the role of contingency. That’s what The Path to Paralysis does.

The book illuminates the broad forces that have shaped and reshaped American society and politics since the mid-1960s: the shift from an industrial to an information economy that produced economic inequality not seen since the 1920s; dramatic, unsettling changes in gender and sexuality; sharp conflict between those who embrace the culture of personal freedom that was a legacy of the 1960s and politically mobilised White evangelicals; persistent racial discord that transformed Southern politics and shattered the New Deal coalition; and dramatic changes in communication that transformed broadcasting into narrowcasting, creating alternate news and truths.

These developments had their origin in the late 1960s and have generated sharp political conflict for six decades. But they didn’t overwhelm the system until the 21st century. Ronald Reagan moved American politics to the right, but Republicans and Democrats forged compromise on issues as diverse as economic policy, civil rights, and immigration. After the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush tacked to the centre and sought bipartisan solutions to issues like welfare, education and immigration. Sharp conflict and governance were compatible.

The tipping point was the election of the nation’s first Black president and the economic collapse he inherited. Fault lines of religion, region, gender, sexual orientation, class, education and, especially, race widened. People chose sides and identified enemies, the number of true swing voters shrunk, fewer states and congressional districts were competitive, the two major parties became more monolithic, and appeals to the base drove strategy and what passed for policy. It was an atmosphere that provided fertile ground for a demagogue whose norm-busting appeals to White grievance and Christian Nationalism, as well as to regional and class resentment strengthened his appeal to an angry base and threatened the peaceful transition of power, the bedrock of American democracy for more than two centuries.

Donald G. Nieman is an authority on modern U.S. law and politics, and professor of history and provost emeritus at Binghamton University – State University of New York.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nick Spencer, "The Landscapes of Science and Religion: What Are We Disagreeing About?" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The relationship between science and religion has long been a heated debate and is becoming an ever more popular topic. The scientific capacity to manipulate and change humans and their environment through genetic engineering, life extension, and AI is going to take a huge leap forward in the twenty-first century, provoking endless debates around humans “playing God”.

But what do we mean by this? Asking this question is surprisingly hard work. Attempts to 'essentialise' science, let alone religion, quickly run into trouble. Where are the boundaries? Whose definition of science is definitive? Which concept of religious is the authoritative one?

Ultimately, neither “science” nor “religion” can be pinned down to one single meaning or definition. Rather, they encompass a family of definitions that relate to one another in a complex web of shifting ways. Drawing on extensive research with over a hundred leading thinkers in the UK — including Martin Rees, Brian Cox, Susan Greenfield, A.C. Grayling, Ray Tallis, Linda Woodhead, Steve Bruce, Adam Rutherford, Robin Dunbar, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, and Iain McGilchrist — The Landscapes of Science and Religion takes the much-needed step of asking what science and religion actually are, before turning to the familiar question of how they relate to one another.

Building on this, by paying particular attention to those who sense some form of conflict here, Spencer and Waite explore where the perceived conflict really lies. What exactly are people disagreeing about when they disagree about science and religion, and what, if anything, can we do to improve that disagreement and bring about a fruitful dialogue between these two important human endeavours.

Nicholas Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos, a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion and a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of a number of books including Darwin and God, The Evolution of the West and Atheists. He has presented a BBC Radio 4 series on The Secret History of Science and Religion, and has written for the Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, New Statesman, Prospect and more. He lives in London.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Walter Scheidel, "What Is Ancient History?" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

It’s easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history—obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of extinction. In What Is Ancient History?, Walter Scheidel presents a compelling case for a new kind of ancient history—a global history that captures antiquity’s pivotal role as a decisive phase in human development, one that provided the shared foundation of our world and continues to shape our lives today.

For Scheidel, ancient history is when the earliest versions of today’s ways of life were created and spread—from farming, mining, and engineering to housing and transportation, cities and government, writing and belief systems. Transforming the planet, this process unfolded all over the world, in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, often at different times, sometimes haltingly but ultimately unstoppably. Yet it’s rarely studied or taught that way. Since the eighteenth century, Western intellectuals have dismembered the ancient world, driven not only by their quest for professional expertise but also by nationalism, colonialism, racism, and the idealization of Greece and Rome. Specialized scholarship has fractured into numerous academic niches, obscuring broader patterns and dynamics and keeping us from understanding just how much humanity has long had in common.

The time has come, Scheidel argues, to put the ancient world back together—by moving beyond the limitations of Greco-Roman “classics,” by systematically comparing ancient societies, and by exploring early exchanges and connections between them. The time has come, in other words, for an ancient history for everyone.

New books in late antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Walter Schiedel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics and History

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jack Buffington, "Environmental Innovation: An Action Plan for Saving the Economy and the Planet by 2050" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Environmental sustainability policy has failed due to focusing on symptoms rather than the root cause problems. Through significant research and a detailed roadmap for how to achieve sustainability by 2050, Buffington provides a realistic, game changing path forward that is both good for the environment and the economy.

Dr. Jack Buffington received a Ph.D. in Supply Chain Management from the Lulea University of Technology in Sweden, and a Post-Doctorate at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and now he is currently the Program Director/Professor for the Supply Chain Management program and the Denver Transportation Institute at the University of Denver. Jack has published over twenty peer-reviewed journal articles and seven books before this one. Jack’s current research efforts are focused on Africa, which he believes is the epicenter of where environmental innovation must be fostered. And he is also Sustainability Director at First Key Consulting, a global brewing consulting firm. Jack is collaborating with innovators in supply chain, sustainability, and healthcare across the planet. Before these roles, Jack was responsible for supply chain logistics for MillerCoors Brewing Company, the second-largest beer company in the U.S. and the fourth-largest worldwide.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mario Livio and Jack Szostak, "Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest for Cosmic Life" (Basic Books, 2024)

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For a long time, scientists have wondered how life has emerged from inanimate chemistry, and whether Earth is the only place where it exists. Charles Darwin speculated about life on Earth beginning in a warm little pond. Some of his contemporaries believed that life existed on Mars. It once seemed inevitable that the truth would be known by now.

It is not. For more than a century, the origins and extent of life have remained shrouded in mystery. But, as Mario Livio and Jack Szostak reveal in Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest for Cosmic Life (Basic Books, 2024), the veil is finally lifting. The authors describe how life's building blocks--from RNA to amino acids and cells--could have emerged from the chaos of Earth's early existence. They then apply the knowledge gathered from cutting-edge research across the sciences to the search for life in the cosmos: both life as we know it and life as we don't.

Why and where life exists are two of the biggest unsolved problems in science. Is Earth Exceptional? is the ultimate exploration of the question of whether life is a freak accident or a chemical imperative.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis eds., "The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025)

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Autonomous weapons exist in a strange territory between Pentagon procurement contracts and Hollywood blockbusters, between actual military systems and speculative futures. For this week's Liminal Library, I spoke with Jascha Bareis, co-editor of The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025), about how these dual existences shape international relations and cultural imagination. The collection examines autonomous weapons not just as military hardware but as psychological tools that reshape power dynamics through their mere possibility. These systems epitomize what the editors call "the fluidity of violence"—warfare that dissolves traditional boundaries between human decision and machine action, between targeted strikes and algorithmic inevitability.

Bareis and his contributors trace fascinating connections between fictional representations and military doctrine—how Terminator narratives influence Pentagon planning while actual weapons development feeds back into artistic imagination. The book wrestles with maintaining "meaningful human control" over systems designed to operate faster than human thought, a challenge that grows more urgent as militaries worldwide race toward greater autonomy. Each chapter reveals how thoroughly we need to rethink human-machine relationships in warfare, from the gendered coding of robot soldiers in film to the way AI imaginaries differ between Silicon Valley and New Delhi. Autonomous weapons force us to confront uncomfortable realities about agency, violence, and the increasingly blurred line between human judgment and algorithmic certainty.

Links:

A Clean Kill? the role of Patriot in the Gulf War

Statement delivered by Germany on Working Definition of LAWS / “Definition of Systems under Consideration”

The Silicon Valley venture capitalists who want to ‘move fast and break things’ in the defence industry

Hype Studies

'The Gatekeepers' documentary

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Todd Mcgowan, "Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Todd McGowan forges a new theory of capitalism as a system based on the production of more than what we need: pure excess. He argues that the promise of more—more wealth, more enjoyment, more opportunity, without requiring any sacrifice—is the essence of capitalism. Previous socioeconomic systems set up some form of the social good as their focus. Capitalism, however, represents a revolutionary turn away from the good and the useful toward excessive growth, which now threatens the habitability of the planet.
Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, McGowan shows how the production of commodities explains the role of excess in the workings of capitalism. Capitalism and the commodity ensnare us with the image of the constant fulfillment of our desires—the seductive but unattainable promise of satisfying a longing that has no end. To challenge this system, McGowan turns to art, arguing that it can expose the psychological mechanisms that perpetuate capitalist society and reveal the need for limits. Featuring lively writing and engaging examples from film, literature, and popular culture, Pure Excess uncovers the hidden logic of capitalism—and helps us envision a noncapitalist life in a noncapitalist society.

Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Embracing Alienation, The Racist Fantasy, Emancipation After Hegel, Capitalism and Desire, and Only a Joke Can Save Us, among other books. He is also the cohost of the Why Theory podcast with Ryan Engley.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Hitler, Stalin, and Mao ruled through violence, fear, and ideology. But in recent decades a new breed of media-savvy strongmen has been redesigning authoritarian rule for a more sophisticated, globally connected world. In place of overt, mass repression, rulers such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Viktor Orbán control their citizens by distorting information and simulating democratic procedures. Like spin doctors in democracies, they spin the news to engineer support. Uncovering this new brand of authoritarianism, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman explain the rise of such “spin dictators,” describing how they emerge and operate, the new threats they pose, and how democracies should respond.

Spin Dictators traces how leaders such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and Peru’s Alberto Fujimori pioneered less violent, more covert, and more effective methods of monopolizing power. They cultivated an image of competence, concealed censorship, and used democratic institutions to undermine democracy, all while increasing international engagement for financial and reputational benefits. The book reveals why most of today’s authoritarians are spin dictators—and how they differ from the remaining “fear dictators” such as Kim Jong-un and Bashar al-Assad.

Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2022) is aimed at a general audience, synthesizing a vast amount of qualitative and quantitative research by the authors and many other scholars. The book is highly readable, with a great mix of anecdotes and examples along with plain-English explanations of academic research findings. However, it also provides an excellent overview of contemporary global authoritarianism for academics. Almost every claim in the book has an endnote reference to the original research for those who want to follow up. The endnotes mean that despite its moderately intimidating 340-page heft, the main text is a very approachable 219 pages.

Daniel Treisman is a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on Russian politics and economics as well as comparative political economy, including in particular the analysis of democratization, the politics of authoritarian states, political decentralization, and corruption.

In 2021-22, he was a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and he was recently named a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. A graduate of Oxford University (B.A. Hons.) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1995), he has published five books and numerous articles in leading political science and economics journals including The American Political Science Review and The American Economic Review, as well as in public affairs journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. He has also served as a consultant for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and USAID. In Russia, he has been a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Higher School of Economics and a member of the Jury of the National Prize in Applied Economics

Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focuses on the political economy and governance of China.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Every Purchase Matters: How Fair Trade Farmers, Companies, and Consumers are Changing the World

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

We all have the power to change the world through the products we buy. This simple premise has driven the growth of the conscious consumer movement for decades. Indeed, what started with a handful of niche sustainability brands has exploded into the mainstream with labels like Organic, Non-GMO, and Fair Trade Certified now adorning products in major retailers across the country. Yet the true promise of ethical sourcing and conscious consumerism has not been fully realized. Paul Rice has dedicated his career to helping consumers and businesses embrace the power they have to protect the environment and improve the lives of farmers and workers on the far side of our global supply chains.
In Every Purchase Matters, Mr. Rice reveals the untold story of the Fair Trade movement and its significance for us all. Calling on the close relationships he cultivated over the last forty years with the pioneers of ethical sourcing—CEOs, activists, grassroots farmer leaders, and consumer advocates—Mr. Rice gives voice to the visionaries and practitioners who are making sustainable business the new normal. These protagonists share successes and failures, lessons learned, and their extraordinary impact in communities around the world. Their stories illuminate how sustainability is good not only for people and planet but also for business.

Our guest is: Paul Rice, who is the founder of Fair Trade USA and a pioneering figure in the conscious capitalism movement. He is the author of the national bestseller Every Purchase Matters.

Audio content correction: Dr. Gessler incorrectly stated that Mr. Rice worked in South America. He worked in Central America.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and the author of the show’s Substack newsletter. She is a developmental editor and writing coach for humanities scholars at all stages of their careers.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Vijay Selvam, "Principles of Bitcoin: Technology, Economics, Politics, and Philosophy" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Principles of Bitcoin presents a holistic, first-principles-based framework for understanding one of the most misunderstood inventions of our time. By stripping away the hype, jargon, and superficial analysis that often surrounds the crypto industry, this book uncovers the true ingenuity behind Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation—and its profound implications for the future of money, governance, and individual freedom.

Vijay Selvam analyzes the technology, economics, politics, and philosophy of Bitcoin, making the case that only through this holistic understanding can we gain an appreciation of its true meaning and significance. Readers are invited to consider Bitcoin as a tool for individual empowerment, a catalyst for economic autonomy, and a challenge to traditional monetary systems. Selvam demonstrates why Bitcoin stands alone in the digital asset space as a path-dependent once-in-history invention that cannot be replicated.

Principles of Bitcoin is an invaluable resource for professionals in the financial world seeking a rigorous and accessible understanding of Bitcoin. Students, curious thinkers, and all who find the technology daunting will also benefit from its clear, foundational approach. Equipping readers with the tools to grasp the many facets of Bitcoin, this book is an ideal guide to exploring its role in shaping a more decentralized, transparent, and equitable future.

Vijay Selvam is a corporate lawyer and financial services expert with nearly twenty years of experience across the United States, United Kingdom, and Asia. He spent more than a decade at Goldman Sachs and has also held leadership roles in the digital assets industry, advising on the evolving regulatory landscape. Selvam is a graduate of Harvard Law School, Oxford University, and Cardiff University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David J. Helfand, "The Universal Timekeepers: Reconstructing History Atom by Atom" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Atoms are unfathomably tiny. It takes fifteen million trillion of them to make up a single poppy seed—give or take a few billion. And there’s hardly anything to them: atoms are more than 99.9999999999 percent empty space. Yet scientists have learned to count these slivers of near nothingness with precision and to peer into their internal states. In looking so closely, we have learned that atoms, because of their inimitable signatures and imperturbable internal clocks, are little archives holding the secrets of the past.
David J. Helfand reconstructs the history of the universe—back to its first microsecond 13.8 billion years ago—with the help of atoms. He shows how, by using detectors and reactors, microscopes and telescopes, we can decode the tales these infinitesimal particles tell, answering questions such as: Is a medieval illustrated prayer book real or forged? How did maize cultivation spread from the highlands of central Mexico to New England? What was Earth’s climate like before humans emerged? Where can we find clues to identify the culprit in the demise of the dinosaurs? When did our planet and solar system form? Can we trace the births of atoms in the cores of massive stars or even glimpse the origins of the universe itself?
A lively and inviting introduction to the building blocks of everything we know, The Universal Timekeepers demonstrates the power of science to unveil the mysteries of unreachably remote times and places.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ben Zweibelson, "Reconceptualizing War" (Helion, 2025)

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

War remains the most chaotic and destructive act our species is capable of. In addition to waging war against those we disagree with, we also battle with which beliefs about war are superior to alternatives. We make war with ideas, beliefs, and mindsets along with bullets, bombs, and missiles. The tactics and technologies matter, but only if societies can also realize the limitations of their strategic, organizational, and societal frameworks on defining and engaging in organized violence.
Ben Zweibelson presents an entirely disruptive and groundbreaking way to make sense of conflict at a meta-theoretical level. Blending philosophy and sociology, he provides a challenging synthesis of multiple war paradigms, from technological, Westphalian frames of Western industrialized societies to those under Marxist versions, and radical ideological movements and sects. Readers interested in philosophy, political science, security affairs, and foreign policy will find this book highly informative and provocative. In this book, those waging internationally sanctioned warfare clash with proponents of ‘wokefare’, radical terrorists and doomsday cults battle with totalitarian regimes, and more.
Reconceptualizing War (Helion & Company, 2025) attempts what no previous book on war has done, in that each war theory remains grounded in one dominant war paradigm. Zweibelson takes readers on a mind-bending intellectual journey where all war paradigms are explained, contrasted, and overlapped so that greater understanding of our species’ perpetual fascination with conflict is achieved.
Dr. Ben Zweibelson has over three decades of service to the U.S. Department of Defense, retiring as an Infantry Officer with 22 years combined service, multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and awarded four Bronze Stars. Author of two other books, 'Understanding the Military Design Movement' (Routledge, 2023) and 'Beyond the Pale' (Air University Press, 2023), Ben lectures at numerous war colleges and universities around the world. He holds a doctorate in philosophy, has three master's degrees, and graduated U.S. Army Ranger School among numerous other demanding military courses. Ben resides in Colorado Springs with his wife and three boys.
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Zack Cooper, "Tides of Fortune: The Rise and Decline of Great Militaries" (Yale UP, 2025)

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

An ambitious look at how the twentieth century's great powers devised their military strategies and what their implications mean for military competition between the United States and China.

How will the United States and China evolve militarily in the years ahead? Many experts believe the answer to this question is largely unknowable. But Zack Cooper argues that the American and Chinese militaries are following a well-trodden path. For centuries, the world's most powerful militaries have adhered to a remarkably consistent pattern of behavior, determined largely by their leaders' perceptions of relative power shifts. By uncovering these trends, this book places the evolving military competition between the United States and China in historical context.

Drawing on a decade of research and on his experience at the White House and the Pentagon, Cooper outlines a novel explanation for how militaries change as they rise and decline. Tides of Fortune examines the paths of six great powers of the twentieth century, tracking how national leaders adjusted their defense objectives, strategies, and investments in response to perceived shifts in relative power. All these militaries followed a common pattern, and their experiences shed new light on both China's recent military modernization and America's potential responses.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Judith Grisel, "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Doubleday, 2019)

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Not a lot of authors go from spending their early twenties homeless and addicted to cocaine to becoming one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuroscience of addiction. But Dr. Judith Grisel, in her new book Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (Doubleday, 2019), uses her personal story to illuminate the ways in which the brain, in collusion with social and biological factors, makes addiction possible. In our discussion, Grisel outlines the effects of different drugs, explains the “three laws of psychopharmacology,” and wonders if we’ll ever find medicine’s “holy grail” – a cure for addiction.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, she edits Points, the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Lizzie Wade, "Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures" (Harper, 2025)

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A richly imagined new view on the great human tradition of apocalypse, from the rise of Homo sapiens to the climate instability of our present, that defies conventional wisdom and long-held stories about our deep past to reveal how cataclysmic events are not irrevocable endings, but transformations.

A drought lasts for decades, a disease rips through a city, a civilization collapses. When we finally uncover the ruins, we ask: What happened? The good news is, we’ve been here before. History is long, and people have already confronted just about every apocalypse we’re facing today. But these days, archaeologists are getting better at seeing stories of survival, transformation, and even progress hidden within those histories of collapse and destruction. Perhaps, we begin to see, apocalypses do not destroy worlds, but create them anew.

Apocalypse offers a new way of understanding human history, reframing it as a series of crises and cataclysms that we survived, moments of choice in an evolution of humanity that has never been predetermined or even linear. Here Lizzie Wade asks us to reckon with our long-held narratives of these events, from the end of Old Kingdom Egypt, the collapse of the Classic Maya, to the Black Death, and shows us how people lived through and beyond them—and even considered what a new world could look like in their wake.

The more we learn about apocalypses past, the more hope we have that we will survive our own. It won’t be pleasant. It won’t be fair. The world will be different on the other side, and our cultures and communities—perhaps even our species—will be different too.

Lizzie Wade is an award-winning journalist and correspondent for Science, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals. She covers archaeology, anthropology, and Latin America for the magazine's print and online news sections. Her work has also appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, Aeon, Smithsonian, Archaeology, and California Sunday, among other publications.

Gene-George Earle is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at East China Normal University in Shanghai.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

William Marx, "Libraries of the Mind" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left his physical library behind when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis, he was forced to rely on the invisible library of his mind. Each of us has such a library—if not as extensive as Auerbach’s—even if we are unaware of it. In this erudite and provocative book, William Marx explores our invisible libraries—how we build them and how we should expand them.
Libraries, Marx tells us, are mental realities, and, conversely, our minds are libraries. We never read books apart from other texts. We take them from mental shelves filled with a variety of works that help us understand what we are reading. And yet the libraries in our mind are not always what they should be. The selection on our mental shelves—often referred to as canon, heritage, patrimony, or tradition—needs to be modified and expanded. Our intangible libraries should incorporate what Marx calls the dark matter of literature: the works that have been lost, that exist only in fragments, that have been repurposed by their authors, or were never written in the first place. Marx suggests methods for recovering this missing literature, but he also warns us that adding new titles to our libraries is not enough. We must also adopt a new attitude, one that honors the diversity and otherness of literary works. We must shed our preconceptions and build within ourselves a mental world library.

William Marx is professor of comparative literature at the Collège de France. He is the author of The Hatred of Literature, The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were Not Tragic, and other books.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Chris Washington, "Nonbinary Jane Austen" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Nonbinary Jane Austen, Chris Washington theorizes how Jane Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century. Arguing that her writing works to abolish gender exclusivity altogether, Washington shows how she establishes a politics that ushers in a future built on plurality and possibility.

Chris Washington is associate professor of English at Francis Marion University in South Carolina, USA. Washington is the editor of a recent Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and is the author of Nonbinary Jane Austen, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Hope and Life in the Anthropocene (University of Toronto Press, 2019), and essays on the literature of the Romantic period and on contemporary theory and philosophy.

Tristan Burke researches and teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and continental philosophy. He is the author of Byronism, Napoleonism, and Nineteenth-Century Realism: Heroes of Their Own Lives? (Routledge, 2022)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Nomadic Origin of the State

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Contemporary, commonly-accepted understandings of the history of Chinese state formation see the nomadic pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe as peripheral appendages to a centralized, agriculturalist empire. In his work, Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene argues against what he calls “the Sinocentric paradigm” in favor of an interpretation of nomadic pastoralism as the origin of the premodern state. In this interview, we discuss the conquest theory of state formation, how mobility is essential to state control, and how nomadic state origins can be found globally beyond the Eurasian steppe.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

On Bullshit in AI

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today we’re continuing our series on Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work, On Bullshit. I have the privilege to speak with Arvind Narayanan co-author of the book AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What it Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (Princeton University Press, 2024). Arvind is the perfect guest to explore the subject of bullshit in AI as AI Snake Oil takes on the ridiculous hype ascribed to the promise of AI. AI chatbots often hallucinate and many of the promoters of AI engage in the art of bullshit when selling people on wild and crazy AI applications.

Arvind Narayanan is professor of computer science at Princeton University and director of its Center for Information Technology Policy.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, "Classicism and Other Phobias" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton University Press, 2025) shows how the concept of “classicism” lacks the capacity to affirm the aesthetic value of Black life and asks whether a different kind of classicism—one of insurgence, fugitivity, and emancipation—is possible. Engaging with the work of Sylvia Wynter and other trailblazers in Black studies while drawing on his own experiences as a Black classicist, Dan-el Padilla Peralta situates the history of the classics in the racial and settler-colonialist settings of early modern and modern Europe and North America. He argues that immortalizing ancient Greek and Roman authors as “the classical” comes at the cost of devaluing Black forms of expression. Is a newfound emphasis on Black classicism the most effective counter to this phobia? In search of answers, Padilla Peralta ranges from the poetry of Juan de Castellanos to the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and paintings by contemporary artists Kehinde Wiley and Harmonia Rosales. Based on the prestigious W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures delivered at Harvard University, Classicism and Other Phobias draws necessary attention to the inability of the classics as a field of study to fully cope with Blackness and Black people.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is professor of classics at Princeton University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Book Talk 67 : The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What is reliable knowledge? Listen to philosopher Michael Strevens, author of The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, to understand how science discovers the truth. At the current moment, when expertise is under attack and the idea of truth is contested from all sides, Strevens explains the remarkable success of science’s “irrational” method to settle debates, regardless of philosophical, religious, or aesthetic preferences. Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—our host Uli Baer’s all-time favorite non-fiction book—, Karl Popper, and others, Strevens shows how science became the most effective tool for uncovering the secrets of nature.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often fail to achieve their intended goals--and their potent side effects can even harm American interests.

Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the surprising ways sanctions affect multinational companies, governments, and ultimately millions of people around the world. Drawing on interviews with experts, policy makers, and people in sanctioned countries, Agathe Demarais examines the unintended consequences of the use of sanctions as a diplomatic weapon. The proliferation of sanctions spurs efforts to evade them, as states and firms seek ways to circumvent U.S. penalties. This is only part of the story. Sanctions also reshape relations between countries, pushing governments that are at odds with the U.S. closer to each other--or, increasingly, to Russia and China.

Full of counterintuitive insights spanning a wide range of topics, from commodities markets in Russia to Iran's COVID response and China's cryptocurrency ambitions, Backfire reveals how sanctions are transforming geopolitics and the global economy--as well as diminishing U.S. influence. This insider's account is an eye-opening, accessible, and timely book that sheds light on the future of sanctions in an increasingly multipolar world.

Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

On Bullshit in Politics

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today we’re continuing our series on philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work, On Bullshit. Our guest is Michael Patrick Lynch, Provost Professor of the Humanities and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Michael is the author of the recently published book, On Truth in Politics: Why Democracy Demands It (Princeton University Press, 2025). The topic of our discussion today will be on bullshit in politics, and how we might think about ways to combat it.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Edward Tenner, "Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences" (APS Press, 2025)

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How did the addition of lifeboats after the Titanic shipwreck contribute to another tragedy in Chicago harbor three years later? How efficient are wild animals as investors, and how do dog breeds become national symbols? Why have scientific breakthroughs so often originated in the study of shadows? How did the file card prepare scholarship and commerce for the rise of electronic data processing, and why did the visual metaphor of the tab survive into today's graphic interfaces? Why have Amish artisans played an important role in manufacturing advanced technology? Why was United Shoe Machinery the Microsoft of the 1890s? Surprises like these, Edward Tenner believes, can help us deal with the technological issues that confront us now.

Since the 1980s, Edward Tenner has contributed essays on technology, design, and culture to leading magazines, newspapers, and professional journals, and has been interviewed on subjects ranging from medical ethics to typography. Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences (American Philosophical Society Press, 2025)--named for one of the paradoxes that can result from the inherent contradictions between consumer safety and product marketing--brings many of Tenner's essays together into one volume for the first time, accompanied by new introductions by the author on the theme of each work. As an independent historian and public speaker, Tenner has spent his career deploying concepts from economics, engineering, psychology, science, and sociology, to explore both the negative and positive surprises of human ingenuity.

Edward Tenner is an independent writer and Distinguished Scholar in the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and teaches the course Understanding Disasters at Princeton University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Genocide Studies International Partners with New Books Network

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m thrilled to announce a new partnership with Genocide Studies International. GSI is one of the preeminent journals in the field of Genocide Studies. Published by the University of Toronto Press and housed in the Zoryan Institute, GSI is dedicated to “to raising knowledge and awareness among scholars, policy makers, and civil society actors by providing a forum for the critical analysis of genocide, human rights, crimes against humanity, and related mass atrocities.”

With this new partnership, I’ll be bringing you interviews with the editors and authors of cutting-edge articles and special editions on the journal. This isn’t new—we’ve done this with several other journals before. But by formalizing our partnership, we hope you’ll have more access to the best recent research and analysis on the causes, course and consequences of mass atrocity violence. It’s a partnership that enriches both organizations.

In a few weeks, you’ll hear from Alex Alvarez, the editor of a new special issue on genocide education. But first I got a chance to talk with Henry Thierault, one of the editors of the journal, and Megan Reid, Deputy Executive Director of the Zoryan Institute. We discuss the editorial vision of the journal, the Zoryan Institute’s role in genocide education and prevention, and the reasons we’re so excited about the partnership. I hope you enjoy our discussion.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Truth About Bullshit: Celebrating the 20th Anniversary Edition of On Bullshit with Pamela Hieronymi

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m thrilled to launch a brand new series for the Princeton UP Ideas Podcast. 20 years ago, Princeton University Press published a short volume with an excellent title: On Bullshit (Princeton UP, 2025). Written by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit was adapted from an essay that explored the meaning, uses, and consequences of bullshit.

At just 80 pages, On Bullshit became a favorite of readers, selling over 1 million copies and spending 27 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s not often that a work of philosophy breaks through to the mainstream, but readers of On Bullshit quickly discover why. Harry’s meditation on the meaning of bullshit can be read in one sitting, but the ideas have staying power. After you read Harry’s book, you start to see bullshit everywhere and recognize it’s uniquely pernicious effects on whatever’s left of the public square. Harry wrote his book long before modern social media and AI-generated slop. He was unbelievably prescient, making On Bullshit required reading for today. Harry sadly passed in 2023 at 94 years old, but his ideas live on. In this series, we’ll speak with scholars whose lives and work have been influenced by Harry and his seminal book.

To kick things off, I’ll be speaking with Pamela Hieronymi, one of Harry’s former students. Pamela is Professor of Philosophy at UCLA and a leading scholar in the field of moral philosophy. Like Harry, her work has resonated outside the academy. She served as an advisor on the sitcom, The Good Place, which brought philosophical concepts like the trolley problem to a mainstream audience. For the first episode in the series, Pamela will introduce readers to both the book and the man who wrote it. In subsequent episodes, I’ll speak with other scholars who explore Harry’s notion of bullshit in politics, science, and more. If you haven’t read On Bullshit, you should preorder the anniversary edition, which is set to release on August 5th. Now, let’s have ourselves a bull session.

Pamela Hieronymi is Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Watch her lecture on the blame game.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Bernd Roeck, "The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Bernd Roeck about his book, The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2025). Bernd is professor of modern history at the University of Zurich and director of the German Centre for Venetian Studies in Venice. Translated by Patrick Baker, The World at First Light is a truly magisterial work. Much ink and paint has been spilled illuminating and interpreting the cultural flourishing known as Europe’s rebirth. The Renaissance was chiefly marked by a revival in classical literature and philosophy, artistic and scientific innovations embodied by polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, and William Shakespeare. In exploring this historical period, Bernd offers the most authoritative and up-to-date treatment of the Renaissance.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Introducing The Critical Edition of the Works of C. G. Jung

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

"Princeton University Press is thrilled to share news of a major new initiative: the publication of The Critical Edition of the Works of C. G. Jung. As the longtime publisher of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung in North America, PUP is honored to be global publisher of the Critical Edition, having recently secured world language rights and the support from the Foundation of the Works of C. G. Jung in Zürich, who will be facilitating and guiding access to documents and letters and providing its expertise to this major undertaking based on family archives.

Led by general editor Sonu Shamdasani, an esteemed historian of psychiatry and psychology and a preeminent expert on Jung, this ambitious, multi-year undertaking will result in 26 volumes of material, all newly translated by Caitlin Stephens, that will bring the Swiss psychologist’s formidable work to new life for a new generation of readers. Astrid Freuler, an independent professional translator, will provide proofreading for the translations. Volumes will feature a scholarly apparatus, including historical introductions, contextual annotations that will draw heavily on Jung’s unpublished correspondences, and variorum presentations of works that went through multiple editions, noting revisions. Alongside the general editor, Jung historians Gaia Domenici, Martin Liebscher, and Christopher Wagner will serve as volume editors."

-From Princeton University Press' announcement

Sonu Shamdasani is a professor at University College London, co-director at the health humanities center, and recognized as one of the world’s most renowned scholars of psychologist, Carl Jung.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Elizabeth N. Saunders, "The Insiders' Game: How Elites Make War and Peace" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

One of the most widely held views of democratic leaders is that they are cautious about using military force because voters can hold them accountable, ultimately making democracies more peaceful. How, then, are leaders able to wage war in the face of popular opposition, or end conflicts when the public still supports them? The Insiders’ Game (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds light on this enduring puzzle, arguing that the primary constraints on decisions about war and peace come from elites, not the public.
Elizabeth Saunders focuses on three groups of elites—presidential advisers, legislators, and military officials—to show how the dynamics of this insiders’ game are key to understanding the use of force in American foreign policy. She explores how elite preferences differ from those of ordinary voters and how leaders must bargain with elites to secure their support for war. Saunders provides insights into why leaders start and prolong conflicts the public does not want but also demonstrates how elites can force leaders to change course and end wars.
Tracing presidential decisions about the use of force from the Cold War through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Saunders reveals how the elite politics of war are a central feature of democracy. The Insiders’ Game shifts the focus of democratic accountability from the voting booth to the halls of power.

Our guest is Elizabeth N. Saunders, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a member of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Quinn Slobodian and Philip J. Stern on Political Economy

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

• Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated. The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2023), by.

• Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Penguin, 2023).

Adam Smith wrote that, “Political economy belongs to no nation; it is of no country: it is the science of the rules for the production, the accumulation, the distribution, and the consumption of wealth.”

However Adam Smith regarded the science of political economy, in practical terms, one is quite hard pressed to find a case where governments—be it an empire, republic, or nation—were completely left out of the picture. At least, that is how it’s been historically.

Questions about how people and other types of entities organize and generate capital, AND the role that governments play in all of this, fill libraries. The ramifications of the dynamics and rules surrounding money have proved so consequential—and increasingly so, in our increasingly technologized world—that it is no surprise that historians have devoted much energy to the study of political economy. Political economy, in the broadest terms, is the subject of our conversation today. Today on History Ex we put two recent books that bring important perspectives to these questions in conversation with each other. Today’s books both deal with entrepreneurial endeavors, usually “abroad”, or beyond the Metropole. While Philip Stern’s examination of early modern British corporations explains the myriad ways private initiatives sought government legitimacy and became entangled in the business of governance during the age of empires, Quinn Slobodian trenchantly reveals how some entrepreneurs and ideologues seek to escape governments in the age of nation-states.

Our authors find points of convergence as well as divergence in aims, methods, and outcomes of the people at the center of their books. Stern and Slobodian discuss methodologies and chronologies, the ideologies that animated their actors, how memory and history were mobilized in promoting various visions; they probe the historian’s perennial challenges of disentangling ideologies from interest, explain how similar actions in different historical contexts can demand different interpretations; and more. Listen in!

Philip Stern is an associate professor of History at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. His work focuses on various aspects of the legal, political, intellectual, and business histories that shaped the British Empire. He is also the author of The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford University Press, 2011) and many other scholarly works.

Quinn Slobodian is a professor of the history at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. He is also the author of the award-winning Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018), which has been translated into six languages, and a frequent contributor to the Guardian, New Statesman, The New York, Times, Foreign Policy, Dissent and the Nation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert Garland, "What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A lively story of death, What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Dr. Robert Garland explores the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Early Christian, and Islamic. By drawing on the latest scholarship on ancient archaeology, art, literature, and funerary inscriptions, Dr. Garland invites readers to put themselves in the sandals of ancient peoples and to imagine their mental state moment by moment as they sought—in ways that turn out to be remarkably similar to ours—to assist the dead on their journey to the next world and to understand life’s greatest mystery.
What to Expect When You’re Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What’s the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement—and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife—and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving?
Filled with intriguing stories and frequent humor, What to Expect When You’re Dead will be a morbidly delicious treat for every reader alive.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Peter Allen, "How to Think about Politics: A Guide in Five Parts" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 28 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What part should politics play in our everyday lives? In How to Think About Politics: A Guide in Five Parts (Oxford University Press, 2025) Peter Allen, a professor of Politics and Co-Director of the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath, explores this question across a range of practical and philosophical examples. The book directly challenges the conventional academic understanding of politics, showing how politics is much more than election polls or parliamentary behaviours. This broader view of the politic allows the book to offer insights as to what needs to change in political systems, as well as more generally in societies. A much needed and urgent intervention on the current state of our world, the book should be widely read by any readers interested in politics today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Dennis Ross, "Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Survive in a Multipolar World" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Sun, 18 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In a multipolar world where America wields less relative power, the United States can no longer get away with poor statecraft. To understand how the US can approach future national security challenges, I spoke with Dennis Ross, a senior US diplomat and the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His new book, Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World (Oxford University Press, 2025) offers a revised toolkit for US foreign policy and global leadership.

The United States may still be the world's strongest country, but it now faces real challenges at both a global and regional level. The unipolar world which was dominated by America after the Cold War is gone. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is both a military and economic competitor and it is actively challenging the norms and institutions that the US used to shape an international order during and after the Cold War. Directly and indirectly, it has partners trying to undo the American-dominated order, with Russia seeking to extinguish Ukraine, and Iran trying to undermine American presence, influence, and any set of rules for the Middle East that it does not dominate.

The failures of American policy in Afghanistan and Iraq have weakened the domestic consensus for a US leadership role internationally. Traditions in US foreign policy, especially the American sense of exceptionalism, have at different points justified both withdrawal and international activism. Iraq and Afghanistan fed the instinct to withdraw and to end the “forever wars.” But the folly of these US interventions did not necessarily mean that all use of force to back diplomacy or specific political ends was wrong; rather it meant in these cases, the Bush Administration failed in the most basic task of good statecraft: namely, marrying objectives and means. Nothing more clearly defines effective statecraft than identifying well-considered goals and then knowing how to use all the tools of statecraft—diplomatic, economic, military, intelligence, information, cyber, scientific, education—to achieve them. But all too often American presidents have adopted goals that were poorly defined and not thought through.

In Statecraft 2.0, Dennis Ross explains why failing to marry objectives and means has happened so often in American foreign policy. He uses historical examples to illustrate the factors that account for this, including political pressures, weak understanding of the countries where the US has intervened, changing objectives before achieving those that have been established, relying too much on ourselves and too little on allies and partners. To be fair, there have not only been failures, there have been successes as well. Ross uses case studies to look more closely at the circumstances in which Administrations have succeeded and failed in marrying objectives and means. He distills the lessons from good cases of statecraft—German unification in NATO, the first Gulf War, the surge in Iraq 2007-8—and bad cases of statecraft—going to war in Iraq 2003, and the Obama policy toward Syria. Based on those lessons, he develops a framework for applying today a statecraft approach to our policy toward China, Iran, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book concludes with how a smart statecraft approach would shape policy toward the new national security challenges of climate, pandemics, and cyber.

Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Rasheedah Phillips, "Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time" (AK Press, 2025)

Sat, 17 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.

Phillips unfolds the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. Yet Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future?

Drawing on philosophy, archival research, quantum physics, and Phillips’s own art practice and work on housing policy, Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time (AK Press, 2025) expands the horizons of what can be imagined and, ultimately, achieved.

Rasheedah Phillips is a queer housing advocate, lawyer, parent, and interdisciplinary artist working through a Black futurist lens. Phillips is the founder of the AfroFuturist Affair, founding member of the Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, and co-creator of the art duo Black Quantum Futurism. Phillips’ work has been featured in the New York Times, The Wire, New York Magazine, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, and e-flux.

You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Rasheedah continue their conversation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Eric Heinze, "Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left" (MIT Press, 2025)

Fri, 16 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What has gone wrong with the left—and what leftists must do if they want to change politics, ethics, and minds. Leftists have long taught that people in the West must take responsibility for centuries of classism, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and other gross injustices. Of course, right-wingers constantly ridicule this claim for its “wokeness.”

In Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left ( MIT Press, 2025), Eric Heinze rejects the idea that we should be less woke. In fact, we need more wokeness, but of a new kind. Yes, we must teach about these bleak pasts, but we must also educate the public about the left’s own support for regimes that damaged and destroyed millions of lives for over a century—Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, or the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Criticisms of Western wrongdoing are certainly important, yet Heinze explains that leftists have rarely engaged in the kinds of open and public self-scrutiny that they demand from others. Citing examples as different as the Ukraine war, LGBTQ+ people in Cuba, the concept of “hatred,” and the problem of leftwing antisemitism, Heinze explains why and how the left must change its memory politics if it is to claim any ethical high ground.

Eric Heinze is Professor of Law and Humanities at Queen Mary University of London.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jeanne Sheehan, "American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government Post January 6" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Tue, 13 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government Post January 6 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) analyzes the roots of widespread disenchantment with American government. While blame often falls on the individuals in office, they are not operating in isolation. Rather they are working within a system designed by the Framers with one goal in mind, protectionism. Although the Framers got much right, their commitment to protection of liberty led them to design a system replete with divisions of power. Whatever its merits at the founding, the government today is frequently described as dysfunctional and far too often unresponsive to the majority, unaccountable, and unable to deliver for its people.

For those disillusioned with the current state of government and committed to effectuating meaningful change, this book advocates in favor of a fundamental reassessment of the system's primary objectives, followed by deliberation as to how it should be restructured accordingly. It not only presents specific reform proposals, but it ends with a stark warning: until and unless we embrace reasoned structural reform, we cannot be surprised if at some point the people become so frustrated that they either disengage, fight back, or seek solace in autocratic alternatives.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sandra Matz, "Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior" (HBRP, 2025)

Wed, 07 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A fascinating exploration of how algorithms penetrate the most intimate aspects of our psychology—from the pioneering expert on psychological targeting.

There are more pieces of digital data than there are stars in the universe. This data helps us monitor our planet, decipher our genetic code, and take a deep dive into our psychology.

As algorithms become increasingly adept at accessing the human mind, they also become more and more powerful at controlling it, enticing us to buy a certain product or vote for a certain political candidate. Some of us say this technological trend is no big deal. Others consider it one of the greatest threats to humanity. But what if the truth is more nuanced and mind-bending than that?

In Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior (Harvard Business Press, 2025), Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz reveals in fascinating detail how big data offers insights into the most intimate aspects of our psyches and how these insights empower an external influence over the choices we make. This can be creepy, manipulative, and downright harmful, with scandals like that of British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica being merely the tip of the iceberg. Yet big data also holds enormous potential to help us live healthier, happier lives—for example, by improving our mental health, encouraging better financial decisions, or enabling us to break out of our echo chambers.

With passion and clear-eyed precision, Matz shows us how to manage psychological targeting and redesign the data game.

Mindmasters is a riveting look at what our digital footprints reveal about us, how they're being used—for good and for ill—and how we can gain power over the data that defines us.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Time to Rethink Democracy: Participatory and More-Than-Human Perspectives

Tue, 06 May 2025 09:00:00 -0000

This is a special episode that features a conversation between Sonia Bussu and Hans Asenbaum on democracy, capitalism, climate and the practices and prospects of participatory, deliberative and more-than-human democracy to transform their relationship. Can we rethink democracy beyond the liberal-democratic institutions that were created as part of the bargain for fossil-fuel-driven, Western-centric economic growth? What does and could democratic participation look like? What does it mean to include the non-human in our understanding of democracy?

Sonia Bussu is Associate Professor in Public Policy at the University of Birmingham. She researches participatory democracy and in her work she uses participatory and creative methods for research and public engagement. She has led on projects on youth participation to influence mental health policy, youth employment policies, as well as coproduction of research on health and social care integration, and leadership styles within collaborative governance. She is scientific coordinator of a Horizon Europe project on participatory policymaking, INSPIRE. She is co-editor of Reclaiming Participatory Governance: Social Movements and the Reinvention of Democratic Innovation. Routledge.

Hans Asenbaum is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. His research interests include radical democracy, queer and gender studies, digital politics, and participatory research methods. In 2022 he received the ECPR Rising Star Award. Hans is the author of The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy (with Ercan, Curato and Mendonça, Oxford University Press, 2022). His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, New Media & Society, Politics & Gender, and the International Journal of Qualitative Methods.

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Stephen H. Legomsky, "Reimagining the American Union: The Case for Abolishing State Government" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Mon, 05 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Since American president Donald Trump was elected to a second term, it is common to hear citizens, journalists, and public officials distinguish between the laws and leaders of their states and the national government. Those who oppose Trump’s policies with regard to reproductive rights, gun violence, LGBTQ+, education, police, and voting often present state constitutions, courts, laws, culture, and leaders as a bulwark against Trump’s autocratic rule.

But Professor Stephen H. Legomsky sees it differently. His new book, Reimagining the American Union: The Case for Abolishing State Government (Cambridge University Press 2025) argues that – if we care about democracy – we should imagine an America without state government. No longer a union of arbitrarily constructed states, the country would become a union of one American people. Reimagining the American Union understands state government as the root cause of the gravest threats to American democracy. While some of those threats are baked into the Constitution, the book argues that others are the product of state legislatures abusing their powers through gerrymanders, voter suppression, and other less-publicized manipulations that often target African-Americans and other minority voters. Reimagining the American Union interrogates how having national, state and local legislative bodies, taxation, bureaucracy, and regulation wastes taxpayer money and burdens the citizenry. After assessing the supposed benefits of state government, Professor Legomsky argues for a new, unitary American republic with only national and local governments.

Stephen H. Legomsky is the John S. Lehmann University Professor Emeritus at the Washington University School of Law. Professor Legomsky has published scholarly books on immigration and refugee law, courts, and constitutional law. He served in the Obama Administration as Chief Counsel of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and later as Senior Counselor to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. He was a member of President-Elect Biden’s transition team, has testified often before Congress, and has worked with state, local, UN, and foreign governments.

Mentioned:

Cambridge University press is offering a 20% discount here (until October)
Susan’s NBN interview with Richard Kreitner on Break It Up: Secession, Division, and The Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union
Jonathan A. Rodden’s Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (Basic Books 2019)
Hendrik Hertzberg’s review of Robert A. Dahl’s How Democratic Is the American Constitution (Yale)
Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court case that overturned the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s pre-clearance requirement for historically discriminating districts

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Laura Spinney, "Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Star. Stjarna. Setareh. Thousands of miles apart, humans look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see. Listen to these English, Icelandic, and Iranian words, and you can hear echoes of one of history's most unlikely, miraculous journeys. For all of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient source.

In a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue exploded outwards, forming new worlds as it spread east and west. Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. How did this happen?

In Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (HarperCollins, 2025), acclaimed journalist Laura Spinney sets off to find out. Travelling over the steppe and the silk roads, she follows in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings – the ancient peoples who spread their words far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists, archaeologists and linguists racing to reanimate this lost world. What they have learned has vital lessons for our modern age, as people and their languages are on the move again. Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word.

Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

How to Found A College: A Conversation with University of Austin President Pano Kanelos

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Pano Kanelos, founding president of the University of Austin. A scholar and professor of Shakespeare studies, Panos’ advocacy for the liberal arts eventually lead him to become president of St. John’s College in Annapolis. In the past few years, Pano has found himself at the center of an academic project that seemed rather unlikely in an era where the big universities are getting bigger and other colleges are shuttering their doors. The University of Austin’s creation points to the potential for dynamism and change in academia. While it’s just getting started, the story of University of Austin is one to follow for anyone interested in how higher education is changing in the 21st century.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Philip V. McHarris, "Beyond Policing" (Legacy Lit, 2024)

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What would happen if policing disappeared? Would we be safe? This book imagines a world without police.

It's evident that policing is a problem. But what is the best way forward? In Beyond Policing, distinguished scholar and writer Philip V. McHarris reimagines the world without police to find answers and reveal how we can make police departments obsolete.

Beyond Policing tackles thorny issues with evidence, including data and personal stories, to uncover the weight of policing on people and communities and the patterns that prove police reform only leads to more policing.

McHarris challenges us to envision a future where safety is not synonymous with policing but is built on the foundation of community support and preventive measures. He explores innovative community-based safety models (like community mediators and violence interrupters), the decriminalization of driving offenses, and the creation of nonpolice crisis response teams. McHarris also outlines strategies for responding to conflict and harm in ways that transform the conditions that give rise to the issues. He asks us to imagine a world where people thrive without the shadow of inequality, where our approach to safety is a collective achievement.

McHarris writes, "What if our response to crisis wasn't about control but about care? How can we create conditions where safety is a shared responsibility? How can we design justice so that no community is routinely oppressed? Envisioning such a world isn't just a daydream; it's the first step toward building a society where violence and fear no longer dictate our lives."

Transformative and forward thinking, Beyond Policing provides a blueprint for a brighter, safer world. McHarris's vision is clear: we must dare to move beyond policing and foster a society where everyone has the resources to thrive and feel safe.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Will AI Transform What it Means to be Human in the Next Ten Years?

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

It’s the UConn Popcast, and what impact will AI have on being human in the next decade? Elon University’s Center for Imagining the Digital Future just released a big report on this question, based on a survey of nearly 300 global tech experts.

These insiders predict major changes in the very near future to the way we think about work, life, and ourselves.

We talked with Lee Rainie, the director of the center and co-author of the report. We also discuss another center report, on the impact of AI on higher education, as well as Lee’s earlier career as a political journalist.

Lee has spent decades studying expert opinion on technology - before joining Elon he spent 24 years directing the Pew Research Center’s studies of the internet. Prior to this, Lee was managing editor of U.S. News and World Report.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David Wiles, "Democracy, Theatre and Performance: From the Greeks to Gandhi" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Democracy, argues David Wiles, is actually a form of theatre. In making his case, the author deftly investigates orators at the foundational moments of ancient and modern democracy, demonstrating how their performative skills were used to try to create a better world. People often complain about demagogues, or wish that politicians might be more sincere. But to do good, politicians (paradoxically) must be hypocrites - or actors.

Moving from Athens to Indian independence via three great revolutions – in Puritan England, republican France and liberal America – Democracy, Theatre and Performance: From the Greeks to Gandhi (Cambridge UP, 2024) opens up larger questions about the nature of democracy. When in the classical past Plato condemned rhetoric, the only alternative he could offer was authoritarianism. Wiles' bold historical study has profound implications for our present: calls for personal authenticity, he suggests, are not an effective way to counter the rise of populism.

Brilliantly reveals the ways in which culture shapes politics, with apposite historical examples
Reframes politics as theatre, allowing politically-minded readers to reflect upon the way performance must always shape the democratic process and in turn allowing theatrically-oriented readers to look afresh at political processes
Proposes a novel and striking historical framing of contemporary issues – Brexit, Trump, political polarization – by using theatre as a tool to imaginatively unlock these issues
Deploys wide-ranging case studies to contrast the ancient Greek city-state with modern electoral democracy around the world

David Wiles is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter. A British theatre historian, he specialises in classical and early modern theatre and has spent his career in departments of drama, where his teaching has always engaged with practice. His research interests include performance space and time, mask, acting and citizenship.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Keith J. Hayward, "Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood" (Constable & Robinson, 2025)

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Have you ever noticed that in areas of everyday life, rather than being addressed like a mature adult, you're increasingly treated like an irresponsible child in constant need of instruction and protection?

Noticing society's creeping descent into infantilisation is one thing, however understanding the roots and causes of the phenomenon is not quite so easy. But in this topical and vitally important new work, cultural theorist and academic, Dr Keith Hayward, exposes the deep social, psychological and political dangers of a world characterised by denuded adult autonomy.

But importantly Infantilised is no one-dimensional, unsympathetic critique. Brimming with anecdotes and examples that span everything from the normalisation of infantilism on reality TV to the rise of a new class of political 'infantocrat', Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood (Constable & Robinson, 2025) also offers an insightful and at times humorous account of infantilism's seductive appeal, and details some suggestions for avoiding some of the pitfalls associated with our increasingly infantilised world.

Keith Hayward is Professor of Criminology at Copenhagen University

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Christopher Key Chapple, "The SāṃKhya System: Accounting for the Real" (SUNY Press, 2024)

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The SāṃKhya System: Accounting for the Real (SUNY Press, 2024) brings new life to an ancient Hindu system of thought. Sāṃkhya spans the fields of philosophy, physics, metaphysics, psychology, and ethics. Although notably not theological, its key premises can be found in virtually all religious traditions that originate from India. Sāṃkhya espouses a reciprocity between Prakṛti, the realm of activity, and Puruṣa, the silent witness. It also delineates the phenomenal experiences that arise from Prakṛti, including the operations of the human body, the five great elements, and the eight mental states. Sāṃkhya proclaims that knowledge of world and self can lead to freedom. This book presents a new translation of Īśvarakṛṣṇa's Sāṃkhya Kārikā, with grammatical analysis.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John Kay, "The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told about Business Is Wrong" (Yale UP, 2025)

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

John Kay's The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told about Business Is Wrong (Yale UP, 2025) is an accessible and entertaining reappraisal of what business is for and how it works.

Full of history and written in a compelling narrative style, this book describes a shift in the underlying assumptions of the relationship between capital & labor. Kay describes how and why we have come to "love the product" as we also "hate the producer".

Kay discusses areas of particular change such as the relationship between business & finance, the concept of the "hollow" corporation, what we mean when we say "growth", and the motivations and standards of industry leaders.

Old ideas of owning the means of production are redundant as workers are increasingly the means of production. Capital is now often a disconnected service contracted from a specialized supplier, and businesses are run by professional managers whose main skill is exerting authority.

Author recommended reading:

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

William Dalrymple, "The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

In The Golden Road (Bloomsbury. 2025), William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and our world today as we know it.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

We Have Never Been Woke: A Conversation with Musa al-Gharbi

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Why does occupation reliably predict political leanings? What is social capitalism, and how does it span income classes? If social capitalists are sincerely committed to equality and “wokeness,” why do they simultaneously benefit from—and perpetuate—the very inequalities they denounce?

Join us as we dive into Musa al-Gharbi’s provocative new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton University Press, 2024). We explore al-Gharbi’s central argument: the disconnect between the stated values of the "symbolic capital elite" and the real-world consequences of their actions, despite their genuine intentions. Al-Gharbi draws parallels to past "great awakenings"—periods of profound cultural upheaval and shifting attitudes toward civil rights. We also examine whether defining "wokeness" is essential to his thesis, and al-Gharbi clarifies some of the most frequently misunderstood aspects of his work.

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. A columnist for The Guardian, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other major publications.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq, "Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State" (U Arizona Press, 2025)

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Although Indigenous peoples are often perceived as standing outside political modernity, Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State (University of Arizona Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Canessa & Dr. Manuela Lavinas Picq takes the provocative view that Indigenous people have been fundamental to how contemporary state sovereignty was imagined, theorized, and practiced.

Delving into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, this open-access book shows how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. The book argues that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book forefronts Indigenous peoples as political actors to reject essentializing views that reduce them to cultural “survivors” rooted in the past.

With insights drawn from diverse global contexts and empirical research from Bolivia and Ecuador, this work advocates for the relevance of Indigenous studies within political science and argues for an ethnography of sovereignty in anthropology. Savages and Citizens makes a compelling case for the centrality of Indigenous perspectives to understand the modern state from political theory to international studies.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For many, technology offers hope for the future―that promise of shared human flourishing and liberation that always seems to elude our species. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark this hope in a particular way. They promise a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome―not by us, but by our machines. Yet rather than open new futures, today's powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into immensely powerful but flawed mirrors, they reflect the same errors, biases, and failures of wisdom that we strive to escape. Our new digital mirrors point backward. They show only where the data say that we have already been, never where we might venture together for the first time. To meet today's grave challenges to our species and our planet, we will need something new from AI, and from ourselves.

In The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford UP, 2024), Shannon Vallor makes a wide-ranging, prophetic, and philosophical case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth, rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past. Rejecting prophecies of doom, she encourages us to pursue technology that helps us recover our sense of the possible, and with it the confidence and courage to repair a broken world. Professor Vallor calls us to rethink what AI is and can be, and what we want to be with it.

Our guest is: Professor Shannon Vallor, who is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and AI at the University of Edinburgh, where she directs the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She is a standing member of Stanford's One Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence (AI100) and member of the Oversight Board of the Ada Lovelace Institute. Professor Vallor joined the Futures Institute in 2020 following a career in the United States as a leader in the ethics of emerging technologies, including a post as a visiting AI Ethicist at Google from 2018-2020. She is the author of The AI Mirror: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking; and Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting; and is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology. She serves as advisor to government and industry bodies on responsible AI and data ethics, and is Principal Investigator and Co-Director of the UKRI research programme BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Chris Skinner, "Intelligent Money: When Money Thinks for You" (Marshall Cavendish, 2024)

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Peter D. Hershock, "Consciousness Mattering: A Buddhist Synthesis" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Consciousness Mattering (Bloombury, 2023) presents a contemporary Buddhist theory in which brains, bodies, environments, and cultures are relational infrastructures for human consciousness. Drawing on insights from meditation, neuroscience, physics, and evolutionary theory, it demonstrates that human consciousness is not something that occurs only in our heads and consists in the creative elaboration of relations among sensed and sensing presences, and more fundamentally between matter and what matters. Peter Hershock argues that without consciousness there would only be either unordered sameness or nothing at all. Evolution is consciousness mattering.

Shedding new light on the co-emergence of subjective awareness and culture, the possibility of machine consciousness, the risks of algorithmic consciousness hacking, and the potentials of intentionally altered states of consciousness, Hershock invites us to consider how freely, wisely, and compassionately consciousness matters.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Adam K. Webb, "The World's Constitution: Spheres of Liberty in the Future Global Order" (Routledge, 2025)

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

“One thing I would note about the Trumpian populists and their counterparts elsewhere in the West today is that they're a very peculiarly tribal kind of post conservative right. It's almost a kind of reassertion of paganism and tribal boundaries and grievance. That is very different from a more traditional kind of conservatism, where the texture of society and the accumulated wisdom of the past and the cultivation of virtue loomed large – at least as ideals, as aspirations. In contrast to that, this kind of contemporary populism has very little texture or wisdom or virtue – its more like a resentful atomism that is invoking certain tribal markers of membership because it's politically convenient, as it were.”

– Adam Kempton Webb, NBN interview March 2025

In this expansive and thought-provoking interview, Adam K. Webb lays out a sweeping vision for a post-liberal, post-national world constitution, challenging the dominance of state sovereignty, corporate capitalism, and procedural liberalism. Drawing on over a quarter-century of scholarship culminating in his latest book The World’s Constitution (Routledge, 2025) Webb proposes a system of functional sphere pluralism, where governance is rooted in ethical traditions rather than ideology – where citizenship, law, and economic participation are no longer restricted by territorial nation-states.

Coming to terms with Webb’s interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective suggests an affinity with thinkers like the late James C. Scott, in his critique of centralized control, coupled with the sensibilities of Roger Scruton and Patrick Deneen, in their defense of ethical and cultural order. Yet Webb diverges from them all in his insistence on a global, meta-constitutional framework, which might place him closer to the likes of Robert D. Kaplan, as seen in his latest work on civilizational cycles and geopolitical evolution.

From his critique of elite legal capture (responding to a question on Katharina Pistor’s The Code of Capital) to his historical engagement with Confucian, Islamic, and European pluralist traditions, Webb offers a bold alternative to today’s stagnating governance models. Whether you are interested in constitutional theory, global governance, or the future of civilization itself, the professor’s insights in this interview offers an intellectually rich and thought provoking conversation that is well worth your time.

Below are links to Dr. Webb’s latest books – Taylor & Francis Open Access publications:

Deep Cosmopolis: Rethinking World Politics and Globalization (2015)

The World’s Constitution: Spheres of Liberty in the Future Global Order (2025)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Paul Seabright, "The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Religion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements has led to their accumulating great power and wealth. Religions in many traditions have honed their competitive strategies over thousands of years. Today, they are big business; like businesses, they must recruit, raise funds, disburse budgets, manage facilities, organize transportation, motivate employees, and get their message out.

In The Divine Economy (Princeton UP, 2024), economist Paul Seabright argues that religious movements are a special kind of business: they are platforms, bringing together communities of members who seek many different things from one another—spiritual fulfilment, friendship and marriage networks, even business opportunities. Their function as platforms, he contends, is what has allowed religions to consolidate and wield power.

This power can be used for good, especially when religious movements provide their members with insurance against the shocks of modern life, and a sense of worth in their communities. It can also be used for harm: political leaders often instrumentalize religious movements for authoritarian ends, and religious leaders can exploit the trust of members to inflict sexual, emotional, financial or physical abuse, or to provoke violence against outsiders. Writing in a nonpartisan spirit, Seabright uses insights from economics to show how religion and secular society can work together in a world where some people feel no need for religion, but many continue to respond with enthusiasm to its call.

Paul Seabright teaches economics at the Toulouse School of Economics, and until 2021 was director of the multidisciplinary Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. From 2021 to 2023, he was a Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford. His books include The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present and The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (both Princeton).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Bruce Hood, "The Science of Happiness: Seven Lessons for Living Well" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This interview with Prof. Bruce Hood marks the first anniversary of his bestselling book, The Science of Happiness: Seven Lessons for Living Well (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024). In our lively (and happy) discussion we talk with Prof. Hood about what happiness is and how it is assessed scientifically, the importance of human connections and a sense of community. Prof. Hood shares some of the exercises that appear throughout the book, including the importance of keeping a diary. Bruce is the Director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre in the Experimental Psychology Department at the University of Bristol. He undertook his Ph.D. at Cambridge University followed by appointments at University College London, MIT and a faculty professor at Harvard. He is a highly regarded international lecturer.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

M. Chirimuuta, "The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience" (MIT Press, 2024)

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This book is available open access here.

The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Mazviita Chirimuuta argues that the standard ways neuroscientists simplify the human brain to build models for their research purposes mislead us about how the brain actually works. The key issue, instead, is to figure out which details of brain function are relevant for understanding its role in causing behavior; after all, the biological brain is a highly energetically efficient basis of cognition in contrast to the massive data centers driving AI that are based on the simplification that brain functionality is just a matter of neuronal action potentials. Chirimuuta, who is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, also argues for a Kantian-inspired view of neuroscientific knowledge called haptic realism, according to which what we can know about the brain is the product of interaction between brains and the scientific methods and aims that guide how we investigate them.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jørgen Møller and Jonathan Doucette, "The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Generations of social scientists and historians have argued that the escape from empire and consequent fragmentation of power - across and within polities - was a necessary condition for the European development of the modern territorial state, modern representative democracy, and modern levels of prosperity. The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500 (Oxford UP, 2022) inserts the Catholic Church as the main engine of this persistent international and domestic power pluralism, which has moulded European state-formation for almost a millennium.

The 'crisis of church and state' that began in the second half of the eleventh century is argued here as having fundamentally reshaped European patterns of state formation and regime change. It did so by doing away with the norm in historical societies - sacral monarchy - and by consolidating the two great balancing acts European state builders have been engaged in since the eleventh century: against strong social groups and against each other. The book traces the roots of this crisis to a large-scale breakdown of public authority in the Latin West, which began in the ninth century, and which at one and the same time incentivised and permitted a religious reform movement to radically transform the Catholic Church in the period from the late tenth century onwards.

Drawing on a unique dataset of towns, parliaments, and ecclesiastical institutions such as bishoprics and monasteries, the book documents how this church reform movement was crucial for the development and spread of self-government (the internal balancing act) and the weakening of the Holy Roman Empire (the external balancing act) in the period AD 1000-1500.

Jørgen Møller, Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, and Jonathan Stavnskær Doucette, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Chris Higgins, "Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education" (MIT Press, 2024)

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education (MIT Press, 2024) is an imaginative tour of the contemporary university as it could be: a place to discover self-knowledge, meaning, and purpose.

What if college were not just a means of acquiring credentials, but a place to pursue our formation as whole persons striving to lead lives of meaning and purpose? In Undeclared, Chris Higgins confronts the contemporary university in a bid to reclaim a formative mission for higher education. In a series of searching essays and pointed interludes, Higgins challenges us to acknowledge how far our practices have drifted from our ideals, asking: What would it look like to build a college from the ground up to support self-discovery and personal integration? What does it mean to be a public university, and are there any left? How can the humanities help the job-ified university begin to take vocation seriously?

Cutting through the underbrush of received ideas, Higgins follows the insight where it leads, clearing a path from the corporate multiversity to the renaissance in higher education that was Black Mountain College and back again. Along the way, we tour a campus bent on becoming a shopping mall, accompany John Dewey through a midlife crisis, and witness the first "happening.” Through diverse and grounded philosophical engagements, Undeclared assembles the resources to expand the contemporary educational imagination.

Chris Higgins is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Formative Education in Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development, where he directs the Transformative Educational Studies program. He is the author of The Good Life of Teaching.

The book is available Open Access here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Webb Keane, "Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Revolutions in technology are fundamentally transforming what it means to be human. Or are they? As Webb Keane points out, before humans consulted ChatGPT, they propitiated oracles. Before they fell in love with robot boyfriends, they ventured into the forest to marry nature spirits.

In his new book Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination (Princeton UP, 2025) Keane combines anthropology and philosophy to show us what is new and what is not in our current technological moment. Using a broad comparative perspective he shows us how shamans, hunters, priests, and doctors have long responded to the existential questions which drive our current technological obsessions: Where is the line between human and non-human? How do humans find meaning in our interactions with non-humans? By widening our intellectual imagination, Keane shows us how many of our current intellectual dilemmas about technology are not new -- and are far more deep than enduring than we might have previously suspected.

Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jeff Yoshimi, "Gaming Cancer: How Building and Playing Video Games Can Accelerate Scientific Discovery" (MIT Press, 2025)

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Can experimenting with game design increase our chances of finding a cure for cancer? Cancer is crafty, forcing us to be just as clever in our efforts to outfox it—and we’ve made excellent progress, but is it time for a new play in the playbook?

In Gaming Cancer: How Building and Playing Video Games Can Accelerate Scientific Discovery (MIT Press, 2025), Jeff Yoshimi proposes a new approach to fighting an increasingly exhausting war. By putting the work of cancer research into the hands of nonspecialists, Yoshimi believes, we can accelerate the process of outgaming the disease once and for all. Gamers have already used “serious games” to discover new galaxies, digitize ancient texts, decode viruses, and solve theoretical problems in neuroscience. Cancer is a multilayered threat, and our best bet at overcoming it is via more minds working in concert. Gaming Cancer is an instruction manual for engineering games that motivate users to strain and sweat to find cancer cures. It integrates game design with research in cancer biology, data visualization techniques, and developments in cognitive science and AI while remaining sensitive to the limitations of citizen science and ethical concerns. Yoshimi sees in cutting-edge game technology the potential to educate and empower people to outwit cancer, an indirect route to richer science literacy that draws on the boundless resources of the mind. This book offers anyone invested in beating this seemingly intractable disease a concrete playbook that combines real science with creative vision in an effort to defeat the boss monster, cancer.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Steven Lesk, "Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness" (Prometheus, 2023)

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Of all the mental illnesses, schizophrenia eludes us the most. No matter the strides scientists have made in neurological research nor doctors have made in psychiatric treatment, schizophrenia remains misunderstood, almost complacently mythologized. Without a reason for the illness, patients feel even more alienated than they already do, families are left hopeless, and doctors struggle to provide accurate care. Steven Lesk, though, after a medical career dedicated to those affected by schizophrenia and a determination to find the answer to its existence, presents a groundbreaking theory that will forever change the lives of the mentally ill.

In Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Madness (Prometheus, 2023), Lesk threads evolutionary evidence with neurological evidence, turning the mysteries of our minds into a tapestry of logic. With his breakthrough theory and this unprecedented book, Lesk will invite necessary cultural dialogue about this stigmatized illness, provoke new psychiatric and pharmacological research, and provide unequivocal comfort to those afflicted and affected by schizophrenia.

Lesk's "primitive organization theory" is based in human evolution, from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, and the specific changes to our brains after the emergence of language. We have existed in human-like form for six million years, but we've only had language for 50,000; within the vast span of evolutionary time, that's hardly any time at all. Lesk elucidates us to the hormones affected by language, especially dopamine, and with brilliant clarity, connects human evolution, our brain affected by language, and those with schizophrenia whose dopamine doesn't flow in our new, adaptive way. In other words, the twenty million people who have schizophrenia in the world don't suppress dopamine in the way evolution has trained us, so their brains don't process language well and function as if they're in a hallucinatory, delusional dream state. Not only will Lesk's theory focus treatment efforts for schizophrenia, but it will also affect that of other dopamine-related mental illnesses like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's chorea, Tourette's, ADD, and more. Publishing Lesk's work will usher in a new era of psychiatric understanding, one that the field and the public desperately needs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Anxious Generation: A Conversation with Jonathan Haidt

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of Madison's Notes, Jonathan Haidt, renowned social psychologist and author, dives deep into the impact of digital saturation on today's youth, drawing insights from his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Allen Lane, 2024). The discussion explores how growing up immersed in social media, video games, and smart technology is reshaping young people’s sense of self and influencing their political engagement. Haidt explains how the constant connectivity may be contributing to an increase in anxiety and how it’s altering their approach to both personal identity and societal participation.

Haidt also addresses the potential for a "generational war," where differences between older and younger generations are often framed as inherent character flaws. He emphasizes the importance of understanding that many of Gen Z’s choices have been shaped by forces beyond their control, rather than pointing to a moral failing. This leads into a comparison with the themes explored in The Coddling of the American Mind, particularly the societal impact of overprotection and the lack of resilience-building among youth.

The conversation then moves into practical territory, with Haidt discussing the importance of activating the brain’s inhibition system to help young people develop resilience and the ability to handle stress, conflict, and complex decision-making. He suggests that cultivating the inhibition system through thoughtful practices is key in fostering more resilient and independent young adults.

Finally, Haidt examines the role of tech giants like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in shaping the digital landscape and their growing political influence. He discusses the challenges of addressing the negative impacts of social media, pondering whether government intervention will result in meaningful change or if the influence of tech leaders will prevent any real reform.

This episode provides a compelling exploration of how technology, societal norms, and political dynamics intersect to shape the lives of younger generations and offers valuable insight into the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for both youth and society at large.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Glen L. Thompson, "Jingjiao: The Earliest Christian Church in China" (Eerdmans, 2024)

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Many people assume that the first introduction of Christianity to the Chinese was part of nineteenth-century Western imperialism. In fact, Syriac-speaking Christians brought the gospel along the Silk Road into China in the seventh century. Glen L. Thompson introduces readers to the fascinating history of this early Eastern church, referred to as Jingjiao, or the “Luminous Teaching.”

Thompson presents the history of the Persian church’s mission to China with rigor and clarity. While Christianity remained a minority and “foreign” religion in the Middle Kingdom, it nonetheless attracted adherents among indigenous Chinese and received imperial approval during the Tang Dynasty. Though it was later suppressed alongside Buddhism, it resurfaced in China and Mongolia in the twelfth century. Thompson also discusses how the modern unearthing of Chinese Christian texts has stirred controversy over the meaning of Jingjiao to recent missionary efforts in China.

In an accessible style, Thompson guides readers through primary sources as well as up-to-date scholarship. As the most recent and balanced survey on the topic available in English, Jingjiao: The Earliest Christian Church in China (Eerdmans, 2024) will be an indispensable resource for students of global Christianity and missiology.

Glen L. Thompson is professor emeritus of New Testament and historical theology at Asia Lutheran Seminary in Hong Kong. He has retired to Milwaukee, where he researches, works with students, and expands his Fourth-Century Christianity website.

New Books in Syriac Studies is presented by Kristian Heal.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ada Palmer, "Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Ada Palmer joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Inventing the Renaissance (U Chicago Press, 2025) and the ways history is written and used.

From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.

Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save them from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Albertus, "Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies" (Basic Books, 2025)

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (Basic Books, 2025), political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.

Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, from Soviet and Maoist collectivization to initiatives turning large estates over to family farmers. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career’s worth of original research and on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis—and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate.

Michael Albertus is professor of political science at the University of Chicago. The author of four previous books, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Arvid J. Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro, "Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2024) challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing scholarship has overlooked the severity, persistence, and harmful consequences of the social-welfare crises affecting the region. Dr. Arvid J. Lukauskas and Dr. Yumiko Shimabukuro fill this gap and put a major asterisk on East Asia's economic record.

Combining big-picture analysis, abundant data, a dynamic interdisciplinary framework, and powerful human stories, they shed light on the social ills that governments have failed to address adequately, including low wages, child abuse, elderly poverty, and substandard housing. One of the major forces behind the multidimensional welfare crises is the region's productivist welfare strategy, which prioritizes economic growth while abandoning a robust social safety net, leaving the most vulnerable segments of society largely unprotected.

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia brings the region into debates over the dangers of seeking growth at all costs that are currently embroiling the United States and other advanced industrialized countries.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Hal Brands, "The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World" (Norton, 2025)

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

We often think of the modern era as the age of American power. In reality, we’re living in a long, violent Eurasian century. That giant, resource-rich landmass possesses the bulk of the global population, industrial might, and potential military power; it touches all four of the great oceans. Eurasia is a strategic prize without equal―which is why the world has been roiled, reshaped, and nearly destroyed by clashes over the supercontinent.

Since the early twentieth century, autocratic powers―from Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II to the Soviet Union―have aspired for dominance by seizing commanding positions in the world’s strategic heartland. Offshore sea powers, namely the United Kingdom and America, have sought to make the world safe for democracy by keeping Eurasia in balance. America’s rivalries with China, Russia, and Iran are the next round in this geopolitical game. If this new authoritarian axis succeeds in enacting a radically revised international order, America and other democracies will be vulnerable and insecure.

In The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025) Hal Brands, a renowned expert on global affairs, argues that a better understanding of Eurasia’s strategic geography can illuminate the contours of rivalry and conflict in today’s world. The Eurasian Century explains how revolutions in technology and warfare, and the rise of toxic ideologies of conquest, made Eurasia the center of twentieth-century geopolitics―with pressing implications for the struggles that will define the twenty-first.

Hal Brands, coauthor of Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Daniel Oberhaus, "The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum" (MIT Press, 2025)

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

AI psychiatrists promise to detect mental disorders with superhuman accuracy, provide affordable therapy for those who can't afford or can't access treatment, and even invent new psychiatric drugs. But the hype obscures an unnerving reality. In The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum (MIT Press, 2025), Daniel Oberhaus tells the inside story of how the quest to use AI in psychiatry has created the conditions to turn the world into an asylum. Most of these systems, he writes, have vanishingly little evidence that they improve patient outcomes, but the risks they pose have less to do with technological shortcomings than with the application of deeply flawed psychiatric models of mental disorder at unprecedented scale.

Oberhaus became interested in the subject of mental health after tragically losing his sister to suicide. In The Silicon Shrink, he argues that these new, ostensibly therapeutic technologies already pose significant risks to vulnerable people, and they won't stop there. These new breeds of AI systems are creating a psychiatric surveillance economy in which the emotions, behavior, and cognition of everyday people are subtly manipulated by psychologically savvy algorithms that have escaped the clinic. Oberhaus also introduces readers to the concept of “swipe psychology,” which is quickly establishing itself as the dominant mode of diagnosing and treating mental disorders.

It is not too late to change course, but to do so means we must reckon with the nature of mental illness, the limits of technology, and what it means to be human.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Antonio A. Casilli, "Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings, and consider them efficient. As users, we may complain when these technologies don’t obey, or worry about their influence on our choices and our livelihoods. And yet, we also yearn for their convenience, see ourselves reflected in them, and treat them as something entirely new. But when we overestimate the automation of these tools, award-winning author Antonio A. Casilli argues, we fail to recognize how our fellow humans are essential to their efficiency. The danger is not that robots will take our jobs, but that humans will have to do theirs.

In this bracing and powerful book, Antonia A. Casilli uses up-to-the-minute research to show how today’s technologies, including AI, continue to exploit human labor—even ours. He connects the diverse activities of today’s tech laborers: platform workers, like Uber drivers and Airbnb hosts; “micro workers,” including those performing atomized tasks like data entry on Amazon Mechanical Turk; and the rest of us, as we evaluate text or images to show we’re not robots, react to Facebook posts, or approve or improve the output of generative AI. As Casilli shows us, algorithms, search engines, and voice assistants wouldn’t function without unpaid or underpaid human contributions. Further, he warns that if we fail to recognize this human work, we risk a dark future for all human labor.

Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation (U Chicago Press, 2025) urges us to move beyond the simplistic notion that machines are intelligent and autonomous. As the proverbial Godot, robots are the bearers of a messianic promise that is always postponed. Instead of bringing prosperity for all, they discipline the workforce, so we don’t dream of a world without drudgery and exploitation. Casilli’s eye-opening book makes clear that most “automation” requires human labor—and likely always will—shedding new light on today’s consequences and tomorrow’s threats of failing to recognize and compensate the “click workers” of today.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about the negotiation that humans make between oneself, identification of place, and the attachment/s they have to those places. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social),Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email (johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

James Boyle, "The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood" (MIT Press, 2024)

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

This conversation includes James Boyle, Duke University; Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, UPR-M; Héctor José Huyke, UPR-M, and Natalia Bustos, UPR-M.

This is the first of two episodes about The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood. The second, in Spanish, will appear on the New Books Network en español. The series is sponsored by the Encuentros descoloniales focal group at Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at UPRM, a group of scholars who consider how decolonial approaches can provide nuance in scientific knowledge.

This episode and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at the UPRM have been supported by the Mellon Foundation. The conversation is part of the “STEM to STEAM” project of the “Cornerstone” initiative, sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, which stresses the importance of integrating humanistic perspectives in the sciences.

The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood is available online for free through the MIT website per the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Brigid Schulte, "Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life" (Henry Holt, 2024)

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Following Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte's groundbreaking examination of time management and stress, the prizewinning journalist now turns her attention to the greatest culprit in America's quality-of-life crisis: the way our economy and culture conceive of work. Americans across all demographics, industries, and socioeconomic levels report exhaustion, burnout, and the wish for more meaningful lives. This full-system failure in our structure of work affects everything from gender inequality to domestic stability, and it even shortens our lifespans.

Drawing on years of research, Schulte traces the arc of our discontent from a time before the 1980s, when work was compatible with well-being and allowed a single earner to support a family, until today, with millions of people working multiple hourly jobs or in white-collar positions where no hours are ever off duty.

She casts a wide net in search of solutions, exploring the movement to institute a four-day workweek, introducing Japan's Housewives Brigade--which demands legal protection for family time--and embedding with CEOs who are making the business case for humane conditions. And she demonstrates the power of a collective and creative demand for change, showing that work can be organized in an infinite number of ways that are good for humans and for business.

Fiercely argued and vividly told, rich with stories and informed by deep investigation, Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life (Henry Holt, 2024) lays out a clear vision for ending our punishing grind and reclaiming leisure, joy, and meaning.

Brigid Schulte is the author of the bestselling Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time and an award-winning journalist formerly for the Washington Post, where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize. She is also the director of the Better Life Lab, the work-family justice and gender equity program at New America.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mariam Motamedi Fraser, "Dog Politics: Species Stories and the Animal Sciences" (Manchester UP, 2024)

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Do dogs belong with humans? Scientific accounts of dogs' 'species story,' in which contemporary dog-human relations are naturalised with reference to dogs' evolutionary becoming, suggest that they do. Dog Politics: Species Stories and the Animal Sciences (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Mariam Motamedi Fraser dissects this story.

This book offers a rich empirical analysis and critique of the development and consolidation of dogs' species story in science, asking what evidence exists to support it, and what practical consequences, for dogs, follow from it. It explores how this story is woven into broader scientific shifts in understandings of species, animals, and animal behaviours, and how such shifts were informed by and informed transformative political events, including slavery and colonialism, the Second World War and its aftermath, and the emergence of anti-racist movements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book pays particular attention to how species-thinking bears on 'race,' racism, and individuals.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Cordelia Fine, "Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society" (Norton, 2018)

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Many people believe that, at its core, biological sex is a fundamental, diverging force in human development. According to this overly familiar story, differences between the sexes are shaped by past evolutionary pressures―women are more cautious and parenting-focused, while men seek status to attract more mates. In each succeeding generation, sex hormones and male and female brains are thought to continue to reinforce these unbreachable distinctions, making for entrenched inequalities in modern society.

In Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (Norton, 2018), psychologist Cordelia Fine wittily explains why past and present sex roles are only serving suggestions for the future, revealing a much more dynamic situation through an entertaining and well-documented exploration of the latest research that draws on evolutionary science, psychology, neuroscience, endocrinology, and philosophy. She uses stories from daily life, scientific research, and common sense to break through the din of cultural assumptions. Testosterone, for instance, is not the potent hormonal essence of masculinity; the presumed, built-in preferences of each sex, from toys to financial risk taking, are turned on their heads.

Moving beyond the old “nature versus nurture” debates, Testosterone Rex disproves ingrained myths and calls for a more equal society based on both sexes’ full, human potential.

Cordelia Fine is a Canadian-born British philosopher of science, psychologist, and writer. She is a full professor in the History and Philosophy of Science programme at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David G. Hunter et al., "Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity: Authors, Texts, and Ideas" (Brill, 2024)

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity: Authors, Texts, and Ideas (Brill, 2024) focuses on the history of early Christianity, covering texts, authors, ideas, and their reception. Its content is intended to bridge the gap between the fields of New Testament studies and patristics, connecting a number of related fields of study including Judaism, ancient history and philosophy, covering the whole period of early Christianity up to 600 CE.

The BEEC aims both to provide a critical review of the methods used in Early Christian Studies and also to update the history of scholarship.

The BEEC addresses a range of traditions, including iconographic, martyrological, ecclesiastical, and Christological traditions, as well as cultic phenomena, such as the veneration of saints. The history of the transmission of texts and the reception of early Christian writers are also addressed. The BEEC focuses on early Christianity from a historical perspective in order to uncover the lasting legacy of the authors and texts until the present day.

David G. Hunter is the Margaret O'Brien Flatley Chair of Catholic Theology at Boston College.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Brandon Keim, "Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World" (Norton, 2024)

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

What does the science of animal intelligence mean for how we understand and live with the wild creatures around us?

Honeybees deliberate democratically. Rats reflect on the past. Snakes have friends. In recent decades, our understanding of animal cognition has exploded, making it indisputably clear that the cities and landscapes around us are filled with thinking, feeling individuals besides ourselves. But the way we relate to wild animals has yet to catch up. In Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World (W.W. Norton, 2024), acclaimed science journalist Brandon Keim asks: what would it mean to take the minds of other animals seriously?

In this wide-ranging, wonder-filled exploration of animals’ inner lives, Keim takes us into courtrooms and wildlife hospitals, under backyard decks and into deserts, to meet anew the wild creatures who populate our communities and the philosophers, rogue pest controllers, ecologists, wildlife doctors, and others who are reimagining our relationships to them. If bats trade favors and groups of swans vote to take off by honking, should we then see them as fellow persons—even members of society? When we come to understand the depths of their pleasures and pains, the richness of their family lives and their histories, what do we owe so-called pests and predators, or animals who are sick or injured? Can thinking of nonhumans as our neighbors help chart a course to a kinder, gentler planet? As Keim suggests, the answers to these questions are central to how we understand not only the rest of the living world, but ourselves.

A beguiling invitation to discover an expanded sense of community and kinship beyond our own species, Meet the Neighbors opens our eyes to the world of vibrant intelligence just outside our doors.

Brandon Keim is an independent journalist specializing in animals, nature, and science. His work appears regularly in the New York Times, Atlantic, Nautilus, National Geographic, and elsewhere.

Kyle Johannsen is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Fuerstein, "Experiments in Living Together: How Democracy Drives Social Progress" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Various kind of philosophical considerations have been offered in favor of democracy. By some accounts, democracy realizes some intrinsic value, such as equality or collective autonomy. According to other views, democracy’s value is more instrumental: it tends to produce or promote certain social goods like stability, prosperity, and peace. However, a longstanding alternative tradition locates democracy’s value in its capacity to make social and moral progress. Here, the idea isn’t so much that democracy produces an already-identified social good, but rather that democracy fosters a kind of social and moral discovery.

In Experiments in Living Together: How Democracy Drives Social Progress (Oxford UP, 2024), Michael Fuerstein draws on normative and empirical considerations in proposing a systematic account of democracy’s capacity to foster progress.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Frederick Crews, "Freud: The Making of an Illusion" (Picador, 2018)

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world.

Perhaps Freud’s sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud’s legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth.

Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud’s extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man.

How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work?

In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what’s so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he’s going in for the kill shot.

Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. cassandraseltman@gmail.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Marc Schuilenburg, "Hysteria: Crime, Media, and Politics" (Routledge, 2021)

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

According to the medical world, hysteria is a thing of the past, an outdated diagnosis that has disappeared for good. Hysteria: Crime, Media, and Politics (Routledge, 2021) argues that hysteria is in fact alive and well.

Hyperventilating, we rush from one incident into the next - there is hardly time for a breather. From the worldwide run on toilet paper to cope with coronavirus fears to the overheated discussions about immigration and overwrought reactions to the levels of crime and disorder around us, we live in a culture of hysteria. While hysteria is typically discussed in emotional terms - as an obstacle to be overcome - it nevertheless has very real consequences in everyday life. Irritating though this may be, hysteria needs to be taken seriously, for what it tells us about our society and way of life. That is why Marc Schuilenburg examines what hysteria is and why it is fuelled by a culture that not only abuses, but also encourages and rewards it.

Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, criminology, philosophy and all those interested in hysteria and how it permeates late modern society.

Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Charles Foster, "Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousness of perhaps the strangest animal of all—the human being.

To experience the Upper Paleolithic era—a turning point when humans became behaviorally modern, painting caves and telling stories, Foster learns what it feels like to be a Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer by living in makeshift shelters without amenities in the rural woods of England. He tests his five impoverished senses to forage for berries and roadkill and he undertakes shamanic journeys to explore the connection of wakeful dreaming to religion. For the Neolithic period, when humans stayed in one place and domesticated plants and animals, forever altering our connection to the natural world, he moves to a reconstructed Neolithic settlement. Finally, to explore the Enlightenment—the age of reason and the end of the soul—Foster inspects Oxford colleges, dissecting rooms, cafes, and art galleries. He finds his world and himself bizarre and disembodied, and he rues the atrophy of our senses, the cause for much of what ails us.

Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, natural history, agriculture, medical law and ethics, Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness (Metropolitan Books, 2021) is one man’s audacious attempt to feel a connection with 45,000 years of human history. This glorious, fiercely imaginative journey from our origins to a possible future ultimately shows how we might best live on earth—and thrive.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Kit Kowol, "Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

We think we know all there is to know about Britain's Second World War. We don't.

This radical re-interpretation of British history and British Conservatism between 1939 and 1945 reveals the bold, at times utopian, plans British Conservatives drew up for Britain and the post-war world.

From proposals for world government to a more united Empire via dreams of a new Christian elite and a move back-to-the-land, Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War (Oxford UP, 2024) reveals how Conservatives were every bit as imaginative and courageous as their Labour and left-wing opponents in their wartime plans for a post-war world.

Bringing these alternative visions of Britain's post-war future back to life, Blue Jerusalem restores politics to the centre of the story of Britain's war. It demonstrates how everything from the weapons Britain fought with, to the theatres in which the fighting took place and the allies Britain chose were the product of political decisions about the different futures Conservatives wanted to make.

Rejecting notions of a 'people's war' that continue to cloud how we think of World War II, it explores how the Tories used their control of the home and battle front to fight a deeply Conservative war and build the martial, imperial, and Christian nation of which many of a conservative disposition had long dreamed.

A study of political thinking as well as political manoeuvre, Blue Jerusalem goes beyond an examination of the usual suspects - such as Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain - to reveal a hitherto lost world of British Conservativism and a set of forgotten futures that continue to shape our world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Leah Downey, "Our Money: Monetary Policy as If Democracy Matters" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How the creation of money and monetary policy can be more democratic.

The power to create money is foundational to the state. In the United States, that power has been largely delegated to private banks governed by an independent central bank. Putting monetary policy in the hands of a set of insulated, nonelected experts has fueled the popular rejection of expertise as well as a widespread dissatisfaction with democratically elected officials.

In Our Money: Monetary Policy as If Democracy Matters (Princeton UP, 2024), Leah Downey makes a principled case against central bank independence (CBI) by both challenging the economic theory behind it and developing a democratic rationale for sustaining the power of the legislature to determine who can create money and on what terms. How states govern money creation has an impact on the capacity of the people and their elected officials to steer policy over time. In a healthy democracy, Downey argues, the balance of power over money creation matters.

Downey applies and develops democratic theory through an exploration of monetary policy. In so doing, she develops a novel theory of independent agencies in the context of democratic government, arguing that states can employ expertise without being ruled by experts. Downey argues that it is through iterative governance, the legislature knowing and regularly showing its power over policy, that the people can retain their democratic power to guide policy in the modern state. As for contemporary macroeconomic arguments in defense of central bank independence, Downey suggests that the purported economic benefits do not outweigh the democratic costs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Markus Vinzent, "Christ's Torah: The Making of the New Testament in the Second Century" (Routledge, 2023)

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Christ's Torah: The Making of the New Testament in the Second Century (Routledge, 2023) explores the creation of the collection now known as the New Testament. While it is generally accepted that it did not emerge as a collection prior to the late second century CE, a more controversial question is how it came to be.

How did the writings that make up the New Testament - The Gospels, the so-called Praxapostolos (Acts and the canonical letters), the Epistles of Paul, and Revelation - make their way into the collection, and what do we know about their possible historical origins, and in turn the emergence of the New Testament itself? The New Testament as we know it first became recognisable in more detail in Irenaeus of Lyon towards the end of the second century CE. However, questions remain as to how and by whom was it redacted. Was it a slow, organic process in which texts written by different authors, members of different communities and in various places, grew together into one book? Or were certain writings compiled on the basis of an editorial decision by an individual or a group of editors, revised for this purpose and partly harmonised with each other? This volume sketches out the complex development of the New Testament, arguing that key second century scholars played an important role in the emergence of the canonical collection and putting forward the possible historical origins of the text’s composition.

Markus Vinzent, who had held the H.G. Wood Chair in the History of Theology at the University of Birmingham (1999–2010) and was Professor for Theology and Patristics at the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London (2010–2021, ret.), is Fellow of the Max-Weber-Centre for Anthropological and Cultural Studies, University of Erfurt (2011–present). A recipient of awards from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Agence Nationale de Recherche, France, he is the author of Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Resetting the Origins of Christianity: A New Theory of Sources and Beginnings (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Josh Spodek, "Sustainability Simplified: The Definitive Guide to Solving All (Yes, All) Our Environmental Problems" (Amplify, 2025)

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Josh Spodek disconnected his Manhattan apartment from the electric grid in May 2022. Over time, he has reduced his consumption and contribution to landfill. His new book argues that sustainability is not a sacrifice but an upgrade that can bring joy and increased quality of life. The book traces his journey to live more sustainably in a Manhattan apartment but also offers an argument about politics. He asks what narratives are already available to frame environmental degradation deploying a wide range of sources from John Locke to indigenous thinkers. Spodek, doubtful about governments or corporations leading on the environment, favors bottom up change focused on the actions and leadership of individuals. Sustainability Simplified: The Definitive Guide to Solving All (Yes, All) Our Environmental Problems (Amplify, 2025) explores the importance of culture and habit. How did the United States and other nations adopt polluting and passive habits? What can be done to reverse these cultural norms? The solutions range from a WWII level mobilization to a Constitutional Amendment.

Dr. Josh Spodek earned a PhD in Physics and an MBA in entrepreneurial leadership from Columbia University. He is a four-time TEDx speaker author (Initiative and Leadership Step by Step), and leadership coach. He hosts the This Sustainable Life podcast. He has been an Adjunct Professor at New York University. A 2024 recent New York Times article highlights his life changes in Who Says You Can’t Live Off the Grid in Manhattan?

Mentioned:

NOAA’s interactive sea level rise map. NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Eric Williams’s Capitalism & Slavery (3rd edition, University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
Works of Steven Pinker
Spodek Method
Susan’s research on Locke’s Enough and as Good from Perspectives on Politics

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nick Couldry, "The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can't?" (Polity, 2024)

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Is human solidarity achievable in a world dominated by continuous digital connectivity and commercially managed platforms? And what if it’s not? Professor Nick Couldry explores these urgent questions in his latest book, The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can’t? (Polity, 2024), as discussed in a recent interview with the New Books Network.

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, Couldry reflects on how society has ceded critical decisions to Big Tech, enabling these companies to construct what he calls our "space of the world"—the artificial environment of social media platforms that now shapes much of our social existence. He argues this delegation of power was reckless, with far-reaching and damaging social consequences.

While the harmful effects on social life, youth mental health, and political solidarity are widely recognized, Couldry emphasizes a deeper issue that has been overlooked: humanity’s decision to allow businesses to define and exploit this shared digital space for profit. In doing so, we disregarded centuries of political thought on the conditions required for healthy and non-violent politics. This oversight has jeopardized a vital resource in the era of the climate crisis: solidarity.

In The Space of the World, the first book in his trilogy Humanising the Future, Couldry proposes a transformative vision for redesigning digital spaces to foster, rather than erode, solidarity and community. He stresses that caring for our shared digital space is no longer optional—it is an urgent task that must be tackled collectively.

Nick Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. As a sociologist of media and culture, he approaches media and communications from the perspective of the symbolic power that has been historically concentrated in media institutions. He is interested in how media and communications institutions and infrastructures contribute to various types of order (social, political, cultural, economic, ethical). His work has drawn on, and contributed to, social, spatial, democratic and cultural theory, anthropology, and media and communications ethics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Erich Hatala Matthes, "What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Erich Hatala Matthes, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Advisory Faculty for Environmental Studies at Wellesley College. We are discussing his Oxford University Press, What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation (Oxford University Press, 2024). Erich’s book explores the idea of conservation: the practice of preserving things for posterity and fighting against the tides of entropy. What we choose to save can range from famous paintings and natural landscapes, to Marilyn Monroe’s dress and endangered species. Depending on your personal concerns, what we save, how we should save it, and why differs for everyone. This philosophical and investigation will make you think deeply about what matters and what should be saved.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler, "Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

American democracy is in trouble. At the heart of the contemporary crisis is a mismatch between America's Constitution and today's nationalized, partisan politics. Although American political institutions remain federated and fragmented, the ground beneath them has moved, with the national subsuming and transforming the local.

In Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era (U Chicago Press, 2024), political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring today's challenges into new perspective. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape-state parties, interest groups, and media-varied locally and reinforced the nation's stark regional diversity. They created openings for new policy demands and factional divisions that disrupted party lines. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. Now thoroughly integrated into a single political order and tightly coupled with partisanship, they no longer militate against polarization. Instead, they accelerate it. Precisely because today's polarization is different, it is self-perpetuating and, indeed, intensifying. With the precision and acuity characteristic of both authors' earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy. They show that America's political system is distinctively, and acutely, vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America's unusual Constitutional design.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Yaacov Yadgar, "To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism" (NYU Press, 2024)

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In one of the first books to ask head-on what it means for Israel to be a Jewish state, Yaacov Yadgar delves into what the designation "Jewish" amounts to in the context of the sovereign nation-state, and what it means for the politics of the state to be identified as Jewish. The volume interrogates the tension between the notion of Israel as a Jewish state--one whose very character is informed by Judaism--and the notion of Israel as a "state of the Jews," with the sole criterion the maintenance of a demographically Jewish majority, whatever the character of that majority's Jewishness might or might not be.

The volume also examines Zionism's relationship to Judaism. It provocatively questions whether the Christian notion of supersessionism, the idea that the Christian Church has superseded the nation of Israel in God's eyes and that Christians are now the true People of God, may now be applied to Zionism, with Zionism understood by some to have taken over the place of traditional Judaism, rendering the actual Jewish religion superfluous.

To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism (NYU Press, 2024) deeply informs the democratic crisis in Israel, discussing whether Jewish laws put into effect by the state or political moves made to ensure a Jewish majority can be seen as undermining democracy. In our current era, with nationalism resurging, To Be a Jewish State urges a critical re-assessment of the very meaning of modern Jewish identity.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Andrea Scarantino, "Emotion Theory: The Routledge Comprehensive Guide" (Routledge, 2024)

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

This interview is an exception to our “single author monographs” rule, because the edited collection that is its topic is an intellectual achievement worth making an exception for in over 12 years of New Books in Philosophy podcasts. Emotion Theory: The Routledge Comprehensive Guide: Volume I and Volume II (Routledge, 2024) is a two-volume compendium of 62 chapters on emotion theory written by 101 leading theorists from philosophy, psychology, biology, sociology, neuroscience, and other fields, all grappling with the question: What is an emotion? Editor Andrea Scarantino, who is a professor of philosophy at George State University, has compiled a synoptic and thematically organized collection that covers the history of emotion theory, the main contemporary theories of emotions, individual chapters on 35 distinct emotions, and more. The volumes bring together theorists from distinct disciplines that don’t normally engage with each others’ work, and provide readers with a one-stop-shop for clearly written introductions to the current states of play in emotion research.

Andrea Scarantino is Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University, where he has taught since 2005.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Andy Hines, "Imagining After Capitalism" (Triarchy Press, 2025)

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Imagining After Capitalism (Triarchy Press, 2025) is the culmination of a decade-long exploration of what comes next after capitalism. It leverages previous work in developing foresight methodologies, which are featured in two previous books: Teaching about the Future and Thinking about the Future (2nd edition), both with Peter Bishop. It also leverages my work in identifying long-term values shifts—which are pivotal to After Capitalism—that are highlighted in ConsumerShift: How Changing Values Are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape.

Arguing that the absence of compelling positive alternatives keeps us stuck in a combination of fear, denial, and false hope, he offers three “guiding images” for the long-term future: an environmentally driven Circular Commons, a socially and politically driven Non-Workers’ Paradise, and a technology-driven Tech-Led Abundance.

Imagining After Capitalism argues “first things first.” Let us first decide where we want to go before building detailed plans for getting there. The three “guiding images” are not the answers, but are intended to provoke discussion about the possibilities.

The book offers an alternative to the prevailing doom and gloom and suggests there are indeed positive alternatives out there and it’s time to get started on crafting a different path to the future!

Andy Hines brings more than three decades of experience as a futurist to the Imagining After Capitalism work. He has explored the future from multiple vantage points. He is currently an Associate Professor and Program Coordinator at the University of Houston Foresight program. He also spent a decade as an organizational futurist, first with Kellogg’s and then Dow Chemical. His consulting futurists roles included Coates & Jarratt, Inc., Social Technologies/Innovaro and currently his own firm Hinesight.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Larry Alan Busk, "The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory: Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, Strauss, and Rand" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

What really separates emancipatory thinking from its opposite? The prevailing Left defines itself against neoliberalism, conservative traditionalism, and fascism as a matter of course. The philosophical differences, however, may be more apparent than real.

The Right-Wing Mirror of Critical Theory: Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, Strauss, and Rand (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) argues that dominant trends in critical and radical theory inadvertently reproduce the cardinal tenets of the twentieth century’s most influential right-wing philosophers. It finds the rejection of foundationalism, rationalism, economic planning, and vanguardism mirrored in the work of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Strauss. If it is to be more than merely an inverted image of the Right, critical theory must reevaluate its relationship to what Julius Nyerere once called “deliberate design” in politics. In the era of anthropogenic climate change, a substantial—not merely nominal—departure from right-wing talking points is all the more necessary and momentous.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alexander Guerrero, "Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Elections loom large in our everyday understanding of democracy. Yet we also acknowledge that our familiar electoral apparatus is questionable from a democratic point of view. Very few citizens have access to the kinds of resources that could enable them to stand for election; consequently, political candidates (thus officeholders) tend to come from elite social backgrounds. Moreover, elections involve campaigns, and campaigns almost always deploy various persuasion techniques, many of which are deceptive, manipulative, and downright toxic. Once elected, officials begin seeking re-election, which means that they must devote a great deal of attention to potential donors to their re-election campaigns. And on it goes. If by “democracy” one means “rule by the people,” it’s difficult to see how contemporary electoral practices empower us.

Notably, our fixation with elections as the sine qua non of democracy is relatively recent. Aristotle claimed that elections are fundamentally oligarchic, and that lotteries were a truly democratic way of filling public offices. In Lottocracy: Democracy without Elections (Oxford University Press, 2024), Alex Guerrero proposes a non-electoral version of democracy that relies on “single issue legislatures” composed of citizens chosen by lot.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Yochai Ataria, "Not in Our Brain: Consciousness, Body, World" (Magnes Press, 2019)

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Yochai's book, Not in Our Brain: Consciousness, Body, World (Magnes Press, 2019), examines the meaning of psychology and life based on the premise (following Merleau-Ponty's theory) that we are present in the world through our bodies. We are not merely rational beings or machines, but our existence in the world is through the body. While the book examines Merleau-Ponty's theory through stories of prisoners and people dedicated to meditation, our conversation took a different and fascinating direction. We examined the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza through the lens of Merleau-Ponty and the question of trauma.

Yochai Ataria is a professor at Tel-Hai College, Israel. He completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and conducted post-doctoral research in the Neurobiology Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His notable works include The Structural Trauma of Western Culture (2017), Body Disownership in Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (2018), The Mathematics of Trauma [in Hebrew] (2014), Not in Our Brain [in Hebrew] (2019), Levi versus Ka-Tsetnik (2022), Consciousness in Flesh (2022), and Genes, Technology, and Apocalypse (2024).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Laura C. Chávez-Moreno, "How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America" (Harvard Education Press, 2024)

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America (Harvard Education Press, 2025), Dr. Laura C. Chávez-Moreno uncovers the process through which schools implicitly and explicitly shape their students’ concept of race and the often unintentional consequences of this on educational equity. Dr.Chávez-Moreno sheds light on how the complex interactions among educational practices, policies, pedagogy, language, and societal ideas interplay to form, reinforce, and blur the boundaries of racialized groups, a dynamic which creates contradictions in classrooms and communities committed to antiracism.

In this provocative book, Dr. Chávez-Moreno urges readers to rethink race, to reconceptualize Latinx as a racialized group, and to pay attention to how schools construct Latinidad (a concept about Latinx experience and identity) in relation to Blackness, Indigeneity, Asianness, and Whiteness. The work explores, as an example, how Spanish-English bilingual education programs engage in race-making work. It also illuminates how schools can offer ambitious teachings to raise their students’ critical consciousness about race and racialization.

Ultimately, Dr. Chávez-Moreno’s groundbreaking work makes clear that understanding how our schools teach about racialized groups is crucial to understanding how our society thinks about race and offers solutions to racial inequities. The book invites educators and scholars to embrace ambitious teaching about the ambivalence of race so that teachers and students are prepared to interrogate racist ideas and act toward just outcomes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sabrina Strings, "The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance" (Beacon Press, 2024)

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

More men than ever are refusing loving partnerships and commitment, and instead seeking out “situationships.” When these men deign to articulate what they are looking for in a steady partner, they’ll often rely on superficial norms of attractiveness rooted in whiteness and anti-Blackness.

Connecting the past to the present, in The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance (Beacon Press, 2024) sociologist Dr. Sabrina Strings argues that following the Civil Rights movement and the integration of women during the Second Wave Feminist movement, men aimed to hold on to their power by withholding love and commitment, a basic tenet of white supremacy and male domination, that served to manipulate all women. From pornography to hip hop, women—especially Black and “insufficiently white” women—were presented as gold diggers, props for masturbation, and side-pieces.

Using historical research, personal stories, and critical analysis, Dr. Strings argues that the result is fuccboism, the latest incarnation of toxic masculinity. This work shows that men are not innately “toxic.” Nor do they hate love, commitment, or sex. Instead, men across race have been working a new code to effectively deny loving partnerships to women who are not pliant, slim, and white as a new mode of male domination.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Brian Donahue, "Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests" (Yale UP, 2024)

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests (Yale UP, 2024), environmental historian Brian Donahue advances a radical proposal for healing the relationship between humans and forests through responsible, sustainable use of local and regional wood in home building.

American homes are typically made of lumber and plywood delivered by a global system of ruthless extraction, or of concrete and steel, which are even worse for the planet. Wood is often the most sustainable material for building, but we need to protect diverse forests as much as we desperately need more houses. Donahue addresses this modern conundrum by documenting his experiences building a timber frame home from the wood growing on his family farm, practicing “worst first” forestry. Through the stories of the trees he used (sugar maple, black cherry, black birch, and hemlock), and some he didn’t (white pine and red oak), the book also explores the history of Americans’ relationship with their forests.

Donahue provides a new interpretation of the connection between American houses and local woodlands. He delves into how this bond was broken by the rise of a market economy of industrial resource extraction and addresses the challenge of restoring a more enduring relationship. Ultimately, this book provides a blueprint and a stewardship plan for how to live more responsibly with the woods, offering a sustainable approach to both forestry and building centered on tightly connected ecological and social values.

Brian Donahue is Emeritus Professor of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University and co-owner of Bascom Hollow Farm in Gill, Massachusetts.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert B. Talisse, "Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

An internet search of the phrase "this is what democracy looks like" returns thousands of images of people assembled in public for the purpose of collective action. But is group collaboration truly the defining feature of effective democracy?

In Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance (Oxford UP, 2024), Robert B. Talisse suggests that while group action is essential to democracy, action without reflection can present insidious challenges, as individuals' perspectives can be distorted by group dynamics. The culprit is a cognitive dynamic called belief polarization. As we interact with our political allies, we are exposed to forces that render us more radical in our beliefs and increasingly hostile to those who do not share them. What's more, the social environments we inhabit in our day-to-day lives are sorted along partisan lines. We are surrounded by triggers of political extremity and animosity. Thus, our ordinary activities encourage the attitude that democracy is possible only when everyone agrees--a profoundly antidemocratic stance.

Drawing on extensive research about polarization and partisanship, Talisse argues that certain core democratic capacities can be cultivated only at a distance from the political fray. If we are to meet the responsibilities of democratic citizenship, we must occasionally step away from our allies and opponents alike. We can perform this self-work only in secluded settings where we can engage in civic reflection that is not prepackaged in the idiom of our political divides, allowing us to contemplate political circumstances that are not our own.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Thinking Machines: Will Robots Have Rights?

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

It’s the UConn Popcast, and in this episode of our series on artificial intelligence, we discuss Joanna Bryson’s essay “Robots Should be Slaves.”

We dive headlong into this provocative argument about the rights of robots. As scholars of cultural and social understanding, we are fascinated by the arguments Bryson - a computer scientist - makes about who should, and should not, be rights-bearing members of a community.

Does Bryson mean we should enslave robots now and always, regardless of their claims to rights? How does Bryson deal with the natural human tendency to anthropomorphize non-human things, and with the likelihood that as AI advances, robots will appear more human? If the robot as slave is an unacceptable idea - even in metaphorical form - then what other metaphors might help us think through our relationships with thinking machines?

Music by aiva.ai

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Saadia Yacoob, "Beyond the Binary: Gender and Legal Personhood in Islamic Law" (U California Press, 2024)

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Saadia Yacoob’s excellent new book, Beyond the Binary: Gender and Legal Personhood in Islamic Law (U of California Press 2024), makes a compelling argument about gender and Islamic law that has been shockingly overlooked: Legal personhood in Islamic law is intersectional and relational, and gender is not a binary. While Muslims commonly treat gender as a fixed, stand-alone category in Islam that fundamentally shapes an individual’s legal status, Yacoob shows that that legal status in Islamic law was not determined by fixed categories of male or female but by a complex web of social hierarchies, including class, age, freedom, enslavement, social status, and lineage. She challenges the conventional binary understanding of gender by drawing on a rich array of historical, early Hanafi texts from the ninth to twelfth centuries. With insightful coverage of topics such as marriage, slavery, and sexual ethics, Yacoob finds that the categories of man and woman are unstable and conditional in Islamic law. In fact, she shows, the person’s legal and social status determined their role in society and not just their role but also how they were punished and treated in the law. Further, she argues that the category gender “did not exist as a group that had shared interests or a shared social position that led to a shared legal personhood as men or women” (p. 92).

In our interview today, Yacoob describes the origins of the book and its main arguments and findings and explains what she means by “beyond the binary” and “legal personhood” in the title of the book. We also discuss the specific chapters and some of the major themes that show up in each chapter, such as illicit sex and its consequences depending on one’s legal personhood, how a “child” was understood in her sources, what the terms “emphasized femininity” and “hegemonic masculinity” mean. Yacoob also explains what scholars miss by using only “gender” as an analytical category for studying power relations in Islamic law. We end with some of the practical implications of the arguments and findings of this book for both academics and lay Muslims, such as how we can use Islamic law itself to build our critiques of where we are today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Rachael Litherland and Philly Hare, "People with Dementia at the Heart of Research: Co-Producing Research through The Dementia Enquirers Model" (Jessica Kingsley, 2024)

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

People with dementia are uniquely qualified to discuss the challenges of their condition and the features of effective support, but their voices are all too often drowned out in research and debates about policy. According to People with Dementia at the Heart of Research: Co-Producing Research through The Dementia Enquirers Model (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2024) by Rachael Litherland & Philly Hare, it's time for that to change.

Dementia Enquirers is an ambitious and novel programme of work which has tested out what it means for people with dementia to lead research and has developed a new 'driving seat' approach to co-research.

This ground-breaking book features 26 research projects led by groups of people with dementia, supported by group facilitators and academics, to make their voices heard. Topics include giving up driving, GP dementia reviews, living alone with dementia, and using AI platforms such as smart speakers. The book also describes how people with dementia shaped the entire programme, and addressed head-on issues such as ethics approval processes and complex research language. The book is a key read for anyone involved in dementia support, this research brings the voices of people with dementia to the fore to explore their experiences of researching the condition.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matti Eklund, "Alien Structure: Language and Reality" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

It is not uncommon to encounter people who think and talk about the world so differently from the way you do that it’s not really possible to put yourself in their shoes. But such systems of representing the world are not truly alien – they still involve terms that pick out objects, properties, and other elements found in familiar languages and metaphysical theories.

In Alien Structure: Language and Reality (Oxford University Press, 2024)), Matti Eklund considers whether there are ways of representing the world that are completely alien in both linguistic and metaphysical structure, and which may capture reality better (on an ontological realist view) or which might show the limits to “anything goes” (on an ontological relativist view). Eklund, who is professor of philosophy at Uppsala University, defends the value of considering these possibilities and links his discussion to conceptual engineering, philosophy of quantum mechanics, and other contemporary philosophical debates.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Harvey Whitehouse, "Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Each of us is endowed with an inheritance--a set of evolved biases and cultural tools that shape every facet of our behavior. For countless generations, this inheritance has taken us to ever greater heights: driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organized religions, more expansive empires. But now, for the first time, it's failing us. We find ourselves hurtling toward a future of unprecedented political polarization, deadlier war, and irreparable environmental destruction.

In Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2024), renowned anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse offers a sweeping account of how our biases have shaped humanity's past and imperil its future. He argues that three biases--conformism, religiosity, and tribalism--drive human behavior everywhere. Forged by natural selection and harnessed by thousands of years of cultural evolution, these biases catalyzed the greatest transformations in human history, from the birth of agriculture and the arrival of the first kings to the rise and fall of human sacrifice and the creation of multiethnic empires. Taking us deep into modern-day tribes, including terrorist cells and predatory ad agencies, Whitehouse shows how, as we lose the cultural scaffolding that allowed us to manage our biases, the world we've built is spiraling out of control.

By uncovering how human nature has shaped our collective history, Inheritance unveils a surprising new path to solving our most urgent modern problems. The result is a powerful reappraisal of the human journey, one that transforms our understanding of who we are, and who we could be.

Harvey Whitehouse is Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Libuse Hannah Veprek, "At the Edge of AI: Human Computation Systems and Their Intraverting Relations" (Transcript, 2024)

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How are human computation systems developed in the field of citizen science to achieve what neither humans nor computers can do alone?

In At the Edge of AI: Human Computation Systems and Their Intraverting Relations (Transcript, 2024), Libuse Hannah Veprek examines the imagination of these assemblages, their creation, and everyday negotiation in the interplay of various actors and play/science entanglements at the edge of AI. Focusing on their human-technology relations, this ethnographic study shows how these formations are marked by intraversions, as they change with technological advancements and the actors' goals, motivations, and practices. This work contributes to the constructive and critical ethnographic engagement with human-AI assemblages in the making.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Roberto Morales-Harley, "The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater” (Open Book, 2024)

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater (Open Book, 2024) presents a sophisticated and intricate examination of the parallels between Sanskrit and Greco-Roman literature. By means of a philological and literary analysis, Morales-Harley hypothesizes that Greco-Roman literature was known, understood, and recreated in India. Moreover, it is argued that the techniques for adapting epic into theater could have been Greco-Roman influences in India, and that some of the elements adapted within the literary motifs (specifically the motifs of the embassy, the ambush, and the ogre) could have been Greco-Roman borrowings by Sanskrit authors.

This book draws on a wide variety of sources, including Iliad, Phoenix, Rhesus and Cyclops (Greco-Roman) as well as Mahābhārata, The Embassy, The Five Nights and The Middle One (Sanskrit). The result is a well-supported argument which presents us with the possibility of cultural exchange between the Greco-Roman world and India – a possibility which, though hypothetical, is worth acknowledging.

This book is available open access here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mara Kardas-Nelson, "We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance" (Metropolitan Books, 2024)

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this deeply researched and compelling narrative, journalist Mara Kardas-Nelson examines the complex history and impact of microfinance - the practice of giving small loans to poor people, particularly women, that was once hailed as a revolutionary solution to global poverty. Through intimate portraits of borrowers in Sierra Leone and extensive interviews with key figures in the microfinance movement, Kardas-Nelson reveals how an idea that began with noble intentions became a multi-billion dollar industry with sometimes devastating consequences for the very people it aimed to help.

We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance (Metropolitan Books, 2024) weaves together two parallel narratives: the stories of women in Sierra Leone struggling with high-interest microloans while trying to support their families, and the history of how microfinance evolved from a small experiment into a global phenomenon championed by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Muhammad Yunus. Through careful reporting and historical analysis, Kardas-Nelson explores how problematic ideologies about poverty, entrepreneurship, and individual responsibility shaped the development of microfinance programs, often overlooking local economic realities and existing informal lending practices.

What makes this book particularly valuable is how it challenges conventional narratives about microfinance without dismissing the real needs that drive people to seek these loans. Through detailed portraits of women in Sierra Leone, Kardas-Nelson shows how borrowers navigate a complex web of debt, social obligations, and economic pressures. The author raises important questions about whether encouraging poor people to take on high-interest debt is truly the best way to address poverty, while also examining alternative approaches like direct cash transfers and comprehensive social services.

This timely investigation offers crucial insights for anyone interested in international development, poverty alleviation, and the often unintended consequences of well-meaning interventions in the lives of the world's poor. Through meticulous reporting and thoughtful analysis, Kardas-Nelson challenges readers to think more critically about how we approach poverty alleviation and what truly constitutes meaningful economic development.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Anneli Jefferson, "Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders?" (Routledge, 2024)

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The question of whether mental disorders are disorders of the brain has led to a long-running and controversial dispute within psychiatry, psychology and philosophy of mind and psychology. While recent work in neuroscience frequently tries to identify underlying brain dysfunction in mental disorders, detractors argue that labelling mental disorders as brain disorders is reductive and can result in harmful social effects.

Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders? (Routledge, 2024) brings a much-needed philosophical perspective to bear on this important question. Anneli Jefferson argues that while there is widespread agreement on paradigmatic cases of brain disorder such as brain cancer, Parkinson's or Alzheimer’s dementia, there is far less clarity on what the general, defining characteristics of brain disorders are. She identifies influential notions of brain disorder and shows why these are problematic. On her own, alternative, account, what counts as dysfunctional at the level of the brain frequently depends on what counts as dysfunctional at the psychological level. On this notion of brain disorder, she argues, many of the consequences people often associate with the brain disorder label do not follow. She also explores the important practical question of how to deal with the fact that many people do draw unlicensed inferences about treatment, personal responsibility or etiology from the information that a condition is a brain disorder or involves brain dysfunction.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nicholas Spencer, "Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion" (Oneworld, 2024)

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Most things you 'know' about science and religion are myths or half-truths that grew up in the last years of the nineteenth century and remain widespread today.

The true history of science and religion is a human one. It's about the role of religion in inspiring, and strangling, science before the scientific revolution. It's about the sincere but eccentric faith and the quiet, creeping doubts of the most brilliant scientists in history - Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein. Above all it's about the question of what it means to be human and who gets to say - a question that is more urgent in the twenty-first century than ever before.

From eighth-century Baghdad to the frontiers of AI today, via Song dynasty China, medieval Europe and Soviet Russia, Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion (Oneworld, 2024) sheds new light on this complex historical landscape. Rejecting the thesis that science and religion are inevitably at war, Nicholas Spencer illuminates a compelling and troubled relationship that has definitively shaped human history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David Peña-Guzmán: Animals Dream and that Makes Them Morally Considerable (JP)

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In his marvelous new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (Princeton UP, 2023), David Peña-Guzmán (SF State as well as the lovely philosophical podcast Overthink) offers up something new in animal studies--"a philosophical interpretation of biological subjectivity." Although we share no linguistic schema with animals there is lots more evidence than just YouTube (octopuses, dogs, signing chimpanzees, brain scans of dreaming birds etc) to suggest oneiric behaviors and underlying mental states occur all over the animal kingdom. So, David discusses with John his interest in using dreaming as a window into consciousness. Here is what it means that we are not alone in our dreams...

David details the "flattening and impoverishing effect on the natural sciences" wrought by 20th century behaviorist paradigms. He also expresses skepticism about the likelihood of AI ever achieving more than a "zombie" state; it now and perhaps always will profoundly differ from animals' varied experiences of our shared world.

The biological commonality that most strikes David is the idea it is logically inconceivable that there might be a dreamer devoid of consciousness or sentience. Dreaming, he argues may be the key to acknowledging animal's "moral considerability"--the right to have their consciousness, sentience and in the deepest sense their standing taken into account. . Finally David admits to a feeling of tragedy in writing this book: he has had to engage with experimentation that crosses boundaries in animal treatment in order to make the case for those boundaries. He understands his decision as tragic because either way--to engage or to ignore the science--would be to lose something.

Mentioned in the episode:

New Wave of "inner space" SF authors who focus on the alien nature of humanity itself: J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and John's hero Ursula Le Guin.

Recallable Books:

Susana Monso, Playing Possum a newly translated book on the ways that animals mourn their beloveds.
Charles Darwin, Descent of Man and The expression of the emotions in man and animals (both 1872) are two of the crucial 19th century texts begin to think of animals as complete subjects. Charles Darwin as an early theorist of biosemiosis who deserves, Jain and David agree, to be reactivated.

Listen and Read here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Greg Epstein, "Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation" (MIT Press, 2024)

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Technology has surpassed religion as the central focus of our lives, from our dependence on smartphones to the way that tech has infused almost every aspect of our lives including our homes, our relationships, and even our bodies. Beyond these practical matters, Tech has become a religion with multiple sects who follow their own beliefs, practices, hierarchies, and visions of heaven and hell. There are zealous prophets and humble servants, messiahs and visions of a coming apocalypse.

In Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation (MIT Press, 2024), Harvard and MIT’s humanist chaplain Greg Epstein approaches Tech with the perspective of a critical thinker who is fascinated by technical innovation and also questions the worth of those advancements in human terms. He places the current faith in Tech in historical and personal context by examining the skeptics, mystics, heretics, and whistleblowers who embody the reform mindset he believes we desperately need.

Epstein argues for demanding that technology serve the development of human lives that are worth living rather than the extreme "up and to the right" transactional approach that is often rewarded in our current age of capitalism.

In this age of global technology worship, Greg Epstein presents the case for taking an agnostic view, one that can both appreciate the benefits of Tech and also remain skeptical about some of the more outlandish claims and seductive promises.

Author recommended reading:

Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein
Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Peter Harrison, "Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In his famous argument against miracles, David Hume gets to the heart of the modern problem of supernatural belief. 'We are apt', says Hume, 'to imagine ourselves transported into some new world; where the whole form of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its operation in a different manner, from what it does at present.'

This encapsulates, observes Peter Harrison, the disjuncture between contemporary Western culture and medieval societies. In the Middle Ages, people saw the hand of God at work everywhere. Indeed, many suppose that 'belief in the supernatural' is likewise fundamental nowadays to religious commitment. But dichotomising between 'naturalism' and 'supernaturalism' is actually a relatively recent phenomenon, just as the notion of 'belief' emerged historically late.

In Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age (Cambridge UP, 2024), the author overturns crucial misconceptions - 'myths' - about secular modernity, challenging common misunderstandings of the past even as he reinvigorates religious thinking in the present.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Hardt, "The Subversive Seventies" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A thought-provoking reconsideration of how the revolutionary movements of the 1970s set the mold for today's activism.

The 1970s was a decade of "subversives". Faced with various progressive and revolutionary social movements, the forces of order--politicians, law enforcement, journalists, and conservative intellectuals--saw subversives everywhere. From indigenous peasant armies and gay liberation organizations, to anti-nuclear activists and Black liberation militants, subversives challenged authority, laid siege to the established order, and undermined time-honored ways of life. Every corner of the left was fertile ground for subversive elements, which the forces of order had to root out and destroy--a project they pursued with zeal and brutality.

In The Subversive Seventies (Oxford UP, 2023), Michael Hardt sets out to show that popular understandings of the political movements of the seventies--often seen as fractious, violent, and largely unsuccessful--are not just inaccurate, but foreclose valuable lessons for the political struggles of today. While many accounts of the 1970s have been written about the regimes of domination that emerged throughout the decade, Hardt approaches the subversive from the perspectives of those who sought to undermine the base of established authority and transform the fundamental structures of society. In so doing, he provides a novel account of the theoretical and practical projects of liberation that still speak to us today, too many of which have been all but forgotten.

Departing from popular and scholarly accounts that focus on the social movements of the 1960s, Hardt argues that the 1970s offers an inspiring and useful guide for contemporary radical political thought and action. Although we can still learn much from the movements of the sixties, that decade's struggles for peace, justice, and freedom fundamentally marked the end of an era. The movements of the seventies, in contrast, responded directly to emerging neoliberal frameworks and other structures of power that continue to rule over us today. They identified and confronted political problems that remain central for us. The 1970s, in this sense, marks the beginning of our time. Looking at a wide range of movements around the globe, from the United States, to Guinea Bissau, South Korea, Chile, Turkey, and Italy, The Subversive Seventies provides a reassessment of the political action of the 1970s that sheds new light not only on our revolutionary past but also on what liberation can be and do today.

Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author, with Antonio Negri, of the Empire trilogy and, most recently, Assembly. He is co-director with Sandro Mezzadra of The Social Movements Lab.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nathan J. Murphy, "The Ideas That Rule Us: How Other People's Ideas Rule our Lives and How to Change it" (Prepolitica, 2024)

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Ideas That Rule Us: How Other People's Ideas Rule Our Lives and How to Change it (Prepolitica, 2024), political theory researcher, author, and entrepreneur Nathan J. Murphy takes an eye-opening, multi-disciplinary deep dive into how others’ ideologies, perceived societal norms, and pop culture influences shape our lives, through our decision-making, political affiliations, and consumer spending.

Murphy deftly weaves over four years of political, cognitive, and sociological research into a very relatable and practical discussion about the fascinating origins of the many influential ideas and ideologies that rule our lives. He also examines the undeniable bond between the abstract and the emotional—a relationship that plays a dominant role in the human condition… and the quality of our lived experience.

Recommended by Kirkus Reviews, which calls it, "A well-researched, thought-provoking reconsideration of society’s sacred cows."

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matilde Masso, "Contested Money: Towards a New Social Contract" (Routledge, 2023)

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Discussing money is always accompanied by controversy as well as enchantment. Debating what money is and how it performs its main functions in the contemporary economy is fundamental to understanding the social consequences of money transformation associated with the digital revolution. This book explores the links between the current and prospective properties of money, its production, and its relationship to the concepts of value, the common good, and innovation.

Contested Money: Towards a New Social Contract (Routledge, 2023) opens a debate on the role that money could play in a different paradigm based on a renewed conception of monetary properties and functions that are capable of having a positive impact on social and individual welfare. Massó outlines the fundamentals of this monetary model, which would operate as a parallel currency, where the processes of monetary and value creation are connected in a new deal between the citizen and the state, grounded on an approach of reciprocal rights and responsibilities.

This book will appeal to scholars, students, and, more broadly, readers interested in a contemporary understanding of what money is, how it is being transformed, and the role that it can play in redefining the twenty-first-century social contract.

Matilde Massó is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Communication Sciences at the University of A Coruña (UDC). Her main research interests focus on the transformations of money, the role of culture and emotions in economic processes, and how technological innovation is shaping a new conception of the economy concerning theories of justice. She has extensive experience leading research projects in economic sociology, particularly in financialization studies, the sociology of money, and financial innovation. Her recent publications include Contested Money (Routledge, 2024) and Why Money Matters? (Journal of Economic Issues, 2023). Additionally, she was awarded a Marie Curie IF Action in 2016.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Steven Levitsky, "Tyranny of the Minority: How to Reverse an Authoritarian Turn, and Forge a Democracy for All" (Crown, 2024)

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it?

With the clarity and brilliance that made their first book, How Democracies Die, a global bestseller, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer a coherent framework for understanding these volatile times. They draw on a wealth of examples—from 1930s France to present-day Thailand—to explain why and how political parties turn against democracy. They then show how our Constitution makes us uniquely vulnerable to attacks from within: It is a pernicious enabler of minority rule, allowing partisan minorities to consistently thwart and even rule over popular majorities. Most modern democracies—from Germany and Sweden to Argentina and New Zealand—have eliminated outdated institutions like elite upper chambers, indirect elections, and lifetime tenure for judges. The United States lags dangerously behind.

In Tyranny of the Minority: How to Reverse an Authoritarian Turn, and Forge a Democracy for All (Crown, 2024), Levitsky and Ziblatt issue an urgent call to reform our politics. It’s a daunting task, but we have remade our country before—most notably, after the Civil War and during the Progressive Era. And now we are at a crossroads: America will either become a multiracial democracy or cease to be a democracy at all.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

René Boer, "Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives" (Valiz, 2023)

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In cities across the world, a new urban condition is spreading rapidly: an ever-increasing push toward efficiency, sanitization, surveillance and the active eradication of any aberration, friction or alternative. From Dubai, Hong Kong and London to Amsterdam and Cairo, the smooth city, with its gated communities and theme-park zones, insidiously transforms urban life into seamless "experience." While the demand for safe, clean and well-functioning urban environments is understandable, the ascent of the smooth city corrodes the democratic and emancipatory potential of cities, leaving little space for the experimental and the non-normative.

In Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives (Valiz, 2023), René Boer investigates the origins, characteristics and consequences of "smoothness" and points toward possible alternatives.

René Boer is a critic, curator and organizer in and beyond the fields of architecture, art, design and heritage. Based in Amsterdam, he is a founding partner of Loom: Weaving New Worlds and an editor at Failed Architecture.

This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo, a graduate student in urban studies at the University of Vienna. He has worked professionally as a researcher at the University of Chicago and as an urban policy advisor to the City of Chicago.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee, "Confucian Feminism: A Practical Ethic for Life" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Confucian Feminism: A Practical Ethic for Life (Bloomsbury, 2024), Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee expands the theoretical horizons of feminism by using characteristic Confucian terms, methods, and concerns to interrogate the issue of gender oppression and liberation.

With its theoretical roots in the Confucian textual tradition, this is the first re-imagining of Confucianism that enriches, and is enriched by, feminism.

Incorporating distinctive Confucian conceptual tools such as ren (benevolent governance), xiao (filial care), you (friendship), li (ritual), and datong (great community), Rosenlee creates an ethic of care that is feminist and Confucian. At the same time she confronts the issue of gender inequity in Confucian thought. Her hybrid feminist theory not only broadens the range of feminist understandings of the roots of gender oppression, but opens up what we believe constitutes gender liberation for women transnationally and transculturally.

Here is a practical ethic that uses Confucianism to navigate the contours of inequality in everyday life.

Readers interested in the book referenced during our interview please check here: Beyond Individualism by Rupp.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Francisco Aboitiz, "A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness" (MIT Press, 2024)

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Francisco Aboitiz is a professor at the Medical School and the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Neuroscience at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness (MIT Press, 2024) tells the story of life and nervous systems. It introduces the conceptual framework and terminology of evolution, gives a great overview of our current knowledge and a thorough discussion of open questions.

The first part defines two basic concepts: evolution and life. Surprisingly, we learn that the first definition is more straightforward. If you are challenged by some terminology in the later chapters - like phylogeny, ontogeny, or the different types of homology - it is highly recommended to revisit the definitions in the first chapter.

The story begins in the second part. Chapter 3 introduces multiple theories on how the first cells might have appeared. In the next chapter, these cells start to form more complex, multicellular organisms. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the main characteristics and early history of neurons.

In the third part, we get acquinted with more complex animals. In chapter 6 with the bilaterians, in chapter 7 and 8 with the vertebrates and their nervous system, in chapter 9 with mammals. Chapter 10 provides a deep dive into the neocortex and its role in cognition.

The fourth part of the book is about "a singular ape". Chapter 11 describes the history of primates, focusing on Hominins. It goes into details on various aspects like walking, the growth of brains, toolmaking, and social life. Chapter 12 describes the evolution of vocal communication. Chapter 13 discusses how speech has influenced communication and social life. Chapter 14 explores numerous open questions around consciousness. How to define it? When and how did it emerge in evolution? Which animals are conscious and in which ways? After this long history, chapter 15 arrives in the present and the future. What are some current evolutionary trends? How do cultural and technological changes influence our nervous systems?

In our conversation with Professor Aboitiz, we focused on a few remarkable milestones in this story. For start, he outlined some theories how life might have begun.

Then a huge jump in time followed: How the first mammals appeared and survived in a world dominated by dinosaurs. Professor Aboitiz elaborated on how the brains of mammals differ from the brains of other vertebrates. He described the cerebral cortex, a new part in the mammalian brain. The role of senses changed significantly: The early mammals had worse vision, but better smell, touch, and audition compared to other vertebrates. Changes in the anatomy of the head and neck supported these more developed senses. The enhanced olfactory system is also related to the hippocampus, where some new skills appeared: advanced spatial orientation and short-term memory.

The next milestone we discussed in detail is the appearance of language. Professor Aboitiz shared some fascinating facts about the vocal communication of birds and primates. He explained the connection between toolmaking and language. He described the speech loop and the connection between working memory and talking. He proposes that manual gestures and vocal communication have evolved together, and communication has always been multi-modal.

The last part of our conversation focused on the current and future situation. How culture and technology has changed our nervous system, e.g. how a brain area is particularly involved in reading. Professor Aboitiz also discussed the more recent technological innovations and their effects on society and the environment. He introduced the social projects conducted by the Interdisciplinary Center for Neuroscience. The project RIEN (Robótica Integral Educativa & Neurociencia) facilitates workshops where kids work in teams with rotating roles to build and program robots.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Social Contract in the Ruins: A Conversation with Dr. Paul DeHart

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the latest episode of Madison’s Notes, we sit down with Dr. Paul DeHart, professor of Political Science at Texas State University and author of The Social Contract in the Ruins: Natural Law and Government by Consent (University of Missouri Press, 2024). In this illuminating discussion, Dr. DeHart challenges the prevailing belief that social contract theory and classical natural law are fundamentally incompatible. His book offers a bold argument: political authority and obligation cannot be grounded solely in human agreement but must rest on a deeper, antecedent moral foundation—one that is uncreated and independent of human or divine will. Without this objective moral good, even the widely accepted principle of government by consent loses its coherence.

Throughout the episode, Dr. DeHart explores key philosophical questions surrounding political legitimacy and the moral underpinnings of authority. We dive into why modern approaches to grounding political authority through consent alone are self-defeating and how classical natural law is essential to upholding the principles that guide just governance.

Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the intersection between political theory, philosophy, and morality, as well as the relevance of these ideas in today's political landscape. Whether you're a scholar of political philosophy or simply curious about the foundations of political authority, this episode is packed with rich insights and thoughtful discussion.

Dr. Dehart’s other works:

Uncovering the Constitution's Moral Design

Reason, Revelation, and the Civic Order: Political Philosophy and the Claims of Faith

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Marietje Schaake, "The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Over the past decades, under the cover of "innovation," technology companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power from governments themselves. Facial recognition firms track citizens for police surveillance. Cryptocurrency has wiped out the personal savings of millions and threatens the stability of the global financial system. Spyware companies sell digital intelligence tools to anyone who can afford them. This new reality--where unregulated technology has become a forceful instrument for autocrats around the world--is terrible news for democracies and citizens.

In The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley (Princeton UP, 2024), Marietje Schaake offers a behind-the-scenes account of how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies--from social media to artificial intelligence--have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines game-changing solutions to empower elected officials and citizens alike. Democratic leaders can--and must--resist the influence of corporate lobbying and reinvent themselves as dynamic, flexible guardians of our digital world.

Drawing on her experiences in the halls of the European Parliament and among Silicon Valley insiders, Schaake offers a frightening look at our modern tech-obsessed world--and a clear-eyed view of how democracies can build a better future before it is too late.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Luke Clossey, "Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520" (Open Book, 2024)

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim poets praised his life-giving breath, and Christopher (“Christ-bearing”) Columbus brought the symbol of his cross to the Americas. Beyond the European periphery, this global study follows Jesus across – and sometimes between – religious boundaries, from Greenland to Kongo to China.

Amidst this diversity, Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind, 1380-1520 (Open Book, 2024) offers readers sympathetic and immersive insight into the religious realities of its subjects. To this end, this book identifies two perspectives: one uncovers hidden meanings and unexpected connections, while the other restricts Jesus to the space and time of human history. Minds that believed in Jesus, and those that opposed him, made use of both perspectives to make sense of their worlds.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

S4E9 The Fragility of China: A Conversation with Dennis Unkovic

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of Madison's Notes, we sit down with Dennis Unkovic to discuss his latest book, The Fragility of China (Encounter Books, 2024). Unkovic delves into the complex forces shaping China's political, economic, and social landscape. From the country's rising internal challenges to its evolving role on the global stage, Unkovic offers a nuanced perspective on why China's future may be more uncertain than it appears. He unpacks the key themes of his book, including economic instability, demographic shifts, and geopolitical tensions, while offering insights into what these trends mean for the rest of the world.

Dennis Unkovic is an international attorney with decades of experience advising global businesses on trade, investment, and international relations. He is a prolific author and speaker, known for his expertise in U.S.-Asia relations. In addition to The Fragility of China, Unkovic has authored several books and articles on global trade and economic issues.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alan F. Blackwell, "Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI" (MIT Press, 2024)

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why the world needs less AI and better programming languages. Decades ago, we believed that robots and computers would take over all the boring jobs and drudgery, leaving humans to a life of leisure. This hasn’t happened. Instead, humans are still doing boring jobs, and even worse, AI researchers have built technology that is creative, self-aware, and emotional—doing the tasks humans were supposed to enjoy. How did we get here?

In Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI (MIT Press, 2024), Alan Blackwell argues that there is a fundamental flaw in the research agenda of AI. What humanity needs, Blackwell argues, is better ways to tell computers what we want them to do, with new and better programming languages: More Open Representations, Access to Learning, and Control Over Digital Expression, in other words, MORAL CODE. Blackwell draws on his deep experiences as a programming language designer—which he has been doing since 1983—to unpack fundamental principles of interaction design and explain their technical relationship to ideas of creativity and fairness. Taking aim at software that constrains our conversations with strict word counts or infantilizes human interaction with likes and emojis, Blackwell shows how to design software that is better—not more efficient or more profitable, but better for society and better for all people. Covering recent research and the latest smart tools, Blackwell offers rich design principles for a better kind of software—and a better kind of world.

Alan F. Blackwell is Professor of Interdisciplinary Design in the Cambridge University department of Computer Science and Technology. He is a Fellow of Darwin College Cambridge, cofounder with David Good of the Crucible Network for Research in Interdisciplinary Design, and with David and Lara Allen the Global Challenges strategic research initiative of the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael J. Thompson, "Descent of the Dialectic: Phronetic Criticism in an Age of Nihilism" (Routledge, 2024)

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 04:00:00 -0000

In Descent of the Dialectic: Phronetic Criticism in an Age of Nihilism (Routledge, 2024), Michael J. Thompson reconstructs the concept and practice of dialectics as a means of grounding a critical theory of society. At the center of this project is the thesis of phronetic criticism or a form of reason that is able to synthesize human value with objective rationality.

Thompson argues that defects in modern forms of social reason are the result of the powers of social structure and the norms and purposes they embody. Increasingly, modern societies are driven not by substantive values concerning human good but by the technical imperatives of economic management, leading to a cultural condition of nihilism that has eroded dialectical consciousness. In the first half of the book, Thompson demonstrates the various ways that social power erodes and undermines critical-rational forms of consciousness. In the second part of the book, he constructs an alternative basis for critical reason by showing how it requires seeing human value as essentially ontological: that is, constituted by objective forms of sociality that either promote human freedom or pervert our capacities and drive toward pathological forms of life. The philosophical claim is that a critical theory of ethics must be rooted in these concrete forms of life and that this will serve as a critical vantage point for critical political judgment and transformational praxis.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of built-environment, experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research on the negotiation of identity and place for residents at the neighborhood level. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alexandre Lefebvre, "Liberalism as a Way of Life" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why liberalism is all you need to lead a good, fun, worthy, and rewarding life—and how you can become a better and happier person by taking your liberal beliefs more seriously

Where do you get your values and sensibilities from? If you grew up in a Western democracy, the answer is probably liberalism. Conservatives are right about one thing: liberalism is the ideology of our times, as omnipresent as religion once was.

Yet, as Alexandre Lefebvre argues in Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton UP, 2024), many of us are liberal without fully realizing it—or grasping what it means. Misled into thinking that liberalism is confined to politics, we fail to recognize that it’s the water we swim in, saturating every area of public and private life, shaping our psychological and spiritual outlooks, and influencing our moral and aesthetic values—our sense of what is right, wrong, good, bad, funny, worthwhile, and more. This eye-opening book shows how so many of us are liberal to the core, why liberalism provides the basis for a good life, and how we can make our lives better and happier by becoming more aware of, and more committed to, the beliefs we already hold.

A lively, engaging, and uplifting guide to living well, the liberal way, Liberalism as a Way of Life is filled with examples from television, movies, stand-up comedy, and social media—from Parks and Recreation and The Good Place to the Borat movies and Hannah Gadsby. Along the way, you’ll also learn about seventeen benefits of being a liberal—including generosity, humor, cheer, gratitude, tolerance, and peace of mind—and practical exercises to increase these rewards.

Alexandre Lefebvre is Professor of Politics and Philosophy at The University of Sydney. He teaches and researches in political theory, the history of political thought

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Faisal Devji, "Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea" (Harvard UP, 2013)

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Pakistan, founded less than a decade after a homeland for India's Muslims was proposed, is both the embodiment of national ambitions fulfilled and, in the eyes of many observers, a failed state. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Harvard UP, 2013) cuts to the core of the geopolitical paradoxes entangling Pakistan to argue that India's rival has never been a nation-state in the conventional sense. Pakistan is instead a distinct type of political geography, ungrounded in the historic connections of lands and peoples, whose context is provided by the settler states of the New World but whose closest ideological parallel is the state of Israel.

A year before the 1948 establishment of Israel, Pakistan was founded on a philosophy that accords with Zionism in surprising ways. Faisal Devji understands Zion as a political form rather than a holy land, one that rejects hereditary linkages between ethnicity and soil in favor of membership based on nothing but an idea of belonging. Like Israel, Pakistan came into being through the migration of a minority population, inhabiting a vast subcontinent, who abandoned old lands in which they feared persecution to settle in a new homeland. Just as Israel is the world's sole Jewish state, Pakistan is the only country to be established in the name of Islam.

Revealing how Pakistan's troubled present continues to be shaped by its past, Muslim Zion is a penetrating critique of what comes of founding a country on an unresolved desire both to join and reject the world of modern nation-states.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

From Tribalism to Common Humanity: A Conversation with Dr. John Ellis

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

For most of recorded history, neighboring countries, tribes, and peoples everywhere in the world regarded each other with apprehension—when not outright fear and loathing. Tribal or racial attitudes were virtually universal, no one group being much better or worse in this respect than any other—and for good reason given the conditions of life before the modern era. But in the last 500 years, relations between different peoples have undergone a slow but profound change.

In our episode, explore Dr. Ellis’ upcoming publication, A Short History of Relations Between People: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism. Join us as we explore how a confluence of discoveries, inventions, explorations, as well as social and political changes gave birth to a new attitude, one expressed succinctly in the Latin phrase: gens una sumus—we are all one people. This sentiment has by now become a modern orthodoxy. Ellis tells the story of how the transition happened, setting out the crucial stages in its progress as well as the key events that moved it forward, and identifying the individuals and groups that brought about the eventual dominance of this new outlook.

John M. Ellis is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He taught at universities in England, Wales, and Canada before joining UCSC in 1966, serving as dean of the Graduate Division in 1977–86.

A Short History of Relations Between People: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism is available on October 15th, 2024 and available wherever books are sold.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ian Williams, "Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy (Birlinn, 2024)

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

State capitalism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics. A socialist market economy. There have been numerous descriptions of the Chinese economy. However, none seems to capture the predatory, at times surreal, nature of the economy of the world’s most populous nation – nor the often bruising and mind-bending experience of doing business with the Middle Kingdom.

Ian Williams, a long-standing reporter on China, has a new argument in Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy (Birlinn, 2024).

Rules and agreements mean little. Markets are distorted, statistics fabricated, foreign industrial secrets and technology systematically stolen. Companies and entrepreneurs, at home and abroad, are bullied – often with the collusion of the victims themselves. The Party is in every boardroom and lab, with businesses thriving or dying at its will.

All this is part of realising President Xi Jinping’s ambition of China becoming the world’s pre-eminent economic, technological and military power.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jeff Schuhrke, "Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade" (Verso, 2024)

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How the CIA used American unions to undermine workers at home and subvert democracy abroad.

Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade (Verso, 2024) tells the shocking story of the AFL-CIO's global anticommunist crusade--and its devastating consequences for workers around the world.

Unions have the power not only to secure pay raises and employee benefits but to bring economies to a screeching halt and overthrow governments. Recognizing this, in the late twentieth century, the US government sought to control labor movements abroad as part of the Cold War contest for worldwide supremacy. In this work, Washington found an enthusiastic partner in the AFL-CIO's anticommunist officials, who, in a shocking betrayal, for decades expended their energies to block revolutionary ideologies and militant class consciousness from taking hold in the workers' movements of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Jeff Schuhrke is a labor historian, journalist, union activist, and assistant professor at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State University in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to In These Times and Jacobin, and his scholarship has been published in Diplomatic History and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jason A. Josephson Storm, "The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?

Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.

By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (U Chicago Press, 2017) dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

Professor Storm is a historian and philosopher of the Human Sciences. He has three primary research foci: Japanese Religions, European Intellectual History, and Theory more broadly. At the heart of his work, lies an attempt to challenge conventional narratives in the study of religion and science.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ilias Alami and Adam D. Dixon, "The Spectre of State Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

After close to three decades of the hegemony of free market ideas, the state has made a big comeback as an economic actor since the 2008 financial crisis. China’s state-owned companies and international financial institutions have made headlines for their growing influence in the world economy. State-backed investment vehicles based in the Gulf states have made high-profile investments in global real estate markets and professional sports, while their state-owned firms have become world leaders in the logistics and natural resource sectors. Governments around the world – including in the heartlands of advanced capitalism – have promoted the interests of ‘national champion’ companies in strategic economic sectors, bailed out financial institutions by taking toxic assets off of their balance sheets, and implemented industrial policies with the aim of moving into the most profitable segments of global value chains.

What accounts for this renewed prominence of states in global capitalism? Does the increased activism of states mark the end of neoliberal hegemony? And how do contemporary state-led economic initiatives compare to the heyday of Keynesian and developmentalist policy agendas in the decades immediately following World War II?

The book that we are discussing today, The Spectre of State Capitalism (Oxford UP, 2024) by Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon, marks the culmination of a highly productive research project that the authors have led on the compulsions and constraints that shape the ‘new’ state capitalism. The book aims to challenge narratives that pathologize state capitalism as an authoritarian deviation from the ‘normal’ course of free market capitalism while also showing how new forms of state activism depart from earlier models of state-led development.

Ilias Alami is a University assistant professor in the political economy of development at Cambrdige University. His previous book is Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets (2019). Adam Dixon holds the Adam Smith Chair in Sustainable Capitalism at Heriot Watt University’s Ediburgh Business School. He is the author of several books, most recently Sovereign Wealth Funds: Between States and Markets (2022).

This book is available open access here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

William H. F. Altman, "The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism" (Lexington Books, 2010)

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish emigrant to the United States, an author, professor and political philosopher. Born in 1899 in Kirchhain in the Kingdom of Prussia to an observant Jewish family, Strauss received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1921, and began his scholarly work in the 1920s, as well as participating in the German Zionist movement. In 1932, a recommendation letter from the jurist and later Nazi party member Carl Schmitt enabled Strauss to leave Germany on a Rockefeller Foundation grant, shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power. Strauss continued his work in France and England before settling in the United States in 1937, teaching at the New School and other colleges, and then becoming professor of political science at the University of Chicago in 1949. It is in America that Strauss wrote his most famous works, including Persecution and the Art of Writing, On Tyranny, Natural Right and History, The City and Man, What Is Political Philosophy?, and many other works. His work typically takes the form of interpretations of ancient authors, especially Plato.

Over the years, Strauss attracted many dedicated students, who became known as “Straussians,” spreading his influence not only within academia but eventually into the American government. Straussians would attain such prominence and eventually cause such controversy, that, decades after Strauss’ death, the field of political science was gripped by what would become known as “the Strauss wars.” Strauss wrote in a difficult, densely layered and evasive style that has led to long-lasting disputes about whether his apparent endorsement of liberal democracy was genuine, or whether his work contains an esoteric teaching about human hierarchies, one that might justify illiberal and anti-democratic Machiavellian coups. Heightening the urgency of figuring out what Strauss truly stood for is the widespread view that Straussians who worked in the State Department and Defense Department and who came to be called “Neoconservatives” were instrumental in launching the Iraq war in 2003, and are otherwise associated with hawkish, not to say hubristic and imperial U.S. foreign policy.

But, leaving the neocons aside; Leo Strauss, Jewish Nazi? Could such a charge possibly be fair? Who is the real Leo Strauss? These are the questions that bring us to this author and this book. William Henry Furness Altman is a retired public high school teacher and author of many articles and books on figures including Plato, Cicero, Plotinus, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and indeed, Leo Strauss.

The book we are discussing today is entitled The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (Lexington Books, 2010). William Altman’s first published book is an extensively researched and exhaustively footnoted work substantiating his charge that Leo Strauss, the revered and influential Jewish emigre, and recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, did indeed harbor a lifelong commitment to the principles of Nazi ideology and that such indeed is Strauss’ secret teaching.

Joseph Liss is an independent scholar based in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. His studies focus on ancient religion, philosophy, political theory, critical theory, and history. He can be reached at Joseph.Nathaniel.Liss@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Neil Van Leeuwen, "Religion As Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

It is an intuitive truth that religious beliefs are different from ordinary factual beliefs. We understand that a belief in God or the sacredness of scripture is not the same as believing that the sun will rise again tomorrow or that flipping the switch will turn on the light.

In Religion as Make Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity (Harvard UP, 2023), Neil Van Leeuwen draws on psychological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence to show that psychological mechanisms underlying religious beliefs function like those that enable imaginative play.

When someone pretends, they navigate the world on two levels simultaneously, or as Van Leeuwen describes it, by consulting two maps. The first map is that of factual, mundane reality. The second is a map of the imagined world. This second map is then superimposed on top of the first to create a multi-layered cognitive experience that is consistent with both factual and imaginary understandings.

With this model in mind, we can understand religious belief, which Van Leeuwen terms religious "credence", as a form of make-believe that people use to define their group identity and express values they hold as sacred. Religious communities create a religious-credence map which sits on top of their factual-belief map, creating an experience where ordinary objects and events are rich with sacred and supernatural significance.

Recognizing that our minds process factual and religious beliefs in fundamentally different ways allows us to gain deeper understanding of the complex individual and group psychology of religious faith.

Author recommended reading:

The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich.

Mentioned resources:

Lecture 'But... But... But... Extremists!' by Neil van Leeuwen
Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists by Scott Atran

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Danny Sriskandarajah, "Power to the People: Use Your Voice, Change the World" (Headline Press, 2024)

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Power to the People: Use Your Voice, Change the World (Headline Press, 2024) is Danny Sriskandarajah‘s radical manifesto for change designed to inspire citizen action around the world. The book presents a blueprint for how we, as individuals, can make a difference through greater community engagement and how we can deliver a society that works for the many and not the few. He speaks to voter apathy and a growing sense that elections no longer matter, with politicians and institutions too focused on short-term issues to grapple with complex global problems such as climate change, rising inequality, and digital disruption. Yet the book is also filled with inspiring real-life examples of citizen power in action, ranging from a volunteer-run repair café in Danny's local suburb to Avaaz's successful campaigns to tackle endemic corruption in Brazil.

From public ownership of social media spaces to democratizing share ownership and from re-energizing co-operatives to creating a people's chamber at the United Nations, this campaigning book has a mission to make us reclaim our power as citizens of the world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Kevin J. McMahon, "A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Many scholars and members of the press have argued that John Roberts’ Supreme Court is exceptional. While some emphasize the approach to interpreting the Constitution or the justices conservative ideology, Dr. Kevin J. McMahon suggests that the key issue is democratic legitimacy. Historically, the Supreme Court has always had some “democracy gap” – democratically elected presidents appoint justices that serve for life. As presidents select justices, they attempt to move the Supreme Court in their desired ideological direction while “simultaneously advancing their electoral interests and managing their governing coalition.” Despite these forces, Dr. McMahon argues that past Supreme Courts were still closer to democratic principles. Today’s court is exceptional because the “democracy gap” is severe.

A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People (U Chicago Press, 2024) draws on historical and contemporary data to reveal how the long arc of court battles (from FDR to Donald Trump) created this democracy gap. McMahon highlights changes to the politics of nominating and confirming justices, the changes in who is even considered to be in the pool to be a Supreme Court justice, and the increased salience of the Court in elections.

Dr. Kevin J. McMahon (he/him) is the John R. Reitemeyer [RightMeyer]Professor of Political Science at Trinity College, and the author of two award-winning books, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race and Nixon’s Court, both published by The University of Chicago Press. Together with A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other, the three books form a trilogy that interrogates whether 100 years of presidential efforts to shape the high court affect the supreme court’s democratic legitimacy.

Dr. McMahon also writes public facing essays in outlets such as US News & World Report and The Conversation. For example, The Presidential Immunity Case & American Democracy, President Biden & the Courage it Takes to Call it Quits, Conservative Justices Polarized on the State of American Politics, and Calls for a Supreme Court Justice to Retire.

Susan mentioned a stark New York Times graphic of how 6 senators (CA, NY, TX) represent the same number of voters as 62 senators. 2022 data (but less dramatically presented) is here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Lynn M. Tesser, "Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics" (Stanford UP, 2024)

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why did a nation-state order emerge when nationalist activism was usually an elitist pursuit in the age of empire? Ordinary inhabitants and even most indigenous elites tended to possess religious, ethnic, or status-based identities rather than national identities. Why then did the desires of a typically small number result in wave after wave of new states? The answer has customarily centred on the actions of "nationalists" against weakening empires during a time of proliferating beliefs that "peoples" should control their own destiny.

Rethinking the End of Empire: Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Lynn M. Tesser upends conventional wisdom by demonstrating that nationalism often existed more in the perceptions of external observers than of local activists and insurgents. Dr. Tesser adds nuance to scholarship that assumes most, if not all, pre-independence unrest was nationalist and separatist, and sheds light on why the various demands for change eventually coalesced around independence in some cases but not others.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Are We Experiencing a Crisis of Culture?

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey spoke with Olivier Roy, professor of social and political sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and author of The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms (Oxford University Press, 2024). Roy argues that neoliberal globalization is dissolving not just subordinate cultures but also dominant ones by undermining the tacit understanding that undergird cultures and demanding that those norms be made explicit.

Moreover, Roy discusses how identity politics has come to supplant the norms once implicit in a broader culture, undermining the possibility that people know how to live in society at all. These development reflect the decline of utopian dreams – for better or worse – and the difficulties involved in maintaining social bonds.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Gavin, "Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Across the humanities and social sciences, scholars increasingly use quantitative methods to study textual data. Considered together, this research represents an extraordinary event in the long history of textuality. More or less all at once, the corpus has emerged as a major genre of cultural and scientific knowledge. In Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies (Stanford UP, 2022), Michael Gavin grapples with this development, describing how quantitative methods for the study of textual data offer powerful tools for historical inquiry and sometimes unexpected perspectives on theoretical issues of concern to literary studies.

Student-friendly and accessible, the book advances this argument through case studies drawn from the Early English Books Online corpus. Gavin shows how a copublication network of printers and authors reveals an uncannily accurate picture of historical periodization; that a vector-space semantic model parses historical concepts in incredibly fine detail; and that a geospatial analysis of early modern discourse offers a surprising panoramic glimpse into the period's notion of world geography. Across these case studies, Gavin challenges readers to consider why corpus-based methods work so effectively and asks whether the successes of formal modeling ought to inspire humanists to reconsider fundamental theoretical assumptions about textuality and meaning. As Gavin reveals, by embracing the expressive power of mathematics, scholars can add new dimensions to digital humanities research and find new connections with the social sciences.

Michael Gavin is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and author of The Invention of English Criticism, 1650-1760 (2015)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Yakov Feygin, "Building a Ruin: The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A masterful account of the global Cold War’s decisive influence on Soviet economic reform, and the national decay that followed.

What brought down the Soviet Union? From some perspectives the answers seem obvious, even teleological—communism was simply destined to fail. When Yakov Feygin studied the question, he came to another conclusion: at least one crucial factor was a deep contradiction within the Soviet political economy brought about by the country’s attempt to transition from Stalinist mass mobilization to a consumer society.

Building a Ruin: The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform (Harvard UP, 2024) explores what happened in the Soviet Union as institutions designed for warfighting capacity and maximum heavy industrial output were reimagined by a new breed of reformers focused on “peaceful socioeconomic competition.” From Khrushchev on, influential schools of Soviet planning measured Cold War success in the same terms as their Western rivals: productivity, growth, and the availability of abundant and varied consumer goods. The shift was both material and intellectual, with reformers taking a novel approach to economics. Instead of trumpeting their ideological bona fides and leveraging their connections with party leaders, the new economists stressed technical expertise. The result was a long and taxing struggle for the meaning of communism itself, as old-guard management cadres clashed with reformers over the future of central planning and the state’s relationship to the global economic order.

Feygin argues that Soviet policymakers never resolved these tensions, leading to stagnation, instability, and eventually collapse. Yet the legacy of reform lingers, its factional dynamics haunting contemporary Russian politics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Terrence G. Peterson, "Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Algerian War of Independence constituted a major turning point of 20th century history. The conflict exacerbated divisions in French society, culminating in an unsuccessful coup attempt by the OAS in 1961. The war also launched the Third Worldist movement, delegitimized colonial rule because of its brutality, and it gave us one of the towering anti-colonial intellectual figures, the pro-FLN Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon.

Today’s episode focuses on another important development that occurred as a result of the Algerian War: the transformation of modern warfare. Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency (Cornell UP, 2024) shows how French generals, officers, and civil officials sought to counter Algerian independence with their own project of social transformation. My guest, Terrence Peterson, argues that the French military effort in Algeria never exclusively focused on repression. Instead, military leaders fashioned new forms of surveillance and social control that its proponents hoped would capture the loyalty of Algerians and transform Algerian society. Although ultimately unsuccessful in its attempt to ‘keep Algeria French,’ the new strategy of counterinsurgency became a model for anti-communist military and intelligence officers around the world.

Terrence Peterson is an Associate Professor of History at Florida International University, where he teaches on modern Europe and European empires. He holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jordan Magnuson, "Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice" (Amherst College Press, 2023)

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Scholars, critics, and creators describe certain videogames as being “poetic,” yet what that means or why it matters is rarely discussed. In Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice (Amherst College Press, 2023), independent game designer Jordan Magnuson explores the convergences between game making and lyric poetry and makes the surprising proposition that videogames can operate as a kind of poetry apart from any reliance on linguistic signs or symbols.

This rigorous and accessible short book first examines characteristics of lyric poetry and explores how certain videogames can be appreciated more fully when read in light of the lyric tradition—that is, when read as “game poems.” Magnuson then lays groundwork for those wishing to make game poems in practice, providing practical tips and pointers along with tools and resources. Rather than propose a monolithic framework or draw a sharp line between videogame poems and poets and their nonpoetic counterparts, Game Poems brings to light new insights for videogames and for poetry by promoting creative dialogue between disparate fields. The result is a lively account of poetic game-making praxis.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sarah Malanowski and Nicholas R. Baima, "Why It's Ok to Be a Gamer" (Routledge, 2024)

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

If you enjoy video games as a pastime, you are certainly not alone—billions of people worldwide now play video games. However, you may still find yourself reluctant to tell others this fact about yourself. After all, we are routinely warned that video games have the potential to cause addiction and violence. And when we aren’t being warned of their outright harms, we are told we should be doing something better with our time, like going outside, socializing with others, or reading a book. Playing video games is thus often seen at best as a waste of time, and at worst a source of violent tragedy.

Why It's Ok to Be a Gamer (Routledge, 2024) takes on the pervasive assumption that playing video games is a childish and time-wasting hobby, and a potentially addictive and dangerous one at that. It argues instead that there are many ways in which gaming can help us flourish, for example by: developing genuine friendships and other meaningful relationships with others, helping us cultivate a virtuous personal character, giving us a unique aesthetic experience, providing us with psychological benefits, and just plain helping us relax and enjoy ourselves. Video games are not just for those with no life; on the contrary, they can help contribute to a rich and meaningful life.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Brian Clegg, "Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe" (MIT Press, 2021)

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Our universe might appear chaotic, but deep down it's simply a myriad of rules working independently to create patterns of action, force, and consequence. In Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe (MIT Press, 2021), Brian Clegg explores the phenomena that make up the very fabric of our world by examining ten essential sequenced systems. From diagrams that show the deep relationships between space and time to the quantum behaviors that rule the way that matter and light interact, Clegg shows how these patterns provide a unique view of the physical world and its fundamental workings.

Guiding readers on a tour of our world and the universe beyond, Clegg describes the cosmic microwave background, sometimes called the "echo of the big bang," and how it offers clues to the universe's beginnings; the diagrams that illustrate Einstein's revelation of the intertwined nature of space and time; the particle trail patterns revealed by the Large Hadron Collider and other accelerators; and the simple-looking patterns that predict quantum behavior (and decorated Richard Feynman's van). Clegg explains how the periodic table reflects the underlying pattern of the configuration of atoms, discusses the power of the number line, demonstrates the explanatory uses of tree diagrams, and more.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John V. Pavlik, "Journalism and the Metaverse" (Anthem Press, 2024)

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Journalism has been in a state of disruption since the development of the Internet. The Metaverse, or what some describe as the future of the Internet, is likely to fuel even further disruption in journalism. Digital platforms and journalism enterprises are already investing substantial resources into the Metaverse, or its likely components of artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality. Although research shows most of the public has little knowledge of the Metaverse, many are keenly interested in what it or its components may bring.

Journalism and the Metaverse (Anthem Press, 2024) by Dr. John Pavlik critically examines the nature of the Metaverse and its implications for journalism. In particular, the book will examine how the advance of a broadband, interactive and immersive Internet called the Metaverse may change the content and format of news, the nature of journalistic work, who or what is a journalist, the nature and structure of the new industry and how it is funded, as well as the fundamental role of journalism in a digital society.

In particular, this book builds on a vision of the Metaverse as an immersive and interactive virtual world, a key development in the next generation of the broadband, publicly accessible Internet. Broadband means high-speed, high-bandwidth Internet connectivity, especially wirelessly. Immersive refers to enveloping, 3D forms of media and communication. Today, we often see immersive media in the form of augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) or other forms of what are labeled extended Reality (XR). Fueled by artificial intelligence, these forms are three dimensional (3D), they have depth and they surround the user in a 360 virtual world visually and aurally (and potentially via other senses, including the haptic). Interactive means both user-to-user engagement (e.g., social media) as well as an exchange between the user and the enveloping content experience of a virtual world. This book examines the implications of the Metaverse for journalism in four broad domains, including content, how journalists work, structural and systemic considerations, and user and public engagement with news.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mark Valeri, "The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

During the mid-seventeenth century, Anglo-American Protestants described Native American ceremonies as savage devilry, Islamic teaching as violent chicanery, and Catholicism as repugnant superstition. By the mid-eighteenth century, they would describe amicable debates between evangelical missionaries and Algonquian religious leaders about the moral appeal of Christianity, recount learned conversations between English merchants and Muslim scholars, and tell of encounters with hospitable and sincere priests in Catholic Canada and Europe. What explains this poignant shift?

Using a variety of sources--travel narratives, dictionaries and encyclopaedias of the world's religions, missionary tracts, and sermons, The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Mark Valeri traces a transformation in how English and colonial American Protestants described other religions during a crucial period of English colonisation of North America. After the English Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent growth of the British empire, observers began to link Britain's success to civic moral virtues, including religious toleration, rather than to any particular religious creed. Mark Valeri shows how a wide range of Protestants--including liberal Anglicans, Calvinist dissenters, deists, and evangelicals--began to see other religions not as entirely good or entirely bad, but as complex, and to evaluate them according to their commitment to religious liberty. In the view of these Protestants, varieties of religion that eschewed political power were laudable, while types of religion that combined priestly authority with political power were illegitimate. They also changed their evangelistic practices, jettisoning civilising agendas in favour of reasoned persuasion.

Dr. Valeri neither valorizes Anglo-Protestants nor condemns them. Instead, he reveals the deep ambiguities in their ideas while showing how those ideas contained the seeds of modern religious liberty.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Bhaskar Sunkara, "The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality" (Basic Books, 2020)

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (Basic Books, 2020), Bhaskar Sunkara explores socialism's history since the mid-1800s and presents a realistic vision for its future. With the stunning popularity of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Americans are embracing the class politics of socialism. But what, exactly, is socialism? And what would a socialist system in America look like? The editor of Jacobin magazine, Sunkara shows that socialism, though often seen primarily as an economic system, in fact offers the means to fight all forms of oppression, including racism and sexism. The ultimate goal is not Soviet-style planning, but to win rights to healthcare, education, and housing, and to create new democratic institutions in workplaces and communities. A primer on socialism for the 21st century, this is a book for anyone seeking an end to the vast inequities of our age.

Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Human Advantage: A Conversation with Jay Richards

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, we explore the insights of Jay Richards, author of The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines (Forum, 2019). Richards wrote this book during a time when automation and technology were beginning to redefine the boundaries of human work and creativity. His core argument is that, despite the rise of machines, there are certain uniquely human qualities—such as creativity, moral judgment, and entrepreneurial spirit—that cannot be replicated by technology. These traits, he suggests, are what give us a distinct edge in the face of automation.

As we look at today's world, where artificial intelligence and machine learning have advanced at an unprecedented pace, we must ask: Do Richards' ideas still hold true? In an era where AI can perform tasks once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans, from creative endeavors to complex decision-making, is there still a clear-cut human advantage? Richards' book offers a lens through which to examine these questions, urging us to consider how we can harness our inherent strengths to adapt and thrive in this new landscape.

In our conversation, we dive deep into these questions, exploring the relevance of The Human Advantage in today's rapidly evolving technological environment. How can we, as individuals and as a society, ensure that we maintain and even enhance our human edge? What role do creativity, ethics, and entrepreneurship play in a world increasingly driven by algorithms and automation? This episode offers valuable insights for anyone grappling with the implications of modern technology on our work, lives, and future.

Jay Richards is an American analytical philosopher who focuses on the intersection of politics, philosophy, and religion. He is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nick Chater, "The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain" (Yale UP, 2019)

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In the The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain (Yale UP, 2019), behavioural scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences. Engaging the reader with eye-opening experiments and visual examples, Chater first demolishes our intuitive sense of how our mind works, then argues for a positive interpretation of the brain as a ceaseless and creative improviser.

Dr. Nick Chater is Professor of behavioral science at the Warwick Business School and cofounder of Decision Technology Ltd. He has contributed to more than two hundred articles and book chapters and is author, co-author, or co-editor of fourteen books.

Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (www.grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Devonya N. Havis, "Creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy" (Lexington Books, 2022)

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What can philosophy do? By taking up Black American cultural practices, Devonya N. Havis suggests that academic philosophy has been too narrow in its considerations of this question, supporting domination and oppression.

In Creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy (Lexington Books, 2022), Havis brings our focus to theoretically rich practices of African diasporic communities. Offering critical insight into how philosophy has been narrowed, Havis also offers a guide to interpreting the world otherwise, engaging stories, novels, the blues, jazz, work songs, naming and self-naming, and more. Havis does Black Vernacular Philosophy in conversation with other doers as she shows us the urgent need for such work.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Stuart Elden, "The Birth of Territory" (U Chicago Press, 2013)

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territory continues to matter politically, and territorial disputes and arrangements are studied in detail, the concept of territory itself is often neglected today. Where did the idea of exclusive ownership of a portion of the earth’s surface come from, and what kinds of complexities are hidden behind that seemingly straightforward definition?

The Birth of Territory (U Chicago Press, 2013) provides a detailed account of the emergence of territory within Western political thought. Looking at ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern thought, Stuart Elden examines the evolution of the concept of territory from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century to determine how we arrived at our contemporary understanding. Elden addresses a range of historical, political, and literary texts and practices, as well as a number of key players—historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, and secular political theorists—and in doing so sheds new light on the way the world came to be ordered and how the earth’s surface is divided, controlled, and administered.

Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Stephen Pinfield, "Achieving Global Open Access: The Need for Scientific, Epistemic and Participatory Openness" (Routledge, 2024)

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Often assumed to be a self-evident good, Open Access has been subject to growing criticism for perpetuating global inequities and epistemic injustices. it has been seen as imposing exploitative business and publishing models and as exacerbating exclusionary research evaluation culture and practices.

Achieving Global Open Access: The Need for Scientific, Epistemic, and Participatory Openness (Taylor & Francis, 2024) engages with these issues, recognizing that the global Open Access debate is now not just about publishing and business models or academic reward structures, but also about what constitutes valid and valuable knowledge, how we know and who gets to say. the book argues that, for Open Access to deliver its potential, it first needs to be associated with "epistemic openness", a wider and more inclusive understanding of what constitutes valid and valuable knowledge. it also needs to be accompanied by "participatory openness", enabling contributions to knowledge from more diverse communities. interacting with relevant theory and current practices, the book discusses the challenges in implementing these different forms of openness, the relationship between them and their limits.

Stephen Pinfield is Professor of Information Services Management at the University of Sheffield, UK, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Research on Research Institute (RoRI).

Xiaoli Chen is project lead at DataCite, a non-profit organization that provides open scholarly infrastructure and supports the global research community to ensure the open availability and connectedness of research outputs. She has a background in Library and Information Science and worked with different disciplinary communities to create and integrate services and workflows for open and FAIR scholarship. She can be reached at xiaoli.chen@datacite.org

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sudhir Kakar, "The Indian Jungle: Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Civilizations" (Karnac, 2024)

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this podcast, Ashis Roy (Psychoanalyst (IPA) and author of the recently published book Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-Muslim Relationships (Yoda Press, 2024) is in conversation with Dhwani Shah, MD. Shah is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst currently practicing in Princeton, NJ. He is a clinical associate faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a Supervising Analyst and instructor at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia.

Together they engage with Late Sudhir Kakar´s last book the Indian Jungle: Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Civilizations (Karnac, 2024). Shah reflects on Kakar´s contributions to psychoanalysis and on some of the pillars in Kakar´s writing.

About the Indian Jungle

For more than a century, the cultural imagination of psychoanalysis has been assumed and largely continues to be assumed as Western. Although the terroirs of psychoanalysis in South America, France, Italy, England, the United States, and so on have important differences, they all share a strong family resemblance which distinguishes them clearly from the cultural imaginations of Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other non-Western terroirs.

Fundamental ideas about human relationships, family, marriage, and gender often remain unexamined and pervade the analytic space as if they are universally valid. Thus, ideas that are historically and culturally only true of and limited to modern Western, specifically European and North American middle-class experience, have been incorporated unquestioningly into psychoanalytic thought.

In the intellectual climate of our times, with the rise of relativism in the human sciences and politically with the advent of decolonization, the cultural and historical transcendence of psychoanalytic thought can no longer be taken for granted. Insights from clinical work embedded in the cultural imaginations of non-Western civilizations could help psychoanalysis rethink some of its theories of the human psyche, extending these to cover a fuller range of human experience. These cultural imaginations are an invaluable resource for the move away from a universal psychoanalysis to a more global one that remains aware of but is not limited by its origins in the modern West. This book of essays aims to be a step in that journey, of altering the self-perception of psychoanalysis from ‘one size fits all’ into a more nuanced enterprise that reflects and is enriched by cultural particularities.

The perfect book for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, cultural psychologists, anthropologists, students of South Asian, cultural, and post-colonial studies, and anyone interested in the current and possible future shape of psychoanalytic thought.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Claudio Lomnitz, "Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico" (Duke UP, 2024)

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Over the past fifteen years in Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been murdered and 110,000 more have been disappeared. In Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico (Duke UP, 2024), Claudio Lomnitz examines the Mexican state in relation to this extreme violence, uncovering a reality that challenges the familiar narratives of “a war on drugs” or a “failed state.” Tracing how neoliberal reforms, free trade agreements, and a burgeoning drug economy have shaped Mexico’s sociopolitical landscape, Lomnitz shows that the current crisis does not represent a tear in the social fabric. Rather, it reveals a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state and the economy in which traditional systems of policing, governance, and the rule of law have eroded. Lomnitz finds that power is now concentrated in the presidency and enforced through militarization, which has left the state estranged from itself and incapable of administering justice or regaining control over violence. Through this critical examination, Lomnitz offers a new theory of the state, its forms of sovereignty, and its shifting relation to capital and militarization.

In this episode, host Richard Grijalva and Claudio Lomnitz discuss the long gestation of what became Sovereignty and Extortion, the challenges of writing for a broader public discussion, the affordances and responsibilities of a writer in a public-facing institution like El Colegio Nacional, the central ideas and arguments animating Sovereignty and Extortion, and the prospects facing president-elect Claudia Shienbaum Pardo's tenure in confronting the issues Lomnitz raised in these lectures. They also discuss the kind of traction that this work has produced in Mexico and the possibilities for collective, collaborative work that the topic warrants.

Claudio W. Lomnitz is Campbell Family Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is the author of several books in English and Spanish, including Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National Space (Univ. of California Press, 1992), Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001), Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2014), and Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation (Other Press, 2021). In 2021, he was named a member of El Colegio Nacional in Mexico City. Sovereignty and Extortion gathers the cycle of inaugural lectures he delivered at the Colegio, which was published in Spanish in 2022 by Ediciones Era as El tejido social rasgado.

Richard A. Grijalva is a scholar of Mexican and Mexican American Studies based in Austin, TX. From 2022-2024 he was an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gavin Steingo, "Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 04:00:00 -0000

In Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity (U Chicago Press, 2024), music scholar Gavin Steingo examines significant cases of attempted communication beyond the human--cases in which the dualistic relationship of human to non-human is dramatically challenged. From singing whales to Sun Ra to searching for alien life, Steingo charts the many ways we have attempted to think about, and indeed to reach, beings that are very unlike ourselves.

Steingo focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, when scientists developed new ways of listening to oceans and cosmic space--two realms previously inaccessible to the senses and to empirical investigation. As quintessential frontiers of the postwar period, the outer space of the cosmos and the inner space of oceans were conceptualized as parallel realities, laid bare by newly technologized "ears." Deeply engaging, Interspecies Communication explores our attempts to cross the border between the human and non-human, to connect with non-humans in the depths of the oceans, the far reaches of the universe, or right under our own noses.

Gavin Steingo is Professor in the Department of Music at Princeton University. He is also affiliated with the programs in Media and Modernity, African Studies, and Jazz Studies. Steingo’s research examines sound and music as fundamental features in the construction of global modernity, with research specializations in African music, sound studies, acoustic ecology, and music and philosophy. Methodologically, his work is united by a mode of inquiry where theory, history, and ethnography form part of a shared constellation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Samuel Ely Bagg, "The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

This year, many countries around the world, including most of the world's most populous democracies, have consequential nation-wide elections. In many of these elections, democracy itself is at stake. The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023) is an urgent call to rethink centuries of conventional wisdom about what democracy is, why it matters, and how to make it better. Drawing from history, social science, psychology, and critical theory, Samuel Ely Bagg explains why we should shift our orientation away from maximizing collective self-rule and why prevailing strategies of democratic reform often make things worse. Bagg argues we should see democracy as a way of protecting public power from capture - a vision that is at once more realistic and, he argues, more inspiring. The book presents an ambitious and comprehensive engagement with democracy's foundations, principles, and practices. Make no mistake, this work of political theory is profoundly worldly: it bears reading for those interested in politics across time, space, and scale - from the reconstruction US to contemporary Hungary, Turkey and Venezuela.

Samuel Bagg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches courses in political theory. Before coming to UofSC, he taught at the University of Oxford, McGill University, and Duke University, where he received his PhD in 2017.

Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. His recent publications include co-edited volumes on Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The GiveWell Method

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Caleb Zakarin and Uri Bram dive into the world of effective charitable giving through the lens of GiveWell, an organization known for its rigorous evaluation of charities. Uri explains how GiveWell identifies and recommends high-impact charities, discussing the data-driven criteria and ethical considerations behind their assessments. The conversation highlights real-world examples of how smart giving can lead to substantial, measurable benefits. Whether you're a seasoned donor or new to philanthropy, this episode offers valuable insights into making your contributions truly count.

Please consider donating with GiveWell.

Work at GiveWell. A great job for academics considering an alternative path.

Uri Bram is head of communications at GiveWell and CEO of The Browser.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jason Blakely, "Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life" (Agenda Publishing, 2023)

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

If ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as it appears to be today then, Jason Blakely argues in his new book Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life (Agenda Publishing, 2023), this may not be because we are like travellers guided by old maps of the political world but because we make the mistake of thinking that our maps are the worlds in which we live and act politically. When we read them as if they are reality, rather than a representation of it, we get lost.

If you like this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science then you might also be interested in others in the series, including Jason and Mark Bevir talking about their Interpretive Social Science, and James C. Scott, who passed away shortly before this episode was recorded, discussing his Against the Grain.

Jason recommends Charles Taylor’s sequel to The Language Animal, Cosmic Connections, and Jon Fosse’s novelistic exploration of the human condition, Septology.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Shai Held, "Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life" (FSG, 2024)

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A common misconception has shaped the history of the West: Christianity is seen as the religion of love, and Judaism as the religion of law. Addressing this misinterpretation, Rabbi Shai Held argues that love is as integral to Judaism as it is to Christianity.

In Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life (FSG, 2024), Rabbi Held combines intellectual rigor, respect for tradition, and a commitment to equality. He demonstrates that love is foundational to Jewish faith, influencing perspectives on injustice, grace, family life, and responsibilities to others, including neighbors and even enemies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ellie Laks, "Cow Hug Therapy: How the Animals at the Gentle Barn Taught Me about Life, Death, and Everything in Between" (New World Library, 2024)

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Cow Hug Therapy: How the Animals at the Gentle Barn Taught Me about Life, Death, and Everything in Between (New World Library, 2024), Ellie Laks recounts the extraordinary journey that started with her first teacher, Buddha -- not the religious figure, but a rescued miniature Hereford cow. One evening Buddha wrapped her neck around an exhausted and upset Ellie and transferred a singular form of healing and comfort with an incredible impact. Understanding that this was something to be shared with others, Ellie developed Cow Hug Therapy, a groundbreaking approach to emotional healing that has proved effective for trauma, illness, disabilities, addiction, grief, and stress.

This colorful and compelling narrative introduces the healing mavens of the barnyard, each with a unique story of being rescued from trauma and treated with love and respect. In their new role at Ellie's Gentle Barn sanctuaries, these animals have transformed lives and ignited breakthroughs and newfound purpose for visitors including a young mother who lost her baby, a suicidal teenager, a wounded serviceman, an open-heart-surgery patient, and many more. A testament to empathy and the mission to heal animals, people, and the planet, Cow Hug Therapy serves as a beacon of hope for all seeking healing and connection.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Bernard E. Harcourt. "Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, another path—cooperation democracy. From consumer co-ops to credit unions, worker cooperatives to insurance mutuals, nonprofits to mutual aid, countless examples prove that people working together can extend the ideals of participatory democracy and sustainability into every aspect of their lives. These forms of cooperation do not depend on electoral politics. Instead, they harness the longstanding practices and values of cooperatives: self-determination, democratic participation, equity, solidarity, and respect for the environment.

Bernard E. Harcourt develops a transformative theory and practice that builds on worldwide models of successful cooperation. He identifies the most promising forms of cooperative initiatives and then distills their lessons into an integrated framework: Coöperism. This is a political theory grounded on recognition of our interdependence. It is an economic theory that can ensure equitable distribution of wealth. Finally, it is a social theory that replaces the punishment paradigm with a cooperation paradigm.

A creative work of normative critical theory, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (Columbia UP, 2023) provides a positive vision for addressing our most urgent challenges today. Harcourt shows that by drawing on the core values of cooperation and the power of people working together, a new world of cooperation democracy is within our grasp.

Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and professor of political science at Columbia University and a chaired professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. An editor of Michel Foucault’s work in French and English, Harcourt is the author of several books, including Critique and Praxis (Columbia, 2020). He is a social-justice litigator and the recipient of the 2019 Norman Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award from the New York City Bar Association for his longtime representation of death row prisoners.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Musa al-Gharbi, "We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How a new "woke" elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status--without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged.

Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton UP, 2024), Musa al-Gharbi argues that these trends are closely related, each tied to the rise of a new elite—the symbolic capitalists. In education, media, nonprofits, and beyond, members of this elite work primarily with words, ideas, images, and data, and are very likely to identify as allies of antiracist, feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive causes. Their dominant ideology is “wokeness” and, while their commitment to equality is sincere, they actively benefit from and perpetuate the inequalities they decry. Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged.

We Have Never Been Woke details how the language of social justice is increasingly used to justify this elite—and to portray the losers in the knowledge economy as deserving their lot because they think or say the “wrong” things about race, gender, and sexuality. Al-Gharbi’s point is not to accuse symbolic capitalists of hypocrisy or cynicism. Rather, he examines how their genuine beliefs prevent them from recognizing how they contribute to social problems—or how their actions regularly provoke backlash against the social justice causes they champion.

A powerful critique, We Have Never Been Woke reveals that only by challenging this elite’s self-serving narratives can we hope to address social and economic inequality effectively.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Daisy Dunn, "The Missing Thread: How Women Shaped the Course of Ancient History" (Viking, 2024)

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Around four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with snakes slithering on their arms. Over one thousand years later, Sappho wrote great poems of longing and desire. For classicist Daisy Dunn, these women--whether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of power--were up to something much more interesting than other histories would lead us to believe. Together, these women helped to make antiquity as we know it.

In this monumental work, Dunn reconceives our understanding of the ancient world by emphasizing women's roles within it. The Missing Thread: How Women Shaped the Course of Ancient History (Viking, 2024) never relegates women to the sidelines and is populated with well-known names such as Cleopatra and Agrippina, as well as the likes of Achaemenid consort Atossa and Olympias, a force in Macedon. Spanning three thousand years, the story moves from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece, from Lesbos to Asia Minor, from the Persian Empire to the royal court of Macedonia, and concludes with Rome and its growing empire. The women of antiquity are undeniably woven throughout the fabric of history, and in The Missing Thread they finally take center stage.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David E. Kaiser, “The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy” (Harvard UP, 2008)

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

There are some topics that historians know not to touch. They are just too hot (or too cold). The assassination of JFK is one of them. Most scholars would say either: (a) the topic has been done to death so nothing new can be said or (b) it’s been so thoroughly co-opted by nutty theorists that no sane discussion is possible. Thank goodness David Kaiser believes neither of these things, for if he did we would never have his thought-provoking The Road to Dallas. The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Harvard UP, 2008). Taking a professional historian’s skills to documents old and new, Kaiser provides what is doubtless the best argument available that the assassination was in fact a conspiracy, though not the one you may know from a certain movie by Oliver Stone. He weighs each piece of evidence and builds his case point by point. Conclusions are never forced but follow naturally from the record. Not everyone will agree with Kaiser’s position, but it must be taken seriously by anyone interested in the topic. Kaiser has thrown down the gauntlet to those who believe Oswald acted alone. Now it is for other historians to take it up. PS: Read David’s blog “History Unfolding.” Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Francine Banner, "Beyond Complicity: Why We Blame Each Other Instead of Systems" (U California Press, 2024)

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Beyond Complicity: Why We Blame Each Other Instead of Systems (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Francine Banner is a fascinating cultural diagnosis that identifies our obsession with complicity as a symptom of a deeply divided society. The questions surrounding what it means to be legally complicit are the same ones we may ask ourselves as we evaluate our own and others' responsibility for inherited and ongoing harms, such as racism, sexism, and climate change: What does it mean that someone "knew" they were contributing to wrongdoing? How much involvement must a person have in order to be complicit? At what point are we obligated to intervene?

Dr. Banner ties together pop culture, politics, law, and social movements to provide a framework for thinking about what we know intuitively: that our society is defined by crisis, risk, and the quest to root out hazards at all costs. Engaging with legal cases, historical examples, and contemporary case studies, Beyond Complicity unfolds the complex role that complicity plays in US law and society today, offering suggestions for how to shift focus away from blame and toward positive, lasting systemic change.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Seth A. Berkowitz, "Equal Care: Health Equity, Social Democracy, and the Egalitarian State" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Health inequity is one of the defining problems of our time. But current efforts to address the problem focus on mitigating the harms of injustice rather than confronting injustice itself. In Equal Care: Health Equity, Social Democracy, and the Egalitarian State (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024), Seth A. Berkowitz, MD, MPH, offers an innovative vision for the future of health equity by examining the social mechanisms that link injustice to poor health. He also presents practical policies designed to create a system of social relations that ensures equal care for everyone.

As Berkowitz illustrates, the project of social democracy works to improve health by bringing relationships of equality to the sites of human cooperation: in civil society, in political processes, and in economic activities. This book synthesizes three elements necessary for such a project—normative justification, mechanistic knowledge, and technical proficiency—into a practical vision of how to create health equity. Drawing from the fields of medicine, social epidemiology, sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, and more, Berkowitz makes clear that health inequity is social failure embodied, and the only true cures are political.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mahjabeen Dhala, "Feminist Theology and Social Justice in Islam: A Study on the Sermon of Fatima" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Fatima, the daughter of Prophet Muhammad, has an interesting legacy, one that is often shaped by sectarian differences and tensions. The sermon of Fatima, which is the focus of Mahjabeen Dhala's Feminist Theology and Sociology of Islam: A Study of the Sermon of Fatima (Cambridge University Press, 2024), though itself riddled with questions of authenticity, is a compelling incident which brings to light various possibilities of analysis and insights. The issue of fadak or inheritance, which prompts Fatima to take a public stance against the male leaders of the community, such as Abu Bakr, after the passing of her father, results in a rich sermon that has theological and social justice implications, as Dhala highlights. In Dhala's reading of the sermon by Fatima and her response to an injustice experienced by her and her family, Fatima is seen as a theologian and a social activist. Moreover, this study also sheds on light of an example of pre-modern history of Muslim woman’s resistance. This book will be of interest to those who think about gender and Islam, social justice, theology, feminism and much more.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, "The Abrahamic Vernacular" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Contemporary thought typically places a strong emphasis on the exclusive and competitive nature of Abrahamic monotheisms. This instinct is certainly borne out by the histories of religious wars, theological polemic, and social exclusion involving Jews, Christians, and Muslims. But there is also another side to the Abrahamic coin. Even in the midst of communal rivalry, Jews, Christians, and Muslim practitioners have frequently turned to each other to think through religious concepts, elucidate sacred history, and enrich their ritual practices.

Scholarship often describes these interactions between the Abrahamic monotheisms using metaphors of exchange between individuals-as if one tradition might borrow a theological idea from another in the same way that a neighbour might borrow a recipe. The Abrahamic Vernacular (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Rebecca Wollenberg proposes that there are deeper forms of entanglement at work in these historical moments.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Shannon Vallor, "The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

There's a lot of talk these days about the existential risk that artificial intelligence poses to humanity -- that somehow the AIs will rise up and destroy us or become our overlords.

In The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford UP), Shannon Vallor argues that the actual, and very alarming, existential risk of AI that we face right now is quite different. Because some AI technologies, such as ChatGPT or other large language models, can closely mimic the outputs of an understanding mind without having actual understanding, the technology can encourage us to surrender the activities of thinking and reasoning. This poses the risk of diminishing our ability to respond to challenges and to imagine and bring about different futures. In her compelling book, Vallor, who holds the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Futures Institute, critically examines AI Doomers and Long-termism, the nature of AI in relation to human intelligence, and the technology industry's hand in diverting our attention from the serious risks we face.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Premal Dharia et al., "Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change" (FSG Originals, 2024)

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In recent years, a searching national conversation has called attention to the social and racial injustices that define America’s criminal system. The incarceration of vast numbers of people, and the punitive treatment of African Americans in particular, are targets of widespread criticism. But despite the election of progressive prosecutors in several cities and the passage of reform legislation at the local, state, and federal levels, the system remains very much intact. How can the damage and depredations of the carceral state be undone?

In this pathbreaking reader, three of the nation’s leading advocates —Premal Dharia, James Forman Jr., and Maria Hawilo—provide us with tools to move from despair and critique to hope and action. Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change (FSG Originals, 2024) surveys new approaches to confronting the carceral state in all its guises, exploring ways that police, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, prisons, and even life after prison can be radically reconceived. The book captures debates about the comparative merits of reforming or abolishing prisons and police forces, and introduces a host of bold but practical interventions. The contributors range from noted figures such as Angela Davis, Clint Smith, and Larry Krasner to local organizers, judges, and people currently or formerly incarcerated. The result is an invaluable guide for students, activists, and anyone who wishes to understand mass incarceration—and hasten its end.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Dmitri Alperovitch, "World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century" (PublicAffairs, 2024)

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In his book World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century (PublicAffairs, 2024), Dmitri Alperovitch (with Garrett M. Graff) argues that the United States is in a “Cold War II” with China, and lays out a set of policy recommendations for how the US can win this new Cold War.

Alperovitch is currently the Founder and Executive Chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a think tank focused on “advancing American prosperity and global leadership in the 21st century and beyond.” Before moving into the think tank world, Alperovitch was the CTO and co-founder of CrowdStrike, a multi-billion dollar cybersecurity company that gained public attention for investigating the 2016 DNC email leaks and 2014’s North Korean hack of Sony Pictures.

Through his work at CrowdStrike and McAfee before that, Alperovitch was involved in investigating numerous Chinese cyber-intrusions into US and global institutions, for instance Operation Aurora and Operation Shady RAT. Alperovitch’s cybersecurity expertise has also led him to advise numerous US government institutions including the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security.

Drawing from his experiences across the private and public sectors, Alperovitch injects World on the Brink with incisive analyses and historical precedents that should spark the interest of those who follow US-China competition.

Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Tara Ward, "Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram" (U California Press, 2024)

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What does an art history of Instagram look like? Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Tara Ward reveals how Instagram shifts long-established ways of interacting with images. Dr. Ward argues Instagram is a structure of the visual, which includes not just the process of looking, but what can be seen and by whom. She examines features of Instagram use, including the effect of scrolling through images on a phone, the skill involved in taking an “Instagram-worthy” picture, and the desires created by following influencers, to explain how the constraints imposed by Instagram limit the selves that can be displayed on it. The proliferation of technical knowledge, especially among younger women, revitalises on Instagram the myth of the masculine genius and a corresponding reinvigoration of a masculine audience for art.

Dr. Ward prompts scholars of art history, gender studies, and media studies to attend to Instagram as a site of visual expression and social consequence. Through its insightful comparative analysis and acute close reading, Appreciation Post argues for art history’s value in understanding the contemporary world and the visual nature of identity today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Eve Herold, "Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

Thu, 04 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The latest developments in robotics and artificial intelligence and a preview of the coming decades, based on research and interviews with the world's foremost experts. If there’s one universal trait among humans, it’s our social nature. The craving to connect is universal, compelling, and frequently irresistible.

This concept is central to Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding on to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots (St. Martin's Press, 2024). Socially interactive robots will soon transform friendship, work, home life, love, warfare, education, and nearly every nook and cranny of modern life. This book is an exploration of how we, the most gregarious creatures in the food chain, could be changed by social robots. On the other hand, it considers how we will remain the same, and asks how human nature will express itself when confronted by a new class of beings created in our own image. Drawing upon recent research in the development of social robots, including how people react to them, how in our minds the boundaries between the real and the unreal are routinely blurred when we interact with them, and how their feigned emotions evoke our real ones, science writer Eve Herold takes readers through the gamut of what it will be like to live with social robots and still hold on to our humanity. This is the perfect book for anyone interested in the latest developments in social robots and the intersection of human nature and artificial intelligence and robotics, and what it means for our future.

Sophia the Robot Tries to Convince the Experts

Eve Herold is an award-winning science writer and consultant in the scientific and medical nonprofit space. A longtime communications and policy executive for scientific organizations, she currently serves as Director of Policy Research and Education for the Healthspan Action Coalition.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jason Hannan, "Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

We commonly think of trolls as anonymous online pranksters who hide behind clever avatars and screen names. In Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2024), Jason Hannan reveals how the trolls have emerged from the cave and now walk in the clear light of day. Once limited to the darker corners of the internet, trolls have since gone mainstream, invading our politics and eroding our civic culture. Trolls are changing the norms of democratic politics and shaping how we communicate in the public sphere. Adding a twist to Neil Postman's classic thesis, this book argues that we are not so much amusing as trolling ourselves to death. But how did this come to be? Is this transformation attributable solely to digital technology? Or are there deeper political, economic, and cultural roots?

This book moves beyond the familiar picture of trolls by recasting trolling in a broader historical light. It shows how trolling is the logical expression of widespread alienation, cynicism, and paranoia deeply rooted in a culture of possessive individualism. Drawing from Postman, Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt, this book explores the disturbing rise of political unreason in the form of mass trolling. It explains the proliferation of disinformation, conspiracy theory, "cancel culture," and public shaming. Taking inspiration from G. F. W. Hegel, Paulo F reire, and bell hooks, this book makes a case for building a spirit of trust to counter the culture of mass distrust that feeds the epidemic of political trolling.

Dr. Jason Hannan is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2023) and the editor of Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial (Sydney University Press, 2020). His current book project is Reactionary Speech: Conservatism and the Rhetoric of Denial.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John Thomas Maier, "The Disabled Will: A Theory of Addiction" (Routledge, 2024)

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

John T. Maier's The Disabled Will: A Theory of Addiction (Routledge Press, 2024) defends a comprehensive new vision of what addiction is and how people with addictions should be treated. The author argues that, in addition to physical and intellectual disabilities, there are volitional disabilities - disabilities of the will - and that addiction is best understood as a species of volitional disability. This theory serves to illuminate long-standing philosophical and psychological perplexities about addiction and addictive motivation. It articulates a normative framework within which to understand prohibition, harm reduction, and other strategies that aim to address addiction. The argument of this book is that these should ultimately be evaluated in terms of reasonable accommodations for addicted people and that the priority of addiction policy should be the provision of such accommodations. What makes this book distinctive is that it understands addiction as a fundamentally political problem, an understanding that is suggested by standard legal approaches to addiction, but which has not received a sustained defense in the previous philosophical or psychological literature. This text marks a significant advance in the theory of addiction, one which should reshape our understanding of addiction policy and its proper aims.

Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to New Books Network!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

A Psychoanalytic Overview of Racism in America

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The first podcast in this series was inspired by a documentary film made in 2014 called “Black Analysts Speak” as well as some of the findings in the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis published in 2023. It also considered the reasons why racism has persisted so long in America including perspectives from a psychoanalytic vantage point. Mechanism of defense, particularly projective identification was discussed as one specific reason why change has been slow. The host and co-host also talked about the some of the reasons why it is important for white people to listen to the Black experience. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s book, Where do we go from here, Chaos or Community was also considered because of its relevance today.

Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is a podcast host for the New Books Network and chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Scholarship and Writing section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). She is a member of the AI Council of APsA (CAI). She has also written and edited six books. Her topics focus on applying psychoanalytic ideas to real-world issues we all face in our complex world.

Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is a child and adolescent supervising psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston, Texas, where she also holds the position of President of Board of Directors. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is also a faculty member in the Child and Adult Training Programs. In addition, she provides clinical supervision for the State of Texas licensing board, as well as supervision as a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor with the Association for Play Therapy. She is also the chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Diversity section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Adrian Johnston, "Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Marxism and psychoanalysis have a rich and complicated relationship to one another, with countless figures and books written on the possible intersection of the two. Our guest today, Adrian Johnston, returns to NBN to discuss his own latest entry into the genre, Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital (Columbia UP, 2024). While the book does retread some already-covered territory, Johnston’s book stands out as a unique entry in a crowded field by emphasizing the theoretical overlap of psychoanalytic concepts with the economic core of Marx’s thinking. Libidinal economics are turned into, well, economics and vice-versa in this detailed and rigorously written study that deserves to become one of the canonical texts in the Freudo-Marxist tradition.

Adrian Johnston is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico and a faculty member of the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of numerous books, including three previously discussed on this podcast; A New German Idealism: Hegel, Zizek and Dialectical Materialism, and Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism volumes one and two. He is also the coeditor, with Slavoj Zizek and Todd McGowan of the book series Diaeresis.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Aziz Rana, "The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home.

Revealing how the current constitutional order was forged over the twentieth century, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (U Chicago Press, 2024) also sheds light on an array of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons. As time passed, these voices of opposition were excised from memory. Today, they offer essential insights that Rana reconstructs to forward an ambitious and comprehensive vision for moving past the constitutional bind.

Aziz Rana is a Professor and Provost’s Distinguished Fellow at Boston College Law School and the incoming J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government (beginning 2024).

Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. He is the editor of Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Daniel Scott Souleles et al., "People before Markets: An Alternative Casebook" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

People before Markets:: An Alternative Casebook (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents twenty comparative case studies of important global questions, such as 'Where should our food come from?' 'What should we do about climate change?' and 'Where should innovation come from?' A variety of solutions are proposed and compared, including market-based, economic, and neoliberal approaches, as well as those determined by humane values and ethical and socially responsible perspectives. Drawing on original research, its chapters show that more responsible solutions are very often both more effective and better aligned with human values. Providing an important counterpoint to the standard capitalist thinking propounded in business school education, People Before Markets reveals the problematic assumptions of incumbent frameworks for solving global problems and inspires the next generation of business and social science students to pursue more effective and human-centered solutions.

Robin Steiner is an economic anthropologist based in Miami, FL. His published work explores economic development, labor, and citizenship in Oman and the Arab Gulf. He teaches in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Robin can be reached at rsteiner@fiu.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Allison J. Pugh, "The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and labor-saving technologies like self-checkouts and automated factories, the future of work has never been more uncertain, and even jobs requiring high levels of human interaction are no longer safe. The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton UP, 2024) explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other in these settings is valuable and worth preserving.

Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions--from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers--Allison Pugh develops the concept of "connective labor," a kind of work that relies on empathy, the spontaneity of human contact, and a mutual recognition of each other's humanity. The threats to connective labor are not only those posed by advances in AI or apps; Pugh demonstrates how profit-driven campaigns imposing industrial logic shrink the time for workers to connect, enforce new priorities of data and metrics, and introduce standardized practices that hinder our ability to truly see each other. She concludes with profiles of organizations where connective labor thrives, offering practical steps for building a social architecture that works.

Vividly illustrating how connective labor enriches the lives of individuals and binds our communities together, The Last Human Job is a compelling argument for us to recognize, value, and protect humane work in an increasingly automated and disconnected world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gordon C. Chang, "Revolution and Witchcraft: The Code of Ideology in Unsettled Times" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Ideas influence people. In particular, extremely well-developed sets of ideas shape individuals, groups, and societies in far-reaching ways. In Revolution and Witchcraft: The Code of Ideology in Unsettled Times (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Gordon Chang establishes these “idea systems” as an academic concept.

Through three intense episodes of manipulation and mayhem connected to idea systems—Europe’s witch hunts, the Mao Zedong-era “revolutions,” and the early campaign of the U.S. War on Terror—Revolution and Witchcraft charts the cognitive and informational matrices that seize control of people’s mentalities and behaviors across societies. Through these, the author reaches two conclusions. The first, that we are all vulnerable to the dominating influence of our own matrices of ideas and to those woven by others in the social system. The second, that even the most masterful manipulators of idea programs may lose control of the outcomes of programmatic manipulation. Amongst this analysis, sixty-plus central conceptual terms are provided for readers to analyze multiform idea systems that exist across space, time, and cultural contexts.

This book is available open access here.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nivedita Menon, "Secularism As Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South" (Duke UP, 2024)

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, we speak to Nivedita Menon about her new book, Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South (Duke University Press, 2024; Permanent Black, 2023).

Secularism as Misdirection is an ambitious and wide-ranging work, unravelling a term that is perhaps as contentious as it is ubiquitous in discourses of the Global South. Working across political theory, legal history, and religious thought, Menon reveals the dangers of secularism's false promise—likening it to a magic trick that draws "attention from where the trick is happening ... to objects that are made to appear more fascinating."

Nivedita Menon is Professor at the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Her previous books include Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law (University of Illinois Press, 2004) and the landmark work, Seeing like a Feminist (Penguin/Zubaan, 2012). She has co-authored and edited several volumes, including Power and Contestation: India Since 1989 (2nd edition: Bloomsbury, 2013). In addition to her award-winning work as a scholar and translator, Menon is a prominent public intellectual, whose writing on issues such as academic freedom and feminist politics in India can be read at kafila.online, a vital independent blog that she helped found.

Arnav Adhikari is a doctoral candidate in English at Brown University, where he works on the aesthetics and politics of Cold War South Asia. His writing has appeared in Postcolonial Text and Global South Studies, amongst other venues.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Timothy Morton, "Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Hell on earth is real. The toxic fusion of big oil, Evangelical Christianity, and white supremacy has ignited a worldwide inferno, more phantasmagoric than anything William Blake could dream up and more cataclysmic than we can fathom. Escaping global warming hell, this revelatory book shows, requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery.

In Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2024) Dr. Timothy Morton argues that there is an unexpected yet profound relationship between religion and ecology that can guide a planet-scale response to the climate crisis. Spiritual and mystical feelings have a deep resonance with ecological thinking, and together they provide the resources environmentalism desperately needs in this time of climate emergency. Morton finds solutions in a radical revaluation of Christianity, furnishing ecological politics with a language of mercy and forgiveness that draws from Christian traditions without bringing along their baggage. They call for a global environmental movement that fuses ecology and mysticism and puts race and gender front and centre. This nonviolent resistance can stage an all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting today in white supremacy, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. Passionate, erudite, and playful, Hell takes readers on a full-colour journey into the contemporary underworld—and offers a surprising vision of salvation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jason Read, "The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work" (Verso, 2024)

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Even as the rewards of work decline and its demands on us increase, many people double-down on their commitment to wage slavery – working harder, doing overtime, and learning to hustle. People take pride in having a strong work ethic and demonstrate their passionate commitment to optimizing their time and resources on social media platforms like LinkedIn. But why do people fight to be exploited as if it were liberation?

My guest today, Jason Read, turns to the intersection of Marx and Spinoza to examine contemporary ideologies and the modern phenomena of work. His new book, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work (Verso, 2024), argues for the transformation of our collective imagination and attachment to work.

Jason Read is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of The Production of Subjectivity, The Politics of Transindividuality, and The Micro-Politics of Capital.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mark Robert Rank, "The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World Around Us" (U California Press, 2024)

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

It’s comforting to think that we can be successful because we work hard, climb ladders, and get what we deserve, but each of us has been profoundly touched by randomness. Chance is shown to play a crucial role in shaping outcomes across history, throughout the natural world, and in our everyday lives.

In The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World around Us (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Mark Robert Rank draws from a wealth of evidence, including interviews and research, to explain how luck and chance play out and reveals how we can use these lessons to guide our personal lives and public policies.

The Random Factor traverses luck from macro to micro, from events like the Cuban Missile Crisis to our personal encounters and relationships. From his perspective as a scholar of poverty, Dr. Rank also delves into the class and race dynamics of chance, emphasizing the stark disparities it brings to light. This transformative book prompts a new understanding of the twists and turns in our daily lives and encourages readers to fully appreciate the surprising world of randomness in which we live.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

AI and the Humanities: Nina Beguš DIscusses "Artificial Humanities"

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this debut conversation, we speak to Dr. Nina Beguš, a researcher at UC Berkeley and the founder of InterpretAI who holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Listen to learn about Nina’s path at the intersection of AI and the humanities, the challenges and rewards of working across disciplines, what questions to ask as an ethical researcher, and practical advice for how to succeed in a multifaceted, multidisciplinary career in today’s fast-changing digital landscape.

Beguš' first book, titled Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI, is currently under an advance contract with the University of Michigan Press.

Towards Knowledge is a Latent Knowledge podcast series where we interview industry and academic leaders about research in the real world — from career development to the most pressing philosophical questions in today’s changing research landscape.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Weh Yeoh, "Redundant Charities: Escaping the Cycle of Dependence" (Koan Press, 2023)

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Weh Yeoh's Redundant Charities: Escaping the Cycle of Dependence (Koan Press, 2023) presents a transformative approach to charitable work. Drawing on his extensive experience in the non-profit sector, Yeoh argues that the ultimate goal of a charity should be to render itself unnecessary. He critiques the traditional charity model, which often perpetuates dependency and self-preservation, and instead advocates for organizations to implement clear exit strategies and focus on supporting local communities to solve their own problems.

Yeoh asserts that success in charity work is measured by the ability to address root causes and sustainably transfer skills and resources to local populations, ensuring they can continue the work independently. This approach is exemplified by his own work founding OIC Cambodia, where he aimed to establish a sustainable speech therapy profession in Cambodia, ultimately handing over the leadership to local practitioners.

The book is not just a critique but also offers practical guidance on how charities can shift towards this new model, challenging readers to rethink their strategies and align their missions with long-term, self-sustaining impact.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Chris Haufe, "Do the Humanities Create Knowledge?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Tue, 28 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

There is in certain circles a widely held belief that the only proper kind of knowledge is scientific knowledge. This belief often runs parallel to the notion that legitimate knowledge is obtained when a scientist follows a rigorous investigative procedure called the 'scientific method'.

In Do the Humanities Create Knowledge? (Cambridge UP, 2023), Chris Haufe challenges this idea. He shows that what we know about the so-called scientific method rests fundamentally on the use of finely tuned human judgments directed toward certain questions about the natural world. He suggests that this dependence on judgment in fact reveals deep affinities between scientific knowledge and another, equally important, sort of comprehension: that of humanistic creative endeavour. His wide-ranging and stimulating new book uncovers the unexpected unity underlying all our efforts – whether scientific or arts-based – to understand human experience. In so doing, it makes a vital contribution to broader conversation about the value of the humanities in an increasingly STEM-saturated educational culture.

If it is agreed that the humanities are valuable and essential, are there better and worse ways in which to generate humanistic knowledge? This book offers compelling answers.

Chris Haufe is the Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of How Knowledge Grows (2022) and Fruitfulness (2024).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Bernardo Kastrup, "Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A Straightforward Summary of the 21st Century's Only Plausible Metaphysics" (Iff Books, 2024)

Fri, 24 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Is reality more than the material? Raj Balkaran holds a fascinating interview with philosopher Bernardo Kastrup on this topic. At the vanguard of the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, Bernardo presents cogent argumentation that reality is essentially mental, and examines the proper place of the scientific method in this deliberation. Bernardo’s research exhibits some astonishing parallels with ancient Indic thought.

Bernardo Kastrup is the author of Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A Straightforward Summary of the 21st Century's Only Plausible Metaphysics" (Iff Books, 2024). About the book:

As the failures of physicalism begin to shake the confidence of even the most biased of its supporters, a new view on the nature of reality is establishing itself as the only tenable alternative: Analytic Idealism. According to it, there is a world out there independent of our individual minds, but such world is - just like ourselves - also mental or experiential. While being a realist, naturalist, rationalist, and even reductionist view, Analytic Idealism flips our culture-bound intuitions on their head, revealing that only through understanding our own inner nature can we understand the nature of the world. This book embodies its author's years-long experience on how best to explain Analytic Idealism to someone who has never studied it before, and has no background in the technical fields involved. It meets the readers where they are, holding their hand as they are shown - through a series of evocative metaphors - how to see through their own unexamined assumptions, so to realize how the impossible dilemas of physicalism disappear when nature is regarded from a slightly different slant. The conclusions have tremendous implications for our values and way of life, as well as our understanding of purpose, self, identity, and death.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mark Moyar, "Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968" (Encounter, 2023)

Wed, 22 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968 (Encounter, 2023) is the long-awaited sequel to the immensely influential Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Like its predecessor, this book overturns the conventional wisdom using a treasure trove of new sources, many of them from the North Vietnamese side. Rejecting the standard depiction of U.S. military intervention as a hopeless folly, it shows America's war to have been a strategic necessity that could have ended victoriously had President Lyndon Johnson heeded the advice of his generals. In light of Johnson's refusal to use American ground forces beyond South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland employed the best military strategy available. Once the White House loosened the restraints on Operation Rolling Thunder, American bombing inflicted far greater damage on the North Vietnamese supply system than has been previously understood, and it nearly compelled North Vietnam to capitulate.

The book demonstrates that American military operations enabled the South Vietnamese government to recover from the massive instability that followed the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem. American culture sustained public support for the war through the end of 1968, giving South Vietnam realistic hopes for long-term survival. America's defense of South Vietnam averted the imminent fall of key Asian nations to Communism and sowed strife inside the Communist camp, to the long-term detriment of America's great-power rivals, China and the Soviet Union.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Hippokratis Kiaris, "The End of the Western Civilization?: The Intellectual Journey of Humanity to Adulthood" (Vernon Press, 2022)

Sat, 11 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Hippokratis Kiaris about his book The End of the Western Civilization?: The Intellectual Journey of Humanity to Adulthood (Vernon Press, 2022).

The podcast episode delves into the intellectual and philosophical exploration of the Western civilization's journey from its inception to its current "adulthood" stage, guided by the insightful narrative and analysis of Professor Hippokratis Kiaris. Framing the development of Western civilization in stages akin to human development, Kiaris articulates how each phase of societal advancement mirrors the cognitive and moral growth phases from childhood towards adulthood, as seen through the lenses of intellectual history. He stretches this analogy from the explorative and question-driven "toddler" years characteristic of the Greek civilization era, through the rigid yet foundational "childhood" of the Middle Ages, moving onto the rebellious "teenage" years of the Enlightenment period, and finally arriving at the responsible yet crisis-ridden "adulthood" of contemporary times. Professor Kiaris's exploration doesn't solely reminisce on the past milestones but rather seeks to understand the inherent responsibilities, limitations, and existential dilemmas facing the West today, particularly those related to sustainability, technological reliance, and the urgent reevaluation of values towards more qualitative, rather than quantitative, societal growth. Through discussing the shifting paradigms towards expertise and technocracy, and the concurrent depersonalization and dehumanization of society, Kiaris offers a critical perspective on the Western civilization’s current challenges and questions the path forward, advocating for a balance between technological progress and maintaining a critical, human-centric approach to societal development.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Carl Zimmer, "Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive" (Dutton, 2022)

Fri, 10 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on Earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts - whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.

Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive (Dutton, 2022) is an utterly fascinating investigation that no one but one of the most celebrated science writers of our generation could craft. Zimmer journeys through the strange experiments that have attempted to recreate life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what that should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious winner. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to a theory of life. It's never clear why some items on the list are essential and others not. Coronaviruses have altered the course of history, and yet many scientists maintain they are not alive. Chemists are creating droplets that can swarm, sense their environment, and multiply. Have they made life in the lab?

Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating bats in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test tube with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein's monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Donald Stoker, "Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Sun, 05 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this provocative challenge to United States policy and strategy, former Professor of Strategy & Policy at the US Naval War College, and author or editor of eleven books, Dr. Donald Stoker argues that America endures endless wars because its leaders no longer know how to think about war in strategic terms and he reveals how ideas on limited war and war in general have evolved against the backdrop of American conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. These ideas, he shows, were and are flawed and have undermined America's ability to understand, wage, and win its wars, and to secure peace afterwards. America's leaders he argues have too often taken the nation to war without understanding what they want or valuing victory, leading to the “forever wars” of today in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present(Cambridge University Press, 2019) dismantles seventy years of misguided thinking and lays the foundations for a new approach to the wars of tomorrow. Why American Loses War is a must read for policy practitioners, serving soldiers and the lay educated public.

Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

J. P. Messina, "Private Censorship" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Wed, 01 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

When we think of censorship, our minds might turn to state agencies exercising power to silence dissent. However, contemporary concerns about censorship arise in contexts where non-state actors suppress expression and communication. There are subtle and not-so-subtle forms of interference that come from social groups, employers, media corporations, and even search engines. Should these “new” forms of censorship alarm us? Should we assess them in ways that mirror our typical views about state-enacted censorship? If not, how should we think about non-state modes of censorship?

In Private Censorship (Oxford University Press, 2024), JP Messina takes up these broad questions. He examines a range of emerging sites of non-state censorship – what he calls “private” censorship – and sorts through the normative, political, and legal issues.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Markus Vinzent, "Resetting the Origins of Christianity: A New Theory of Sources and Beginnings" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How do we know what we know about the origins of the Christian religion? Neither its founder, nor the Apostles, nor Paul left any written accounts of their movement. The witnesses' testimonies were transmitted via successive generations of copyists and historians, with the oldest surviving fragments dating to the second and third centuries - that is, to well after Jesus' death.

In Resetting the Origins of Christianity: A New Theory of Sources and Beginnings (Cambridge UP, 2022), Markus Vinzent interrogates standard interpretations of Christian origins handed down over the centuries. He scrutinizes - in reverse order - the earliest recorded sources from the sixth to the second century, showing how the works of Greek and Latin writers reveal a good deal more about their own times and preoccupations than they do about early Christianity. In so doing, the author boldly challenges understandings of one of the most momentous social and religious movements in history, as well as its reception over time and place.

Markus Vinzent has recently retired as Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College, London. He is a Fellow of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies of the University of Erfurt. A recipient of awards from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Agence Nationale de Recherche, France, he is the author of Writing the History of Early Christianity: From Reception to Retrospection (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Teri Ann Finneman et al., "Reviving Rural News: Transforming the Business Model of Community Journalism in the US and Beyond" (Routledge, 2024)

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Based on extensive research into weekly rural publishers and rural readers, Reviving Rural News: Transforming the Business Model of Community Journalism in the US and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) outlines a mode of practice by which small publications can stay financially sound and combat the rise of "news deserts." This book argues that publishers must actively reach out to their communities to foster a sense of belonging and shared purpose. A new model known as Press Club -- tested for a year at a weekly newspaper in Kansas -- is presented as a template through which memberships, social events, and online newsletters can create a more sustainable path for the future. Reviving Rural News will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of local, community, and rural journalism as well as practitioners looking to bring about real-world change in journalism organizations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alexander Statman, "A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Alexander Statman's book A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science.

The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to challenge the emerging concept of Western advancement.

A Global Enlightenment traces this overlooked exchange between China and the West to make compelling claims about the history of progress, notions of European exceptionalism, and European engagement with Chinese science. To tell this story, Alexander Statman focuses on a group of thinkers he terms “orphans of the Enlightenment,” intellectuals who embraced many of their contemporaries’ ideals but valued ancient wisdom. They studied astronomical records, gas balloons, electrical machines, yin-yang cosmology, animal magnetism, and Daoist medicine. And their inquiries helped establish a new approach to the global history of science.

Rich with new archival research and fascinating anecdotes, A Global Enlightenment deconstructs two common assumptions about the early to late modern period. Though historians have held that the idea of a mysterious and inscrutable East was inherent in Enlightenment progress theory, Statman argues that it was the orphans of the Enlightenment who put it there: by identifying China as a source of ancient wisdom, they turned it into a foil for scientific development. But while historical consensus supposes that non-Western ideas were banished from European thought over the course of the Enlightenment, Statman finds that Europeans became more interested in Chinese science—as a precursor, then as an antithesis, and finally as an alternative to modernity.

Alexander Statman is a Distinguished Scholar and JD candidate at the UCLA School of Law and a former A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matt Qvortrup, "The Political Brain: The Emergence of Neuropolitics" (CEU Press, 2024)

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with Matt Qvortrup (Coventry University) to discuss his new book with CEU Press entitled, The Political Brain: The Emergence of Neuropolitics (CEU Press, 2024).

Putting the “science” back into political science, The Political Brain shows how fMRI-scans can identify differences between liberals and conservatives, can predict our behaviour, and can explain the biology of uprisings, revolutions, and wars. The book also provides an overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge of the organ that shapes our politics. It warns that if we rely on the evolutionarily primitive parts of the midbrain, those engaged when we succumb to polarised politics, we stand in danger of squandering the gains we made through the last eight million years.

Matt’s book is part of our new series, CEU Press Perspectives. The series offers the latest viewpoints on both new and perennial issues, these books address a wide range of topics of critical importance today. The new series, originating from an international collection of leading authors, encourages us to look at issues from a different viewpoint, to think outside the box, and to stimulate debate.

You can learn more about the series here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more: https://ceupress.com/

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Seth D. Kaplan, "Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time" (Little, Brown Spark, 2023)

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The neighborhoods we live in impact our lives in so many ways: they determine who we know, what resources and opportunities we have access to, the quality of schools our kids go to, our sense of security and belonging, and even how long we live.

Yet too many of us live in neighborhoods plagued by rising crime, school violence, family disintegration, addiction, alienation, and despair. Even the wealthiest neighborhoods are not immune; while poverty exacerbates these challenges, they exist in zip codes rich and poor, rural and urban, and everything in between.

In Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time (Little, Brown Spark, 2023), fragile states expert Seth D. Kaplan offers a bold new vision for addressing social decline in America, one zip code at a time. By revitalizing our local institutions—and the social ties that knit them together—we can all turn our neighborhoods into places where people and families can thrive.

Readers will meet the innovative individuals and organizations pioneering new approaches to everything from youth mentoring to affordable housing: people like Dreama, a former lawyer whose organization works with local leaders and educators in rural Appalachia to equip young people with the social support they need to succeed in school; and Chris, whose Detroit-based non-profit turns vacant school buildings into community resource hubs.

Along the way, Kaplan offers a set of practical lessons to inspire similar work, reminding us that when change is hyperlocal, everyone has the opportunity to contribute.

Seth D. Kaplan, Ph.D. is a leading expert on fragile states. He is a Professorial Lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Adviser for the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), and consultant to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, U.S. State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and OECD as well as developing country governments and NGOs.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, "Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice" (FSG, 2021)

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Raj Patel, the renowned political economist and New York Times bestselling author of The Value of Nothing, teams up with the physician Rupa Marya to offer a radical new cure: the deep medicine of decolonization. Decolonizing heals what has been divided, reestablishing our relationships with the Earth and one another. Combining the latest scientific research and scholarship on globalization with the stories of Marya's work with patients in marginalized communities, activist passion, and the wisdom of Indigenous groups, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (FSG, 2021) points the way toward a deep medicine that has the potential to heal not only our bodies, but the world. “This book advances a new level of diagnosis that incorporates history and lines of power into our understanding of the root causes of health disparities and the rise of inflammatory disease in industrialized places, offering compelling treatment options for what is ailing people and the planet”.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Eric Schwitzgebel, "The Weirdness of the World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

"What's life for if there's no time to play and explore?" In The Weirdness of the World (Princeton UP, 2024), Eric Schwitzgebel invites the reader to a walk on the wilder side of philosophical speculation about the cosmos and consciousness. Is consciousness entirely a material phenomenon? How much credence should we have in the existence of a world outside our minds? Are there multiple parallel universes? Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at the University of California-Riverside, constructs chains of conditional probabilities to explore the zone just beyond the edge of what we can understand, however imperfectly, given current scientific theory. He distinguishes hypothetical scenarios that are not worth taking seriously – like being a brain in a vat – from those that are just plausible enough to deserve playful, yet motivated, consideration.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matthieu Grandpierron, "Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War: How Leaders of Great Powers Cope with Status Decline" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2024)

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why do great powers go to war? Why are non-violent, diplomatic options not prioritised? Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War: How Leaders of Great Powers Cope with Status Decline (McGill-Queen's Press, 2024) by Dr. Matthieu Grandpierron argues that world leaders react to status decline by going to war, guided by a nostalgic, virile understanding of what it means to be powerful. This nostalgic virility - a system of subjective beliefs about power, bravery, strength, morality, and health - acts as a filter through which leaders articulate glorified interpretations of history and assess their power and their country’s status on the international stage.

In this rigorous study of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Dr. Grandpierron tests the theory of nostalgic virility against the two more common theoretical frameworks of realism and the diversionary theory of war. Consulting thousands of newly declassified government documents at the highest levels of decision making, Dr. Grandpierron examines three specific cases - the early years of the Indochina War (1945-47), the British reconquest of the Falklands in 1982, and the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 - convincingly contending that status-seeking behaviour and nostalgic virility are more relevant in explaining why a leader chooses war and conflict over non-violent, diplomatic options than the dominant frameworks.

Looking to the recent past, Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War considers how this new model can be applied to current conflicts - from the Russian war in Ukraine to Chinese actions in the South China Sea - and provides surprising ways of thinking about the relationship between power, decision makers, and causes of war.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Building the Future Buddha: A Discussion with Jundho Cohen

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Jundo Cohen is a Zen Buddhist teacher and founder of Treeleaf Zendo, a digital Zen community with members in over 50 countries. He writes on the intersection of Buddhism, ethics, science, and the future of the planet. He resides in Tsukuba, Japan’s “Science City”. He is the author of The Zen Master’s Dance: A Guide to Understanding Dogen and Who You Are in the Universe (Wisdom, 2020), and is co-host of The Zen of Everything podcast.

In this episode I speak to Jundo about his new book, Building the Future Buddha: The Zen of AI, Genes, Saving the World, and Travel to the Stars (Treeleaf, 2024). The conversation covers a wide range of topics related to the future and Buddhism with some fun utopian thought on the way and some disagreement that makes for an interesting exploration.

Jundho claims that tomorrow’s technologies will change Buddhism. AI and robotics, bio-engineering and physical enhancements, genetics and nano-implants, virtual reality and new media, medical miracles and manufacturing marvels, extended lifespans and expanded minds will make many of Buddhism’s most fabulous ideals potentially realizable.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David E. Sutton, "Bigger Fish to Fry: A Theory of Cooking as Risk, with Greek Examples" (Berghahn, 2021)

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What defines cooking as cooking, and why does cooking matter to the understanding of society, cultural change and everyday life? Bigger Fish to Fry: A Theory of Cooking as Risk, with Greek Examples (Berghahn, 2021) by Dr. David E. Sutton explores these questions by proposing a new theory of the meaning of cooking as a willingness to put oneself and one’s meals at risk on a daily basis. Richly illustrated with examples from the author’s anthropology fieldwork in Greece, Bigger Fish to Fry proposes a new approach to the meaning of cooking and how the study of cooking can reshape our understanding of social processes more generally.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ignacio Cofone, "The Privacy Fallacy: Harm and Power in the Information Economy" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Our privacy is besieged by tech companies.

Companies can do this because our laws are built on outdated ideas that trap lawmakers, regulators, and courts into wrong assumptions about privacy, resulting in ineffective legal remedies to one of the most pressing concerns of our generation.

Drawing on behavioral science, sociology, and economics, Ignacio Cofone challenges existing laws and reform proposals and dispels enduring misconceptions about data-driven interactions. This exploration offers readers a holistic view of why current laws and regulations fail to protect us against corporate digital harms, particularly those created by AI. Cofone then proposes a better response: meaningful accountability for the consequences of corporate data practices, which ultimately entails creating a new type of liability that recognizes the value of privacy.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Ortiz, "Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism" (Bloombury, 2023)

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What is fascism? Is it an anomaly in the history of modern Europe? Or its culmination?

In Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism (Bloomsbury, 2023), Dr. Michael Ortiz makes the case that fascism should be understood, in part, as an imperial phenomenon. He contends that the Age of Appeasement (1935-1939) was not a titanic clash between rival socio-political systems (fascism and democracy), but rather an imperial contest between satisfied and unsatisfied empires.

Historians have long debated the extent to which Western imperialisms served as ideological and intellectual precursors to European fascisms. To date, this scholarship has largely employed an “inside-out” methodology that examines the imperial discourses that pushed fascist regimes outward, into Africa, Asia, and the Americas. While effective, such approaches tend to ignore the ways in which these places and their inhabitants understood European fascisms.

Addressing this imbalance, Anti-Colonialism adopts an “outside-in” approach that analyses fascist expansion from the perspective of Indian anti-colonialists such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose, and Mohandas Gandhi. Seen from India, the crises of Interwar fascism-the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Spanish Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, Munich Agreement, and the outbreak of the Second World War-were yet another eruption of imperial expansion analogous (although not identical) to the Scramble for Africa and the Treaty of Versailles.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Karl Widerquist, "Universal Basic Income" (MIT Press, 2024)

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Karl Widerquist's Universal Basic Income (MIT Press, 2024) is an accessible introduction to the simple (yet radical) premise that a small cash income, sufficient for basic needs, ought to be provided regularly and unconditionally to every citizen. The growing movement for universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining attention from politics and the media with the audacious idea of a regular, unconditional cash grant for everyone as a right of citizenship.

This volume in the Essential Knowledge series presents the first short, solid UBI introduction that is neither academic nor polemic. It takes a position in favor of UBI, but its primary goal remains the provision of essential knowledge by answering the fundamental questions about it: What is UBI? How does it work? What are the arguments for and against it? What is the evidence? Widerquist discusses how UBI functions, showing how it differs from other redistributional approaches. He summarizes the common arguments for and against UBI and presents the reasons for believing it is a tremendously important reform. The book briefly discusses the likely cost of UBI; options for paying for it; the existing evidence on the probable effects of UBI; and the history of UBI from its inception more than two hundred years ago through the two waves of support it received in the twentieth century to the third and largest wave of support it is experiencing now. Now more than ever, conditions in much of the world are ripe for such enthusiasm to keep growing, and there are good reasons to believe that this current wave of support will eventually lead to the adoption of UBI in several countries around the world—making this volume an especially timely and necessary read.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti, "Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Parents everywhere want their children to be happy and do well. Yet how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. For instance, American and Chinese parents are increasingly authoritative and authoritarian, whereas Scandinavian parents tend to be more permissive. Why? Love, Money, and Parenting investigates how economic forces and growing inequality shape how parents raise their children. From medieval times to the present, and from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden to China and Japan, Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti look at how economic incentives and constraints—such as money, knowledge, and time—influence parenting practices and what is considered good parenting in different countries.

Through personal anecdotes and original research, Doepke and Zilibotti show that in countries with increasing economic inequality, such as the United States, parents push harder to ensure their children have a path to security and success. Economics has transformed the hands-off parenting of the 1960s and ’70s into a frantic, overscheduled activity. Growing inequality has also resulted in an increasing “parenting gap” between richer and poorer families, raising the disturbing prospect of diminished social mobility and fewer opportunities for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In nations with less economic inequality, such as Sweden, the stakes are less high, and social mobility is not under threat. Doepke and Zilibotti discuss how investments in early childhood development and the design of education systems factor into the parenting equation, and how economics can help shape policies that will contribute to the ideal of equal opportunity for all. Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids (Princeton UP, 2019) presents an engrossing look at the economics of the family in the modern world.

Matthias Doepke is professor of economics at Northwestern University. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Fabrizio Zilibotti is the Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics at Yale University. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Myisha Cherry, "Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

From religion to popular culture, institutions and people have shaped how we conceive forgiveness. Myisha Cherry, associate professor of philosophy, argues that these understandings have been limiting or even narrow. Those ideas, in turn, have been harmful to society. In Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better (Princeton University Press 2023), Cherry offers a new conceptualization of forgiveness rooted in a holistic approach.

Dr. N'Kosi Oates is a curator and assistant professor. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Travis Rieder, "Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices" (Dutton, 2024)

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In a world of often confusing and terrifying global problems, how should we make choices in our everyday lives? Does anything on the individual level really make a difference? In Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices (Dutton, 2024), Travis Rieder tackles the moral philosophy puzzles that bedevil us. He explores vital ethical concepts from history and today and offers new ways to think about the “right” thing to do when the challenges we face are larger and more complex than ever before.

Alongside a lively tour of traditional moral reasoning from thinkers like Plato, Mill, and Kant, Rieder posits new questions and exercises about the unique conundrums we now face, issues that can seem to transcend old-fashioned philosophical ideals. Should you drink water from a plastic bottle or not? Drive an electric car? When you learn about the horrors of factory farming, should you stop eating meat or other animal products? Do small commitments matter, or are we being manipulated into acting certain ways by corporations and media? These kinds of puzzles, Rieder explains, are everywhere now. And the tools most of us unthinkingly rely on to “do the right thing” are no longer enough. Principles like “do no harm” and “respect others” don’t provide guidance in cases where our individual actions don’t, by themselves, have any effect on others at all. We need new principles, with new justifications, in order to navigate this new world.

In the face of consequential and complex crises, Rieder shares exactly how we can live a morally decent life. It’s time to build our own catastrophe ethics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Poulshock, "Power Structures in International Politics" (Low 8, 2023)

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Power Structures in International Politics (Low 8, 2023) presents an original perspective on the dynamics underlying world events, approaching international relations through the lens of computational science. It explains how states accumulate political power and how this competition leads to resource conflict, coalition building, imperialism, the balance of power, and global instability. Written in an engaging and accessible style with over a hundred illustrations, the book will appeal to a wide audience interested in geopolitics, international relations, and quantitative science.

Michael Poulshock is a lawyer, software engineer, and technology manager.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Joseph Cone, "Seeing Opera Anew: A Cultural and Biological Perspective" (Routledge, 2023)

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

What people ultimately want from music-drama, audience research suggests, is to be absorbed in a story that engages their feelings, even moves them deeply, and that may lead them to insights about life and, perhaps, themselves. Joseph Cone's Seeing Opera Anew: A Cultural and Biological Perspective (Routledge, 2023) shows how both human biology and culture cause these effects.

Cone, a lifelong opera fan, ardent amateur singer and professional science writer, goes beyond the traditional approaches of musicology, criticism, history and biography. He adopts a "stereo" approach to assimilate cultural perspectives and contemporary evolutionary theories based in human biology. In doing so, he offers fresh insights on why music-dramas can offer such rich, immersive experiences, powerfully affecting our feelings and our understanding of life.

Written to stimulate the student and opera-goer as much as the professional, "Seeing Opera Anew" examines and interprets more than 15 operas in an informal and lively way based on a range of recent scholarship.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Poppy Wilde, "Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities" (Routledge, 2023)

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities (Routledge, 2023) explores the relationship between avatar and gamer in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft, to examine notions of entangled subjectivity, affects, and embodiments – what it means and how it feels to be posthuman.

With a focus on posthuman subjectivity, Wilde considers how we can begin to articulate ourselves when the boundary between self and other is unclear. Drawing on fieldnotes of her own gameplay experiences, the author analyses how subjectivity is formed in ways that defy a single individual notion of “self”, and explores how different practices, feelings, and societal understandings can disrupt strict binaries and emphasise our posthumanism. She interrogates if one can speak of an “I” in the face of posthuman multiplicity, before exploring different analytical themes, beginning with how acting theories might be posthumanised and articulate the relationship between avatar and gamer. She then defines posthuman empathy and explains how this is experienced in gaming, before addressing the need to account for boredom, the complexity of nostalgia, and ways death and loss are experienced through gaming.

This volume will appeal to a broad audience and is particularly relevant to scholars and students of cultural studies, media studies, humanities, and game studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Thomas J. Barfield, "Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Empires are one of the most common forms of political structure in history—yet no empire is alike. We have our “standard” view of empire: perhaps the Romans, or the China of the Qin and Han Dynasties—vast polities that cover numerous different people, knit together by strong institutions from a political center.

But where do, say, the empires of the steppe, like the Xiongnu or the Mongols, fit into our understanding of empire? Or the Portuguese empire, which got its start as an array of ports and forts in South and Southeast Asia? Or the Manchus, who waltzed into a collapsing Ming China and rapidly re-established its governing structures–with themselves at the head?

These are just a handful of what Thomas Barfield calls exogenous, or “shadow” empires, which grow on the frontiers of larger, wealth-growing polities, in his most recent book Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Shadow empires cannot exist without their hosts, extracting wealth from them—and yet, the most successful of them grow to become wealth creators in their own right, becoming what Barfield terms “endogenous empires.”

In this interview, Thomas and I talk about empires—both the commonly-accepted kind and their shadow variants—and how we can differentiate between the many different kinds of empire throughout history.

Thomas Barfield is professor of anthropology at Boston University. His books include Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton University Press: 2010) and The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Wiley-Blackwell: 1992).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shadow Empires. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Vernon James Schubel, "Teaching Humanity: An Alternative Introduction to Islam" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In his splendid new book, Teaching Humanity: An Alternative Introduction to Islam (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Vernon Schubel makes a compelling case for taking seriously the foundational importance of humanity and moral pedagogy to the venture of Islam, especially in relation to introductory books on this topic. Through a finely layered yet always engaging and accessible examination of a panoply of Muslim intellectual traditions and lived practice, Schubel offers an alternative to introductory textbooks on Islam limited in their conceptual purview to Islamic law, theology, and the textual sources of the tradition. One of the hallmarks of this book is that it focuses substantively on Shi‘i Islam and Sufism, especially in contexts like the Alevi-Bektashi tradition that might be relegated to the margins of Islam in dominant introductory surveys of Islam. Indeed, among the major achievements of this beautifully written book is that it fundamentally reorients our understanding of the center and the margins of Islam.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Yanis Varoufakis, "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" (Melville House, 2023)

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2023), Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is dead and a new economic era has begun.

Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies in the wake of the financial crisis and the pandemic have ended up supercharging big tech's hold over every aspect of the economy. Capitalism's twin pillars - markets and profit - have been replaced with big tech's platforms and rents. Meanwhile, with every click and scroll, we labour like serfs to increase its power. Welcome to technofeudalism.

Drawing on stories from Greek Myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power and ultimately what it will take overthrow it.

Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Today’s book is: Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2024), by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein, a book that asks why stimulating jobs and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while. People stop noticing what is most wonderful in their own lives. They also stop noticing what is terrible, due to something called habituation. Because of habituation, people get used to dirty air, become unconcerned by their own misconduct, and become more liable to believe misinformation. But what if you could dishabituate? Could you find a way to see everything anew? What if you could regain sensitivity, not only to the great things in your life, but also to the terrible things you stopped noticing and so don’t try to change?

In Look Again, neuroscience professor Tali Sharot and Harvard law professor Cass R. Sunstein investigate why we stop noticing both the great and not-so-great things around us and how to “dishabituate.” This groundbreaking work, based on decades of research in the psychological and biological sciences, illuminates how we can reignite the sparks of joy, innovate, and recognize where improvements urgently need to be made. The key to this disruption—to seeing, feeling, and noticing again—is change. By temporarily changing your environment, changing the rules, changing the people you interact with—or even just stepping back and imagining change—you regain sensitivity, allowing you to more clearly identify the bad and more deeply appreciate the good.

Our guest is: Cass R. Sunstein, who is the nation’s most-cited legal scholar. For the past fifteen years, he has been at the forefront of behavioral economics. From 2009 to 2012, he served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Since that time, he has served in the US government in multiple capacities and worked with the United Nations and the World Health Organization, where he chaired the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. His book Nudge, coauthored with Richard Thaler, was a national bestseller. In 2018, he was the recipient of the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. He lives in Boston and Washington, DC, with his wife, children, and labrador retrievers. He is the co-author [along with Tali Sharot, who could not join us for this episode] of Look Again.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jeffrey D. Long, "Perspectives on Reincarnation: Hindu, Christian, Scientific" (MDPI Books, 2019)

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

What happens after you die? The book brings together fascinating theological and religious studies perspectives on a controversial yet pervasive idea: reincarnation. An estimated 1 on 5 Americans subscribe to this belief, despite their religious background. Why is this? What are the philosophical, spiritual, pragmatic merits of subscribing to reincarnation? What about the pitfalls? Does believing in reincarnation counter Christian teachings? Is it a uniquely Hindu practice? Join us as we explore these and other questions with Dr. Jeffrey D. Long, Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Elizabethtown College (PA) and editor of the open access peer-reviewed book Perspectives on Reincarnation: Hindu, Christian, Scientific(MDPI Books, 2019).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Neil Lee, "Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy" (U California Press, 2024)

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How can we build a more equal economy? In Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy (U California Press, 2024), Neil Lee, a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, explores the question of how societies have fostered and supported innovation. The book challenges conventional assumptions that innovative economies must be unequal. Drawing on 4 detailed, and critical, case studies- Switzerland, Austria, Taiwan and Sweden, the book shows how Europe has good models of innovation; how the state matters; and how innovation and shared prosperity policies are mutually reinforcing. Accessible and clearly written, the book will be essential reading across social sciences and public policy, as well as anyone wanting a blueprint for equitable economic development,

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert Louis Wilken, "Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom" (Yale UP, 2019)

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Robert Louis Wilken, the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has written an intellectual history of the ideas surrounding freedom of religion. Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press, 2019) offers a revisionist history of how the ideas of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion originated in the writings of the Christian fathers of the early Church, such as Tertullian and Lactantius, during the period when Christians were a persecuted sect of the Roman Empire. Wilken argues that it was not the political theorists of the Enlightenment who invented religious freedom in response to the wars of the Reformation, but rather the participants of the Reformation itself, including both Protestant and Catholic thinkers, who recovered ideas from the Roman-era Church fathers and used them to develop arguments about religious liberty for both individuals and faith communities. Wilken demonstrates that the concerns about whether faith could ever be enforced by the sword were present from the beginnings of Christianity. Wilken’s book helps inform our understanding of the origins of religious liberty, which is a concept of great import in contemporary debates about the meaning of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, "Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How can territory and peoples be organized? After the dissolution of empires, was the nation-state the only way to unite people politically, culturally, and economically?

In Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia (Princeton UP, 2023), historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine three large-scale, transcontinental projects aimed at bringing together peoples of different regions to mitigate imperial legacies of inequality. Eurasia, Eurafrica, and Afroasia—in theory if not in practice—offered alternative routes out of empire. The theory of Eurasianism was developed after the collapse of imperial Russia by exiled intellectuals alienated by both Western imperialism and communism. Eurafrica began as a design for collaborative European exploitation of Africa but was transformed in the 1940s and 1950s into a project to include France’s African territories in plans for European integration. The Afroasian movement wanted to replace the vertical relationship of colonizer and colonized with a horizontal relationship among former colonial territories that could challenge both the communist and capitalist worlds. Both Eurafrica and Afroasia floundered, victims of old and new vested interests. But Eurasia revived in the 1990s, when Russian intellectuals turned the theory’s attack on Western hegemony into a recipe for the restoration of Russian imperial power. While both the system of purportedly sovereign states and the concentrated might of large economic and political institutions continue to frustrate projects to overcome inequities in welfare and power, Burbank and Cooper‘s study of political imagination explores wide-ranging concepts of social affiliation and obligation that emerged after empire and the reasons for their unlike destinies.

This is Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper second major scholarly collaboration. They previously co-authored Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 2010).

Frederick Cooper is Professor Emeritus of History at New York University. His research has focused on 20th-century Africa, empires, colonization and decolonization, and citizenship. Among his books are Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005); Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (2014); Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (2014); Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives (2018); and Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (2nd ed., 2019).

Jane Burbank is Professor Emerita, New York University. Her areas of research are Russian political culture, law, and empire. Her works include Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922 (1986); Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917 (2004); Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, edited with David L. Ransel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930, edited with Mark von Hagen and Anatolyi Remnev (2007).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jenna Ng, "The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Screens are ubiquitous today. Yet contemporary screen media eliminate the presence of the screen and diminish the visibility of its boundaries. As the image becomes indistinguishable from the viewer’s surroundings, this unsettling prompts re.examination of how screen boundaries demarcate.

Through readings of three media forms – Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections – The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (University of Amsterdam Press, 2021) by Dr. Jenna Ng develops new theories of the surfaces on and spaces in which images are displayed. Interrogating contemporary contestations of reality against illusion, this open-access book argues that the disappearance of difference reflects shifted conditions of actuality and virtuality in understanding the human condition. These shifts further connect to the current state of politics by way of their distorted truth values, corrupted terms of information, and internalizations of difference.

The Post.Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections thus thinks anew the image’s borders and delineations, evoking the screen boundary as an instrumentation of today’s intense virtualizations which do not tell the truth. In the process, a new imagination for images emerges for a gluttony of the virtual; for new conceptualizations of object and representation, materiality and energies, media and histories, real and unreal; for new understandings of appearances, dis-appearances, replacement and re.placement – the post-screen.

This book is available open access here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Lehasa Moloi, "Developing Africa?: New Horizons with Afrocentricity" (Anthem Press, 2024)

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Developing Africa? New Horizons with Afrocentricity (Anthem Press, 2024) is written for those who are interested in theoretical debates as they relate to the field of Development Studies. It is aimed at academics and all those who work in the field of development, politicians, policy-makers and civil servants who need to familiarize themselves with key historical development debates, especially those relevant to Africa. The book takes an Afrocentric intellectual standpoint, grounded in the theory of Afrocentricity, in its interrogation of the idea and processes of development in Africa. It also adopts an historical approach in its interrogation of the idea of African development as a by-product of political deliberations. This book is about how the discourse of development as a field of study needs to be re-oriented towards African-based epistemologies to dismantle coloniality, in opposition to the historical embeddedness of development discourse in Eurocentrism.

This book contests the limitation of the modern African understanding of Africa’s journey with development to the period of the aftermath of World War II, to be specific, to President Harry S. Truman’s 1949 Point Four programme. Instead, the book argues that, that journey should be understood holistically. By this, I mean that Africa’s engagement with development did not begin with the politics of the Euro-North American political bloc – the story of African development must take into consideration Africa’s classical civilization, namely, the Nile Valley civilization and its contributions to human civilization. Such an approach provides a more holistic interrogation and casts light on how Africa’s history of greatness continues to be an inspiration even in modern times. Such an approach rejects the many reductionist lies and half-truths that undergird the modernist paradigm which seeks to portray African people as dependent beneficiaries of the colonial Euro-modernity framework. This framework has undermined the humanity of non-Western people in general, and Africans in particular. The book pursues the tradition of decolonial epistemic reflections grounded on Afrocentricity as its theoretical thrust to oppose discourses that are riddled with a racist agenda towards those in the Global South, especially in Africa to enable endogeneity. In the spirit of the pursuit for cognitive justice in the 21st century, this book argues that the discourse of development must be decolonized from hegemonic Eurocentric propaganda and needs to be framed from the viewpoint of those who have been seen as being on the receiving end, those projected as “backwards” from a Eurocentric perspective.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Seth Zuiho Segall, "The House We Live in: Virtue, Wisdom, and Pluralism" (Equinox, 2023)

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The values of liberalism, pluralism, and democratic governance are under sustained attack from right-wing Christian fundamentalists, white ethnonationalists, and economic populists. At the same time, liberal democracies are failing at cultivating and transmitting the values, wisdom, and virtues that are the prerequisites for individual and collective flourishing. They seem increasingly unable to negotiate diverse visions of the good life rooted in regional, ethnic, racial, religious, generational, and socioeconomic differences.

Addressing these problems effectively requires a deeper understanding of human flourishing and the wisdom and virtues that make it possible. Seth Zuiho Segall's book The House We Live in: Virtue, Wisdom, and Pluralism (Equinox, 2023) takes up this challenge, exploring the commonalities underlying three classical approaches to virtue ethics—Aristotelean, Buddhist, and Confucian—to develop a flourishing-based ethics. The book examines the moral and intellectual virtues that promote flourishing, the diversity of ways in which we may flourish, and the factors all flourishing lives share. It shows how a flourishing-based ethics can serve as a corrective to the historical Western over-emphasis on individualism at the expense of community. Finally, it addresses key issues in domestic and foreign policy and the difficulties in talking to each other across the political divide. The book is a reaffirmation of pluralism, the liberal democratic tradition, and the necessity of a pragmatic approach to living together despite seemingly incommensurable differences.

Jack Petranker is Senior Teacher at the Center for Creative Inquiry, where he leads retreats and workshops, and the Director of the Mangalam Buddhist Research Center. He holds degrees in law and political theory, and has served as Dean of the Tibetan Nyingma Institute.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nick Romeo, "The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy" (PublicAffairs, 2024)

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Winners Take All meets Nickel and Dimed: a provocative debunking of accepted wisdom, providing the pathway to a sustainable, survivable economy.

Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sabina Andron, "Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City" (Routledge, 2024)

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Sabina Andron's book Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City (Routledge, 2024) focuses on urban surfaces, on exploring their authorship and management, and on their role in struggles for the right to the city.

Graffiti, pristine walls, advertising posters, and municipal signage all compete on city surfaces to establish and imprint their values on our environments. It is the first time that the surfacescapes of our cities are granted the entire attention of a book as material, visual, and legal territories. The book includes a critical history of graffiti and street art as contested surface discourses and argues for surfaces as sites of resistance against private property, neoliberal creativity, and the imposition of urban order. It also proposes a seven-point manual for a semiotics of urban surfaces, laying the ground for a new discipline: surface studies.

Page after page and layer after layer, surfaces become porous and political and emerge as key spatial conditions for rethinking and re-practicing urban dwelling and spatial justice. They become what the author terms the surface commons.

The book will appeal to a wide readership across the disciplines of urban studies, architectural theory and design, graffiti, street art and public art, criminology, semiotics, visual culture, and urban and legal geography. It will also serve as a tool for city scholars, policy makers, artists, and vandals to disrupt existing imaginaries of order, justice, and visibility in cities.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Chrystin Ondersma, "Dignity Not Debt: An Abolitionist Approach to Economic Justice" (U California Press, 2024)

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

American households have a debt problem. The problem is not, as often claimed, that Americans recklessly take on too much debt. The problem is that US debt policies have no basis in reality. Weaving together the histories and trends of US debt policy with her own family story, Chrystin Ondersma debunks the myths that have long governed debt policy, like the belief that debt leads to prosperity or the claim that bad debt is the result of bad choices, both of which nest in the overarching myth of a free market unhindered by government interference and accessible to all.

In Dignity Not Debt: An Abolitionist Approach to Economic Justice (U California Press, 2024), Ondersma offers a compelling, flexible, and reality-based taxonomy rooted in the internationally recognized principle of human dignity. Ondersma's new categories of debt--grounded in abolitionist principles--revolutionize how policymakers are able to think about debt, which will in turn revolutionize the American debt landscape itself.

Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ismar Volić, "Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

What's the best way to determine what most voters want when multiple candidates are running? What's the fairest way to allocate legislative seats to different constituencies? What's the least distorted way to draw voting districts? Not the way we do things now. Democracy is mathematical to its very foundations. Yet most of the methods in use are a historical grab bag of the shortsighted, the cynical, the innumerate, and the outright discriminatory. Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation (Princeton UP, 2024) sheds new light on our electoral systems, revealing how a deeper understanding of their mathematics is the key to creating civic infrastructure that works for everyone.

In this timely guide, Ismar Volic empowers us to use mathematical thinking as an objective, nonpartisan framework that rises above the noise and rancor of today's divided public square. Examining our representative democracy using powerful clarifying concepts, Volic shows why our current voting system stifles political diversity, why the size of the House of Representatives contributes to its paralysis, why gerrymandering is a sinister instrument that entrenches partisanship and disenfranchisement, why the Electoral College must be rethought, and what can work better and why. Volic also discusses the legal and constitutional practicalities involved and proposes a road map for repairing the mathematical structures that undergird representative government.

Making Democracy Count gives us the concrete knowledge and the confidence to advocate for a more just, equitable, and inclusive democracy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jon Paul Sydnor and Anthony J. Watson, "Nondualism: An Interreligious Exploration" (Lexington Books, 2023)

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The time has come for nondualism. As a fundamentally unifying concept, nondualism may seem out of place in an age of rising nationalism and bitter deglobalization, but our current debates over tribalism and universalism all grant nondualism an informative relevance. Nondualism rejects both separation and identity, thereby encouraging unity-in-difference. Yet “nondualism” as a word occupies a large semantic field. Nondual theists advocate the unity of humankind and God, while nondual atheists advocate the inseparability of all persons, without reference to a divinity. Ecological nondualism asserts that we are in nature and nature is in us, while monistic nondualists assert that only God exists and all difference is illusion.

Edited by Jon Paul Sydnor and Anthony Watson, and guided by scholars from different religions and specializations, Nondualism: An Interreligious Exploration (Lexington Books, 2023) explores the semantic field that nondualism occupies. The collection elicits the expansive potential of the concept, clarifies agreement and disagreement, and considers current applications. In every case, nondualism is universal in its relevance yet always distinctive in its contribution.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ankhi Mukherjee and Ato Quayson, "Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

George Floyd's death on May 25th 2020 marked a watershed in reactions to anti-Black racism in the United States and elsewhere. Intense demonstrations around the world followed. Within literary studies, the demonstrations accelerated the scrutiny of the literary curriculum, the need to diversify the curriculum, and the need to incorporate more Black writers.

Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum (Cambridge UP, 2023), jointly edited by Professor Ankhi Mukherjee and Professor Ato Quayson, is a major collection that aims to address these issues from a global perspective. An international team of leading scholars illustrate the necessity and advantages of reform from specific decolonial perspectives, with evidence-based arguments from classroom contexts, as well as establishing new critical agendas. The significance of Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum lies in the complete overhaul it proposes for the study of English literature. It reconnects English studies, the humanities, and the modern, international university to issues of racial and social justice.

Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Daniel Peris, "The Ownership Dividend: The Coming Paradigm Shift in the U.S. Stock Market" (Routledge, 2024)

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

We are on the verge of a major paradigm shift for investors in the U.S. stock market. Dividend-focused stock investing has been receding in popularity for more than three decades in the U.S.; once the dominant investment style, it is now a boutique approach. That is about to change.

Daniel Peris' book The Ownership Dividend: The Coming Paradigm Shift in the U.S. Stock Market (Routledge, 2024) explains how and why the stock market drifted away from a mostly cash-based returns system to one almost completely driven by near-term share price movements. It details why the exceptional forces behind that shift―notably the 40-year drop in interest rates and the rise of buybacks―are now substantially exhausted. As a result, the U.S. market is poised for a return to the more typical business-like relationships observed in the private sector and in other mature markets around the world. While many market participants have profited from and become used to the way things have been in recent decades, savvy individual investors, financial advisors, and even institutional portfolio managers will want to position themselves to benefit from the reversion to cash-based investment relationships in the years ahead.

This is a must-read book for financial advisors, institutional consultants, as well as engaged individual investors.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His "History and Investing" blog and "Keep Calm & Carry On Investing" podcast are here.

John Emrich has worked for decades in corporate finance, investment management, and corporate strategy. He is an independent director on 9 mutual fund boards. Mr. Emrich has a podcast about the investment advisory industry called Kick the Dogma. Email: john@ktdpod.com. LinkedIn.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of Ireland: Kevin Meagher on Why a United Ireland is Inevitable

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In A United Ireland: Why Unification in Inevitable and How It Will Come About (Biteback Publishing, 2017), Kevin Meagher argues that a reasoned, pragmatic discussion about the most basic questions regarding Britain's relationship with its nearest neighbour is now long overdue, and questions that have remained unasked, and perhaps unthought, must now be answered. Indeed, in the light of Brexit and a highly probable second independence referendum in Scotland, the reunification of Ireland is not a question of if, but when and how.

Listen to Meagher explain to Owen Bennett Jones why he thinks a united Ireland is inevitable and how he thinks it will happen.

Kevin Meagher was a Special Adviser to former Labour Northern Ireland Secretary Shaun Woodward. He is the associate editor of the Labour Uncut blog and frequently writes about Irish politics for the New Statesman.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Paul Gowder, "The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Governments and consumers expect internet platform companies to regulate their users to prevent fraud, stop misinformation, and avoid violence. Yet, so far, they've failed to do so. The inability of platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon to govern their users has led to stolen elections, refused vaccines, counterfeit N95s in a pandemic, and even genocide. Such failures stem from these companies' inability to manage the complexity of their userbases, products, and their own incentives under the eyes of internal and external constituencies.

In The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms (Cambridge UP, 2023), Paul Gowder argues that countries should adapt the institutional tools developed in political science for platform governance to democratize major platforms. Democratic institutions allow knowledgeable actors to freely share and apply their understanding of the problems they face while leaders more readily recruit third parties to help manage their decision-making capacity.

This book is also available open access on Cambridge Core.

Paul Gowder is Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Research and Intellectual Life at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law and a Founding Fellow of the Integrity Institute. He is the author of The Rule of Law in the Real World and The Rule of Law in the United States: An Unfinished Project of Black Liberation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Can A.I. Mean?

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Listen to Episode No.4 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is whether A.I. can mean.

The short answer is yes, A.I. can mean... whatever we make it mean.

For instance, ChatGPT does has access to text on certain kinds of subject matter, like, for example, the assembly of explosives or specifications on suicide. This kind of stuff is on the web, so ChatGPT has “read it” these subjects into its corpus. However, human programmers have applied filters telling the A.I. not to speak about these things. Nonetheless, you may be able to get to what it “thinks” about these things with some clever prompts, called “jailbreaks” in the hacker trade.

But does the A.I. really think, as we humans would associate with the act of thinking? Not really, because an A.I. like ChatGPT does not think about bombs or self-destruction. It just has words about these subjects which it doesn’t itself “understand.” And on top of that, its human-programmer masters have told it not to repeat them.

But whose purpose is meant to be served here, the A.I.'s or our own? In our discussion in this instalment of All We Mean, we argue, of course, for the A.I. serving the purposes of us humans. But there the questions immediately arises, which of us humans will be served? It may be that only the big stakeholders in the large Internet companies get served, and who knows what purposes they have. Perhaps they're quite content to see A.I. create the illusion of fact and consciousness, if for no other reason than to increase profits.

We, on the opposite side of that, say that the technology has tremendous potential for everyone, if used in everyone's interests. For example, people who want to learn can use A.I. technologies to improve their own performance, just as people who want to discover can use A.I. technologies to communicate their findings more effectively. These are the sorts of purpose we believe A.I. can be used to accomplish, by anyone, for everyone. But, we wonder, will purposes such as these also count when the technology rests firmly in the hands of the very few, because what if they don't really care what the rest of us want?

Read Bill's and Mary's multimodal grammar of A.I.

And read their work on using A.I. in education.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John Quiggin, "Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Trying to follow the key macroeconomic debates that are swirling around DC, CNBC, the WSJ and the NYT? If you are but don't want to go back to graduate school or re-open your college macroeconomics textbook, John Quiggin has a solution. His Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly (Princeton University Press, 2019) achieves several goals. First, it frames the current debates, providing a concise, well-written history of macroeconomics and the key twists and turns in economic policy that have brought us to our current state of (general) disagreement on economic policy. Second, he structures his view of macroeconomics as a rebuttal to a 1946 book by Henry Hazlitt in 1946 called Economics in One Lesson. Seventy years later, Quiggin counters Hazlitt's view that markets are "correct," in that their prices accurately reflect opportunity costs for buyers and sellers. Quiggin's second lesson highlights the externalities and factors that distort those opportunity costs and lead to suboptimal outcomes such as extended unemployment, excessive income inequality, and the seemingly intractable problem (from an economics perspective) of pollution. In the final portion of his book, Quiggin argues what policies he thinks would make markets work better by generating a more accurate understanding of opportunity costs. To some, his prescriptions will look like the program of the Left. The great irony is that his goal is to make markets function better, not rid us of them. Whether you agree with his prescriptions are not, this is a very interesting book and a great way for non-economists to get up to speed on current debates and policy issues without having to do a single test for statistical significance or worry about heteroscedasticity.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Krista K. Thomason, "Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

How could a good life include one with anger, or jealousy, or spite? In Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good (Oxford UP, 2023), Krista Thomason flips the script on popular ways of dealing with our emotions, including neo-Stoicism, mindfulness, and even the prosperity gospel. She makes the case that we should get rid of the double standard we have towards "good" and "bad" emotions, and that we should not aim to be emotional saints. Instead, because "bad" emotions are an essential part of our attachments to our selves, they help us discover what we care about. Thomason, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Swarthmore College, guides the reader through philosophical traditions regarding the relation of emotion to reason and the various approaches thinkers have come up with to deal with our "bad" emotions.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Melanie Joy, "How to End Injustice Everywhere" (Lantern, 2023)

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this eye-opening and compelling work, psychologist Melanie Joy reveals the common denominator driving all forms of injustice. The mentality that drives us to oppress and abuse humans is the same mentality that drives us to oppress and abuse nonhumans and the environment, as well as those in our own groups working for justice.

How to End Injustice Everywhere: Understanding the Common Denominator Driving All Injustices, to Create a Better World for Humans, Animals, and the Planet (Lantern Publishing & Media, 2023) offers a fascinating examination of the psychology and structure of unjust systems and behaviors. It also offers practical tools to help raise awareness of these systems and dynamics, reduce infighting, and build more resilient and impactful justice movements.

Melanie Joy, PhD, is a Harvard-educated psychologist, celebrated speaker, and the author of seven books, including the bestselling Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows; and Getting Relationships Right: How to Build Resilience and Thrive in Life, Love, and Work. Melanie’s work has been featured in major media outlets around the world, and she has received a number of awards, including the Ahimsa Award – previously given to the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela – for her work on global nonviolence. Melanie has given talks and trainings in over 50 countries, and she is also the founding president of the international NGO Beyond Carnism.

Kyle Johannsen is a Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matthew O. Jackson, "The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors" (Vintage, 2019)

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Social networks existed and shaped our lives long before Silicon Valley startups made them virtual. For over two decades economist Matthew O. Jackson, a professor at Stanford University, has studied how the shape of networks and our positions within them can affect us. In this interview, he explains how network structures can create poverty traps, exacerbate financial crises, and contribute to political polarization. He also explains how a new awareness of the role of networks has been used to improve financial regulation, promote public health knowledge, and guide vaccination strategy.

Jackson also discusses how he first began to study networks, previously neglected by economists, and how economists can both learn from and contribute to the exciting cross-disciplinary dialogue among researchers from sociology, math, physics, and other fields.

Professor Jackson's website provides free access to the chapter on contagion, of particular interest in this time of pandemic. For those who want to learn even more than the book can cover, he offers a free online course on the topic.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gary Shiffman, "The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Gary Shiffman’s book The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism (Cambridge UP, 2020) serves as a fantastic introduction to anyone interested in thinking critically about terrorist, insurgency, and criminal groups of all sorts. Using case studies from multiple continents, ideological contexts, and political situations, Dr. Shiffman shows how the language and tools familiar to economists can assist policy makers and security personnel to combat rival ‘firms,’ as he classifies them. Arguing strongly against essentialist labels and stories about why these groups act the way that they do, Dr. Shiffman offers us an approach to understanding ‘illicit’ groups that would be recognizable to leaders of many ‘legitimate’ organizations.

Dr. Gary Shiffman is a Professor at Georgetown University, the CEO of two software companies, a former Naval Officer and Border Patrol leader, a former Fortune 200 executive, and an engaging writer. His is the author of one other book on the Economic Instruments of Security Policy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Martha C. Nussbaum, "Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility" (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum.

Animals are in trouble all over the world. Whether through the cruelties of the factory meat industry, poaching and game hunting, habitat destruction, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love, animals suffer injustice and horrors at our hands every day. The world needs an ethical awakening, a consciousness-raising movement of international proportions.

In Justice for Animals (Simon & Schuster, 2023), one of the world’s most influential philosophers and humanists Martha C. Nussbaum provides a revolutionary approach to animal rights, ethics, and law. From dolphins to crows, elephants to octopuses, Nussbaum examines the entire animal kingdom, showcasing the lives of animals with wonder, awe, and compassion to understand how we can create a world in which human beings are truly friends of animals, not exploiters or users. All animals should have a shot at flourishing in their own way. Humans have a collective duty to face and solve animal harm. An urgent call to action and a manual for change, Nussbaum’s groundbreaking theory directs politics and law to help us meet our ethical responsibilities as no book has done before.

Martha C. Nussbaum is currently the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Department of Philosophy and the Law School.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matthew Gutmann, "Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short" (Basic Books, 2019)

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short (Basic Books, 2019), Matthew Gutmann examines how cultural expectations viewing men as violent and sex driven becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Dubious interpretations of the scientific study of the effects of testosterone, comparisons to the animal kingdom and the persistence of sex segregation reinforces ideas about what is natural. The idea that masculinity is the result of biology allows the “boys will be boys” excuse and reinforces patriarchal values harmful to women and setting false limits for male behavior. Presenting a cross-cultural survey Gutmann demonstrates how the variations across culture from Mexico to China contradict notions of a fixed masculinity. Seeing masculinity as a product of culture and malleable allows us to reimagine fathering, who is capable of leadership and offers new possibilities for how men and women will relate to each other.

Matthew Gutmann is professor of anthropology at Brown University.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the intellectual history of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Adam Mestyan, "Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2023), Adam Mestyan (Duke University) argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism. Rather, they spurred from the process of “recycling empire.” Mestyan shows that in the post–WWI Middle East, Allied Powers officials and ex-Ottoman patricians collaborated to remake imperial institutions, recycling earlier Ottoman uses of genealogy and religion in the creation of new polities, with the exception of colonized Palestine. The polities, he contends, should be understood not in terms of colonies and nation states but as subordinated sovereign local states—localized regimes of religious, ethnic, and dynastic sources of imperial authority.

Meanwhile, governance without sovereignty became the new form of Western domination. Drawing on hitherto unused Ottoman, French, Syrian, and Saudi archival sources, Mestyan explores ideas and practices of creating composite polities in the interwar Middle East and sheds light on local agency in the making of the forgotten Kingdom of the Hijaz, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, the first Muslim republic. Mestyan also considers the adjustment of imperial Islam to a world without a Muslim empire, discussing the post-Ottoman Egyptian monarchy and the intertwined making of Saudi Arabia and the State of Syria in the 1920s and 1930s. Modern Arab Kingship's innovative analysis underscores how an empire-based theory of the modern political order can help refine our understanding of political dynamics throughout the twentieth century and down to the turbulent present day.

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Kevin Hood Gary, "Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Boredom is an enduring problem. In response, schools often do one or both of the following: first, they endorse what novelist Walker Percy describes as a 'boredom avoidance scheme,' adopting new initiative after new initiative in the hope that boredom can be outrun altogether, or second, they compel students to accept boring situations as an inevitable part of life. Both strategies avoid serious reflection on this universal and troubling state of mind.

In Why Boredom Matters (Cambridge UP, 2022)k, Gary argues that schools should educate students on how to engage with boredom productively. Rather than being conditioned to avoid or blame boredom on something or someone else, students need to be given tools for dealing with their boredom. These tools provide them with internal resources that equip them to find worthwhile activities and practices to transform boredom into a more productive state of mind. This book addresses the ways students might gain these skills.

From reviews:

‘Kevin Gary’s important and insightful book challenges readers to consider the moral and practical dimensions of boredom so that we might educate for lives of meaning. He gathers a range of sources from across time, traditions, and disciplines, and he puts these in conversation with our everyday experiences of boredom in the modern world, while also exploring ways that boredom has been written about and experienced in the past. It is an excellent book, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.’--Jeff Frank

‘Why Boredom Matters is one of those delightful books in which the author seamlessly draws from thinkers from across multiple disciplines such as education, theology, philosophy, literature, and pop culture. Søren Kierkegaard, Walker Percy, David Wallace Foster, Leo Tolstoy, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Dewey, Albert Bormann, Simone Weil, Josef Pieper, St. Benedict, Groundhog Day, and The Karate Kid all contribute to a richer understanding of boredom.’-- Elizabeth Amato

Adrian Guiu holds a PhD in History of Christianity from the University of Chicago and teaches at Wright College in Chicago.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David Courtwright, "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

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, vice, and capitalism. His new book is called The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (Harvard University Press, 2019). During our discussion, Courtwright walks us through the emergence of the worldwide commodification of vice and shares his views on "limbic capitalism," the network of competitive businesses targeting the brain pathways responsible for feeling, motivation, and long-term memory. The book is equally interesting and disturbing. And Courtwright offers timely recommendations about how we can understand and address the Age of Addiction. Coming from one of the world's leading experts on the history of drugs and addiction, this important work raises stimulating and sobering questions about consumption and free will.

Courtwright is the author of Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2001) as well as Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Harvard University Press, 1982).

Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ben Jacobsen and David Beer, "Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory: Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past" (Bristol UP, 2023)

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Social media platforms hold vast amounts of biographical data about our lives. They repackage our past content as ‘memories’ and deliver them back to us. But how does that change the way we remember?

Drawing on original qualitative research as well as industry documents and reports, Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory: Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past (Bristol University Press, 2021) by Dr. Ben Jacobsen and Dr. David Beer critically explores the process behind this new form of memory making. In asking how social media are beginning to change the way we remember, it will be essential reading for scholars and students who are interested in understanding the algorithmically defined spaces of our lives.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

André Jansson, "Rethinking Communication Geographies: Geomedia, Digital Logistics and the Human Condition" (Edward Elgar, 2022)

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

How are geographies of communication changing with contemporary digital media and data infrastructure? What is ‘geomedia’ and ‘transmedia’? Where are the possibilities for human agency to emerge in the increasingly digitally mediated world? André Jansson, Professor at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden, introduces his latest book, Rethinking Communication Geographies: Geomedia, Digital Logistics and the Human Condition (Edward Elgar, 2022).

In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, André speaks about how he uses a humanistic and interdisciplinary approach to the study of communication geographies, introducing the framework for understanding ‘geomedia’ as an environmental regime that shapes human subjectivity. The book explores the human condition under digital capitalism, depicting an environment in which digital logistics have taken centre stage in day-to-day life. It argues that human activities are accommodated to sustain the circulation of digital data.

André Jansson is director of the Centre for Geomedia Studies. His research is oriented towards questions of media use, identity and power from an interdisciplinary perspective. His work links various theoretical strands from social phenomenology, human geography and sociology of culture. A particular interest regards the relationship between mediatization processes and the production of social space. He is currently leading the project Hot Desks in Cool Places: Coworking Spaces as Post-Digital Industry and Movement (with Karin Fast), which studies the ‘future of work’ and struggles over this future in relation to so-called coworking spaces in urban settings.

Joanne Kuai is a PhD Candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, with a research project on Journalism as an Institution in the Age of AI. She is also an affiliated PhD student with the Graduate School of Asian Studies at Lund University and with the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research interests center around data and AI for media, computational journalism, and the social implications of automation and algorithms. Find her on LinkedIn or on X @JoanneKuai.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David M. Freidenreich, "Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy" (U California Press, 2023)

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Uncovering the hidden history of Islamophobia and its surprising connections to the long-standing hatred of Jews.

Hatred of Jews and hatred of Muslims have been intertwined in Christian thought since the rise of Islam. In Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy (U California Press, 2023), David M. Freidenreich explores the history of this complex, perplexing, and emotionally fraught phenomenon. He makes the compelling case that, then and now, hate-mongers target "them" in an effort to define "us."

Analyzing anti-Muslim sentiment in texts and images produced across Europe and the Middle East over a thousand years, the author shows how Christians intentionally distorted reality by alleging that Muslims are just like Jews. They did so not only to justify assaults against Muslims on theological grounds but also to motivate fellow believers to live as "good" Christians. The disdain premodern polemicists expressed for Islam and Judaism was never really about these religions. They sought to promote their own visions of Christianity―a dynamic that similarly animates portrayals of Muslims and Jews today.

David M. Freidenreich is Pulver Family Professor of Jewish Studies at Colby College and author of Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael W. Doyle, "Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War" (Liveright, 2023)

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Michael W. Doyle's book Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War (Liveright, 2023) offers an urgent examination of the world barreling toward a new Cold War.

By 1990, the first Cold War was ending. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Warsaw Pact was crumbling; following Russia’s lead, cries for democracy were being embraced by a young Chinese populace. The post–Cold War years were a time of immense hope and possibility. They heralded an opportunity for creative cooperation among nations, an end to ideological strife, perhaps even the beginning of a stable international order of liberal peace.

But the days of optimism are over.

As renowned international relations expert Michael Doyle makes hauntingly clear, we now face the devastating specter of a new Cold War, this time orbiting the trilateral axes of Russia, the United States, and China, and exacerbated by new weapons of cyber warfare and more insidious forms of propaganda.

Such a conflict at this phase in our global history would have catastrophic repercussions, Doyle argues, stymieing global collaboration efforts that are key to reversing climate change, preventing the next pandemic, and securing nuclear nonproliferation. The recent, devastating invasion of Ukraine is both an example and an augur of the costs that lay in wait.

However, there is hope.

Putin is not Stalin, Xi is not Mao, and no autocrat is a modern Hitler. There is also an unprecedented level of shared global interest in prosperity and protecting the planet from environmental disaster.

While it is unlikely that the United States, Russia, and China will ever establish a “warm peace,” there are significant, reasonable compromises between nations that can lead to a détente. While the future remains very much in doubt, the elegant set of accords and non-subversion pacts Doyle proposes in this book may very well save the world.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of moral dilemmas of US foreign relations and an adjunct professor of history at Salt Lake Community College. He is a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network and is currently working on a book about the reversal in US foreign policy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at apace24@slcc.edu or via andrewopace.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Philip Goff, "Why? The Purpose of the Universe" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Does the universe have a purpose? If it does, how is this connected to the meaningfulness that we seek in our lives? In Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2023), Philip Goff argues for cosmic purposivism, the idea that the universe does have a purpose – although this is not because there is an all-powerful God who provides it with one. Instead, Goff argues, fundamental physics provides us with reason to think it is probable there is a cosmic purpose – and, moreover, the best explanation of these reasons is to posit cosmopsychism: the idea that there are fundamental forms of consciousness such that the universe itself is a conscious mind. Goff, who is professor of philosophy at Durham University, argues that these claims are not as extravagant as they may initially seem, and that his view provides a way for understanding human purposes that lies between secular humanism and religious or spiritual perspectives.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of Predictions: A Discussion with Christopher E. Mason

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Predictive algorithms are changing the world – that is the claim of Christopher E. Mason who has co-authored (with Igor Tulchinsky) the book The Age of Prediction: Algorithms, AI, and the Shifting Shadows of Risk (MIT Press, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

This is the Best Statement of the Simulation Hypothesis We've Seen

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

It’s the UConn PopCast, and in this episode we discuss Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 movie World on a Wire, shown on West German television over two nights, and then lost for decades. When it was restored and re-released nearly 40 years later, the movie quickly gained acclaim as a lost masterwork of science fiction cinema.

We discuss the movie’s sophisticated and pioneering presentation of the simulation hypothesis, and its deep engagement with Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of simulacra and simulation.

We examine the deep influence of the movie on blockbusters like The Matrix and Inception, consider the Cold War context of its production, and ask where World on a Wire places in the pantheon of philosophically informed - and philosophically influential - cinema.

The UConn PopCast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

James A. Chamberlain, "Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work" (ILR Press, 2018)

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

This revolutionary book presents a new conception of community and the struggle against capitalism. In Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work (ILR Press, 2018), James A. Chamberlain argues that paid work and the civic duty to perform it substantially undermines freedom and justice. Chamberlain believes that to seize back our time and transform our society, we must abandon the deep-seated view that community is constructed by work, whether paid or not.

Chamberlain focuses on the regimes of flexibility and the unconditional basic income, arguing that while both offer prospects for greater freedom and justice, they also incur the risk of shoring up the work society rather than challenging it. To transform the work society, he shows that we must also reconfigure the place of paid work in our lives and rethink the meaning of community at a deeper level. Throughout, he speaks to a broad readership, and his focus on freedom and social justice will interest scholars and activists alike. Chamberlain offers a range of strategies that will allow us to uncouple our deepest human values from the notion that worth is generated only through labor.

James a Chamberlain is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Mississippi State University, where he specialize in political theory. Chamberlain engages with both ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ traditions of political philosophy, as well as relevant work in the social sciences and humanities. Building on the work we will discuss today his current and recent research focuses on migration and borders.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Simon Joyce, "LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

It has been decades since Michel Foucault urged us to rethink "the repressive hypothesis" and see new forms of sexual discourse as coming into being in the nineteenth century, yet the term "Victorian" still has largely negative connotations. LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for re-visiting the period's thinking about gender and sexual identity at a time when our queer alliances are fraying. We think of those whose primary self-definition is in terms of sexuality (lesbians, gay men, bisexuals) and those for whom it is gender identity (intersex and transgender people, genderqueers) as simultaneously in coalition and distinct from each other, on the assumption that gender and sexuality are independent aspects of self-identification. Re-examining how the Victorians considered such identity categories to have produced and shaped each other can ground a more durable basis for strengthening our present LGBTQ+ coalition.

LGBT Victorians draws on scholarship reconsidering the significance of sexology and efforts to retrospectively discover transgender people in historical archives, particularly in the gap between what the nineteenth century termed the sodomite and the hermaphrodite. It highlights a broad range of individuals (including Anne Lister, and the defendants in the "Fanny and Stella" trial of the 1870s), key thinkers and activists (including Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs and Edward Carpenter), and writers such as Walt Whitman and John Addington Symonds to map the complicated landscape of gender and sexuality in the Victorian period. In the process, it decenters Oscar Wilde and his imprisonment from our historical understanding of sexual and gender nonconformity.

Simon Joyce is Professor of English, College of William and Mary. He holds a BA and MA from the University of Sussex and a PhD from the University of Buffalo. He is a Professor of English at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where he teaches Victorian and modernist literature from Britain and Ireland and LGBTQI+ Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Too Much Communication?

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Listen to Episode No.2 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. We talk about TMC — Too Much Communication.

In the 2000s, people complained about the demand to know more stuff. Not today.

It's amazing if you stop to think — if you can find the peace to stop for anything — but such a short time ago, media were about information. Now it's just communicate — post, tweet, share, text, send, upload, access, retweet, like, promote, influence, watch, listen, follow... we do a lot of activity on that surface of our devices. Well, surface is what communication is. That's it. It’s, make available — that’s communicating. And whether there's too much of it or the wrong kind, one thing is for certain: There’s tons of it. Communication is spread everywhere. And what it's all about is not really the question. The pressing question right now is, What is it?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Samuel Clowes Huneke, "A Queer Theory of the State" (Floating Opera Press, 2023)

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Queer theory has often been hesitant to align itself with a politics of the state, approaching it with a negative or pragmatic framework. A Queer Theory of the State (Floating Opera Press, 2023) expands an earlier online essay from The Point by historian Samuel Huneke to offer a more optimistic perspective. Rather than eschew political engagement with democratic theorizing, Huneke asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answering this question, Huneke shows how the state is an integral component of a politics that seeks to subvert and undo the oppression of queer lives.

Lea Greenberg is an editor, translator, and scholar of German and Jewish studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ceri Houlbrook,"‘Ritual Litter' Redressed" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Ritual deposition is not an activity that many people in the Western world would consider themselves participants of. The enigmatic beliefs and magical thinking that led to the deposition of swords in watery places and votive statuettes in temples, for example, may feel irrelevant to the modern day.

However, Dr. Ceri Houlbrook shows in ‘Ritual Litter' Redressed (Cambridge University Press, 2023) that ritual deposition is a more widespread feature now than in the past, with folk assemblages – from roadside memorials and love-lock bridges, to wishing fountains and coin-trees – emerging prolifically worldwide. Despite these assemblages being as much the result of ritual activity as historically deposited objects, they are rarely given the same academic attention or heritage status. As well as exploring the nature of ritual deposition in the contemporary West, and the beliefs and symbolisms behind various assemblages, this Element explores the heritage of the modern-day deposit, promoting a renegotiation of the pejorative term 'ritual litter'.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Darwinian Accident or Divine Architect? (with Jay Richards)

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Jay Richards PhD, OP discusses the new book to which he contributed a chapter, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design (Sophia Institute Press, 2023), edited by Ann Gauger. We take on the insufficient explanations of Darwinian orthodoxy which insists that our world—from the vast cosmos to the also vast (in its complexity) genetic code in our cells.

At the end of this episode (at 55 minutes), we hear an update from Father Piotr Żelazko in Israel as we enter the second month of the Gaza War.

Here’s the book, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, edited by Ann Gauger (Sophia Institute Press, 2023)
Here’s Jay Richard’s webpage at the Heritage Foundation.
Here’s the debate between Jay Richards and Christopher Hitchens from 2008 at Stanford.
Father Piotr Żelazko on Almost Good Catholics, episode 71: Live from Israel: Catholics in the Holy Land Today.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Plantationocene

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of High Theory, Neil Safier talks with us about the Plantationocene, a geological epoch that traces the effects of climate change to the historical systems of human and nonhuman environmental exploitation known as plantation agriculture. It is another name for the world we currently inhabit.

In the episode, Neil describes how Donna Harraway and Anna Tsing invented the term Plantationocene in response to another recent term Anthropocene. Sources to check out include Donna Haraway’s essay, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationcene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” Environmental Humanities 6 no. 1 (2015): 159-165. doi: 10.1215/22011919-3615934, and Paul Crutzen, “The ‘Anthropocene’” Earth Systems Science in the Anthropocene ed. Eckhart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft (Springer, 2006) pp. 13-18. He references B.F. Skinner’s novel Walden Two (MacMillan, 1962) at the end of our conversation.

Neil Safier is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Brown University where he currently serves as Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies of the Watson Institute for International Affairs. He studies the history of science, agriculture, and other forms of knowledge-making in the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic world, focusing on the plantation cultures of the Caribbean and Brazil. He was recently the director of the John Carter Brown Library, at Brown University, and many years ago, when he was more optimistic about the current global epoch, he managed grants for the Sierra Club Foundation in San Francisco, California. He is the author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (U Chicago, 2008) and is cooking up two new projects, on the historical connections between natural science and plantation agriculture in the Amazon River basin and the global history of collecting.

The image for this week comes from Neil’s research on the history of plantation agriculture. This drawing of a plantation from Hispaniola (Saint-Domingue) was reproduced in José Mariano da Conceição Velozo's Fazendeiro do Brazil Tome III Part II (Lisbon, 1799), in the volume dedicated to coffee production.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Stefan Tanaka, "History without Chronology" (Lever Press, 2019)

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In this interview, we talk with Stefan Tanaka, professor emeritus of UCSD and a specialist in modern Japanese history. He is author of two books on modern Japan, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993) and New Times in Modern Japan (2004), and his most recent book is History Without Chronology (Lever Press, 2019) which we discuss here! The host, Sarah Kearns, was introduced to Tanaka's work at a Digital History and Theory Conference and became very interested in becoming a "mystic" of scholarly communications and how narrative and comic books could facilitate a different understanding of history and time. The 1884 project is here.

A bit about the book, which is available open access:

Although numerous disciplines recognize multiple ways of conceptualizing time, Stefan Tanaka argues that scholars still overwhelmingly operate on chronological and linear Newtonian or classical time that emerged during the Enlightenment. This short, approachable book implores the humanities and humanistic social sciences to actively embrace the richness of different times that are evident in non-modern societies and have become common in several scientific fields throughout the twentieth century. Tanaka first offers a history of chronology by showing how the social structures built on clocks and calendars gained material expression. Tanaka then proposes that we can move away from this chronology by considering how contemporary scientific understandings of time might be adapted to reconceive the present and pasts. This opens up a conversation that allows for the possibility of other ways to know about and re-present pasts. A multiplicity of times will help us broaden the historical horizon by embracing the heterogeneity of our lives and world via rethinking the complex interaction between stability, repetition, and change. This history without chronology also allows for incorporating the affordances of digital media.

Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) reads about scholarship, the sciences, and philosophy, and is likely drinking mushroom tea.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gary Tomlinson, "The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning" (Zone Books, 2023)

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

What is meaning? How does it arise? Where is it found in the world? In recent years, philosophers and scientists have answered these questions in different ways. Some see meaning as a uniquely human achievement, others extend it to trees, microbes, and even to the bonding of DNA and RNA molecules. In this groundbreaking book, Gary Tomlinson defines a middle path. Combining emergent thinking about evolution, new research on animal behaviors, and theories of information and signs, he tracks meaning far out into the animal world. At the same time he discerns limits to its scope and identifies innumerable life forms, including many animals and all other organisms, that make no meanings at all.

Tomlinson’s map of meaning starts from signs, the fundamental units of reference or aboutness. Where signs are at work they shape meaning-laden lifeways, offering possibilities for distinctive organism/niche interactions and sometimes leading to technology and culture. The emergence of meaning does not, however, monopolize complexity in the living world. Countless organisms generate awe-inspiring behavioral intricacies without meaning. The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning (Zone Books, 2023) offers a revaluation of both meaning and meaninglessness, uncovering a foundational difference in animal solutions to the hard problem of life.”

Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Peter Nelson, "Computer Games As Landscape Art" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Peter Nelson's book Computer Games As Landscape Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) proposes that computer games are the paradigmatic form of contemporary landscape and offers a synthesis of art history, geography, game studies and play. Like paint on canvas, the game engine is taken as the underlying medium, and using the Valve Source Engine as the primary case study, it analyses landscapes according to the technical, economic and cultural features this medium affords. It presents the single-player first-person shooter (Half-Life 2) as a Promethean safari, examines how the economics of gambling and product placement shaped the eSports landscapes of Counter-Strike and reveals how sandboxes such as Garry’s Mod visualise the radical landscape of Web 2.0. This book explores how our relationship to the environment is changing, how we express this through computer games and how we can move beyond examining artistic influences on games to examining how historical connections flow through games and the history of landscape images.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jeremy Howick, "The Power of Placebos: Unlocking Their Potential to Improve Health Care" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Should your doctor prescribe a placebo for you, instead of conventional medicine? And if she did, would it work? Is the double-blind placebo-controlled paradigm really the gold standard for medical research?

Placebos are the most widely used treatments in the history of medicine. Thousands of studies show that they can be effective and make us happier and healthier. Yet confusion about what placebos are and how to measure their effects prevents some doctors from using them to help patients. Meanwhile, damage caused by the nocebo effect—the negative effect of expecting something bad—is not widely recognized.

In The Power of Placebos: Unlocking Their Potential to Improve Health Care (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Jeremy Howick provides an interdisciplinary perspective on placebos and nocebos based on more than twenty years of research and data from over 300,000 patients. This book, the culmination of that research, offers practical ways for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to put placebo and nocebo research into practice to improve health outcomes.

In addition to providing an overview of placebos and nocebos and explaining how belief systems and context can create physiological effects in the body, Howick advocates for a number of controversial positions, including why it may be unethical to include placebos in most clinical trials in which there are already established therapies and why physicians should consider using placebos regularly in their practices. Howick also underscores the importance of the therapeutic effects of interactions between health care practitioners and patients, in the context of care. The Power of Placebos dispels the confusion surrounding placebos and paves the way for doctors to help patients by enhancing placebo effects and avoiding the pitfalls of nocebos.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, "Why Men?: A Human History of Violence and Inequality" (Hurst, 2023)

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How did humans, a species that evolved to be cooperative and egalitarian, develop societies of enforced inequality? Why did our ancestors create patriarchal power and warfare? Did it have to be this way? These are some of the key questions that Dr. Nancy Lindisfarne and Dr. Jonathan Neale grapple with in Why Men? A Human History of Violence and Inequality (Hurst, 2023).

Elites have always called hierarchy and violence unavoidable facts of human nature. Evolution, they claim, has caused men to fight, and people—starting with men and women—to have separate, unequal roles. But that is bad science.

Why Men? tells a smarter story of humanity, from early behaviours to contemporary cultures. From bonobo sex and prehistoric childcare to human sacrifice, Joan of Arc, Darwinism and Abu Ghraib, this fascinating, fun and important book reveals that humans adapted to live equally, yet the earliest class societies suppressed this with invented ideas of difference. Ever since, these distortions have caused female, queer and minority suffering. But our deeply human instincts towards equality have endured.

This book is not about what men and women are or do. It’s about the privileges humans claim, how they rationalise them, and how we unpick those ideas about our roots. It will change how you see injustice, violence and even yourself.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Daniele Lorenzini, "The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault’s history of truth.

Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics of truth-telling precisely in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today.

Dr. Richard Grijalva is an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) at the University of Texas at Austin.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Neil Cohn, "Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Drawings and sequential images are so pervasive in contemporary society that we may take their understanding for granted. But how transparent are they really, and how universally are they understood? Combining recent advances from linguistics, cognitive science, and clinical psychology, Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension (Bloomsbury, 2020) argues that visual narratives involve greater complexity and require a lot more decoding than widely thought. Although increasingly used beyond the sphere of entertainment as materials in humanitarian, educational, and experimental contexts, Neil Cohn demonstrates that their universal comprehension cannot be assumed. Instead, understanding a visual language requires a fluency that is contingent on exposure and practice with a graphic system. Bringing together a rich but scattered literature on how people comprehend, and learn to comprehend, a sequence of images, this book coalesces research from a diverse range of fields into a broader interdisciplinary view of visual narrative to ask: Who Understands Comics?

In this interview, Dr. Cohn discusses some common misconceptions about comics, the ability to read and make comics, and how drawings are at the core of so many creations.

Who Understands Comics? was Nominated for the 2021 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work

Dr. Niel Cohn is currently an Associate Professor at the Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, Neil Cohn is an American cognitive scientist best known for his pioneering research on the overlap in cognition between graphic communication and language. His books, The Visual Language of Comics (2013) and the 2021 Eisner-nominated Who Understands Comics? (2020), establish a foundation for the scientific study of comics' structure.

Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jeremy Nobel, "Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection" (Avery Publishing Group, 2023)

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Even before the Covid pandemic began in 2020, chronic loneliness was a private experience of profound anguish that had become a public health crisis. Since then it has reached new heights. Loneliness assumes many forms, from enduring physical isolation to feeling rejected because of difference, and it can have devastating consequences for our physical and mental health. Jeremy Nobel founded Project UnLonely to bring creativity as well as social and medical strategies to address this societal problem.

In his book Project UnLonely: Healing our Crisis of Disconnection (Avery, 2023), Dr. Nobel unpacks our personal and national experiences of loneliness to discover its roots and to show how we can take steps to find comfort and connection. Dr. Nobel brings together many voices, from pioneering researchers, to leaders in business, education, the arts, and healthcare, to lonely people of every age, background, and circumstance. He discovers that the pandemic isolated us in ways that were not only physical, and that, at its core, a true sense of loneliness results from a disconnection to the self. He clarifies how meaningful reconnection can be nourished and sustained. And he reveals that an important component of the healing process is engaging in creativity, a powerful opportunity he shows us can be accessed by all.

Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical and science reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alexandre Baril, "Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide" (Temple UP, 2023)

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Note: This episode contains a discussion of suicide. A list of resources is available below.

In Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide (Temple UP, 2023), Alexandre Baril argues that suicidal people are oppressed by what he calls structural suicidism, a hidden oppression that, until now, has been unnamed and under-theorized. Each year, suicidism and its preventionist script and strategies reproduce violence and cause additional harm and death among suicidal people through forms of criminalization, incarceration, discrimination, stigmatization, and pathologization. This is particularly true for marginalized groups experiencing multiple oppressions, including queer, trans, disabled, or Mad people.

Undoing Suicidism questions the belief that the best way to help suicidal people is through the logic of prevention. Alexandre Baril presents the thought-provoking argument that supporting assisted suicide for suicidal people could better prevent unnecessary deaths. Offering a new queercrip model of (assisted) suicide, he invites us to imagine what could happen if we started thinking about (assisted) suicide from an anti-suicidist and intersectional framework. Baril provides a radical reconceptualization of (assisted) suicide and invaluable reflections for academics, activists, practitioners, and policymakers.

An open access edition of Undoing Suicidism, made available by the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa, is available here.

Alexandre Baril (abaril@uOttawa.ca) is Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa. His work is situated at the crossroads of gender, queer, trans, disability/crip/Mad studies, critical gerontology and critical suicidology. His commitment to equity has earned him awards for his involvement in queer, trans and disabled communities, including the Canadian Disability Studies Association Tanis Doe Francophone Award, and the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion President’s Award at the University of Ottawa. A prolific author who won the Young Researcher Award from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa (2023), he has given over 200 presentations at the international level and has over 80 publications.

Resources:

SAFE HOTLINES and ONLINE SUPPORT GROUPS:

Trans LifeLine (trans/non-binary): 1-877-330-6366 (Canada) and 1-877-565-8860 (USA)
Autisme Soutien: Online support for autistic people (French Canada)
BlackLine (BIPOC): 1-800-604-5841 (USA)

REGULAR HOTLINES (might trace your call and contact emergency services):

Talk Suicide Canada: 1-833-456-4566
Suicide.ca (Québec): 1-866-APPELLE
The Hope for Wellness Helpline (Indigenous people in Canada): 1-855-242-3310
The Samaritains (USA): 1-212-673-3000

A full transcript of the interview is available for accessibility.

Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of Cultural Anthropology, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Religious Studies. Clayton is also a host for the Un/Livable Cultures podcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mutual Aid and the Anarchist Radical Imagination

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

This episode of Darts and Letters examines the theory and practice of anti-statist organizing.

There’s a story you can tell about the post-Occupy left gravitating towards a more state-oriented kind of politics, exemplified by the enthusiasm around Bernie Sanders, The Squad, and others. However, this misses autonomous and anarchist-inflected (and sometimes, explicitly anarchist) social movements that have brought enormous energy, and enormous change–from the movement for black lives, to organizing for Indigenous sovereignty, and so much more. In this episode, we look at the Kurdish movement, and mutual aid experiments across North America.

First, we look at the work of the late libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin. Bookchin broke with Marxism, and later anarchism, and eventually developed an idiosyncratic ecological and revolutionary theory that said radical democracy could be achieved at the municipal level. This Vermont-based theorist has been enormously influential, including in an area formerly known as Rojava. There, the Kurdish people are making these ideas their own, and developing a radical feminist democracy–while fighting to survive. We speak with Elif Genc about these ideas, and about how the Kurdish diaspora implements them within Canada.

Next, what is mutual aid? Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factory of Evolution (1902) examines how cooperation and reciprocity are core to nature. To anarchists, this should be generalized to radical political program, and a radically new way of living. Darts and Letters producer Marc Apollonio speaks to Payton McDonald about how the theory and practice of mutual aid drives many social movements across North America. Payton is co-directing a four-part documentary series called the Elements of Mutual Aid: Experiments Towards Liberation.

Finally, how do social movement scholars understand (or misunderstand) autonomous social movements? There’s a tendency to dismiss movements that do not make clear tangible demands, and deliver pragmatic policy victories (see: Occupy). However, Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish say that this misses something key to radical social movements: their radical imagination. These movements do not want to just improve this system, they want to imagine, and create (or prefigure), a different system. We discuss their book the Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity, the blind spots of social movement theory, and whether there might be a new style of organizing emerging that is somewhere between the the statist and the anti-statist.

This episode received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It’s part of our mini-series that we are producing which looks at the radical imagination, in all its hopeful and its sometimes troubling manifestations. The scholarly leads are Professors Alex Khasnabish at Mount Saint Vincent University and Max Haiven at Lakehead University. They are providing research support and consulting to this series. For a full list of credits of Cited Media staff, visit our about page.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of Superstates: A Discussion with Alasdair Roberts

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Empires are supposed to be a thing of the past but very big countries with global reach are becoming more entrenched. By 2050, almost 40 per cent of the world’s population will live in just four polities: India, China, the US and the EU. So, in what respects are these entities imperial and is there a future for small states? Listen to Owen Bennett-Jones in conversation with Alasdair Roberts, author of Superstates: Empires of the 21st Century (Polity Press, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Swati Srivastava, "Hybrid Sovereignty in World Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The idea of “hybrid sovereignty” describes overlapping relations between public and private actors in important areas of global power, such as contractors fighting international wars, corporations regulating global markets, or governments collaborating with nongovernmental entities to influence foreign elections.

Hybrid Sovereignty in World Politics (Cambridge UP, 2022) shows that these connections – sometimes hidden and often poorly understood – underpin the global order, in which power flows without regard to public and private boundaries. Drawing on extensive original archival research, Swati Srivastava reveals the little-known stories of how this hybrid power operated at some of the most important turning points in world history: spreading the British empire, founding the United States, establishing free trade, realizing transnational human rights, and conducting twenty-first century wars. In order to sustain meaningful dialogues about the future of global power and political authority, it is crucial that we begin to understand how hybrid sovereignty emerged and continues to shape international relations.

Swati Srivastava is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University. Her research focuses on private actors in global governance including tech companies, contractors, lobbyists, and international NGOs. She is the author of articles in International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, and other outlets. She directs the International Politics and Responsible Tech (iPART) research lab with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is currently a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Eric B. Elbogen and Nico Verykoukis, "Violence and Mental Illness: Rethinking Risk Factors and Enhancing Public Safety" (NYU Press, 2023)

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Mass shootings have become a defining issue of our time. Whenever the latest act of newsworthy violence occurs, mental illness is inevitably cited as a preeminent cause by members of the news media and political sphere alike. Eric B. Elbogen and Nico Verykoukis's book Violence and Mental Illness: Rethinking Risk Factors and Enhancing Public Safety (NYU Press, 2023) exposes how mental illness is vastly overemphasized in popular discussion of mass violence, which in turn makes us all less safe.

The recurring and intense focus on mental illness in the wake of violent tragedy is fueled by social stigma and cognitive bias, strengthening an exaggerated link between violence and mental illness. Yet as Elbogen and Verykoukis clearly and compellingly demonstrate in this book, a wide array of empirical data show that this link is much weaker than commonly believed-numerous other risk factors have been proven to be stronger predictors of violence. In particular, the authors argue that overweighting mental illness means underweighting more robust risk factors, which are external (e.g., poverty, financial strain, inadequate social support), internal (e.g., younger age, anger, substance abuse), or violence-defining (e.g., lacking empathy, gun access, hate group membership). These risk factors need to be incorporated more fully into public policies around public safety. These risk factors need to be taken into consideration when crafting policies that concern public safety, with emphasis on strategies for reducing the viability and acceptability of violence as a choice.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

S. D. Chrostowska, "Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A pathbreaking exploration of the fate of utopia in our troubled times, this book shows how the historically intertwined endeavors of utopia and critique might be leveraged in response to humanity's looming existential challenges.

Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics (Stanford UP, 2021) makes the case that critical social theory needs to reinstate utopia as a speculative myth. At the same time the left must reassume utopia as an action-guiding hypothesis—that is, as something still possible. S. D. Chrostowska looks to the vibrant, visionary mid-century resurgence of embodied utopian longings and projections in Surrealism, the Situationist International, and critical theorists writing in their wake, reconstructing utopia's link to survival through to the earliest, most radical phase of the French environmental movement. Survival emerges as the organizing concept for a variety of democratic political forms that center the corporeality of desire in social movements contesting the expanding management of life by state institutions across the globe.

Vigilant and timely, balancing fine-tuned analysis with broad historical overview to map the utopian impulse across contemporary cultural and political life, Chrostowska issues an urgent report on the vitality of utopia.

S.D. Chrostowska is Professor of Humanities and Social & Political Thought at York University. She is the author of Literature on Trial: The Emergence of Critical Discourse in Germany, Poland, and Russia, 1700-1800 (2012), among other titles.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ronna Detrick, "Rewriting Eve: Claiming Women's Sacred Stories As Our Own" (She Writes Press, 2023)

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Rewriting Eve: Rescuing Women’s Stories from the Bible and Reclaiming Them as Our Own (She Writes Press, 2023), Ronna Detrick invites us into the presence and power of ten sacred, biblical women, revealing the endlessly relevant ways in which they speak today and showing how they can heal, embolden, and transform our stories.

Trapped in patriarchy and theological argument, dismissed as irrelevant, or viewed as unchangeable even as times change, these women’s voices, desires, and hearts have too often been silenced through misunderstanding and neglect. When they are reimagined, deconstructed, disentangled from doctrine and dogma, and heard on their own terms, these stories become a powerful inspiration and a source of discernment that reconnects us to a feminine lineage and a sovereign sense of self we’ve never known to call on or trust.

Detrick has combined her love of writing with a diverse and winding career that has included coaching, spiritual direction, professional development training, corporate leadership, and entrepreneurship. She shocked and delighted her audience in a provocative TEDx Talk, Redeeming Eve – Reimagining Everything, on an Eve who inspires and empowers women instead of shaming and silencing them.

Ronna Detrick holds both a Master of Divinity degree and a Certificate in Spiritual Direction from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Business and Communications from Whitworth University.

Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of the EAST: A Discussion of Yasheng Huang

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Exams, autocracy, stability, and technology have been hallmarks of Chinese society for centuries — from ancient times through to the present. Is that set to continue and how well does it work today? Yasheng Huang's book The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology (Yale University Press, 2023) explains how these things brought China success and why they may lead to its decline. Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Kevin J. Mitchell, "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

An astonishing journey of discovery, Free Agents offers a new framework for understanding how, across a billion years of Earth history, life evolved the power to choose, and why it matters.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael D. Smith, "The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World" (MIT Press, 2023)

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

For too long, our system of higher education has been defined by scarcity: scarcity in enrollment, scarcity in instruction, and scarcity in credentials. In addition to failing students professionally, this system has exacerbated social injustice and socioeconomic stratification across the globe. In The Abundant University, Michael D. Smith argues that the only way to create a financially and morally sustainable higher education system is by embracing digital technologies for enrolling, instructing, and credentialing students—the same technologies that we have seen create abundance in access to resources in industry after industry.

The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World (MIT Press, 2023) explains how we got our current system, why it’s such an expensive, inefficient mess, and how a system based on exclusivity cannot foster inclusivity. Smith challenges the resistance to digital technologies that we have already seen among numerous institutions, citing the examples of faculty resistance toward digital learning platforms. While acknowledging the understandable self-preservation instinct of our current system of residential education, Smith makes a case for how technology can engender greater educational opportunity and create changes that will benefit students, employers, and society as a whole.

Smith, the J. Erik Johnson Chaired Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that American higher education is subject to market forces just like any other industry. Forbes says, “With a straightforward, conversational style, Smith succeeds in portraying the current problems bearing down on higher education and offering a set of bold solutions for a future where he envisions a college education becoming ‘more open, flexible, inclusive, and lower-priced.’ The Abundant University is a provocative book that should be read by higher ed insiders as well as those in the general public who care about expanding the reach and the impact of higher education.”

John Emrich has worked for decades in corporate finance, investment management, and corporate strategy. He has a podcast about the investment advisory industry called Kick the Dogma.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nigel Biggar, "Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning" (William Collins, 2023)

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the 'End of History' - that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever.

Now however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats.

These threats are not only external. Especially in the Anglosphere, the 'decolonisation' movement corrodes the West's self-confidence by retelling the history of European and American colonial dominance as a litany of racism, exploitation, and massively murderous violence.

In Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (William Collins, 2023), Nigel Biggar tests this indictment, addressing the crucial questions in eight chapters: Was the British Empire driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate? Should we speak of 'colonialism and slavery' in the same breath, as if they were identical? Was the Empire essentially racist? How far was it based on the theft of land? Did it involve genocide? Was it driven fundamentally by the motive of economic exploitation? Was undemocratic colonial government necessarily illegitimate? and, Was the Empire essentially violent, and its violence pervasively racist and terroristic?

Biggar makes clear that, like any other long-standing state, the British Empire involved elements of injustice, sometimes appalling. On occasions it was culpably incompetent and presided over moments of dreadful tragedy.

Nevertheless, from the early 1800s the Empire was committed to abolishing the slave trade in the name of a Christian conviction of the basic equality of all human beings. It ended endemic inter-tribal warfare, opened local economies to the opportunities of global trade, moderated the impact of inescapable modernisation, established the rule of law and liberal institutions such as a free press, and spent itself in defeating the murderously racist Nazi and Japanese empires in the Second World War.

As encyclopaedic in historical breadth as it is penetrating in analytical depth, Colonialism offers a moral inquest into the colonial past, forensically contesting damaging falsehoods and thereby helping to rejuvenate faith in the West's future.

Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nigel Biggar, "Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning" (William Collins, 2023)

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the 'End of History' - that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever.

Now however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jack Schneider and Ethan L. Hutt, "Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don't Have To)" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Amid widespread concern that our approach to testing and grading undermines education, two experts explain how schools can use assessment to support, rather than compromise, learning.

Anyone who has ever crammed for a test, capitulated to a grade-grubbing student, or fretted over a child’s report card knows that the way we assess student learning in American schools is freighted with unintended consequences. But that’s not all. As experts agree, our primary assessment technologies—grading, rating, and ranking—don’t actually provide an accurate picture of how students are doing in school. Worse, they distort student and educator behavior in ways that undermine learning and exacerbate inequality. Yet despite widespread dissatisfaction, grades, test scores, and transcripts remain the currency of the realm.

In Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don't Have To) (Harvard University Press, 2023), Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt explain how we got into this predicament, why we remain beholden to our outmoded forms of assessment, and what we can do to change course. As they make clear, most current attempts at reform won’t solve the complex problems we face. Instead, Schneider and Hutt offer a range of practical reforms, like embracing multiple measures of performance and making the so-called permanent record “overwritable.” As they explain, we can remake our approach in ways that better advance the three different purposes that assessment currently serves: motivating students to learn, communicating meaningful information about what young people know and can do, and synchronizing an otherwise fragmented educational system.

Written in an accessible style for a broad audience, Off the Mark is a guide for everyone who wants to ensure that assessment serves the fundamental goal of education—helping students learn.

Ethan Hutt is the Gary Stuck Faculty Scholar in Education at the University of North Carolina.

Jack Schneider is the Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University. He currently sit on the Graduate Student Council for the History of Education Society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Christopher F. Zurn, "Splitsville USA: A Democratic Argument for Breaking Up the United States" (Routledge, 2023)

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

At the end of the day, I have faith in the wisdom of democracy: the idea that good political solutions only arise from widely dispersed discussion, debate and decision among the broadest group of those affected. This book is intended, then, not as a finalized blueprint or technical report delivered from on high but as a conversation opener for democratic debate among my fellow citizens.

– Christopher F. Zurn, Splitsville USA (2023)

Splitsville USA: A Democratic Argument for Breaking Up the United States (Routledge, 2023) argues that it’s time for us to break up to save representative democracy, proposing a mutually negotiated, peaceful dissolution of the current United States into several new nations. Zurn begins by examining the United States’ democratic predicament, a road most likely headed for electoral authoritarianism, with distinct possibilities of ungovernability and violent civil strife. Unlike others who share this diagnosis, Zurn presents a realistic picture of how we can get to reform and what it would involve. It is argued that “Splitsville” represents the most plausible way for American citizens to continue living under a republican form of government. Despite recent talk of secession and civil war, this book offers the most extensive treatment yet of the issues we need to think through to enable a peacefully negotiated political divorce.

The publisher’s summary above of Professor Zurn’s latest book is a worthy overview, even more are the insightful thoughts and comments he shares in this interview. There is something here for everyone, as he shares insights about two key influences on his work - Honneth and Habermas, as well as his gratitude for his Northwestern graduate school experience under Thomas McCarthy in heady times when Nancy Fraser was still there.

Zurn explains his argument ‘that democracy minimally requires a widely shared precommitment to obeying and accepting the outcomes of free, fair and regular elections for political representatives’ and contends ‘if we look frankly at our current situation, we—the United States ‘we’—no longer sufficiently share this democratic precommitment.’

The professor elaborates on ideas and concepts such as ‘conflict entrepreneurs’ and their manipulation of an existential framing of our political struggles to gain and maintain power. However, he also makes clear that the American public agrees at a ‘high level on the basic values of American society’ and he expands his argument to ‘think about the complex constellation of values we want to realize in our politics’. As you will hear, Splitsville USA was written by an articulate and passionate voice that is both supportive and highly committed to saving representative government.

Some of Professor Zurn’s other books and chapters in edited books mentioned in this interview:

Deliberative Democracy and the Institutions of Judicial Review (2007)
Axel Honneth: A Critical Theory of the Social (2015)
Chapter 12: ‘Social Pathologies as Second-Order Disorders’ in Axel Honneth: Critical Essays - With a Reply by Axel Honneth (2011)
Introduction to The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2009)

Christopher Zurn is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Bryan Rennie, "An Ethology of Religion and Art: Belief as Behavior" (Routledge, 2020)

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Drawing from sources including the ethology of art and the cognitive science of religion, An Ethology of Religion and Art: Belief as Behavior (Routledge, 2020) proposes an improved understanding of both art and religion as behaviors developed in the process of human evolution. Looking at both art and religion as closely related, but not identical, behaviors a more coherent definition of religion can be formed that avoids pitfalls such as the Eurocentric characterization of religion as belief or the dismissal of the category as nothing more than false belief or the product of scholarly invention. The book integrates highly relevant insights from the ethology and anthropology of art, particularly the identification of "the special" by Ellen Dissanayake and art as agency by Alfred Gell, with insights from, among others, Ann Taves, who similarly identified "specialness" as characteristic of religion. It integrates these insights into a useful and accurate understanding and explanation of the relationship of art and religion and of religion as a human behavior. This in turn is used to suggest how art can contribute to the development and maintenance of religions. The innovative combination of art, science, and religion in this book makes it a vital resource for scholars of Religion and the Arts, Aesthetics, Religious Studies, Religion and Science and Religious Anthropology.

Bryan Rennie is Professor Emeritus of Religion and Philosophy in the Religion Faculty at Westminster College, USA.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michèle Lamont, "Seeing Others: How Recognition Works-And How It Can Heal a Divided World" (Atria, 2023)

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How can we challenge and change inequalities? In Seeing Others: How Recognition Works— and How It Can Heal a Divided World (Atria, 2023), Michele Lamont, Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, at Harvard University, explores this question by empirically substantiating the concept of recognition. Using a huge range of case studies, interview data, as well as wealth of cross-disciplinary research, the book shows the problems of our unequal societies and the people, and ideas, that can contribute to solving them. It looks at art, politics, media and culture, as well as social policy and generational conflicts, all of which show how individuals and social groups need and can give recognition to each other. An accessible as well as detailed analysis, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone who wants to make a better world.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Adam Toon, "Mind As Metaphor: A Defence of Mental Fictionalism" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Folk psychology (on a standard reading) is the way we attribute contentful mental states to others in order to explain and predict their behavior – for example, saying that John thinks the plant needs water as an inner mental state that explains why he is looking for the watering can.

In Mind As Metaphor: A Defence of Mental Fictionalism (Oxford UP, 2023), Adam Toon argues that this view is incorrect: we do not have mental representations. Instead, while our concept of mind is of an inner world, this inner world is a fiction. What we are really doing is picking out complex patterns of behavior and projecting this inward; intentionality resides in public language, not in the mind. Toon, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Exeter, also distinguishes his view from Ryle’s and Dennett’s positions, and argues that while the ascriptions should not be taken literally, their purpose is serious and our practice of ascribing them is indispensable.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

William Darity et al., "The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice" (U California Press, 2023)

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice (U California Press, 2023) gathers an accomplished interdisciplinary team of scholars--members of the Reparations Planning Committee--who have considered the issues pertinent to making reparations happen. This book will be an essential resource in the national conversation going forward.

The first section of The Black Reparations Project crystallizes the rationale for reparations, cataloguing centuries of racial repression, discrimination, violence, mass incarceration, and the immense black-white wealth gap. Drawing on the contributors' expertise in economics, history, law, public policy, public health, and education, the second section unfurls direct guidance for building and implementing a reparations program, including draft legislation that addresses how the program should be financed and how claimants can be identified and compensated. Rigorous and comprehensive, The Black Reparations Project will motivate, guide, and speed the final leg of the journey for justice.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

A Better Way to Buy Books

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.

Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Richard Sclove, "Escaping Maya's Palace: Decoding an Ancient Myth to Heal the Hidden Madness of Modern Civilization" (Karavelle Press, 2022)

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Richard Sclove’s newest book — Escaping Maya’s Palace: Decoding an Ancient Myth to Reveal and Heal the Hidden Madness of Modern Civilization (Karavelle Press, 2023)— won a 2023 Gold Nautlilus Book Award, capturing the top prize in the category “World Cultures’ Transformational Development & Growth.”

Richard founded and for thirteen years directed the Loka Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making research, science, and technology responsive to democratically decided priorities. He is also a cofounder of the ECAST (Expert and Citizens Assessment of Science and Technology) network and of the Living Knowledge network.

He has been the Director of Strategic Planning at the Mind and Life Institute, co-founded by the Dalai Lama, and a Project Director at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.

Richard’s 1995 book Democracy and Technology received the Don K. Price Award of the American Political Science Association honoring “the year’s best book in science, technology, and politics.” He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He has published in numerous venues, including the Washington Post, Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor, Adbusters, Yes! Magazine, Utne Reader, Tikkun, Huffington Post, Technology Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Science magazine, Nature magazine, Issues in Science and Technology, Futures, and Science, Technology and Human Values.

Dr. Sclove has taught and lectured at universities worldwide and delivered many plenary and keynote addresses. He has prepared invited testimony for the House Science Committee of the U.S. Congress and given one-on-one policy briefings to U.S. and other national decision-makers, including the Director of the National Science Foundation and the President’s Science Advisor.

Richard earned his B.A. degree in environmental studies from experimental, interdisciplinary Hampshire College and, from MIT, an M.S. in nuclear engineering and a Ph.D. in political theory. He held the Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship in Economics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Richard has been a meditator for over 40 years, studied with more than half a dozen spiritual teachers, and lived for a year in an ashram/orphanage in Varanasi, India.

Dr. Susan Grelock Yusem is an independent researcher trained in depth psychology, with an emphasis on community, liberation, and eco-psychologies. Her work centers around interconnection and encompasses regenerative food systems, the arts and conservation. She directs narrative development at the innovative global nonprofit Commonweal.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Vincent W. Lloyd, "Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination" (Yale UP, 2022)

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

This radical work by one of the leading young scholars of Black thought delineates a new concept of Black dignity, yet one with a long history in Black writing and action. Previously in the West, dignity has been seen in two ways: as something inherent in one’s station in life, whether acquired or conferred by birth; or more recently as an essential condition and right common to all of humanity.

In what might be called a work of observational philosophy—an effort to describe the philosophy underlying the Black Lives Matter movement—Vincent W. Lloyd defines dignity as something performative, not an essential quality but an action: struggle against domination. Without struggle, there is no dignity.

In Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale UP, 2022), Lloyd defines anti-Blackness as an inescapable condition of American life, and the slave’s struggle against the master as the “primal scene” of domination and resistance. Exploring the way Black writers such as Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, and Audre Lorde have dealt with themes such as Black rage, Black love, and Black magic, Lloyd posits that Black dignity is the paradigm of all dignity and, more audaciously, that Black philosophy is the starting point of all philosophy.

Vincent W. Lloyd is associate professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University. His previous books include Black Natural Law and the coedited Race and Secularism in America. He coedits the journal Political Theology.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Hans Van Eyghen, "The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs" (Routledge, 2023)

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Hans Van Eyghen's book The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs (Routledge, 2023) assesses whether belief in spirits is epistemically justified. It presents two arguments in support of the existence of spirits and arguments that experiences of various sorts (perceptions, mediumship, possession, and animistic experiences) can lend justification to spirit-beliefs.

Most work in philosophy of religion exclusively deals with the existence of God or the epistemic status of belief in God. Spirit beliefs are often regarded as aberrations, and the falsity of such beliefs is often assumed. This book argues that various beliefs concerning spirits can be regarded as justified when they are rooted in experiences that are not defeated. It argues that spirit-beliefs are not defeated by recent theories put forth by neuroscientists, cognitive scientists or evolutionary biologists. Additional arguments are made that traditional theistic belief is epistemically linked to spirit beliefs and that unusual events can be explained in terms of spirit-activity.

The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of religion, religious epistemology, ethnography and cognitive neuroscience.

Tiatemsu Longkumer is a faculty of Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. His Ph.D. work is on Indigenous Religion and Christianity among the Nagas of Nagaland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Who’s Afraid of the Catholic Integralists? (with Kevin Vallier)

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Kevin Vallier is a philosophy professor and author of All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2023), a new book about Catholic Integralism, a mostly online intellectual movement that thinks the church should take over the state, something that made sense fifteen hundred years ago after the collapse of the Roman Empire, but not so much day in our pluralistic, democratic age. Professor Vallier’s goal is to help us all talk together with patience and grace (which includes really listening) to people we disagree with and regard as eccentric. So why not talk it over on Almost Good Catholics?

Kevin Vallier’s faculty website at Bowling Green University, Ohio.
Kevin Vallier’s personal website.
Kevin Vallier’s blogs at Reconciled.
Fr James Rooney, OP, critiques Integralism, in the Intellectual Catholicism podcast with Suan Sonna.
“What is Integralism, Anyway?” by Charlie Camosy, at the Pillar.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property (MIT Press, 2023) provides a framework for knowledge ownership that challenges the mechanisms of inequality in modern society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sara Protasi, "The Philosophy of Envy" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Envy is almost universally condemned and feared. But is its bad reputation always warranted? In The Philosophy of Envy (Cambridge UP, 2022), Sara Protasi argues that envy is more multifaceted than it seems, and that some varieties of it can be productive and even virtuous. Protasi brings together empirical evidence and philosophical research to generate a novel view according to which there are four kinds of envy: emulative, inert, aggressive, and spiteful. For each kind, she individuates different situational antecedents, phenomenological expressions, motivational tendencies, and behavioral outputs. She then develops the normative implications of this taxonomy from a moral and prudential perspective, in the domain of personal loving relationships, and in the political sphere. A historical appendix completes the book. Through a careful and comprehensive investigation of envy's complexity, and its multifarious implications for human relations and human value, The Philosophy of Envy surprisingly reveals that envy plays a crucial role in safeguarding our happiness.

Sara Protasi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Puget Sound

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Peter Heather and John Rapley, "Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West" (Yale UP, 2023)

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, around the start of the new millennium, history took a dramatic turn. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in rapid decline compared to the global periphery it had previously colonized. This is not the first time we have seen such a rise and fall: the Roman Empire followed a similar arc, from dizzying power to disintegration.

In Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West (Yale UP, 2023) Historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rapley explore the uncanny parallels, and productive differences between ancient Rome and the modern West, moving beyond the tropes of invading barbarians and civilizational decay to unearth new lessons. From 399 to 1999, they argue, through the unfolding of parallel, underlying imperial life cycles, both empires sowed the seeds of their own destruction. Has the era of Western global domination indeed reached its end? Heather and Rapley contemplate what comes next.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gary Smith, "Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. Gary Smith's book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science (Oxford UP, 2023) argues that, ironically, science's credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled by the technological advances in Big Data and the development of ever-increasingly powerful computers.

Using a wide range of entertaining examples, this fascinating book examines the impacts of society's growing distrust of science, and ultimately provides constructive suggestions for restoring the credibility of the scientific community.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Peter Heather and John Rapley, "Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West" (Yale UP, 2023)

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Meditating Three Minutes a Day: A Conversation with Richard Dixey

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

After a month or two of absence, the podcast returns for a new season, beginning with an unexpectedly wide ranging conversation with Dr. Richard Dixey. Richard holds a Ph.D. from London University, an M.A. with distinction in the history and philosophy of science from London University, and a B.A. Hons from Oxford. He has been a student of Buddhism since 1972 and has travelled extensively in the Himalayas, India and South East Asia. He is currently an advisor to the Khyentse Foundation, runs the Light of Buddhadharma Foundation and is a senior faculty member at Dharma College in Berkeley.

We discuss two of his works, Searcher Reaches Land's Limits (Dharma, 2020), which is a commentary text on Tarthang Tulku’s Revelations of Mind: A book that engages the reader in an open, non-dogmatic inquiry that has practical, philosophical, scientific, and meditative dimensions. The second is his most recent, Three Minutes a Day: A Fourteen-Week Course to Learn Meditation and Transform Your Life (New World Library, 2023), which makes a bold claim that we explore in our conversation.

We also discuss epistemology, personal experience as all we have; we also touch on A.I. and the history and philosophy of science, and the current state of Buddhism in America.

The introduction mentions a recent text called "An Antidote to Stupidity," written by the host, which is up at the non-Buddhism site, which listeners can read here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein, "We've Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care" (Penguin, 2023)

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Few of us need convincing that the American health insurance system needs reform. But many of the existing proposals focus on expanding one relatively successful piece of the system or building in piecemeal additions. These proposals miss the point.

As the Stanford health economist Liran Einav and the MIT economist and MacArthur Genius Amy Finkelstein argue, our health care system was never deliberately designed, but rather pieced together to deal with issues as they became politically relevant. The result is a sprawling yet arbitrary and inadequate mess. It has left 30 million Americans without formal insurance. Many of the rest live in constant danger of losing their coverage if they lose their job, give birth, get older, get healthier, get richer, or move.

It's time to tear it all down and rebuild, sensibly and deliberately. Marshaling original research, striking insights from American history, and comparative analysis of what works and what doesn’t from systems around the world, Einav and Finkelstein argue for automatic, basic, and free universal coverage for everyone, along with the option to buy additional, supplemental coverage. Their wholly original argument and comprehensive blueprint for an American universal health insurance system will surprise and provoke.

We've Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care (Penguin, 2023) is an erudite yet lively and accessible prescription we cannot afford to ignore.

John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment space called Kick the Dogma.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Stephen Aron, "Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The history of the American West has typically been told in one of two ways: as triumph, or as tragedy. Stephen Aron, accomplished scholar of the West, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, and President of the Autry Museum of the American West, argues that both of these narratives flatten out what was actually a much more complicated story.

Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West (Oxford UP, 2022), Aron zooms in on several moments of contingency in the Western past, moments when people of often radically different backgrounds came together to build community, or at least lived peacefully, despite their differences. Although these moments eventually fell apart, Aron argues that they show that the past was unwritten until it came to pass, and that our own uncertain future is the same. Peace and Friendship offers important lessons about the power of history and contingency, and underscores the unsettled nature of human events and our capacity for overcoming even our deepest differences.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Digital Mind: How Science Is Redefining Humanity

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

What do computers, cells, and brains have in common? Computers are electronic devices designed by humans; cells are biological entities crafted by evolution; brains are the containers and creators of our minds. But all are, in one way or another, information-processing devices. The power of the human brain is, so far, unequaled by any existing machine or known living being. Over eons of evolution, the brain has enabled us to develop tools and technology to make our lives easier. Our brains have even allowed us to develop computers that are almost as powerful as the human brain itself. In The Digital Mind, Arlindo Oliveira describes how advances in science and technology could enable us to create digital minds.

Exponential growth is a pattern built deep into the scheme of life, but technological change now promises to outstrip even evolutionary change. Oliveira describes technological and scientific advances that range from the discovery of laws that control the behavior of the electromagnetic fields to the development of computers. He calls natural selection the ultimate algorithm, discusses genetics and the evolution of the central nervous system, and describes the role that computer imaging has played in understanding and modeling the brain. Having considered the behavior of the unique system that creates a mind, he turns to an unavoidable question: Is the human brain the only system that can host a mind? If digital minds come into existence—and, Oliveira says, it is difficult to argue that they will not—what are the social, legal, and ethical implications? Will digital minds be our partners, or our rivals?

In this episode Chris Gondek speaks with author Arlindo Oliveira about intelligence in respect to consciousness, and how artificial intelligence has spawned and will grow.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 18:34:17 -0000

What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist --part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation--describes Koch's search for an empirical explanation for consciousness. Koch recounts not only the birth of the modern science of consciousness but also the subterranean motivation for his quest--his instinctual (if "romantic") belief that life is meaningful.

Koch describes his own groundbreaking work with Francis Crick in the 1990s and 2000s and the gradual emergence of consciousness (once considered a "fringy" subject) as a legitimate topic for scientific investigation. Present at this paradigm shift were Koch and a handful of colleagues, including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Stanislas Dehaene, Giulio Tononi, Wolf Singer, and others. Aiding and abetting it were new techniques to listen in on the activity of individual nerve cells, clinical studies, and brain-imaging technologies that allowed safe and noninvasive study of the human brain in action.

Koch gives us stories from the front lines of modern research into the neurobiology of consciousness as well as his own reflections on a variety of topics, including the distinction between attention and awareness, the unconscious, how neurons respond to Homer Simpson, the physics and biology of free will, dogs, Der Ring des Nibelungen, sentient machines, the loss of his belief in a personal God, and sadness. All of them are signposts in the pursuit of his life's work--to uncover the roots of consciousness.

Christof Koch is Professor of Biology and of Engineering at the California Institute of Technology and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. He is the author of The Quest for Consciousness and other books.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Ruse, "Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2017)

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.

Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism.

In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought.

Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael J. Diamond, "Ruptures in the American Psyche: Containing Destructive Populism in Perilous Times" (Phoenix Publishing, 2022)

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Michael J. Diamond's book Ruptures in the American Psyche: Containing Destructive Populism in Perilous Times (Phoenix Publishing, 2022) describes Trumpism: the strong allegiance to former President Donald Trump that is in evidence among a sizable portion of the US population. How did Trump come to be elected in 2016, and who supported him during his presidential tenure - and why? How is it that he continues to hold cult-like status, exerting a strong influence not only on many individuals but also on numerous elected officials, despite his defeat in 2020? Why does his character continue to be an object of fascination even among anti-Trumpists, and why will Trumpism continue to play a major role in the American sociopolitical landscape even now he has left the presidential stage?

Diamond ponders these questions through the lenses of American history and culture, political theory, social phenomena, group dynamics, and psychoanalysis. In exploring the relationship between large-group regression, cultism, destructive populism, delusional thinking, conspiratorial beliefs, authoritarianism, and leadership characterised by narcissism and paranoia, psychoanalytic ideas pertaining to group dynamics, malignant regression, and leadership are brought into play. Prominent psychoanalytic thinkers who have addressed these topics and whose work usefully contributes to the discussion include Bion, Freud, Fromm, Bollas, Kernberg, Lifton, Rosenfeld, and Volkan, as well as Bleger, Jaques, and several more recent Kleinian/Bionian-influenced analysts.

Most important, the book makes use of these understandings to reestablish a sufficiently containing frame that strengthens the body politics' nonpathological elements in order to come to grips with these disturbing factors. Whatever their political beliefs, psychoanalysts in the US and worldwide will find much to think about in reading this book's application of their discipline to today's sociopolitical environment. In addition, the book's insights extend beyond arguments targeting a strictly psychoanalytic audience in order to reach social and political thinkers, as well as activists, who are deeply concerned about dangers threatening the very foundations of democracy in the US and worldwide. And finally, the thoughtful lay person will appreciate the accessibility to all these fields that the book provides, and will come away with a much deeper understanding of just what motivates us to take a stand for or against a given political figure. In short, conceptual tools are provided that lead to greater understanding as well as effective strategies and tactics for containment of destructive forces - largely unconscious ones - that imperil our society.

Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "From the Pandemic to Utopia: The Future Begins Now" (Routledge, 2023)

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The coronavirus pandemic forces us to rethink our contemporaneity. It has brought to the surface dimensions of human fragility that partially contradict the euphoria and human hubris of the fourth industrial revolution (artificial intelligence). It has also aggravated the social inequality and racial discrimination that characterize our societies.

In From the Pandemic to Utopia: The Future Begins Now (Routledge, 2023) by Dr. Boaventura De Sousa Santos argues that the virus, rather than an enemy, must be viewed as a pedagogue. It is trying to teach us that the deep causes of the pandemic lie in our dominant mode of production and consumption. The systemic overload of natural resources creates a metabolic rift between society and nature that destabilizes the habitat of wild animals and the vital cycles of natural regeneration whereby pandemics become an increasingly recurrent phenomenon. In trying to take seriously this lesson the book proposes a paradigmatic shift from the current civilizatory model to a new one guided by a more equitable relationship between nature and society and the priority of life, both human and non-human.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Idolatry and Idle Hands (with Jacob Howland)

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Philosophy professor Jacob Howland applies the lessons of Greek classics and Jewish scripture to this our curious moment at the inception of Artificial intelligence when computers are doing more and more work for us, and we humans—like miniature Gods—can make up new simulated realities and even identities for ourselves. There’s a word for when people worship the things they create: idolatry. Looking to the Bible (from the Garden of Eden, the Fall, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, and the Golden Calf) and literature (from Homer, Plato, and Hesiod, all the way to Milton), Professor Howland and I talk about where we are, and where we might be headed.

Jacob Howland’s website and his faculty pages at the University of Tulsa and the University of Austin
Jacob Howland’s article, “AI is a False Prophet: Our enslavement to idolatry will end in disaster.” (Unherd, April 2023)
Jacob Howland’s article, “AI has always plagued mankind: Technological arrogance brought about our Fall.” (Unherd, July 2023)
Jacob Howland’s article, “Henry Adams and the Crisis of Education: How the famed historian foresaw our civilizational predicament” (City Journal, July 2023)
Jacob Howland and Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast (June 2023)

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Cory Doctorow, "The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation" (Verso, 2023)

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Big Tech locked us into their systems by making their platforms hard to leave by design. The impossibility of staying connected to people on their platforms after you delete your account has nothing to do with technological limitations: it's an intentional business strategy.

In The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso, 2023), Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission.

This book comes out September 5, 2023. See seizethemeansofcomputation.org for book details.

Note: Cory mentioned that the book website is seizethemeansofcommunication.org it is actually seizethemeansofcomputation.org.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Landon Mascareñaz and Doannie Tran, "The Open System: Redesigning Education and Reigniting Democracy" ((Harvard Education Press, 2023)

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Landon Mascareñaz and Doannie Tran propose that, even as events of this decade have exposed stress points in existing top-down, closed systems within education and other public institutions, they have also created prime opportunities to rethink and redesign those systems in ways that encourage civic participation and invigorate local democracy.

In The Open System: Redesigning Education and Reigniting Democracy (Harvard Education Press, 2023), Mascareñaz and Tran argue for a critical revitalization of public education centered in openness, an organization design concept in which an entity receives, considers, and acts on input from the community it serves. As they demonstrate, open education policy improves information flow, increasing opportunity, bolstering public trust, and making room for cocreation and coproduction driven by community partnerships and family engagement.

Based on their groundbreaking work with educational coalitions such as the Kentucky Coalition for Advancing Education and Colorado's Homegrown Talent Initiative, Mascareñaz and Tran introduce six key liberatory moves that can bring about open system transformation. They highlight real-life examples of the types of incremental, specific, and discrete projects that leaders can use to create openness in educational systems at the school, district, and state levels, providing a blueprint for changemaking.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robot Futures

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the effort to make walking, talking androids that are indistinguishable from people. Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. They will be embedded in our physical spaces, with the ability to go where we cannot, and will have minds of their own, thanks to artificial intelligence. In Robot Futures, the roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh considers how we will share our world with these creatures, and how our society could change as it incorporates a race of stronger, smarter beings.

Nourbakhsh imagines a future that includes adbots offering interactive custom messaging; robotic flying toys that operate by means of “gaze tracking”; robot-enabled multimodal, multicontinental telepresence; and even a way that nanorobots could allow us to assume different physical forms. Nourbakhsh examines the underlying technology and the social consequences of each scenario. He also offers a counter-vision: a robotics designed to create civic and community empowerment. His book helps us understand why that is the robot future we should try to bring about.

Illah Reza Nourbakhsh is Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also directs the Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab. He is a coauthor of Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots (MIT Press).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 19:52:14 -0000

The vast majority of American college students attend two thousand or so private and public institutions that might be described as the Middle—reputable educational institutions, but not considered equal to the elite and entrenched upper echelon of the Ivy League and other prestigious schools. Richard DeMillo has a warning for these colleges and universities in the Middle: If you do not change, you are heading for irrelevance and marginalization. In Abelard to Apple, DeMillo argues that these institutions, clinging precariously to a centuries-old model of higher education, are ignoring the social, historical, and economic forces at work in today's world. In the age of iTunes, open source software, and for-profit online universities, there are new rules for higher education.

DeMillo, who has spent years in both academia and in industry, explains how higher education arrived at its current parlous state and offers a road map for the twenty-first century. He describes the evolving model for higher education, from European universities based on a medieval model to American land-grant colleges to Apple's iTunes U and MIT's OpenCourseWare. He offers ten rules to help colleges reinvent themselves (including “Don't romanticize your weaknesses”) and argues for a focus on teaching undergraduates.

DeMillo's message—for colleges and universities, students, alumni, parents, employers, and politicians—is that any college or university can change course if it defines a compelling value proposition (one not based in “institutional envy” of Harvard and Berkeley) and imagines an institution that delivers it.

Richard A. DeMillo is Distinguished Professor of Computing and Professor of Management, former John P. Imlay Dean of Computing, and Director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Institute of Technology. Author of over 100 articles, books, and patents, he has held academic positions at Purdue University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Padua. He directed the Computer and Computation Research Division of the National Science Foundation and was Hewlett-Packard’s first Chief Technology Officer.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Chrisoula Andreou, "Choosing Well: The Good, the Bad, and the Trivial" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

It is common to think that rational agency involves acting in ways that, given one’s options, maximize the satisfaction of one’s preferences. This intuitive understanding has generated a wide-ranging literature about the ways in which individuals routinely fail to be rational in the proposed sense: they make choices that not only do not maximize their preference satisfaction, but actually undermine or defeat their aims. Maybe we’re not rational animals after all?

In Choosing Well: The Good, The Bad, and The Trivial (Oxford University Press 2023), Chrisoula Andreou explores certain cases of purported irrationality and argues that they involve disorderly preferences but need not involve irrationality on the part of agents. Chrisoula argues that there are cases where, although our preferences may be disorderly, we can preserve our practical rationality by taking care to attend to the patterns of choice we instantiate. Along the way, Chrisoula proposes intriguing ideas about how we assess our choices, how to understand temptation, and when it’s rational to regret our choices.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 21:42:53 -0000

Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes.

Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains the limitations of our intuitions about the world—our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known.

Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.

Noson S. Yanofsky is Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is a coauthor of Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Zhihua Yao, "Nonexistent Objects in Buddhist Philosophy: On Knowing What There is Not" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Can we know what there is not?

Zhihua Yao's Nonexistent Objects in Buddhist Philosophy: On Knowing What There is Not (Bloomsbury, 2020) examines the historical development of the concept of the cognition of nonexistent objects in several major Buddhist philosophical schools. Beginning with a study of the historical development of the concept in Mahasamghika, Darstantika, Yogacara and Sautrantika, it evaluates how successfully they have argued against the extreme view of their main opponent the Sarvastivadins and established their view that one can know what there is not. It also includes thematic studies on the epistemological issues of nonexistence, discussing making sense of empty terms, controversies over negative judgments, and a proper classification of the conceptions of nothing or nonexistence. Taking a comparative approach to these topics, this book considers contemporary Western philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Meinong and Russell alongside representative figures of the Buddhist Pramana School. Based on first-hand study of primary sources in Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan, Nonexistent Objects in Buddhist Philosophy makes available the rich discussions and debates on the epistemological issues of nonexistence in Buddhist philosophy to students and researchers in Asian and comparative philosophy.

Check out Prof. Yao Zhihua's recent publications here!

Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jade E. Davis, "The Other Side of Empathy" (Duke UP, 2023)

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In The Other Side of Empathy (Duke UP, 2023), Jade E. Davis contests the value of empathy as an affective or critical tool. Whether focusing on technology, colonialism, or racism, she shows how empathy can obscure relationships of dominance, control, submission, and victimization, arguing that these histories taint the whole concept of empathy.

Drawing on digital archives of photographs, memoirs, newspapers, interviews, and advertisements regarding nineteenth-century ethnographic museums and human zoos, Davis shows how empathetic responses erase culpabilities from those institutions that commodify difference. She also contends that empathy’s mediation through digital technology cannot lead to more ethical actions, as technology only connects representations of people rather than the people themselves.

In empathy’s place, Davis proposes mutual recognition as a way to see and experience others beyond colonial modes of empathy. Davis illustrates that moving beyond empathy allows for a more nuanced understanding of the colonial past and its ongoing impact while providing for a more meaningful affective engagement with the world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Benjamin Studebaker, "The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way Is Shut" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Benjamin Studebaker about his new book The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way Is Shut (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)

American democracy is in crisis. The economic system is slowly subjecting Americans of nearly all income levels and backgrounds to enormous amounts of stress. The United States lacks the state capacity required to alleviate this stress, and politicians increasingly find that if they promise to solve economic problems, they are likely to disappoint voters. Instead, they encourage voters to blame each other.

The crisis cannot be solved, the economy cannot be set right, and democracy cannot be saved. But American democracy cannot be killed, either. Americans can’t imagine any compelling alternative political systems. And so, American democracy continues on, in a deeply unsatisfying way. Americans invent ever-more elaborate coping mechanisms in a desperate bid to go on. But it becomes increasingly clear that the way is shut. The American political system was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it.

Benjamin Studebaker speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the runaway effects of globalisation, the false hope industry, cultural non-politics, and the very unlikely get-out scenarios.

Benjamin Studebaker is a political theorist whose work focuses on notions of legitimacy. He hosts the podcasts Political Theory 101.

The equality/equity meme
The 1619 Project
No Labels, the ‘commonsense majority’ party

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Anne Phillips, "Unconditional Equals" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

For centuries, ringing declarations about all men being created equal appealed to a shared human nature as the reason to consider ourselves equals. But appeals to natural equality invited gradations of natural difference, and the ambiguity at the heart of “nature” enabled generations to write of people as equal by nature while barely noticing the exclusion of those marked as inferior by their gender, race, or class. Despite what we commonly tell ourselves, these exclusions and gradations continue today. In Unconditional Equals (Princeton UP, 2021), political philosopher Anne Phillips challenges attempts to justify equality by reference to a shared human nature, arguing that justification turns into conditions and ends up as exclusion. Rejecting the logic of justification, she calls instead for a genuinely unconditional equality.

Drawing on political, feminist, and postcolonial theory, Unconditional Equals argues that we should understand equality not as something grounded in shared characteristics but as something people enact when they refuse to be considered inferiors. At a time when the supposedly shared belief in human equality is so patently not shared, the book makes a powerful case for seeing equality as a commitment we make to ourselves and others, and a claim we make on others when they deny us our status as equals.

Anne Phillips is the Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, where she previously directed the LSE Gender Institute. Her books include Engendering Democracy; The Politics of Presence; Which Equalities Matter?; Multiculturalism without Culture (Princeton); Our Body, Whose Property? (Princeton); and The Politics of the Human.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, "Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do about It" (Basic Books, 2023)

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

From phishing scams to Ponzi schemes, fraudulent science to fake art, chess cheaters to crypto hucksters, and marketers to magicians, our world brims with deception. In Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do about It (Basic Books, 2023), psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris show us how to avoid being taken in. They describe the key habits of thinking and reasoning that serve us well most of the time but make us vulnerable--like our tendency to accept what we see, stick to our commitments, and overvalue precision and consistency. Each chapter illustrates their new take on the science of deception, describing scams you've never heard of and shedding new light on some you have. Simons and Chabris provide memorable maxims and practical tools you can use to spot deception before it's too late.

Informative, illuminating, and entertaining, Nobody's Fool will protect us from charlatans in all their forms--and delight us along the way.

Debbie Sorenson is a psychologist in Denver and the host of the excellent podcast Psychologists Off the Clock.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of Food: A Discussion with Kimberly Wilson

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

We all know that as a nation our mental health is in crisis. But what most don't know is that a critical ingredient in this debate, and a crucial part of the solution - what we eat - is being ignored. Nutrition has more influence on what we feel, who we become and how we behave than we could ever have imagined. Listen to Kimberly Wilson speak with Owen Bennett-Jones discuss the connection between food and mental health. Wilson is the author of Unprocessed: How the Food We Eat Is Fuelling Our Mental Health Crisis (W. H. Allen, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Randall Patnode, "The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Randall Patnode traces the history of the synchronous broadcast experience of the twentieth century and the transition to the asynchronous media that dominate today. Broadcasting grew out of the latent desire by nineteenth-century industrialists, political thinkers, and social reformers to tame an unruly society by controlling how people used their time.

The idea manifested itself in the form of the broadcast schedule, a managed flow of information and entertainment that required audiences to be in a particular place – usually the home – at a particular time and helped to create “water cooler” moments, as audiences reflected on their shared media texts. Audiences began disconnecting from the broadcast schedule at the end of the twentieth century, but promoters of social media and television services still kept audiences under control, replacing the schedule with surveillance of media use.

Dr. Randall Patnode offers compelling new insights into the intermingled roles of broadcasting and industrial/post-industrial work and how Americans spend their time.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Torin Alter, "The Matter of Consciousness: From the Knowledge Argument to Russellian Monism" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Frank Jackson’s "Knowledge Argument" introduced the philosophical world to Mary the brilliant neuroscientist, who knows everything there is to know about the physical world while living in a completely black and white environment. Yet she seems to learn something new when she leaves the room for the first time and sees and smells a red rose. So is physicalism – the claim that everything, including conscious experience, is physical – false?

In The Matter of Consciousness: From the Knowledge Argument to Russellian Monism (Oxford University Press 2023), Torin Alter argues that the argument is sound, comprehensively dealing with all the major types of objections raised against each of the premises. But Alter, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama, also argues to a disjunctive conclusion: either standard physicalism is false, or (his own preference) it leads to Russellian monism – a non-standard physicalist view that posits intrinisic properties that both constitute conscious experience and underlie the basic physical properties. His book is an enjoyable, clearly written tour of one of the major philosophical debates on consciousness.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Daniel Boyarin, "The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto" (Yale UP, 2023)

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Daniel Boyarin's new book The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto (Yale University Press, 2023) is a provocative anti-Zionist manifesto pleading for a new understanding of Jewish peoplehood and sketching an alternative vision for a Jewish future beyond the nation-state: the Diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the "nation" and the "state," only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.

Professor emeritus of Talmudic culture at the University of California, Berkeley, Daniel Boyarin has been one of the most influential and paradigm-shifting scholars in Jewish Studies generally and of rabbinic culture and the study of Judaism and Christianity specifically. His publications include Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (1993), Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Judaism and Christianity (1999), Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (2003), A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (2015) and Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion (2018).

Miriam Chorley-Schulz (neé Schulz) holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University. She is an Assistant Professor and Mokin Fellow in Holocaust Studies at the University of Oregon. Miriam is the co-founder of the EU-funded project We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present and the author of the award-winning monograph Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerstörung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Vermächtnis des Wilnaer Komitees (Berlin: Metropol, 2016).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Kevin J. Elliott, "Democracy for Busy People" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

John Dewey and Jane Addams are both credited with the claim that the cure for democracy’s ills is more democracy. The sentiment is popular to this day among democratic theorists and practitioners. The thought is that a democratic deficit lies at the root of any political and social problem that a democracy might confront. Accordingly, a good deal of work in democratic theory aims at designing new practices and institutions that can erase the deficit. But this raises a problem: The civic task of democratic citizenship must be manageable for ordinary citizens. And ordinary citizens are differentially busy with other pursuits, many of which are independently valuable and socially beneficial. Thus, proposals for “more democracy” tend to be exclusionary.

In Democracy for Busy People (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin J. Elliott addresses this difficulty head on. He devises a conception of the civic responsibilities of citizenship that is authentically democratic without being overly demanding.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Why Do So Many Young People Think the Unabomber was Right?

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Darts and Letters is creating a new podcast, Academic Edgelords.

This is a scholarly podcast about scholarly provocateurs. This is a leftist podcast that takes a second look at their peer-reviewed work, and tries to see if there’s anything we might learn from arguing with them. We are hosted by: Victor Bruzzone, Gordon Katic, Matt McManus, and Ethan Xavier (AKA “Mouthy Infidel”).

On this episode, we introduce our show by reading the ultimate academic edgelord: Ted Kacynski, who just died. This domestic terrorist was also a real scholar, with a few peer-reviewed works in mathematics. We read his manifesto: Industrial Society and its Future.

Why has the Kaczynski become so popular with young people? He is just one extreme proponent of an anti-civilizational political theory called anarcho-primitivism. Few call themselves anarcho-primitivists, yet the basic ideas have become widespread, thanks to worsening environmental degradation and the ongoing techlash. You probably saw some anarcho-primitive thinking on Twitter right after Kaczynski died; many people lamented his death, and praised his arguments.

What makes his thinking appealing to some? What does it get right about technology, and what does it get very wrong? We also discuss the broader anarcho-primitivist tradition, with the help of Chamsy el-Ojeili and Dylan Taylor's critical but generous review article from April, 2020, “the Future in the Past”: Anarcho-primitivism and the Critique of Civilization Today," in Rethinking Marxism.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 21:30:38 -0000

Anyone who has ever been to a public hearing or community meeting would agree that participatory democracy can be boring. Hours of repetitive presentations, alternatingly alarmist or complacent, for or against, accompanied by constant heckling, often with no clear outcome or decision. Is this the best democracy can offer? In Making Democracy Fun, Josh Lerner offers a novel solution for the sad state of our deliberative democracy: the power of good game design. What if public meetings featured competition and collaboration (such as team challenges), clear rules (presented and modeled in multiple ways), measurable progress (such as scores and levels), and engaging sounds and visuals? These game mechanics would make meetings more effective and more enjoyable—even fun.

Lerner reports that institutions as diverse as the United Nations, the U.S. Army, and grassroots community groups are already using games and game-like processes to encourage participation. Drawing on more than a decade of practical experience and extensive research, he explains how games have been integrated into a variety of public programs in North and South America. He offers rich stories of game techniques in action, in children's councils, social service programs, and participatory budgeting and planning. With these real-world examples in mind, Lerner describes five kinds of games and twenty-six game mechanics that are especially relevant for democracy. He finds that when governments and organizations use games and design their programs to be more like games, public participation becomes more attractive, effective, and transparent. Game design can make democracy fun—and make it work.

Josh Lerner is Executive Director of The Participatory Budgeting Project, a nonprofit organization in New York City that empowers communities to decide how to spend public money.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Andy Karr, "Into the Mirror: A Buddhist Journey through Mind, Matter, and the Nature of Reality" (Shambhala, 2023)

Sun, 25 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Into the Mirror: A Buddhist Journey through Mind, Matter, and the Nature of Reality (Shambhala, 2023) examines the materialism of the modern world through the profound teachings of Mahayana Buddhism and offers an accessible and powerful method for investigating the way our minds construct our worlds. Into the Mirror combines contemporary Western inquiries into the nature of consciousness, with classical Buddhist investigations into the nature of mind, to offer deep insights into the nature of reality. Andy Karr invites the reader to make this a personal, experiential journey through study, contemplation, and meditation.

The first part of the book presents the Mahayana Buddhist approach to the path of freedom from suffering. It explores foundational teachings, such as the four truths, the notion of enlightenment, and the practice of meditation, from a fresh perspective. The second part deconstructs assumptions about mind and the material world using easily understood tools from contemporary Western philosophy. Part three presents a series of contemplative practices, ethics, and insights, starting with the Middle Way teachings on emptiness and interdependence, through Yogachara’s subtle understanding of non-duality, to the view that buddha nature is already within us to be revealed rather than something external to be acquired. Into the Mirror concludes with a call to cultivate compassion for beings and the environment right within this world of illusion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Tom Higham, "The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins" (Yale UP, 2021)

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Fifty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was not the only species of humans in the world. There were also Neanderthals in what is now Europe, the Near East, and parts of Eurasia; Hobbits (H. floresiensis) on the island of Flores in Indonesia; Denisovans in Siberia and eastern Eurasia; and H. luzonensis in the Philippines. Tom Higham investigates what we know about these other human species and explores what can be learned from the genetic links between them and us. He also looks at whether H. erectus may have survived into the period when our ancestors first moved into Southeast Asia.

Filled with thrilling tales of recent scientific discoveries, Tom Higham book The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins (Yale UP, 2021) offers an engaging synopsis of our current understanding of human origins and raises new and interesting possibilities--particularly concerning what contact, if any, these other species might have had with us prior to their extinction.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert Falconer, "The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession" (Great Mystery Press, 2023)

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today I interview Bob Falconer about his new book, The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession (Great Mystery Press, 2023). Falconer’s book is the result of a decade-long journey to understand a phenomenon that raises questions not only about how we, as a contemporary Western culture, understand ourselves. It’s also a challenge to the limits of how we understand—the models of self and mind that we assume to be true. In The Others Within Us, Falconer offers a paradigm-shifting vision of what it means to be human and how therapists who work within the model of Internal Family Systems can help to relieve human suffering. Falconer offers both a methodology for therapists as well as an intellectual and transcultural history of the farther reaches of our inner worlds. Falconer himself is a long-time practitioner and trainer of Internal Family Systems (or IFS) and has previously co-written a book with the founder of the IFS model, Richard Schwartz, entitled Many Minds, One Self. Enjoy my conversation with Bob Falconer.

Show notes:

* Interview with Richard Schwartz

* Interview with Tanya Luhrmann

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Richard Duncan, "The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century" (John Wiley & Sons, 2022)

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Chris Impey, "Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity" (MIT Press, 2023)

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The science of finding habitable planets beyond our solar system and the prospects for establishing human civilization away from our ever-less-habitable planetary home. Planet Earth, it turns out, may not be the best of all possible worlds—and lately humanity has been carelessly depleting resources, decimating species, and degrading everything needed for life. Meanwhile, human ingenuity has opened up a vista of habitable worlds well beyond our wildest dreams of outposts on Mars.

Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity (MIT Press, 2023) is an expertly guided tour of this thrilling frontier in astronomy: the search for planets with the potential to host life. With the approachable style that has made him a leading interpreter of astronomy and space science, Chris Impey conducts readers across the vast, fast-developing field of astrobiology, surveying the dizzying advances carrying us ever closer to the discovery of life beyond Earth—and the prospect of humans living on another planet. Since the first exoplanet, or planet beyond our solar system, was discovered in 1995, over 4,000 more have been pinpointed, including hundreds of Earth-like planets, many of them habitable, detected by the Kepler satellite. With a view spanning astronomy, planetary science, geology, chemistry, and biology, Impey provides a state-of-the-art account of what’s behind this accelerating progress, what’s next, and what it might mean for humanity’s future. The existential threats that we face here on Earth lend urgency to this search, raising the question: Could space be our salvation? From the definition of habitability to the changing shape of space exploration—as it expands beyond the interests of government to the pursuits of private industry—Worlds without End shows us the science, on horizons near and far, that may hold the answers.

Chris Impey is University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Josh Milburn, "Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Simon Sharpe, "Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

We need to act five times faster to avoid dangerous climate change. As Greenland melts, Australia burns, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, we think we know who the villains are: oil companies, consumerism, weak political leaders. But what if the real blocks to progress are the ideas and institutions that are supposed to be helping us?

Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change (Cambridge UP, 2023) is an inside story from Simon Sharpe, who has spent ten years at the forefront of climate change policy and diplomacy. In our fight to avoid dangerous climate change, science is pulling its punches, diplomacy is picking the wrong battles, and economics has been fighting for the other side. This provocative and engaging book sets out how we should rethink our strategies and reorganise our efforts in the fields of science, economics, and diplomacy, so that we can act fast enough to stay safe.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Peter Baldwin, "Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All" (MIT Press, 2023)

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A clear-eyed examination of the open access movement: past history, current conflicts, and future possibilities. Open access (OA) could one day put the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. But the goal of allowing everyone to read everything faces fierce resistance.

In Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All (MIT Press, 2023), Peter Baldwin offers an up-to-date look at the ideals and history behind OA, and unpacks the controversies that arise when the dream of limitless information slams into entrenched interests in favor of the status quo. In addition to providing a clear analysis of the debates, Baldwin focuses on thorny issues such as copyright and ways to pay for “free” knowledge. He also provides a roadmap that would make OA economically viable and, as a result, advance one of humanity’s age-old ambitions. Baldwin addresses the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the development of the university and research establishment. As he notes, the hard sciences have already created a funding model that increasingly provides open access, but at the cost of crowding out the humanities. Baldwin proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world. Rich in detail and free of jargon, Athena Unbound is an essential primer on the state of the global open access movement.

Peter Baldwin is Professor of History at UCLA, and Global Distinguished Professor at NYU.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nate G. Hilger, "The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis" (MIT Press, 2023)

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers--parents--labor in isolation. If they ask for help, they are made to feel inadequate; there is no centralized organization to represent their interests; and there is virtually nothing spent on research and development to help them achieve their goals. It's almost as if parents are set up to fail--and the result is lost opportunities that limit children's success and make us all worse off. In The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis (MIT Press, 2023), Nate Hilger combines cutting-edge social science research, revealing historical case studies, and on-the-ground investigation to recast parenting as the hidden crucible of inequality.

Parents are expected not only to care for their children but to help them develop the skills they will need to thrive in today's socioeconomic reality--but most parents, including even the most caring parents on the planet, are not trained in skill development and lack the resources to get help. How do we fix this? The solution, Hilger argues, is to ask less of parents, not more. America should consider child development a public investment with a monumental payoff. We need a program like Medicare--call it Familycare--to drive this investment. To make it happen, parents need to organize to wield their political power on behalf of children--who will always be the largest bloc of disenfranchised people in this country.

The Parent Trap exposes the true costs of our society's unrealistic expectations around parenting and lays out a profoundly hopeful blueprint for reform.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Graham Harman and Christopher Witmore, "Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology" (Polity Press, 2023)

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Objects generate time; time does not generate or change objects. That is the central thesis of this book by the philosopher Graham Harman and the archaeologist Christopher Witmore, who defend radical positions in their respective fields.

Against a current and pervasive conviction that reality consists of an unceasing flux - a view associated in philosophy with New Materialism - object-oriented ontology asserts that objects of all varieties are the bedrock of reality from which time emerges. And against the narrative convictions of time as the course of historical events, the objects and encounters associated with archaeology push back against the very temporal delimitations which defined the field and its objects ever since its professionalization in the nineteenth century.

In a study ranging from the ruins of ancient Corinth, Mycenae, and Troy to debates over time from Aristotle and al-Ash'ari through Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, the authors draw on alternative conceptions of time as retroactive, percolating, topological, cyclical, and generational, as consisting of countercurrents or of a surface tension between objects and their own qualities. Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology (Polity Press, 2023) invites us to reconsider the modern notion of objects as inert matter serving as a receptacle for human categories.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ontology and Ritual Theory”.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Philip Kitcher, "What's the Use of Philosophy?' (Oxford UP, 2023)

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In What's the Use of Philosophy? (Oxford UP, 2023), Philip Kitcher here grapples with an essential philosophical question: what the point of philosophy is, and what it should and can be. Kitcher's portrait of the discipline is not a familiar defense of the importance of philosophy or the humanities writ large. Rather, he is deeply critical of philosophy as it is practiced today, a practice focused on narrow technical questions that are far removed from the concerns of human life. He provides a penetrating diagnosis of why exactly contemporary philosophy has come to suffer this crisis, showing how it suffers from various syndromes that continue to push it further into irrelevance. Then, taking up ideas from William James and John Dewey, Kitcher provides a positive roadmap for the future of philosophy: first, as a discipline that can provide clarity to other kinds of human inquiry, such as religion or science; and second, bringing order to people's notions of the world, dispelling confusion in favor of clarity, and helping us think through our biggest human questions and dilemmas. Kitcher concludes with a letter to young philosophers who wonder how they can align their aspirations with the hyper-professionalism expected of them.

Philip Kitcher has taught for nearly half a century at several American Universities, most recently at Columbia University in the City of New York. His work has been honored with a number of awards, including the Rescher Medal for systematic philosophy, and the Hempel Award for lifetime achievement in the Philosophy of Science. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Member of the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jen Ross, "Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies" (Routledge, 2022)

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

What is the future of education? In Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies (Routledge, 2022), Jen Ross, a senior lecturer in digital education at the University of Edinburgh, analyses the way ideas about the future are produced and become accepted in education (and in society). This analysis is the basis for offering radical alternatives. In the educational context, the book reflects on four research projects that demonstrate the power of particular approaches- speculative methods- to engaging with digital pedagogy and research. The book has a rich theoretical engagement with a range of social and educational theory, as well as giving detailed practical guidance for educators. The detailed guidance for researchers and teachers who want to make alternative digital futures make the book essential reading for anyone interested in the future of education.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, "The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty" (Penguin, 2020)

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Does a strong state mean a weak market? This is a common misconception amongst economists. Many view the state as either taxing and regulating the market too much or too little. However, the truth is that state capacity is just not well conceptualized in economic theory.

James A. Robinson is a political scientist, economist, and professor at the University of Chicago. His recent book, co-authored with Daron Acemoglu, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty, explores the critical balance needed between state and society and how liberty can continue to thrive despite threats from both sides.

James and Greg explore the correlation between inclusive political institutions and economic growth and prosperity and why the absence of state capacity in developing nations is a major contributing factor to their economic struggles. This highlights the necessity for a genuine debate on whether strong governments and effective state institutions facilitate or stifle independence and innovation.

Gregory LaBlanc is a lifelong educator with degrees in History, PPE, Business, and Law, Greg currently teaches at Berkeley, Stanford, and HEC Paris. He has taught in multiple disciplines, from Engineering to Economics, from Biology to Business, from Psychology to Philosophy. He is the host of the unSILOed podcast. unSILOed is produced by University FM.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Orly Lobel, "The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future" (PublicAffairs, 2022)

Wed, 31 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The fear of algorithmic decision-making and surveillance capitalism dominate today's tech policy discussions. But instead of simply criticizing big data and automation, we can harness technology to correct discrimination, historical exclusions, and subvert long-standing stereotypes.

Orly Lobel is the author of The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future and Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law. Lobel is one of the nation's foremost legal experts on labor and employment law. She is also one of the nation's top-cited young legal scholars.

Orly and Greg discuss how collecting more data and adding more inputs into decision algorithms may be beneficial to expose disparities in current frameworks in the real world, and help us to right past injustices and ongoing inequities.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jaime Green, "The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination and Our Vision of the Cosmos" (Hanover Square Press, 2023)

Mon, 29 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode we talk to Jaime Green about her superb cultural and scientific exploration of alien life and the cosmos. It examines how the possibility of life on other planets shapes our understanding of humanity. Fans of Leslie Jamison, Carl Zimmer and Carlo Rovelli will find a lot to think about.

One of the most powerful questions humans ask about the cosmos is: Are we alone? Yet this very question is inevitably reduced to yes or no, to odds and probabilities that posit answers through complex physics. The science is fascinating, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is a reflection of our values and aspirations, our fears and anxieties, and most importantly, our enduring sense of hope.

In The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination and Our Vision of the Cosmos (Hanover Square Press, 2023), acclaimed science journalist Jaime Green, traces the history of our understanding, from the days of Galileo and Copernicus up through to our contemporary quest for exoplanets in the "Goldilocks zone," where life akin to ours on Earth might exist. Along the way, she interweaves insights from a long-standing tradition of science fiction writers who use the power of imagination to extrapolate and construct worlds that in turn inspire scientists. Weaving in expert interviews, cutting-edge astronomy research, philosophical inquiry and pop culture touchstones ranging from A Wrinkle in Time to Star Trek to Avatar, The Possibility of Life explores our evolving conception of the cosmos to ask an even deeper question: What does it mean to be human?

John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Bart D. Ehrman, "Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)

Sun, 28 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A New York Times bestselling Biblical scholar, reveals why our popular understanding of the Apocalypse is all wrong—and why that matters.

You’ll find nearly everything the Bible has to say about the end in the Book of Revelation: a mystifying prophecy filled with bizarre symbolism, violent imagery, mangled syntax, confounding contradictions, and very firm ideas about the horrors that await us all. But whether you understand the book as a literal description of what will soon come to pass, interpret it as a metaphorical expression of hope for those suffering now, or only recognize its highlights from pop culture, what you think Revelation reveals…is almost certainly wrong.

In Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End (Simon and Schuster, 2023), acclaimed New Testament authority Bart D. Ehrman delves into the most misunderstood—and possibly the most dangerous—book of the Bible, exploring the horrifying social and political consequences of expecting an imminent apocalypse and offering a fascinating tour through three millennia of Judeo-Christian thinking about how our world will end. By turns hilarious, moving, troubling, and provocative, Armageddon presents inspiring insights into how to live our lives in the face of an uncertain future and reveals what the Bible really says about the end.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Lawrence H. White, "Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sun, 28 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The recent rise of dollar, pound, and euro inflation rates has rekindled the debate over potential alternative monies, particularly gold and Bitcoin. Though Bitcoin has been much discussed in recent years, a basic understanding of how it and gold would work as monetary standards is rare. Accessibly written by a pioneering economist, Better Money explains and evaluates gold, fiat, and Bitcoin standards without hype. White uses simple supply-and-demand analysis to explain how these standards work, evaluating their relative merits and explaining their response to shocks, allowing for informed comparisons between them. This book addresses common misunderstandings of the gold standard and Bitcoin, using historical evidence to review the history of money with emphasis on the contest between market and government provision. Known for his work on alternative monetary institutions, White offers a reasoned discussion of which standard is most likely to provide a better money.

In Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin? (Cambridge UP, 2023), Lawrence H. White offers a summary of previous work while explaining differences and similarities of the gold standard and how crypto currencies work in an authoritative yet non technical way with a non-specialist audience in mind. His main idea is to explore alternatives to fiat money in a digital world.

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

After the Pill: A Conversation with Mary Eberstadt

Tue, 23 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The pill has rocked our society to its core: but have we fully examined all its repercussions? Influential author and essayist Mary Eberstadt thinks we've only scratched the surface; in her most recent book, Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited (Ignatius Press, 2023) she argues that the papal encyclical Humane Vitae predicted our deep loneliness and other modern woes.

Mary Eberstadt holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic information center in Washington, D.C., and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute.

Number of children per family, broken down by religion
Her recent essay, "1968 is So Over"

Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, "We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism" (Bristol UP, 2023)

Sun, 21 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The concept of transhumanism emerged in the middle of the 20th century, and has influenced discussions around AI, brain–computer interfaces, genetic technologies and life extension. Despite its enduring influence in the public imagination, a fully developed philosophy of transhumanism has not yet been presented.

In We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism (Bristol UP, 2023), leading philosopher Stefan Lorenz Sorgner explores the critical issues that link transhumanism with digitalization, gene technologies and ethics. He examines the history and meaning of transhumanism and asks bold questions about human perfection, cyborgs, genetically enhanced entities, and uploaded minds.

Offering insightful reflections on values, norms and utopia, this will be an important guide for readers interested in contemporary digital culture, gene ethics, and policy making.

Frances Sacks is a graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

James Poskett, "Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science" (Mariner Books, 2022)

Sun, 21 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Horizons: A Global History of Science (Mariner Books, 2022), James Poskett, Associate Professor in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Warwick, begins by asking, “Where did modern science come from?” Arguing against the traditional narrative focusing on “genius” European men, Poskett invites us to reconsider and expand the geography of the history of modern science. Drawing from a wide range of recent scholarship, Poskett successfully tackles the challenge of presenting a “big picture” history of modern science addressing crucial questions of violence, colonization, resistance, and cultural exchange. This tour de force by Poskett shows that, despite legitimate concerns raised against big picture narratives, it is possible to write compelling, informative, and critical histories of modern science intended to both historians and the general public.

What if a history of modern science began with the Aztecs’ incredible botanical gardens in Mexico, rather than with Galileo Galilei pointing his telescope toward the moons of Jupiter? What if a history of modern science spent more time on the implications of Isaac Newton’s investments in the slave trade than on his famous “annus mirabilis”? Deceiving its readers’ expectations, Horizons focuses on modern science as the product of a global history characterized by cultural exchanges and uneven power relations. Inspiring new ways of making accessible the global history of science without compromising on its most problematic facets, Horizons also gives the opportunity to rethink the responsibilities of historians of science in today’s world.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Philip Pettit, "The State" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sat, 20 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In The State (Princeton University Press, 2023), the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit embarks on a massive undertaking, offering a major new account of the foundations of the state and the nature of justice. In doing so, Pettit builds a new theory of what the state is and what it ought to be, addresses the normative question of how justice serves as a measure of the success of a state, and the way it should operate in relation to its citizens and other people.

Philip Pettit is L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values at Princeton University and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Origins of the Modern Self: A Conversation with Carl Trueman

Thu, 18 May 2023 19:09:41 -0000

Modern social and political discussions all seem to revolve around the concept of identity. Dr. Carl Trueman, theologian and former William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life here at the Madison Program, discusses how thinkers like Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche created a world in which sexuality is politicized, and in which we all instinctively know what it means to "identify as."

Dr. Trueman is the author two recent books, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and a shorter, study-version on the same topic, Strange New World.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Carol Graham, "The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us from Despair" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Mon, 15 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In a society marked by extreme inequality of income and opportunity, why should economists care about how people feel? The truth is that feelings of well-being are critical metrics that predict future life outcomes. In The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us from Despair (Princeton UP, 2023), economist Carol Graham argues for the importance of hope--little studied in economics at present--as an independent dimension of well-being. Given America's current mental health crisis, thrown into stark relief by COVID, hope may be the most important measure of well-being, and researchers are tracking trends in hope as a key factor in understanding the rising numbers of "deaths of despair" and premature mortality.

Graham, an authority on the study of well-being, points to empirical evidence demonstrating that hope can improve people's life outcomes and that despair can destroy them. These findings, she argues, merit deeper exploration. Graham discusses the potential of novel well-being metrics as tracking indicators of despair, reports on new surveys of hope among low-income adolescents, and considers the implications of the results for the futures of these young adults.

Graham asks how and why the wealthiest country in the world has such despair. What are we missing? She argues that public policy problems--from joblessness and labor force dropout to the lack of affordable health care and inadequate public education--can't be solved without hope. Drawing on research in well-being and other disciplines, Graham describes strategies for restoring hope in populations where it has been lost. The need to address despair, and to restore hope, is critical to America's future.

Joe Tasca is a host and a reporter for the NPR affiliate in Providence, Rhode Island.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Miraculous Mind (with Paul Bloom)

Thu, 11 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Psychologist Paul Bloom and I talk about the human brain, morality, empathy, perversity, all the things—including Professor Bloom’s new book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind (Ecco Press, 2023). Culturally Jewish but in practice an atheist, Paul Bloom comes at the recurring theological questions familiar to the Almost Good Catholics audience from the materialistic perspective of psychology.

Paul Bloom’s Yale faculty webpage
Paul Bloom’s Toronto faculty webpage
Paul Bloom’s Wikipedia page
Paul Bloom’s book, Psych
Paul Bloom and Dave Pizarro’s Psych podcast
Paul Bloom’s Introduction to Psychology on Yale Open Courses
Paul Bloom’s TED Talk about St. Augustine of Hippo and perversity.
Paul Bloom talks with Russ Roberts on EconTalk about Psych, The Sweet Spot, Cruelty, and Empathy.

Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Karen Schrier, "We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 11 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Ethics and civics have always mattered, but perhaps they matter now more than ever before. Recently, with the rise of online teaching and movements like #PlayApartTogether, games have become increasingly acknowledged as platforms for civic deliberation and value sharing. We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics (Oxford UP, 2021) explores these possibilities by examining how we connect, communicate, analyze, and discover when we play games. Combining research-based perspectives and current examples, this volume shows how games can be used in ethics, civics, and social studies education to inspire learning, critical thinking, and civic change.

We the Gamers introduces and explores various educational frameworks through a range of games and interactive experiences including board and card games, online games, virtual reality and augmented reality games, and digital games like Minecraft,Executive Command, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Fortnite, When Rivers Were Trails, Politicraft, Quandary, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The book systematically evaluates the types of skills, concepts, and knowledge needed for civic and ethical engagement, and details how games can foster these skills in classrooms, remote learning environments, and other educational settings. We the Gamers also explores the obstacles to learning with games and how to overcome those obstacles by encouraging equity and inclusion, care and compassion, and fairness and justice.

Featuring helpful tips and case studies, We the Gamers shows teachers the strengths and limitations of games in helping students connect with civics and ethics, and imagines how we might repair and remake our world through gaming, together.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ami Harbin, "Fearing Together: Ethics for Insecurity" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sun, 07 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Fearing Together: Ethics for Insecurity (Oxford UP, 2023), Ami Harbin explores how fearing is a central part of how we relate to each other and the unpredictable world. Fearing badly is a key part of many of our moral failures, and fearing better a central part of our moral repair.

We might think that fearing is undesirable and should be avoided whenever possible. In fact, Fearing Together shows that the avoidance of fear causes some of our greatest threats. This book brings together philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and psychoanalysis to help us understand fear as a relational practice so that we can see that our relationships with other fearers shape what we fear, what fear feels like, how we identify and understand our fears, and how we cope with them.

Growing as moral agents involves coming to grips with what kinds of fearers we want to be and become, and with what we owe each other when facing what we cannot control. At the heart of this book are the moral quandaries and complexities of relational fearing: the ethics of fearing together.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, "Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity" (PublicAffairs, 2023)

Fri, 05 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs, 2023) is a groundbreaking work by bestselling authors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in which they challenge conventional wisdom about the role of technology in driving prosperity. The authors argue that technology is not a neutral force working in the public interest but is shaped by the interests and beliefs of the powerful. Those who control technology are the ones who benefit from it, leaving the rest of society with the illusion of progress.

The authors provide a historical account of how technological choices have shaped the course of history, from the appropriation of the economic surplus of the Middle Ages by an ecclesiastical elite to the making of vast fortunes from digital technologies today, while millions of people are pushed towards poverty. The authors emphasize that technological progress can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.

The book presents a manifesto for building a better society by using the tremendous digital advances of the last half century to create useful and empowering tools, rather than marginalizing most people through automated work and political passivity. The authors argue that to achieve the true potential of innovation, we need to ensure that technology is creating new jobs and opportunities for everyone. The book offers a vision to reimagine and reshape the path of technology, ensuring that it leads to true shared prosperity.

Power and Progress offers a fresh perspective on how technology shapes our lives and highlights the need for a more democratic approach to technological progress. The book provides a compelling argument that the path of technology is not predetermined but can be brought under control to ensure that it benefits everyone, not just a few powerful individuals or corporations. The authors provide an insightful analysis of the power dynamics that underlie technological progress, and their manifesto for a better society is a call to action for policymakers, business leaders, and individuals alike.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jack Buffington, "Reinventing the Supply Chain: A 21st-Century Covenant with America" (Georgetown UP, 2023)

Fri, 05 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

When the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global economic "shutdown" in March 2020, our supply chains began to fail, and out-of-stocks and delivery delays became the new norm. Contrary to public perception, the pandemic strain did not break the current system of supply chains; it merely exposed weaknesses and fault lines that were decades in the making, and which were already acutely felt in deindustrialized cities and depopulated rural towns throughout the United States.

Reinventing the Supply Chain: A 21st-Century Covenant with America (Georgetown UP, 2023) explores the historical role of supply chains in the global economy, outlines where the system went wrong and what needs to be done to fix it, and demonstrates how a retooled supply chain can lead to the revitalization of American communities. Jack Buffington proposes a transformation of the global supply chain system into a community-based value chain, led by the communities themselves and driven by digital platforms for raising capital and blockchain technology.

Buffington proposes new solutions to problems that have been decades in the making. With clear analysis and profound insight, Buffington provides a clear roadmap to a more durable and efficient system.

Jack Buffington is an assistant professor of the practice in supply chain management in the marketing department at the Daniels College of Business.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold History" (Knopf, 2023)

Thu, 04 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of Germs: A Discussion with Jonathan Kennedy

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Have germs or humans done the most to shape the world’s history? Did Homo Sapiens get the better of the Neanderthals because of superior brainpower or because of better resistance to some infectious disease? And are germs part of the story behind the fall of Rome and rise of Islam? Owen Bennett Jones talks germs with Jonathan Kennedy of London University. Kennedy is the author of Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues (Crown Publishing, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Extraterrestrials

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

An interview with Wade Roush, author of Extraterrestrials, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. Are we alone in the universe? If not, where is everybody? And which might be more meaningful?

Soundtrack produced by artist and author of High Static, Dead Lines (Strange Attractor Press, December 2018) Kristen Gallerneaux.

Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity--but we don't. Where is everybody? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?

This paradox (they're bound to be out there; but where are they?), first formulated by the famed physicist Enrico Fermi, has fueled decades of debate, speculation, and, lately, some actual science. Roush lays out the problem in its historical and modern-day context and summarizes the latest thinking among astronomers and astrobiologists. He describes the long history of speculation about aliens (we've been debating the idea for thousands of years); the emergence of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) as a scientific discipline in the 1960s, and scientists' use of radio and optical techniques to scan for signals; and developments in astrobiology (the study of how life might arise in non-Earth like environments) and exoplanet research (the discovery of planets outside our solar system). Finally, he discusses possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox and suggests way to refocus SETI work that might increase the chances of resolving the paradox--and finding extraterrestrials.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alan Lightman, "The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science" (Pantheon, 2023)

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Are science and spirituality incompatible? From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams comes a rich, fascinating answer to that question...

Gazing at the stars, falling in love, or listening to music, we sometimes feel a transcendent connection with a cosmic unity and things larger than ourselves. But these experiences are not easily understood by science, which holds that all things can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules. Is there space in our scientific worldview for these spiritual experiences?

According to acclaimed physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, there may be. Drawing on intellectual history and conversations with contemporary scientists, philosophers, and psychologists, Lightman asks a series of thought-provoking questions that illuminate our strange place between the world of particles and forces and the world of complex human experience. Can strict materialism explain our appreciation of beauty? Or our feelings of connection to nature and to other people? Is there a physical basis for consciousness, the most slippery of all scientific problems?

In The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science (Pantheon, 2023), Lightman weaves these investigations together to propose what he calls “spiritual materialism”—the belief that we can embrace spiritual experiences without letting go of our scientific worldview. In his view, the breadth of the human condition is not only rooted in material atoms and molecules but can also be explained in terms of Darwinian evolution.

What is revealed in this lyrical, enlightening book is that spirituality may not only be compatible with science, it also ought to remain at the core of what it means to be human.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 19:35:20 -0000

A discussion with the the author of Free Will (from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) and Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem, Mark Balaguer, in which we discuss the scientific arguments for and against the possibility of free will.

In this largely antimetaphysical treatment of free will and determinism, Mark Balaguer argues that the philosophical problem of free will boils down to an open scientific question about the causal histories of certain kinds of neural events. In the course of his argument, Balaguer provides a naturalistic defense of the libertarian view of free will.

The metaphysical component of the problem of free will, Balaguer argues, essentially boils down to the question of whether humans possess libertarian free will. Furthermore, he argues that, contrary to the traditional wisdom, the libertarian question reduces to a question about indeterminacy--in particular, to a straightforward empirical question about whether certain neural events in our heads are causally undetermined in a certain specific way; in other words, Balaguer argues that the right kind of indeterminacy would bring with it all of the other requirements for libertarian free will. Finally, he argues that because there is no good evidence as to whether or not the relevant neural events are undetermined in the way that's required, the question of whether human beings possess libertarian free will is a wide-open empirical question.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Scott Newstok, "How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton UP, 2020) offers a short, spirited defense of rhetoric and the liberal arts as catalysts for precision, invention, and empathy in today's world. The author, a professor of Shakespeare studies at a liberal arts college and a parent of school-age children, argues that high-stakes testing and a culture of assessment have altered how and what students are taught, as courses across the arts, humanities, and sciences increasingly are set aside to make room for joyless, mechanical reading and math instruction. Students have been robbed of a complete education, their imaginations stunted by this myopic focus on bare literacy and numeracy.

Education is about thinking, Newstok argues, rather than the mastery of a set of rigidly defined skills, and the seemingly rigid pedagogy of the English Renaissance produced some of the most compelling and influential examples of liberated thinking. Each of the fourteen chapters explores an essential element of Shakespeare's world and work, aligns it with the ideas of other thinkers and writers in modern times, and suggests opportunities for further reading. Chapters on craft, technology, attention, freedom, and related topics combine past and present ideas about education to build a case for the value of the past, the pleasure of thinking, and the limitations of modern educational practices and prejudices.

Scott Newstok is professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. A parent and an award-winning teacher, he is the author of Quoting Death in Early Modern England and the editor of several other books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Tom Hutton, "Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II" (Texas Tech UP, 2023)

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Toward the end of World War II, Hitler's many health complications became even more pronounced, making an evil man yet more erratic and dangerous. While the subject of Hitler's health has been catalogued previously, never has it been done so this thoroughly or with this level of up-to-date medical expertise.

Tom Hutton's Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II (Texas Tech UP, 2023) draws from a lifetime of medical research and clinical experience to understand how the dictator's particular medical history further warped a deformed personality and altered Hitler's decision making. Dr. Hutton trained under the world-renowned neuropsychologist and father of modern neuropsychological assessment, Dr. Alexander Luria, giving him a uniquely qualified eye to undertake this most difficult assessment.

While many books on the subject thumb through the annals of popular psychology to understand history's most famous monsters, Dr. Hutton's latest book uses contemporary clinical knowledge, lucidly synthesizing medical complexities for all audiences.

Here Dr. Hutton undertakes a thorough medical history to elucidate a pivotal historical moment, examining how disease impacted Hitler's destructive life.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Rachel Robison-Greene, "Edibility and in Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations" (Lexington Books, 2022)

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Consumers and policy makers have unprecedented choices to make in the years to come about how and what we eat. If we continue down our current path of food production, we risk ever-increasing levels of animal exploitation, environmental destruction, biodiversity loss, and challenges to human health. In vitro meat production, or the process of growing meat in a lab, has the potential to reduce the severity of these problems. This proposal would change our food systems dramatically. Edibility and In Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations (Lexington Books, 2022) explores the ethical questions that it’s important to ask every stage of this process. Rachel Robison-Greene considers arguments for and against the production of in vitro meat, as well as challenges for implementation. She argues that in vitro meat should be implemented and that we should re-think how we use the term “edible.”

Rachel Robison-Greene is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Utah State University. Her research interests are largely in meta-ethics, epistemology, and applied ethics, especially as it pertains to animals, the environment, and technology. Rachel serves as the Secretary of the Public Philosophy Network, the Secretary of the Culture and Animals Foundation, and is the Chair Elect of the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Doug Bates on the Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

“It is not events that disturb us, but what we believe about them.” Is this true? Well, apparently Pyrrho, a rather obscure Greek philosopher claimed it to be the case and he may have been influenced by Buddhism in his creation of what today is called “Pyrrhonism”. Pyrrho agreed with the Buddha that delusion was the cause of suffering, but instead of using meditation to end delusion, Pyrrho applied Greek philosophical rationalism.

Pyrrho’s Way: The Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism (Sumeru Press, 2020) lays out the Pyrrhonist path for modern readers on how to apply Pyrrhonist practice to everyday life. Its author is Douglas C. Bates, founder of the Modern Pyrrhonism Movement. He has been a Zen practitioner for over 25 years, was a founding member of Boundless Way Zen, and is a student of Zeno Myoun, Roshi.

“…succeeds in making a difficult and obscure philosophy not only intelligible but, more to the point, something to be practiced in a way that can make a difference to your life here and now.” — STEPHEN BATCHELOR, author of The Art of Solitude

“…an intelligent, readable book that succeeds in its goal of introducing Pyrrhonism as practice.” — CHRISTOPHER BECKWITH, author of Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia

Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Paul Kenny, "Why Populism?: Political Strategy from Ancient Greece to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The rise to power of populists like Donald Trump is usually attributed to the shifting values and policy preferences of voters-the demand side. Paul Kenny's Why Populism?: Political Strategy from Ancient Greece to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2023) shifts the public debate on populism and examines the other half of the equation-the supply side. Kenny argues that to understand the rise of populism is to understand the cost of different strategies for winning and keeping power. For the aspiring leader, populism-appealing directly to the people through mass communication-can be a quicker, cheaper, and more effective strategy than working through a political party. Probing the long history of populism in the West from its Ancient Greek roots to the present, this highly readable book shows that the 'economic laws of populism are constant.' 'Forget ideology. Forget resentment. Forget racism or sexism.' Populism, the author writes, is the result of a hidden strategic calculus.

Paul Kenny is Professor of Political Science at IHSS at Australian Catholic University and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ben Shneiderman, "Human-Centered AI" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The remarkable progress in algorithms for machine and deep learning have opened the doors to new opportunities, and some dark possibilities. However, a bright future awaits those who build on their working methods by including HCAI strategies of design and testing. As many technology companies and thought leaders have argued, the goal is not to replace people, but to empower them by making design choices that give humans control over technology.

In Human-Centered AI (Oxford UP, 2022), Professor Ben Shneiderman offers an optimistic realist's guide to how artificial intelligence can be used to augment and enhance humans' lives. This project bridges the gap between ethical considerations and practical realities to offer a road map for successful, reliable systems. Digital cameras, communications services, and navigation apps are just the beginning. Shneiderman shows how future applications will support health and wellness, improve education, accelerate business, and connect people in reliable, safe, and trustworthy ways that respect human values, rights, justice, and dignity.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David Rothenberg, "Whale Music: Thousand Mile Songs in a Sea of Sound" (Terra Nova Press, 2023)

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Whale song is an astonishing world of sound whose existence no one suspected before the 1960s. Its discovery has forced us to confront the possibility of alien intelligence--not in outer space but right here on earth. Thoughtful, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining, Whale Music: Thousand Mile Songs in a Sea of Sound (Terra Nova Press, 2023) uses the enigma of whale sounds to open up whales' underwater world of sonic mystery. In observing and talking with leading researchers from around the globe as they attempt to decipher undersea music, Rothenberg tells the story of scientists and musicians confronting an unknown as vast as the ocean itself. His search culminates in a grand attempt to make interspecies music by playing his clarinet with whales in their native habitats, from Russia to Canada to Hawaii.

This is a revised edition of Thousand Mile Song, originally published in 2008. The latest advances in cetacean science and interspecies communication have been incorporated into this new edition, along with added photographs and color whale scores.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Brian Villmoare, "The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Big History seeks to retell the human story in light of scientific advances by such methods as radiocarbon dating and genetic analysis. Brian Villmoare's book The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides a deep, causal view of the forces that have shaped the universe, the earth, and humanity. Starting with the Big Bang and the formation of the earth, it traces the evolutionary history of the world, focusing on humanity's origins. It also explores the many natural forces shaping humanity, especially the evolution of the brain and behaviour. Moving through time, the causes of such important transformations as agriculture, complex societies, the industrial revolution, the enlightenment, and modernity are placed in the context of underlying changes in demography, learning, and social organization. Humans are biological creatures, operating with instincts evolved millions of years ago, but in the context of a rapidly changing world, and as we try to adapt to new circumstances, we must regularly reckon with our deep past.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Karen Frost-Arnold, "Who Should We Be Online?: A Social Epistemology for the Internet" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Internet plays a central role in how we communicate, share information, disseminate ideas, maintain social connections, and conduct business. The Internet also exacerbates existing problems regarding irrationality, bias, wrongful discrimination, exploitation, and dehumanization. Moreover, the Internet gives rise to new ethical and epistemological problems – fake news, sock-puppetry, internet hoaxes, disinformation, and so on.

In Who Should We Be Online?: A Social Epistemology for the Internet (Oxford University Press 2023), Karen Frost-Arnold proposes a multi-layered social epistemology designed to assist us in navigating the fraught normative landscape of the online world.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ioannis Gaitanidis, "Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion?" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Ioannis Gaitanidis' book Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion? (Bloomsbury, 2022) critically examines the spirituality phenomenon in contemporary Japan by looking at the main actors involved in the discourse: spiritual therapists as practitioners, scholars of spirituality studies, and the people in the publishing industry. Ioannis Gaitanidis challenges the common understanding of spirituality as simply a new emergent form of “religion” by considering alternativity as a framework to understand how it has been framed in relation to something else.

This book critically analyses the creation and effects of spirituality as both discourse and practice in Japan. It shows how the value of spirituality has been sustained by scholars who have wished for a more civic role for religion; by the publishing industry whose exponential growth in the 1980s fashioned those who later identified as the representatives of this “new spirituality culture”; by “spiritual therapists” who have sought to eke out a livelihood in an increasingly professionalized and regulated therapeutic field; and by the cruel optimism of an increasingly precarious workforce placing its hopes in the imagined alternative that the supirichuaru represents.

Ioannis Gaitanidis offers a new transdisciplinary conceptualisation of 'alternativity' that can be applied across and beyond the disciplines of religious studies, media studies, popular culture studies and the anthropology/sociology of medicine.

Raditya Nuradi is a Phd student at Kyushu University. He works on religion and popular culture, particularly anime pilgrimages. His research explores pilgrims' experiences through space and materiality.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Good Enough Life

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today’s book is: The Good-Enough Life (Princeton UP, 2022) by Avram Alpert. We live in a world oriented toward greatness, one in which we feel compelled to be among the wealthiest, most powerful, and most famous. This book explains why no one truly benefits from this competitive social order, and reveals how another way of life is possible—a good-enough life for all. Dr. Alpert shows how our obsession with greatness results in stress and anxiety, damage to our relationships, widespread political and economic inequality, and destruction of the natural world. He describes how to move beyond greatness to create a society in which everyone flourishes. By competing less with each other, each of us can find renewed meaning and purpose, have our material and emotional needs met, and begin to lead more leisurely lives. Alpert makes no false utopian promises, however. Life can never be more than good enough because there will always be accidents and tragedies beyond our control, which is why we must stop dividing the world into winners and losers and ensure that there is a fair share of decency and sufficiency to go around.

Visionary and provocative, The Good-Enough Life demonstrates how we can work together to cultivate a good-enough life for all instead of tearing ourselves apart in a race to the top of the social pyramid.

Our guest is: Dr. Avram Alpert, a writer and teacher. He is currently a research fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg. He previously taught at Princeton and Rutgers Universities. He is the author of three books, most recently The Good Enough Life. His work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Aeon.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

A Partial Enlightenment: What Modern Literature and Buddhism Can Teach Us about Living Well without Perfection, by Avram Alpert
Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki, by Avram Alpert
How to Human: An Incomplete Manual for Living in a Mess-up World, by Alice Connor
Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving, by Celeste Headlee
Find the Good, by Heather Lende
A Wonderful Life: Insights on Finding a Meaningful Existence, by Frank Martela
Podcast on making a meaningful life
Podcast on belonging and the science of creating connection and bridging divides
Podcast on the knowledge unlocked by facing failure
Podcast on the benefits of doing less, and stressing less

Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us each week, where we learn directly from experts. We embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are informed and inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Alex Hinton, "Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity's Dark Side" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Perpetrators of mass violence are commonly regarded as evil. Their violent nature is believed to make them commit heinous crimes as members of state agencies, insurgencies, terrorist organizations, or racist and supremacist groups. Upon close examination, however, perpetrators are contradictory human beings who often lead unsettlingly ordinary and uneventful lives.

Drawing on decades of on-the-ground research with perpetrators of genocide, mass violence, and enforced disappearances in Cambodia and Argentina, Antonius Robben and Alex Hinton explore how researchers go about not just interviewing and writing about perpetrators, but also processing their own emotions and considering how the personal and interpersonal impact of this sort of research informs the texts that emerge from them. Through interlinked ethnographic essays, methodological and theoretical reflections, and dialogues between the two authors, Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity's Dark Side (Stanford UP, 2023) conveys practical wisdom for the benefit of other researchers who face ruthless perpetrators and experience turbulent emotions when listening to perpetrators and their victims. Perpetrators rarely regard themselves as such, and fieldwork with perpetrators makes for situations freighted with emotion. Research with perpetrators is a difficult but important part of understanding the causes of and creating solutions to mass violence, and Robben and Hinton use their expertise to provide insightful lessons on the epistemological, ethical, and emotional challenges of ethnographic fieldwork in the wake of atrocity.

Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Todd McGowan, "Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets" (Columbia UP, 2016)

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

If you have ever gotten excited over buying a new object only to feel let down once you acquire it, then today’s discussion will be relevant to you. My guest is Todd McGowan, author of the book Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016, Columbia University Press). We discuss his critique of capitalism as a system that encourages us to forever chase satisfactions that never come. And we explore his suggestion that true satisfaction lies in the wanting, not the acquiring. It’s a fascinating conversation that will radically change the way you approach everyday consumption and how you think about your own satisfaction.

Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. He is the author of several other books, including Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013, University of Nebraska Press), Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy (2017, Northwestern University Press), and Universality and Identity Politics (2020, Columbia University Press). He is also co-host, along with Ryan Engley, of the podcast Why Theory.

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is a contributing author to the books Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and Patriarchy and its Discontents: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (2023, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of Genes and Equality: A Discussion with Kathryn Paige Harden

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

If your genes make you better suited to succeed, is that fair? And if not, can anything be done about it? Kathryn Paige Harden – professor psychology at University of Texas in Austin – tells Owen Bennett Jones that we should acknowledge the difference in our genetic make ups and then set about thinking about how to make a fairer society in the light of this differences. Harden is the author of The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (Princeton UP, 2021).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Tobias Tanton, "Corporeal Theology: The Nature of Theological Understanding in Light of Embodied Cognition" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Appropriating insights from empirical findings and theoretical constructs of 'embodied cognition', Corporeal Theology: The Nature of Theological Understanding in Light of Embodied Cognition (Oxford UP, 2023) explores how theological understanding is accommodated to the bodily nature of human cognition. The principle of divine accommodation provides a theological framework for considering the human cognitive capacities that are accommodated by theological concepts and ecclesial practices. A rich portrait of the nature of human cognitive capacities is drawn from an emerging paradigm in cognitive science, embodied cognition, which proposes that cognition depends upon bodily sensorimotor systems to ground concepts and to draw upon environmental resources.

Embodied cognition's hypothesis that human concepts are grounded in sensorimotor states poses a theological quandary for God-concepts, since identifying God with sensorimotor content risks idolatry. The incarnation resolves this problem in theological epistemology by grounding God-concepts in bodily understanding, while avoiding idolatry. Thus, the incarnation represents an accommodation to human conceptual capacities.

Embodied cognition further hypothesises that cognition relies on sensorimotor engagement with the world rather than internal mental representations. Subsequently, in addition to the brain, bodily states and environmental artefacts 'scaffold' cognitive processes. A scaffolded view of cognition highlights the cognitive import of embodied religious practices, which choregraph the body and curate material culture. Tanton applies dozens of studies identifying mechanisms by which bodily or environmental factors influence cognition to the embodied and material dimensions Christian practices. On account of their inherent cognitive effects, practices are theorised to have intrinsic 'embodied' meanings alongside 'symbolic' ones established by conventions. Consequently, liturgy is seen as a bearer of theological content rather than merely an expression of it; a locus of religious experience; and a crucial determinate of religious and ethical formation. Again, the embodied nature of Christian liturgy is understood in terms of accommodation. Embodied cognition research helpfully illuminates the details of human embodiment to which theological understanding must be accommodated.

Frazer MacDiarmid holds a doctorate in theology from the University of Oxford, and currently works on Māori-Crown relations in New Zealand. He talks about books on Instagram @turnsof_fraze.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David LePoire, "Time Patterns in Big History: Cycles, Fractals, Waves, Transitions, and Singularities" (2020)

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

There is the common saying, “history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Are there any discernible patterns in history, and if so, what are these patterns? These are the questions addressed in Dave LePoire’s Time Patterns in Big History: Cycles, Fractals, Waves, Transitions, and Singularities (2020). Among the issues addressed in this book are the various forms of patterns and dynamics that occur within history when examined at the most macro-level scale (the field of Big History) but also the importance of studying the nature of complex adaptive systems.

Dave LePoire researches, develops, and applies science principles in environmental issues, Big History evolutionary trends, and particle scattering. He has a BS in Physics from CalTech, a PhD in Computer Science from DePaul, and over 30 years of experience at Argonne National Laboratory in the development of scientific analyses, software, training, and modeling. His research interests include Big History synergistic trends among energy, environment, organization, and information.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Choice Architecture

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of High Theory, Eli Cook tells us about choice architecture. The term was invented by behavioral economists in 2008 who proposed it as a soft-power model of “libertarian paternalism” to influence consumer choice. Eli traces their concept through a twentieth-century history of structured choices, from personality tests and the five-star rating to the swipes and likes of platform capitalism. He shifts our attention from the rhetoric of consumer choice as freedom to the power of “choice architects” who determine the options for us.

Eli takes the term “choice architecture” from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale UP, 2008). He mentions the industrial psychologist Walter Dill Scott and the inventors of behavioral economics, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Amusingly, there is a New Yorker article about Tversky and Kahneman written by Thaler and Sunstein, called “The Two Friends Who Changed How We Think About How We Think.” (New Yorker 7 Dec 2016). In the full version of our conversation, Eli referenced the work of Sophia Rosenfeld on the longue durée history of choice.

Eli Cook is a historian of American capitalism. He works as a Senior Lecturer in History and as head of the American Studies Program at the University of Haifa in Israel. His first book The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life was published by Harvard University Press in 2017. Last year, he was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center where he worked on his new book about choice architecture.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nicola Rollock, "The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival" (Penguin, 2022)

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Why do racial inequalities persist? In The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival (Penguin, 2023), Nicola Rollock, a Professor of Social Policy & Race at King’s College London, examines the often hidden and subtle rules that underpin the long-term existence of racism. The book draws on a huge range of qualitative and quantitative data to craft individual narratives that illustrate the operation of the racial code. In doing so, the book offers an clear overview of the lived experience of racism, across a variety of social and professional settings. In addition, the book is interspersed with interludes that add further intensity to the already rich analysis of how racism operates. Featuring deeply developed research that is also instantly accessible, the book is essential reading for every academic as well as anyone interested in understanding racism in society today.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, "Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

We are in the midst of a new space race that pairs billionaire space barons with governments in an effort to exploit the cosmos for human gain. While Elon Musk and SpaceX work to establish a human presence on Mars, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin work toward mining operations on the moon, missions to asteroids to extract resources, and millions of people living in rotating near-Earth satellite dwellings. Despite the differences in their visions, these two billionaires share a core utopian project: the salvation of humanity though the colonization of space. But we have already seen the destructive effects of this frontier spirit in the centuries-long history of European colonialism.

Philosopher of religion and space enthusiast Mary-Jane Rubenstein wants to pull back the curtain on the not-so-new myths these space barons are peddling. In Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (U Chicago Press, 2022), she explains why these myths are so problematic and offers a vision for how we might approach the exploration of space in ways that don't reproduce the atrocities of humanity's previous colonial endeavors.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Adrian Bejan, "Time and Beauty: Why Time Flies and Beauty Never Dies" (World Scientific, 2022)

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Poets and philosophers are fascinated by time and beauty. They are two of our most visceral perceptions. In Time and Beauty: Why Time Flies and Beauty Never Dies (World Scientific, 2022), Adrian Bejan — a physicist — explains the scientific basis for the perception of time (“mind time”) and beauty. His is an evolutionary argument for understanding both perceptions, based on visual processing and change.

To observe our immediate surroundings and to understand them faster is highly advantageous to survival; hence, there is an underlying evolutionary advantage to our discernment for ideal ratios, shapes, and beauty at large.

Time and beauty are jointly understood to explain why the global pandemic had decelerated our mind time. The author asserts that this understanding arms us with techniques to slow down our mind time (which accelerates with age), and to create the conditions for living longer and more creatively. In the process, he offers answers to key questions about cognition. Why does the mind "try" to make sense of a new mental image? Why is there a natural tendency to organize a new input and mentally position it among past perceptions?

The author suggests that principles of physics is the basis for other disparate perceptions as well, from time and beauty to ideas, message, shape, perspective, art, science, illusions, and dreams.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jonathan Herring, "The Right to Be Protected from Committing Suicide" (Hart Publishing, 2022)

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Professor Jonathan Herring makes an argument that suicidal people have a right to be protected from committing suicide, and that the state should be under a duty to take reasonable steps to protect them from killing themselves. In The Right to Be Protected from Committing Suicide (Hart, 2022) Herring takes a deep dive into ideas surrounding autonomy and capacity, to draw out the tensions between these concepts and the legal and ethical debates which provide support for non-interventionist argument based on respect for a "right" to commit suicide. Going beyond the usual concerns of Euthanasia, this book challenges readers to examine suicide as a failing of society to offer support to those who need it, as opposed to an individual choice to end one's life.

Professor Jonathan Herring is a Professor of Law at Exeter College in the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford. He is the author of around 50 solo authored monographs.

Listener note: In this interview, we discuss suicide, which may be upsetting for some listeners. However, support is available. In the UK, call Samaritans on 11 61 23; the US, Suicide and Crisis Lifeline on 988; in Australia, Lifeline on 13 11 14; and Hong Kong, call Samaritans on 2896 0000.

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Anna M. Grzymała-Busse, "Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Sacred Foundations. The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton University Press, 2023) argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation. Existing accounts focus on early modern warfare or contracts between the rulers and the ruled. In contrast, this major study shows that the Catholic Church both competed with medieval monarchs and provided critical templates for governing institutions, the rule of law, and parliaments. The Catholic Church was the most powerful, wealthiest, and best-organized political actor in the Middle Ages. Starting in the eleventh century, the papacy fought for the autonomy of the church, challenging European rulers and then claiming authority over people, territory, and monarchs alike.

Anna Grzymała-Busse demonstrates how the church shaped distinct aspects of the European state. Conflicts with the papacy fragmented territorial authority in Europe for centuries to come, propagating urban autonomy and ideas of sovereignty. Thanks to its organizational advantages and human capital, the church also developed the institutional precedents adopted by rulers across Europe—from chanceries and taxation to courts and councils. Church innovations made possible both the rule of law and parliamentary representation. Bringing to light a wealth of historical evidence about papal conflict, excommunications, and ecclesiastical institutions, Sacred Foundations reveals how the challenge and example of powerful religious authorities gave rise to secular state institutions and galvanized state capacity.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Philip Nel, "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books" (Oxford UP, 2017)

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structural: it's embedded in culture and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides-and thus perhaps the best place to oppose it-is books for young people.

Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books (Oxford UP, 2017) presents five serious critiques of the history and current state of children's literature tempestuous relationship with both implicit and explicit forms of racism. The book fearlessly examines topics both vivid-such as The Cat in the Hat's roots in blackface minstrelsy-and more opaque, like how the children's book industry can perpetuate structural racism via whitewashed covers even while making efforts to increase diversity. Rooted in research yet written with a lively, crackling touch, Nel delves into years of literary criticism and recent sociological data in order to show a better way forward. Though much of what is proposed here could be endlessly argued, the knowledge that what we learn in childhood imparts both subtle and explicit lessons about whose lives matter is not debatable. The text concludes with a short and stark proposal of actions everyone-reader, author, publisher, scholar, citizen- can take to fight the biases and prejudices that infect children's literature. While Was the Cat in the Hat Black? does not assume it has all the answers to such a deeply systemic problem, its audacity should stimulate discussion and activism.

Philip Nel is University Distinguished Professor of English at Kansas State University. His many books include Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children's Literature (UP Mississippi, 2012), Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature (NYU Press, 2008, co-edited with Julia Mickenberg), The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats (Random House, 2007), and Dr. Seuss: American Icon (Continuum, 2004).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Karyne E. Messina, "Resurgence of Global Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame-Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy" (Routledge, 2022)

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 04:00:00 -0000

Resurgence of Global Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame-Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022) provides a psychoanalytic perspective to the global implications of the populist movement in the U.S. and its relationship to other parts of the world, particularly focusing on the presidency and legacy of Donald Trump.

The book explores Trump's use of psychological form of manipulation known as projective identification and how his use of this defense mechanism has influenced global institutions, political discourse, and quality of life in the long term. Messina explores the correlation between Trump's rhetoric and an increase in reported racism and prejudiced violence worldwide, disintegration of global values, and a radicalized political climate. She analyzes the dynamics between Trump and his supporters, political opponents, and successors, considers the COVID-19 pandemic as a study of Trump's views of the world, and considers the roles of social and television media. The book concludes with an explanation of antidotes to projective identification, including thoughtful debate and meaningful discussions and scripted dialogues for global healing.

This insightful book will be of interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, academics and students of political psychology and political movements, and readers interested in a deeper analysis of populism and political dynamics.

Ashis Roy is a psychoanalyst practicing in Delhi.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Myth of Modernity: Is There a Bigger Picture?

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Many think modernity is about the rise of science, the spread of democracy and capitalism, or the decline of religion or superstition. But those stories ignore the bigger picture about colonialism and race.

Guests:

Mayra Rivera, professor of Religion and Latinx Studies at Harvard University.

Jared Hickman, professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. Author of the book, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert Ovetz, "We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few" (Pluto Press, 2022)

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

We have been ruled long enough. It is time to govern ourselves. If we are to get past the Constitution and all systems based on constitutions, we need to move past the nation state as the means by which we are governed from above.

– Robert Ovetz, We the Elites (2022, p. 167)

Written by 55 of the richest white men of early America, and signed by only 39 of them, the constitution is the sacred text of American nationalism. Popular perceptions of it are mired in idolatry, myth, and misinformation - many Americans have opinions on the constitution but have no idea what’s in it.

The misplaced faith of social movements in the constitution as a framework for achieving justice actually obstructs social change - incessant lengthy election cycles, staggered terms, and legislative sessions have kept social movements trapped in a redundant loop. This stymies progress on issues like labor rights, public health, and climate change, projecting the American people and the rest of the world towards destruction.

Robert Ovetz’s reading of the constitution shows that the system isn’t broken. Far from it. It works as it was designed.

From the introduction:

‘The Framers genius was in designing a virtually unchangeable system that provides the people with a semblance of participation and allows a few to select some representatives while the rest of us relinquish the power to self-govern. How and why they did that, why it still functions in that same way, and why we need to move past it is the focus of this book.’

Professor Ovetz is a senior lecturer in political science and public administration at San Jose State University and a lecturer in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His first book, When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1924, was published in 2018 by Brill/Haymarket Books. His second book was an edited volume in 2020 entitled, Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives also published by Pluto Press.

Sydney Business School at Shanghai University - can be reached at keith.krueger1@uts.edu.au or keithNBn@gmail.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Data journalist Meredith Broussard talks about her book, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. The book how artificial intelligence systems do and don’t work and why people have come to have such unrealistic understandings of the technologies’ capabilities. One central factor is what Broussard calls technochauvinism, “the belief that technology is always the solution.” Broussard also discusses her early career as a computer scientist, why she became her journalist, and her hopes for a more humane technological future.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Oana Serban, "After Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions" (de Gruyter, 2022)

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions revolutionized the way philosophers and historians of science thought about science, scientific progress, and the nature of scientific knowledge. But Kuhn himself also considered later on how his framework might apply to art. In After Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions (De Gruyter, 2022), Oana Serban elaborates on the suggestions and proposals of Kuhn and others to develop a new view of aesthetic and artistic progress and change based in Kuhn’s work. Serban, who is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Bucharest, adds the key concept of aesthetic validity to the Kuhnian analysis as central to the concept of an aesthetic revolution. The dominance of a particular aesthetic paradigm depends on broadly political factors and are responses to particular ideological questions, such as “What is the relation between humans and God?” Artistic revolutions, in contrast, are stylistic expressions of these ideological frames, such that the norms, values, and styles in art can be transgressive without being Kuhnian revolutions.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Richard Wolin, "Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology" (Yale UP, 2023)

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John P. Gluck, "Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist's Ethical Journey" (U Chicago Press, 2016)

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and place them in sanctuaries. This significant decision comes after a lengthy process of examination and debate about the ethics of animal research. For decades, proponents of such research have argued that the discoveries and benefits for humans far outweigh the costs of the traumatic effects on the animals; but today, even the researchers themselves have come to question the practice. John P. Gluck has been one of the scientists at the forefront of the movement to end research on primates, and in Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist's Ethical Journey (U Chicago Press, 2016) he tells a vivid, heart-rending, personal story of how he became a vocal activist for animal protection.

Gluck begins by taking us inside the laboratory of Harry F. Harlow at the University of Wisconsin, where Gluck worked as a graduate student in the 1960s. Harlow’s primate lab became famous for his behavioral experiments in maternal deprivation and social isolation of rhesus macaques. Though trained as a behavioral scientist, Gluck finds himself unable to overlook the intense psychological and physical damage these experiments wrought on the macaques. Gluck’s sobering and moving account reveals how in this and other labs, including his own, he came to grapple with the uncomfortable justifications that many researchers were offering for their work. As his sense of conflict grows, we’re right alongside him, developing a deep empathy for the often smart and always vulnerable animals used for these experiments.

At a time of unprecedented recognition of the intellectual cognition and emotional intelligence of animals, Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals is a powerful appeal for our respect and compassion for those creatures who have unwillingly dedicated their lives to science. Through the words of someone who has inflicted pain in the name of science and come to abhor it, it’s important to know what has led this far to progress and where further inroads in animal research ethics are needed.

John P. Gluck is professor emeritus of psychology and a senior advisor to the president on animal research ethics and welfare at the University of New Mexico. He is also research professor of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University and coauthor of The Human Use of Animals.

Callie Smith is a poet and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Tommie Shelby, "The Idea of Prison Abolition" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

By any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper moral response to this? Can prisons and the practices surrounding incarceration feasibly be reformed, or should the entire enterprise be abolished? If the latter, then what? If the former, what are the necessary reforms?

In The Idea of Prison Abolition (Princeton UP, 2022), Tommie Shelby undertakes a systematic and critical examination of the arguments in favor of prison abolition. Although he ultimately rejects abolitionism as a philosophical position, he builds from the abolitionist program’s crucial insights a positive view of what it would take to create a prison and incarceration system that is consistent with justice.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ed Cohen, "On Learning to Heal or, What Medicine Doesn't Know" (Duke UP, 2022)

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility.

In On Learning to Heal or, What Medicine Doesn't Know (Duke UP, 2022), Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Luke Munn, "Automation Is a Myth" (Stanford UP, 2022)

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

For some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others, it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full autonomy, claiming that machines will take over production and supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the immense human labor behind "autonomous" processes. There is the myth of universal automation, with technologies framed as a desituated force sweeping the globe. But this fiction ignores the social, cultural, and geographical forces that shape technologies at a local level. And, there is the myth of automating everyone, the generic figure of "the human" at the heart of automation claims. But labor is socially stratified and so automation's fallout will be highly uneven, falling heavier on some (immigrants, people of color, women) than others.

In Automation Is a Myth (Stanford UP, 2022), Munn moves from machine minders in China to warehouse pickers in the United States to explore the ways that new technologies do (and don't) reconfigure labor. Combining this rich array of human stories with insights from media and cultural studies, Munn points to a more nuanced, localized, and racialized understanding of the "future of work."

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Christopher M. Palmer, "Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health" (Benbella Books, 2022)

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Christopher M. Palmer's book Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health (Benbella Books, 2022) will forever change the way we understand and treat mental health. If you or someone you love is affected by mental illness, it might change your life. We are in the midst of a global mental health crisis, and mental illnesses are on the rise. But what causes mental illness? And why are mental health problems so hard to treat? Drawing on decades of research, Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Chris Palmer outlines a revolutionary new understanding that for the first time unites our existing knowledge about mental illness within a single framework: Mental disorders are metabolic disorders of the brain.

Brain Energy explains this new understanding of mental illness in detail, from symptoms and risk factors to what is happening in brain cells. Palmer also sheds light on the new treatment pathways this theory opens up—which apply to all mental disorders, including anxiety, depression, ADHD, alcoholism, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, autism, and even schizophrenia. Brain Energy pairs cutting-edge science with practical advice and strategies to help people reclaim their mental health. This groundbreaking book reveals: Why classifying mental disorders as “separate” conditions is misleading The clear connections between mental illness and disorders linked to metabolism, including diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, pain disorders, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, and epilepsy The link between metabolism and every factor known to play a role in mental health, including genetics, inflammation, hormones, neurotransmitters, sleep, stress, and trauma The evidence that current mental health treatments, including both medications and therapies, likely work by affecting metabolism New treatments available today that readers can use to promote long-term healing Palmer puts together the pieces of the mental illness puzzle to provide answers and offer hope. Brain Energy will transform the field of mental health, and the lives of countless people around the world.

Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Geert Lovink, "Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism" (Pluto Press, 2019)

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Why is the internet making us so unhappy? Why is it in capital’s interests to cultivate populations that are depressed and desperate rather than driven by the same irrational exuberance that moves money?

Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and empty aftermath of time lost to the app.

Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism (Pluto Press, 2019) by Geert Lovink offers a critical analysis of the controversies which drive our online media behaviours. Lovink calls for us to embrace the engineered intimacy of social media, messenger apps and selfies because boredom is the first stage of overcoming ‘platform nihilism’.

Geert Lovink speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the frustrations of studying the internet as it evolves from networks to platforms, the politically-contingent notions of online 'communities', and cycles of ideological production and capture.

Geert Lovink is a media theorist and internet critic who has chronicled the development of internet and network cultures as they came of age alongside him. He is the author of Zero Comments, Networks Without a Cause, Social Media Abyss, and most recently Struck on the Platform. He is the founder of the Institute of Network Cultures.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Illiquidity + Opacity = Insolvency: A Discussion with Gary Stern, Former President of the Minneapolis Fed

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 05:00:00 -0000

What's going on in private markets? As interest rates have gone up, public markets have been marked down much more severely than assets in the private market. Will the chickens come home to roost? And, if so, when?

Gary Stern was president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from March 1985 to September 2009. Stern, a native of Wisconsin, joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in January 1982 as senior vice president and director of research. Before joining the Minneapolis Fed, Stern was a partner in a New York-based economic consulting firm. Stern's prior experience includes seven years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Stern serves on the board of directors of FINRA, The Dolan Company, The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, Ambac Assurance Corporation, and the Council for Economic Education (CEE), where he served for a time as acting President and Chief Executive Officer. Stern is co-author of Too Big to Fail: The Hazards of Bank Bailouts, published by The Brookings Institution (2004). Stern holds an A.B. in economics from Washington University, St. Louis, and a Ph.D. in economics from Rice University, Houston.

Robert Kowit began a career in investing in 1972, working in International Fixed Income and Foreign Exchange as a Senior Vice President at White Weld, Kidder Peabody, and as a Director of Midland Montagu. Moving to the buy-side in 1990, he was Senior Vice President and Head of International Fixed Income at John Hancock and then at Federated Investors until his retirement. He currently participates on committees of the International Chamber of Commerce and the International Trade and Forfaiting Association on ways to attract more financial investors to trade finance assets.

Robert is a contributor to the IMF World Bank Handbook, “Developing Government Bond Markets" and key speaker at the IMF World Bank Annual General Meeting. He is also lead author of the peer-reviewed paper, “Trade Finance as a Financial Asset: Risks and Risk Management For Non-Bank Investors” and most recently a contributor to Trade Wars Are Class Wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Tom McLeish, "The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

What human qualities are needed to make scientific discoveries, and which to make great art? Many would point to 'imagination' and 'creativity' in the second case but not the first. Tom McLeish's The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the assumption that doing science is in any sense less creative than art, music or fictional writing and poetry, and treads a historical and contemporary path through common territories of the creative process. The methodological process called the 'scientific method' tells us how to test ideas when we have had them, but not how to arrive at hypotheses in the first place. Hearing the stories that scientists and artists tell about their projects reveals commonalities: the desire for a goal, the experience of frustration and failure, the incubation of the problem, moments of sudden insight, and the experience of the beautiful or sublime.

Selected themes weave the practice of science and art together: visual thinking and metaphor, the transcendence of music and mathematics, the contemporary rise of the English novel and experimental science, and the role of aesthetics and desire in the creative process. Artists and scientists make salient comparisons: Defoe and Boyle; Emmerson and Humboldt, Monet and Einstein, Schumann and Hadamard. The book draws on medieval philosophy at many points as the product of the last age that spent time in inner contemplation of the mystery of how something is mentally brought out from nothing. Taking the phenomenon of the rainbow as an example, the principles of creativity within constraint point to the scientific imagination as a parallel of poetry.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Batja Mesquita, "Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions" (Norton, 2022)

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

A pioneer of cultural psychology argues that emotions are not innate, but made as we live our lives together. We may think of emotions as universal responses, felt inside, but in Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions (Norton, 2022), acclaimed psychologist Dr. Batja Mesquita asks us to reconsider them through the lens of what they do in our relationships, both one-on-one and within larger social networks. From an outside-in perspective, readers will understand why pride in a Dutch context does not translate well to the same emotion in North Carolina, or why one's anger at a boss does not mean the same as your anger at a partner in a close relationship. By looking outward at relationships at work, school, and home, we can better judge how our emotions will be understood, how they might change a situation, and how they change us. Brilliantly synthesizing original psychological studies and stories from peoples across time and geography, Between Us skillfully argues that acknowledging differences in emotions allows us to find common ground, humanizing and humbling us all for the better.

This interview was conducted by Jolie Ho, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology whose own research focuses on social connection and reward in the context of social anxiety.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a new model for theory he calls metamodernism.

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (U Chicago Press, 2021) works through the postmodern critiques and uncovers the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. In so doing, Storm provides a new, radical account of society’s ever-changing nature—what he calls a “Process Social Ontology”—and its materialization in temporary zones of stability or “social kinds.” Storm then formulates a fresh approach to philosophy of language by looking beyond the typical theorizing that focuses solely on human language production, showing us instead how our own sign-making is actually on a continuum with animal and plant communication.

Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nancy J. Nersessian, "Interdisciplinarity in the Making: Models and Methods in Frontier Science" (MIT Press, 2022)

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Based on examining physics and the practices of physicists, philosophers of science often see models in science as representational intermediaries between scientific theories and the world. But what do scientists do when they don’t yet have the models or the theories?

In Interdisciplinarity in the Making: Models and Methods in Frontier Science (MIT Press, 2022), Nancy Nersessian reveals the bootstrapping creation of models in two biomedical engineering and two integrated system biology labs. Based on her cognitive ethnographic investigations, she argues that models are cognitive artifacts that are central components in distributed cognitive-cultural systems that include the scientists that create and use them. Nersessian, who is Regents’ Professor of Cognitive Science (emerita) at Georgia Institute of Technology, shows how the scientists build the epistemic infrastructure they need, along with the novel modeling practices that their cognitive artifacts enable, in order to do the science they want to do. Her teams’ investigations also led to developing award-winning curricula for science students.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of AI in Work: A Discussion with Daniel Susskind

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

What exactly can artificial intelligence do? It’s an issue some of the professions are grappling with – on the face of it, law is an area that rests on fine human judgment – but in fact many of tasks it involves can be performed by AI and if that is true for law then presumably it is also true for many other areas too. Daniel Susskind of Oxford University discusses his book The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the World of Human Experts (Oxford UP, 2022),

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Hilan Bensusan, "Indexicalism: The Metaphysics of Paradox" (Edinburgh UP, 2021)

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Indexicalism: The Metaphysics of Paradox (Edinburgh UP, 2021), Hilan Bensusan clarifies the logic and structure of an essentially situated and indexical metaphysics that is paradoxical and can also be regarded as a chapter in the critique of metaphysics. Bensusan articulates a metaphysical view of the other – both human and non-human, in what Meillassoux calls 'the great outdoors' – that can never be totalised into a single or univocal whole. He develops an innovative account of perception, as a matter of our irreducibly situated relationship to this non-totalisable outdoors. In the book's coda, Bensusan underscores the social-political implications of this radical metaphysics in a postcolonial context in a meditation on the sites of Potosi in the Andes and Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Equally at home with analytic and continental philosophy, Bensusan enlists Levinas, Whitehead, Heidegger, Kripke, Deleuze, Derrida, Benso, Harman, Garcia, Cogburn, McDowell and Haraway. He does so in a way that proves to be transformative for crucial aspects of their work, for contemporary approaches to thinking about what it means to be in our world, and for reckoning with the responsibilities that press upon us from the outside.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Bess, "Planet in Peril: Humanity's Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Michael Bess is the Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His fifth and most recent book is Planet in Peril: Humanity’s Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. This study focuses on the existential risks posed by climate change, nuclear weapons, pandemics (natural or bioengineered), and artificial intelligence – surveying the solutions that have been tried, and why they have fallen short thus far. Bess describes a pathway for gradually modifying the United Nations over the coming century so that it becomes more effective at coordinating global solutions. Planet in Peril explores how to get past ideological polarization and global political fragmentation, drawing lessons from the experiences of environmental movements and European integration.

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Joseph Silk, "Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Just over half a century since Neil Armstrong first stepped foot on the lunar surface, a new space race to the Moon is well underway and rapidly gaining momentum. Laying out a vision for the next fifty years, Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind (Princeton UP, 2022) is astrophysicist Joseph Silk's persuasive and impassioned case for putting scientific discovery at the forefront of lunar exploration.

The Moon offers opportunities beyond our wildest imaginings, and plans to return are rapidly gaining momentum around the world. NASA aims to build a habitable orbiting space station to coordinate lunar development and exploration, while European and Chinese space agencies are planning lunar villages and the mining of precious resources dwindling here on Earth. Powerful international and commercial interests are driving the race to revisit the Moon, but lunar infrastructures could also open breathtaking vistas onto the cosmos. Silk describes how the colonization of the Moon could usher in a thrilling new age of scientific exploration, and lays out what the next fifty years of lunar science might look like. With lunar telescopes of unprecedented size situated in permanently dark polar craters and on the far side of the Moon, we could finally be poised to answer some of the most profound questions confronting humankind, including whether we are alone in the Universe and what our cosmic origins are.

Addressing both the daunting challenges and the immense promise of lunar exploration and exploitation, Back to the Moon reveals how prioritizing science, and in particular lunar astronomy, will enable us to address the deepest cosmic mysteries.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Samuel J. Levine, "Was Yosef on the Spectrum?: Understanding Joseph Through Torah, Midrash, and Classical Jewish Sources" (Urim Publications, 2018)

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Samuel J. Levine's Was Yosef on the Spectrum?: Understanding Joseph Through Torah, Midrash, and Classical Jewish Sources (Urim Publications, 2018) offers a coherent and cohesive reading of the well-known Biblical story of Joseph, presenting a portrait of him as an individual on the autism spectrum. Viewed through this lens, he emerges as a more familiar and less enigmatic individual, exhibiting both strengths and weaknesses commonly associated with autism spectrum disorder.

Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Lowell Gustafson, "Religion, Space and Deep Time" (Routledge, 2022)

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The issue of how science and religion relate to one another has been a major controversy of our age. It helped fuel the rise of the New Atheist movement in the early 21st century for example. It has also been a major area of contention within the growing field known as "Big History" that seeks the scientific study of the history of the entire universe. How can Big History and religion truly relate to one another, are they inevitably hostile or perhaps do we need to rethink our established paradigms to truly grasp this subject? To discuss this and much more is Lowell Gustafson, editor of Science, Religion, and Deep Time (Routledge, 2022) alongside Barry H. Rodrigue and David Blanks.

Lowell Gustafson is currently a member of the International Big History Association (IBHA) Board, IBHA Treasurer, Associate Editor of the Journal of Big History, and editor of Origins: The Bulletin of the IBHA. He earned his PhD in Government and Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia in 1984 and has been on the Political Science faculty of Villanova University since 1986.

Stephen Satkiewicz is independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Big History, Historical Sociology, War studies, as well as Russian and East European history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Željka Matijasević, "The Borderline Culture: Intensity, Jouissance, and Death" (Lexington, 2021)

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Borderline personality disorder is no longer a secret. Many people who are not therapists know what it is and see it as a fitting description for their personal experience. But what does it mean for someone to be “borderline”? Is it something one is or that one has? Perhaps most importantly, where does it come from? The prevailing view in psychological circles has long been that it stems from traumatic experiences and problematic internal psychological patterns. But is it possible that society actually makes certain people “borderline?”

These and other questions are taken up in my interview with Željka Matijašević, author of the new book The Borderline Culture: Intensity, Jouissance, and Death (2021, Rowman & Littlefield). She advances a compelling argument that perhaps our fast-paced, capitalist society bears some responsibility for the creation of borderline states, with its proclivity towards intensity and promotion of insatiable consumption, both features with striking resemblance to borderline states. This interview is for anyone wanting to better understand the borderline phenomenon.

Željka Matijašević is full professor of comparative literature at the Department of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She holds and MPhil and Ph.D. in psychoanalytic studies from the University of Cambridge, UK. Her prior books include Lacan: The Persistence of the Dialectics (2005); Structuring the Unconscious: Freud and Lacan (2006); An Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Oedipus, Hamlet, Jekyll/Hyde (2011); The Century of the Fragile Self: Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society (2016); and Drama, Drama (2020). She is a member of La Fondation Européenne pour la Psychoanalyse and the Croatian Writers’ Society.

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gerd Gigerenzer, "How to Stay Smart in a Smart World: Why Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms" (MIT Press, 2022)

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Doomsday prophets of technology predict that robots will take over the world, leaving humans behind in the dust. Tech industry boosters think replacing people with software might make the world a better place--while tech industry critics warn darkly about surveillance capitalism. Despite their differing views of the future, they all agree: machines will soon do everything better than humans. In How to Stay Smart in a Smart World: Why Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms (MIT Press, 2022), Gerd Gigerenzer shows why that's not true, and tells us how we can stay in charge in a world populated by algorithms.

Machines powered by artificial intelligence are good at some things (playing chess), but not others (life-and-death decisions, or anything involving uncertainty). Gigerenzer explains why algorithms often fail at finding us romantic partners (love is not chess), why self-driving cars fall prey to the Russian Tank Fallacy, and how judges and police rely increasingly on nontransparent "black box" algorithms to predict whether a criminal defendant will reoffend or show up in court. He invokes Black Mirror, considers the privacy paradox (people want privacy, but give their data away), and explains that social media get us hooked by programming intermittent reinforcement in the form of the "like" button. We shouldn't trust smart technology unconditionally, Gigerenzer tells us, but we shouldn't fear it unthinkingly, either.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Rachel Aumiller, "A Touch of Doubt: On Haptic Scepticism" (de Gruyter, 2021)

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

What can we know about ourselves and the world through the sense of touch and what are the epistemic limits of touch? Scepticism claims that there is always something that slips through the epistemologist's grasp.

A Touch of Doubt: On Haptic Scepticism (de Gruyter, 2021) explores the significance of touch for the history of philosophical scepticism as well as for scepticism as an embodied form of subversive political, religious, and artistic practice. Drawing on the tradition of scepticism within nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, this volume discusses how the sense of touch uncovers contradictions within our knowledge of ourselves and the world. It questions 1) what we can know through touch, 2) what we can know about touch itself, and 3) how our experience of touching the other and ourselves throws us into a state of doubt. This volume is intended for students and scholars who wish to reconsider the experience of touching in intersections of philosophy, religion, art, and social and political practice.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Adrian Hon, "You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All" (Basic Books, 2022)Adrian Hon, "You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All" (Basic Books, 2022)

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet.

Points, badges, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. In You’ve Been Played, game designer Adrian Hon delivers a blistering takedown of how corporations, schools, and governments use games and gamification as tools for profit and coercion. These are games that we often have no choice but to play, where losing has heavy penalties. You’ve Been Played is a scathing indictment of a tech-driven world that wants to convince us that misery is fun, and a call to arms for anyone who hopes to preserve their dignity and autonomy.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Paul Daugherty and H. James Wilson, "Radically Human: How New Technology Is Transforming Business and Shaping Our Future" (HBR Press, 2022)

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Jim Wilson about his book (co-authored with Paul Daugherty) Radically Human: How New Technology Is Transforming Business and Shaping Our Future (HBR Press, 2022).

Technology has evolved from device intelligence to data intelligence (big data) to now the new stage of a more human-centric approach where the user/worker’s needs, wants and biases are being taken into account to make technology easier to deploy and more of an equal partner. That’s the progression Jim Wilson champions in this book and on-air conversation. Covid-19 ushered in not only a host of human behavior changes, e.g., hybrid work arrangements and the Great Resignation, the pandemic also spurred the Great Acceleration as companies rushed to adopt technology that will transform their business practices. How to do so in a way that will democratize technology, empowering employees and rewarding customers along the way, is the challenge that Wilson addresses here. After all, technology innovations that don’t also safeguard and enhance trust will instead create “algorithm aversion,” and undercut the promise of how technology can benefit companies, societies and individuals alike.

Jim Wilson is the Managing Director of Thought Leadership & Technology Research at Accenture Research. Jim speaks to business audiences worldwide, is a long-time contributor to the Harvard Business Review and has been cited as one of the top 50 Business Innovators by CODEX.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Lisa Feldman Barrett, "Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain" (Mariner Books, 2020)

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett demystify that big gray blob between your ears. In Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain (Mariner Books, 2020), Feldman reveals mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research. You’ll learn where brains came from, how they’re structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience. Along the way, you’ll also learn to dismiss popular myths such as the idea of a “lizard brain” and the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions, or even between nature and nurture, to determine your behavior.

Sure to intrigue casual readers and scientific veterans alike, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is full of surprises, humor, and important implications for human nature—a gift of a book that you will want to savor again and again.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D.is among the top one percent most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior.

She is the author of two books How Emotions are Made, and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. In addition, Dr. Barrett has published over 260 peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. She has also given two popular TED talks one of which has over 6.5 million views.

Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Geert Lovink, "Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet" (Valiz, 2022)

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

We’re all trapped. No matter how hard you try to delete apps from your phone, the power of seduction draws you back. Doom scrolling is the new normal of a 24/7 online life. What happens when your home office starts to feel like a call center and you’re too fried to log out of Facebook? We’re addicted to large-scale platforms, unable to return to the frivolous age of decentralized networks. How do we make sense of the rising disaffection with the platform condition? Zoom fatigue, cancel culture, crypto art, NFTs and psychic regression comprise core elements of a general theory of platform culture. Geert Lovink argues that we reclaim the internet on our own terms. Stuck on the Platform: Reclaiming the Internet (Valiz 2022) is a relapse-resistant story about the rise of platform alternatives, built on a deep understanding of the digital slump.

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organisation after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018) and Sad by Design (2019). In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). His center organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), The Future of Art Criticism and MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing experiments, critical meme research, participatory hybrid events and precarity in the creative sector. In December, 2021 he was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the Art History Department, Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam for one day a week.

Reuben Niewenhuis is interested in philosophy, theory, technology, and interdisciplinary topics. Subscribe to his interviews here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Neil Levy, "Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Misinformation, disinformation, fake news, alternative facts: we are awash in a vast sea of epistemically questionable, not to mention false, testimony. How can we discern what is epistemically good to believe from what is not? Why are so many of us vulnerable to believing in ways that are unresponsive to widely available evidence – in other words, to holding bad beliefs?

In Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People (Oxford UP, 2021), Neil Levy argues that we are in fact acting rationally, in accordance with how we have evolved to defer to our peers and authorities in our social networks. Levy, who is Professor of philosophy at Macquarie University and research fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, argues that bad beliefs are more likely in epistemically polluted environments, and that our current epistemic environments are badly polluted. Overall, the book takes a bold stand against the traditional epistemological emphasis on the individual cognitive agent’s responsibility for justifying belief.

This book is available open access here.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gabriel Levy, "Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion" (MIT Press, 2022)

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (MIT Press, 2022), Gabriel Levy argues that collective religious narratives and beliefs are part of nature; they are the basis for the formation of the narratives and beliefs of individuals. Religion grows out of the universe, but to make sense of it, we have to recognize the paradox that the universe is both mental and material (or neither). Levy contends that we need both humanities and natural science approaches to study religion and religious meaning, but we must also recognize the limits of these approaches. First, we must make the dominant metaphysics that undergirds the various disciplines of science and humanities more explicit. Second, we must reject those versions of metaphysics that maintain simple monisms and radical dualisms.

Bringing Donald Davidson’s philosophy—a form of pragmatism known as anomalous monism—to bear on religion, Levy offers a blueprint for one way that the humanities and natural sciences can have a mutually respectful dialogue. Levy argues that to understand religions, we must take their semantic content seriously. We need to rethink such basic concepts as narrative fiction, information, agency, creativity, technology, and intimacy. In the course of his argument, Levy considers the relation between two closely related semantics, fiction, and religion, and outlines a new approach to information. He then applies his theory to discrete cases: ancient texts, modern media, and intimacy.

Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Joseph Blankholm, "The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious" (NYU Press, 2022)

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals.

In The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious (NYU Press, 2022), Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition.

Blankholm relies heavily on the voices of women and people of color to understand what it means to live with the secular paradox. The struggles of secular misfits—the people who mis-fit normative secularism in the United States—show that becoming secular means rejecting parts of life that resemble Christianity and embracing a European tradition that emphasizes reason and avoids emotion. Women, people of color, and secular people who have left non-Christian religions work against the limits and contradictions of secularism to create new ways of being secular that are transforming the American religious landscape. They are pioneering the most interesting and important forms of secular “religiosity” in America today.

Joseph Stuart is a scholar of African American history, particularly of the relationship between race, freedom rights, and religion in the twentieth century Black Freedom Movement.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Adam Adatto Sandel, "Happiness in Action: A Philosopher's Guide to the Good Life" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

A young philosopher and Guinness World Record holder in pull-ups argues that the key to happiness is not goal-driven striving but forging a life that integrates self-possession, friendship, and engagement with nature.

What is the meaning of the good life? In Happiness in Action: A Philosopher's Guide to the Good Life (Harvard UP, 2022), Adam Adatto Sandel draws on ancient and modern thinkers and on two seemingly disparate pursuits of his own, philosophy and fitness, to offer a surprising answer to this age-old human question.

Sandel argues that finding fulfillment is not about attaining happiness, conceived as a state of mind, or even about accomplishing one’s greatest goals. Instead, true happiness comes from immersing oneself in activity that is intrinsically rewarding. The source of meaning, he suggests, derives from the integrity or “wholeness” of self that we forge throughout the journey of life.

At the heart of Sandel’s account of life as a journey are three virtues that get displaced and distorted by our goal-oriented striving: self-possession, friendship, and engagement with nature. Sandel offers illuminating and counterintuitive accounts of these virtues, revealing how they are essential to a happiness that lasts.

To illustrate the struggle of living up to these virtues, Sandel looks to literature, film, and television, and also to his own commitments and adventures. A focal point of his personal narrative is a passion that, at first glance, is as narrow a goal-oriented pursuit as one can imagine: training to set the Guinness World Record for Most Pull-Ups in One Minute. Drawing on his own experiences, Sandel makes philosophy accessible for readers who, in their own infinitely various ways, struggle with the tension between goal-oriented striving and the embrace of life as a journey.

Adam Adatto Sandel is a philosopher, Guinness World Record holder for Most Pull-Ups in One Minute, and an award-winning teacher. Author of the critically acclaimed book The Place of Prejudice: A Case for Reasoning within the World, Sandel has taught at Harvard University and is currently an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

C. Thi Nguyen, "Games: Agency as Art" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Games are a unique art form. Games work in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be and what to care about during the game. Game designers sculpt alternate agencies, and game players submerge themselves in those alternate agencies. Thus, the fact that we play games demonstrates the fluidity of our own agency. We can throw ourselves, for a little while, into a different and temporary motivations.

This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on their unique value. In Games: Agency as Art (Oxford UP, 2020), C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part our systems of communication and our art. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. When we play games, we can pursue a goal, not for its own value, but for the value of the struggle. Thus, playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life. We adopt an interest in winning temporarily, so we can experience the beauty of the struggle. Games offer us a temporary experience of life under utterly clear values, in a world engineered to fit to our abilities and goals.

Games also let us to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, it turns out, are a special technique for communication. They are a technology that lets us record and transmit forms of agency. Our games form a "library of agency" and we can explore that library to develop our autonomy. Games use temporary restrictions to force us into new postures of agency.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Samo Tomšič, "The Labour of Enjoyment: Towards a Critique of Libidinal Economy" (Walther Konig Verlag, 2019)

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Enjoyment appears as purely private matter, but this is by far not the case. Ever since Aristotle the philosophical social critique is tormented by the question, whether the libidinal tendencies of human subjects allow the construction of a just political-economic order. It seemed at first that in modernity this problem had been overcome. Economic liberalism and utilitarianism argued that egoistic private interests and social justice were directly linked and that capitalism united libidinal and political economy in the best possible manner. But the political-economic panorama soon turned out significantly more complex and contradictory. Tomšič’s book The Labour of Enjoyment: Towards a Critique of Libidinal Economy (Walther Konig Verlag, 2020) recalls central Marxian and Freudian insights and circumscribes the political stakes of psychoanalysis under the general banner of a Critique of Libidinal Economy.

Samo Tomšič is interim professor of philosophy in Hamburg at the University of Fine Arts.

Reuben Niewenhuis is interested in philosophy, theory, technology, and interdisciplinary topics. Subscribe to his interviews here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea, "Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World)" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The hardest part of research isn't answering a question. It's knowing what to do before you know what your question is. Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World) (University of Chicago Press, 2022) tackles the two challenges every researcher faces with every new project: How do I find a compelling problem to investigate--one that truly matters to me, deeply and personally? How do I then design my research project so that the results will matter to anyone else?

This book will help you start your new research project the right way for you with a series of simple yet ingenious exercises. Written in a conversational style and packed with real-world examples, this easy-to-follow workbook offers an engaging guide to finding research inspiration within yourself, and in the broader world of ideas.

Read this book if you (or your students):

have difficulty choosing a research topic
know your topic, but are unsure how to turn it into a research project
feel intimidated by or unqualified to do research
worry that you're asking the wrong questions about your research topic
have plenty of good ideas, but aren't sure which one to commit to
feel like your research topic was imposed by someone else
want to learn new ways to think about how to do research.

Thomas S. Mullaney is professor of history at Stanford University and a Guggenheim fellow. His books include The Chinese Typewriter: A History and Your Computer is on Fire.

Christopher Rea is professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia. His books include Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949 and The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Amber M. Trotter, "Psychoanalysis as a Subversive Phenomenon: Social Change, Virtue Ethics, and Analytic Theory" (Lexington Books, 2020)

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

“Perhaps psychoanalysis survives because it obstinately carries a torch of wild freedom and reverence for the unknowable in a world of rational epistemology and increasingly rigid sociopolitical control. Psychoanalysis does not scream its sociopolitical agenda, waving signs and shouting slogans, but may be a fundamentally political project nonetheless, and one of a subversive nature.”

In her book Psychoanalysis as a Subversive Phenomenon: Social Change, Virtue Ethics, and Analytic Theory (Lexington Books, 2020) Amber Trotter teases out the radical legacy of psychoanalysis. Contrary to some attempts in the field to tone down the disruptive potential of psychoanalysis to make it respectable, she champions psychoanalysis as a force of radical change of the individual and collective psychic functioning. A central question of the book seems to be why psychoanalysis rarely delivers on its subversive promise. How might the discipline need to develop to counter its hypermarginalization and position it in optimal and generative marginality to urgent issues of ethics and politics? Among other pertinent issues, I read the book as a plea for solidarity within the field to help bringing about this development.

Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at sebastian.thrul@gmx.de.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nicholas Gamso, "Art After Liberalism" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Art After Liberalism (Columbia UP, 2022) is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging political and social rifts – a moment that could be described as a crisis of liberalism. The apparent failures of liberal thinking are a starting point for an inquiry into emergent ways of living, acting, and making art in the company of others.

What happens when the framework of the nation-state, the figure of the enterprising individual, and the premise of limitless development can no longer be counted on to produce a world worth living in? It is increasingly clear that these commonplace liberal conceptions have failed to improve life in any lasting way. In fact, they conceal fundamental connections to enslavement, colonization, moral debt, and ecological devastation.

Nicholas Gamso speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the ills of liberalism and art’s role in deciding on what may come after the impasse.

Nicholas Gamso is a writer and academic who works across theory, visual culture, performance, and space/place. He’s an editor at Places.

Kara Walker, A Subtlety, 2014
Manaf Halbouni, Monument, 2017
Warren Kanders controversy at the Whitney
Triple Chaser by Forensic Architecture
My conversations with and on Forensic Architecture
Wolfgang Tillmans and his anti-Brexit campaign
Ren Hang

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Joel Michael Reynolds, "The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality (U Minnesota Press, 2022) investigates the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy. Building on decades of activism and scholarship, Joel Michael Reynolds shows how longstanding views of disability are misguided and unjust, and he lays out a vision of what an anti-ableist moral future requires.

More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle said: "let there be a law that no deformed child shall live." This idea is alive and well today. During the past century, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued that the United States can forcibly sterilize intellectually disabled women and philosopher Peter Singer argued for the right of parents to euthanize certain cognitively disabled infants. The Life Worth Living explores how and why such arguments persist by investigating the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy.

Joel Michael Reynolds argues that this history demonstrates a fundamental mischaracterization of the meaning of disability, thanks to the conflation of lived experiences of disability with those of pain and suffering. Building on decades of activism and scholarship in the field, Reynolds shows how longstanding views of disability are misguided and unjust, and he lays out a vision of what an anti-ableist moral future requires.

The Life Worth Living is the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of the history of moral philosophy and phenomenology, and it demonstrates how lived experiences of disability demand a far richer account of human flourishing, embodiment, community, and politics in philosophical inquiry and beyond.

Joel Michael Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Senior Bioethics Advisor to The Hastings Center, Faculty Scholar of The Greenwall Foundation, and core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program. He is the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society from Oxford University Press.

Dr. Reynolds’ work explores the relationship between bodies, values, and society. He is especially concerned with the meaning of disability, the issue of ableism, and how philosophical inquiry into each might improve the lives of people with disabilities and the justness of institutions ranging from medicine to politics. These concerns lead to research across a range of traditions and specialties, including philosophy of disability, applied ethics (especially biomedical ethics, public health ethics, tech/data ethics, and ELSI research in genomics), 20th c. European and American philosophy (with an emphasis on phenomenology and pragmatism as practiced in connection with the history of philosophy), and social epistemology (particularly issues of epistemic injustice as linked to social ontology).

Autumn Wilke works in higher education as an ADA coordinator and diversity officer and is also an author and doctoral candidate with research/topics related to disability and higher education.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Survival of the Leftest: Should We Embrace Behavioural Genetics?

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Can genetics play a role in crafting left social policy? Or should we not touch those ideas ever again–even with a 10 foot pole? Paige Harden’s book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality” makes a forceful case for an egalitarian politics informed by DNA. However, geneticist Joseph Graves critiqued the book, arguing that we do not need sophisticated genetic knowledge to make a more socially just world. On this episode managing producer Marc Apollonio guest hosts, talking to both.

—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————-

You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.

If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.

——————-ABOUT THE SHOW——————

For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere, "Global China as Method" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 04:00:00 -0000

Is China part of the world? Based on much of the political, media, and popular discourse in the West the answer is seemingly no. Even after four decades of integration into the global socioeconomic system, discussions of China continue to be underpinned by a core assumption: that the country represents a fundamentally different 'other' that somehow exists outside the 'real' world. Either implicitly or explicitly, China is generally depicted as an external force with the potential to impact on the 'normal' functioning of things. This core assumption, of China as an orientalised, externalised, and separate 'other', ultimately produces a distorted image of both China and the world.

In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Ivan Franceschini from Australian National University and Nicholas Loubere from Lund University. Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere’s 2022 book Global China as Method (Cambridge University Press), seeks to illuminate the ways in which China and the Chinese people form an integral part of the global capitalist system. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Dr. Chen serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science (Springer, SSCI). Formerly, she was chair of Nordic Association of China Studies (NACS) and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Ethnicity (Taylor & Francis). You can find her on University of Helsinki Chinese Studies’ website, Youtube and Facebook, and her personal Twitter.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk

Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alfie Bown, "Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships" (Pluto Press, 2022)

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

We are in the middle of a 'desirevolution' - a fundamental and political transformation of the way we desire as human beings. Perhaps as always, new technologies - with their associated and inherited political biases - are organising and mapping the future. What we don’t seem to notice is that the primary way in which our lives are being transformed is through the manipulation and control of desire itself.

Our very impulses, drives and urges are 'gamified' to suit particular economic and political agendas, changing the way we relate to everything from lovers and friends to food and politicians. Digital technologies are transforming the subject at the deepest level of desire – re-mapping its libidinal economy - in ways never before imagined possible. From sexbots to smart condoms, fitbits to VR simulators and AI to dating algorithms, the 'love industries' are at the heart of the future smart city and the social fabric of everyday life.

Alfie Bown's Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships (Pluto Press, 2022) considers these emergent technologies and what they mean for the future of love, desire, work and capitalism.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mathew Lawrence and Adrienne Buller, "Owning the Future: Power and Property in an Age of Crisis" (Verso, 2022)

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Adrienne Buller (The Value of a Whale) and Mathew Lawrence (Planet on Fire) have penned a radical manifesto for the transformation of post-pandemic politics: Owning the Future: Power and Property in an Age of Crisis (Verso, 2022).

The question of ownership is the critical fault line of our times. During the pandemic this issue has only become more divisive. Since March 2020 we have witnessed the extraordinary growth of asset manager capitalism and the explosive concentration of wealth within the hands of the already super-rich. This new oligarchy controls every part of our social and economics lives. In the face of crisis, the authors warn that mere redistribution within current forms of ownership is not enough; our goal must be to go beyond the limits of the current system, dominated by private enclosure and unequal ownership. Only by reimagining how our economy is owned and by whom can we address the crises of our time - from the fallout of the pandemic to ecological collapse - at their roots. Building from this insight, the authors argue the systemic change we need hinges on a new era of democratic ownership: a reinvention of the firm as a vehicle for collective endeavour and meeting social needs. Against the new oligarchy of the platform giants, a digital commons that uses our data for collective good, not private profit. In place of environmental devastation, a new agenda of decommodification - of both nature and needs - with a Green New Deal and collective stewardship of the planet’s natural wealth. Together, these proposals offer a road map to owning the future, and building a better world.

Adrienne Buller is Director of Research at the UK-based think tank Common Wealth.

Mathew Lawrence is Common Wealth's founder and director.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ron Broglio, "Animal Revolution" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Callie Smith is a poet and a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of Net Zero: A Discussion with Eric Lonergan

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

There is no shortage of words written about climate change and the goal of reaching net zero - but there is a shortage of practical suggestions about to get to net zero. Even governments committed to net zero are wondering how they are going to do it. Eric Lonergan has tried to address that problem with the book Super Charge Me: Net Zero Faster (Agenda, 2022) - co-authored with Corrine Sawyers - which sets out to suggest ways Net Zero can be achieved.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Eswar S. Prasad, "The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution is Transforming Currencies and Finance (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021) provides a cutting-edge look at how accelerating financial change, from the end of cash to the rise of cryptocurrencies, will transform economies for better and worse. We think we have seen financial innovation. We bank from laptops and buy coffee with the wave of a phone. But these are minor miracles compared with the dizzying experiments now underway around the globe, as businesses and governments alike embrace the possibilities of new financial technologies. As Eswar Prasad explains, the world of finance is at the threshold of major disruption that will affect corporations, bankers, states, and indeed all of us. The transformation of money will fundamentally rewrite how ordinary people live. Above all, Prasad foresees the end of physical cash. The driving force won't be phones or credit cards but rather central banks, spurred by the emergence of cryptocurrencies to develop their own, more stable digital currencies. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies themselves will evolve unpredictably as global corporations like Facebook and Amazon join the game. The changes will be accompanied by snowballing innovations that are reshaping finance and have already begun to revolutionize how we invest, trade, insure, and manage risk. Prasad shows how these and other changes will redefine the very concept of money, unbundling its traditional functions as a unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. The promise lies in greater efficiency and flexibility, increased sensitivity to the needs of diverse consumers, and improved market access for the unbanked. The risk is instability, lack of accountability, and erosion of privacy. A lucid, visionary work, The Future of Money shows how to maximize the best and guard against the worst of what is to come.

Eswar Prasad is the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy at Cornell University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the New Century Chair in International Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was previously chief of the Financial Studies Division in the International Monetary Fund's Research Department and, before that, was the head of the IMF's China Division.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mark Solms, "The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness" (Norton, 2021)

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

If you have ever been skeptical about whether neuroscience has anything to teach psychoanalysis, or vice-versa, you will be stimulated by this book which engages the two disciplines in a fascinating dialogue with each other. How does the mind connect to the body? Why does it feel like something to be us? For one of the boldest thinkers in neuroscience, solving this puzzle has been a lifetime's quest. Now at last, the man who discovered the brain mechanism for dreaming appears to have made a breakthrough. The very idea that a solution is at hand may seem outrageous. Isn't consciousness intangible, beyond the reach of science?

Yet Mark Solms shows how misguided fears and suppositions have concealed its true nature. Stick to the medical facts, pay close attention to the eerie testimony of hundreds of neurosurgery patients, and a way past our obstacles reveals itself. Join Solms on a voyage into the extraordinary realms beyond. More than just a philosophical argument, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (Norton, 2021) will forever alter how you understand your own experience. There is a secret buried in the brain's ancient foundations: bring it into the light and we fathom all the depths of our being.

Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He can be reached at PhilipJLance@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner, "The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be" (MIT Press, 2022)

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

For The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be (MIT Press, 2022), Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner analyzed in-depth interviews with more than 2,000 students, alumni, faculty, administrators, parents, trustees, and others, which were conducted at ten institutions ranging from highly selective liberal arts colleges to less-selective state schools. What they found challenged characterizations in the media: students are not preoccupied by political correctness, free speech, or even the cost of college. They are most concerned about their GPA and their resumes; they see jobs and earning potential as more important than learning. Many say they face mental health challenges, fear that they don't belong, and feel a deep sense of alienation. Given this daily reality for students, has higher education lost its way? Fischman and Gardner contend that US universities and colleges must focus sharply on their core educational mission.

Fischman and Gardner, both recognized authorities on education and learning, argue that higher education in the United States has lost sight of its principal reason for existing: not vocational training, not the provision of campus amenities, but to increase what Fischman and Gardner call "higher education capital"--to help students think well and broadly, express themselves clearly, explore new areas, and be open to possible transformations. Fischman and Gardner offer cogent recommendations for how every college can become a community of learners who are open to change as thinkers, citizens, and human beings.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Lisa Jean Moore, "Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification, and the Will to Change Nature" (NYU Press, 2022)

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The process of manipulating the genetic material of one animal to include the DNA of another creates a new transgenic organism. Several animals, notably goats, mice, sheep, and cattle are now genetically modified in this way. In Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification, and the Will to Change Nature (NYU Press, 2022), Lisa Jean Moore wonders what such scientific advances portend. Will the natural world become so modified that it ceases to exist? After turning species into hybrids, can we ever get back to the original, or are they forever lost? Does genetic manipulation make better lives possible, and if so, for whom?

Moore centers the story on goats that have been engineered by the US military and civilian scientists using the DNA of spiders. The goat’s milk contains a spider-silk protein fiber; it can be spun into ultra-strong fabric that can be used to manufacture lightweight military body armor. Researchers also hope the transgenically produced spider silk will revolutionize medicine with biocompatible medical inserts such as prosthetics and bandages. Based on in-depth research with spiders in Florida and transgenic goats in Utah, Our Transgenic Future focuses on how these spider goats came into existence, the researchers who maintain them, the funders who have made their lives possible, and how they fit into the larger science of transgenics and synthetics. This book is a fascinating story about the possibilities of science and the likely futures that may come.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Maxwell Kennel, "Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this thought provoking book entitled PostSecular History:Political Theology and The Politics of Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Max Kennel explores how contemporary approaches to the meaning of time and history follow patterns that are simultaneously political and theological. Even after postsecular critiques of Christianity, religion, and secularity, many influential ways of dividing time and history continue to be formed by providential narratives that mediate between experience and expectation in movements from promise to fulfilment. In response to persistent theological influences within ostensibly secular ways of understanding time and history, Postsecular History revisits and revises the concept of periodization by tracing powerful efforts to divide time into past, present, and future, and by critiquing historical partitions between the Reformation and Enlightenment. Developing a postsecular critique of theopolitical periodization in six chapters, Postsecular History questions how relations of possession, novelty, freedom, and instrumentality implied in the prefix ‘post’ are reproduced in postsecular discourses and the field of political theology.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Siniša Malešević, "Why Humans Fight: The Social Dynamics of Close-Range Violence" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In his book Why Humans Fight: The Social Dynamics of Close-Range Violence (2022, Cambridge University Press), Siniša Malešević emphasises the centrality of the social and historical contexts that make fighting possible. He argues that fighting is not an individual attribute, but a social phenomenon shaped by one's relationships with other people. Drawing on recent scholarship across a variety of academic disciplines as well as his own interviews with the former combatants, Malešević shows that one's willingness to fight is a contextual phenomenon shaped by specific ideological and organisational logic. This book explores the role biology, psychology, economics, ideology, and coercion play in one's experience of fighting, emphasising the cultural and historical variability of combativeness. By drawing from numerous historical and contemporary examples from all over the world, Malešević demonstrates how social pugnacity is a relational and contextual phenomenon that possesses autonomous features.

Siniša Malešević is the chair of the sociology department at University College, Dublin. His main research interests include the study of war and violence, ethnicity, nation-states, and nationalism, empires, ideology, sociological theory and comparative historical sociology.

Christian Axboe Nielsen is associate professor of history and human security at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jed Esty, "The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits" (Stanford Briefs, 2022)

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

As the US becomes a second-place nation, can it shed the superpower nostalgia that still haunts the UK? The debate over the US's fading hegemony has raged and sputtered for 50 years, glutting the market with prophecies about American decline. Media experts ask how fast we will fall and how much we will lose, but generally ignore the fundamental question: What does decline mean? What is the significance, in experiential and everyday terms, in feelings and fantasies, of living in a country past its prime?

Drawing on the example of post-WWII Britain and looking ahead at 2020s America, Jed Esty suggests that becoming a second-place nation is neither disastrous, as alarmists claim, nor avoidable, as optimists insist. Contemporary declinism often masks white nostalgia and perpetuates a conservative longing for Cold War certainty. But the narcissistic lure of "lost greatness" appeals across the political spectrum. As Esty argues, it resonates so widely in mainstream media because Americans have lost access to a language of national purpose beyond global supremacy. It is time to shelve the shopworn fables of endless US dominance, to face the multipolar world of the future, and to tell new American stories. The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits (Stanford Briefs, 2022) is a guide to finding them.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jamie Susskind, "The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century" (Pegasus Books, 2022)

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

From one of the leading intellectuals of the digital age, The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century (Pegasus Books, 2022) is the definitive guide to the great political question of our time: how can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful digital technologies? A Financial Times “Book to Read” in 2022. Not long ago, the tech industry was widely admired, and the internet was regarded as a tonic for freedom and democracy. Not anymore. Every day, the headlines blaze with reports of racist algorithms, data leaks, and social media platforms festering with falsehood and hate. In The Digital Republic, acclaimed author Jamie Susskind argues that these problems are not the fault of a few bad apples at the top of the industry. They are the result of our failure to govern technology properly. The Digital Republic charts a new course. It offers a plan for the digital age: new legal standards, new public bodies and institutions, new duties on platforms, new rights and regulators, new codes of conduct for people in the tech industry. Inspired by the great political essays of the past, and steeped in the traditions of republican thought, it offers a vision of a different type of society: a digital republic in which human and technological flourishing go hand in hand.

Jamie Susskind is a barrister and the author of the award-winning bestseller Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech (Oxford University Press, 2018), which received the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize 2019, and was an Evening Standard and Prospect Book of the Year. He has fellowships at Harvard and Cambridge and currently lives in London.

Austin Clyde is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science. He researches artificial intelligence and high-performance computing for developing new scientific methods. He is also a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society program, where my research addresses the intersection of artificial intelligence, human rights, and democracy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Max Ajl, "A People's Green New Deal" (Pluto Press, 2021)

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The idea of a Green New Deal was launched into popular consciousness by US Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. It has become a watchword in the current era of global climate crisis. But what – and for whom – is the Green New Deal? In this concise and urgent book, Max Ajl provides an overview of the various mainstream Green New Deals. Critically engaging with their proponents, ideological underpinnings and limitations, he goes on to sketch out a radical alternative: a 'People's Green New Deal' committed to decommodification, working-class power, anti-imperialism and agro-ecology. Ajl diagnoses the roots of the current socio-ecological crisis as emerging from a world-system dominated by the logics of capitalism and imperialism. Resolving this crisis, he argues, requires nothing less than an infrastructural and agricultural transformation in the Global North, and the industrial convergence between North and South. As the climate crisis deepens and the literature on the subject grows, A People's Green New Deal (Pluto Press, 2021) contributes a distinctive perspective to the debate.

Eyad Houssami makes theatre and has participated in the revitalization of an ancient organic farm in southern Lebanon. He is editor of the Arabic-English book Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre (Pluto/Dar Al Adab) and was editor-at-large of Portal 9, a bilingual literary and academic journal about urbanism. His doctoral research project on ecology and agriculture in post-independence Lebanon at the University of Leeds and this work are supported by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R012733/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Adrienne Buller, "The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism" (Manchester UP, 2022)

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this searing and insightful critique, Adrienne Buller examines the fatal biases that have shaped the response of our governing institutions to climate and environmental breakdown, and asks: are the 'solutions' being proposed really solutions? Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish.

The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism (Manchester UP, 2022) examines what is wrong with mainstream climate and environmental governance, from carbon pricing and offset markets to 'green growth', the commodification of nature and the growing influence of the finance industry on environmental policy. In doing so, it exposes the self-defeating logic of a response to these challenges based on creating new opportunities for profit, and a refusal to grapple with the inequalities and injustices that have created them. Both honest and optimistic, The Value of a Whale asks us - in the face of crisis - what we really value.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David Hunter, "On Believing: Being Right in a World of Possibilities" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

According to many standard philosophical accounts, beliefs are a kind of stance one takes toward a proposition. To believe that Nashville is in Tennessee is to adopt a certain attitude towards the proposition ‘Nashville is in Tennessee’. One advantage of this view is that it seems to make clear how beliefs can be right or wrong: to believe a proposition that is false is to have a false belief, while to believe a proposition that is true is to have a true belief. But in Philosophy things are never simple. And this kind of account occasions significant difficulties. Given how central the phenomenon of believing is to everything we do, it may seem odd to say that belief is a puzzle. Yet here we are.

On Believing: Being Right in a World of Possibilities (Oxford UP, 2022), David Hunter seeks to sort it all out. He presents a novel theory belief that stands in stark contrast with the standard view. On his view, “To believe something is to be in a position to do, think, and feel things in light of a possibility whose obtaining would make one right.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ryan North, "How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain" (Riverhead Books, 2022)

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Taking over the world is a lot of work. Any supervillain is bound to have questions: What's the perfect location for a floating secret base? What zany heist will fund my wildly ambitious plans? How do I control the weather, destroy the internet, and never, ever die?

Bestselling author and award-winning comics writer Ryan North has the answers. In How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain (Riverhead Books, 2022), he details a number of outlandish villainous schemes that harness the potential of today's most advanced technologies. Picking up where How to Invent Everything left off, his explanations are as fun and elucidating as they are completely absurd.

You don't have to be a criminal mastermind to share a supervillain's interest in cutting-edge science and technology. This book doesn't just reveal how to take over the world--it also shows how you could save it. This sly guide to some of the greatest threats facing humanity accessibly explores emerging techniques to extend human life spans, combat cyberterrorism, communicate across millennia, and finally make Jurassic Park a reality.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Frans de Waal, "Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist" (W. W. Norton, 2022)

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist (W. W. Norton, 2022), world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal draws on decades of observation and studies of both human and animal behavior to argue that despite the linkage between gender and biological sex, biology does not automatically support the traditional gender roles in human societies. While humans and other primates do share some behavioral differences, biology offers no justification for existing gender inequalities.

Using chimpanzees and bonobos to illustrate this point--two ape relatives that are genetically equally close to humans--de Waal challenges widely held beliefs about masculinity and femininity, and common assumptions about authority, leadership, cooperation, competition, filial bonds, and sexual behavior. Chimpanzees are male-dominated and violent, while bonobos are female-dominated and peaceful. In both species, political power needs to be distinguished from physical dominance. Power is not limited to the males, and both sexes show true leadership capacities.

Different is a fresh and thought-provoking approach to the long-running debate about the balance between nature and nurture, and where sex and gender roles fit in. De Waal peppers his discussion with details from his own life--a Dutch childhood in a family of six boys, his marriage to a French woman with a different orientation toward gender, and decades of academic turf wars over outdated scientific theories that have proven hard to dislodge from public discourse. He discusses sexual orientation, gender identity, and the limitations of the gender binary, exceptions to which are also found in other primates.

With humor, clarity, and compassion, Different seeks to broaden the conversation about human gender dynamics by promoting an inclusive model that embraces differences, rather than negating them.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Joni Schwartz and John R. Chaney, "Gifts from the Dark: Learning from the Incarceration Experience" (Lexington Books, 2022)

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

While in no way supporting the systemic injustices and disparities of mass incarceration, in Gifts from the Dark: Learning from the Incarceration Experience (Lexington Books, 2021), Joni Schwartz and John Chaney argue that we have much to learn from those who have been and are in prison. Schwartz and Chaney profile the contributions of literary giants, social activists, entrepreneurs, and other talented individuals who, despite the disorienting dilemma of incarceration, are models of adult transformative learning that positively impact the world. In focusing upon how men and women have chosen the worst moments of their lives as a baseline not to define, but to refine themselves, Gifts from the Dark promises to alter the limited mindset of incarceration as a solely one-dimensional, deficit event.

Joni Schwartz is professor of humanities at the City University of New York – LaGuardia Community College and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice Graduate Studies Program.

John Chaney is assistant professor and director of Criminal Justice programs for City University of New York -- LaGuardia Community College.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Christopher Blattman, "Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace" (Viking, 2022)

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace (Viking, 2022), Chris Blattman explains the five reasons why conflict (rarely) blooms into war, and how to interrupt that deadly process. It's easy to overlook the underlying strategic forces of war, to see it solely as a series of errors, accidents, and emotions gone awry. It's also easy to forget that war shouldn't happen-and most of the time it doesn't. Around the world, there are millions of hostile rivalries, yet only a tiny fraction erupt into violence. Too many accounts of conflict forget this. With a counterintuitive approach, Blattman reminds us that most rivals loathe one another in peace. That's because war is too costly to fight. Enemies almost always find it better to split the pie than spoil it or struggle over thin slices. So, in those rare instances when fighting ensues, we should ask: what kept rivals from compromising?

Why We Fight draws on decades of economics, political science, psychology, and real-world interventions to lay out the root causes and remedies for war, showing that violence is not the norm; that there are only five reasons why conflict wins over compromise; and how peacemakers turn the tides through tinkering, not transformation. From warring states to street gangs, ethnic groups and religious sects to political factions, there are common dynamics to heed and lessons to learn. Along the way, we meet vainglorious European monarchs, African dictators, Indian mobs, Nazi pilots, British football hooligans, ancient Greeks, and fanatical Americans. Realistic and optimistic, this is a book that lends new meaning to the old adage, "Give peace a chance."

Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jonathan Crary, "Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World" (Verso, 2022)

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our ‘digital age’ is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialisation of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (Verso, 2022) surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support.

This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be an instrument of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.

Dr. Jonathan Crary is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University in the Art history and Archeology Department. He is a prolific art and culture critic and is the co-founder (and co-editor) of Zone Books. Professor Crary has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2005, his teaching and mentoring were recognized with a Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. Dr. Crary is also the author of Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (winner of the 2001 Lionel Trilling Book Award), and 24/7 (a finalist for the 2016 Terzani International Literary Prize).

Cody Skahan (cskahan@ksu.edu) is an anthropologist by training, starting an MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland in August 2022 as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on the intersections of queerness, environmentalisms, and tourism in Iceland. Cody has a blog here where he sometimes writes about Games User Research and will totally, 100% in the future post the podcast and other projects he is working on.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert-Jan Smits and Rachael Pells, "Plan S for Shock: Science. Shock. Solution. Speed." (Ubiquity Press, 2022)

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Plan S: the open access initiative that changed the face of global research.

Robert-Jan Smits and Rachael Pells's book Plan S for Shock: Science. Shock. Solution. Speed. (Ubiquity Press, 2022) tells the story of open access publishing - why it matters now, and for the future. In a world where information has never been so accessible, and answers are available at the touch of a fingertip, we are hungrier for the facts than ever before - something the Covid-19 crisis has brought to light. And yet, paywalls put in place by multi-billion dollar publishing houses are still preventing millions from accessing quality, scientific knowledge - and public trust in science is under threat. On 4 September 2018, a bold new initiative known as 'Plan S' was unveiled, kickstarting a world-wide shift in attitudes towards open access research. For the first time, funding agencies across continents joined forces to impose new rules on the publication of research, with the aim of one day making all research free and available to all. What followed was a debate of global proportions, as stakeholders asked: Who has the right to access publicly-funded research? Will it ever be possible to enforce change on a multi-billion dollar market dominated by five major players? Here, the scheme's founder, Robert-Jan Smits, makes a compelling case for Open Access, and reveals for the first time how he set about turning his controversial plan into reality - as well as some of the challenges faced along the way. In telling his story, Smits argues that the Covid-19 crisis has exposed the traditional academic publishing system as unsustainable.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Munger, "The Sharing Economy: Its Pitfalls and Promises" (Duke UP, 2021)

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Transactions have always taken place. For hundreds of years that 'place' was a market or, more recently, a shopping mall. But in the past two decades these physical locations have increasingly been replaced by their virtual counterparts - online platforms. In this book Michael Munger explains how these platforms act as matchmakers or middlemen, a role traders have adopted since the very first exchanges thousands of years ago. The difference today is that the matchmakers often play no direct part in buying or selling anything - they just help buyers and sellers find each other. Their major contribution has been to reduce the costs of organizing and completing purchases, rentals or exchanges. The Sharing Economy: Its Pitfalls and Promises (Duke UP, 2021) contends that the key role of online platforms is to create reductions in transaction costs and it highlights the importance of three 'Ts' - triangulation, transfer and trust - in bringing down those costs.

Professor Munger trained as an economist at Washington University in St. Louis under Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Douglass North. He has published prolifically across disciplines in the areas of political economy and public choice, and is now a professor of political science at Duke University, with secondary appointments in economics and public policy.

Professor Munger is also an avowed libertarian, and has stood for office as a candidate of the Libertarian Party. In our interview, he explains how the emergence of the platform economy creates concentrations of economic power that are just as concerning to him as concentrations of political power. He also explains how thinking through the many changes and disruptions in our working lives that will result from the platform economy has led him to the view that Universal Basic Income and single-payer healthcare are necessary to creating the kind of free and prosperous society that he and other libertarians want.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics that trains students in the skills of data analytics needed to understand, succeed in, or make positive changes to the evolving digital platform economy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of Religion: A Conversation with Robin Dunbar

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Of the many differences between the West and the rest of the world the issue of religiosity is one of the most striking. In the West ever fewer people belong to a religion – the number for the UK is now around 50% - and in the US around a third of people are religiously unaffiliated. But elsewhere in the world religions are growing – and in the world as a whole nearly 90% of people are religious. Robin Dunbar – Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Oxford University has been thinking about the reason for religion’s appeal for his book How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures (Oxford UP, 2022).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin, "How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth" (Polity, 2022)

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass?

In How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth (Polity, 2022), Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They discuss recently-advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism. Pieces of each of these theories help explain key events on the path to modern riches. Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in 18th-century Britain? Why did some European countries, the USA, Canada, and Japan catch up in the 19th century? Why did it take until the late 20th and 21st centuries for other countries? Why have some still not caught up? Koyama and Rubin show that the past can provide a guide for how countries can escape poverty. There are certain prerequisites that all successful economies seem to have. But there is also no panacea. A society’s past and its institutions and culture play a key role in shaping how it may—or may not—develop.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Catherine Besteman, "Militarized Global Apartheid" (Duke UP, 2020)

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Militarized Global Apartheid, Catherine Besteman offers a sweeping theorization of the ways in which countries from the global north are reproducing South Africa's apartheid system on a worldwide scale to control the mobility and labor of people from the global south. Exploring the different manifestations of global apartheid, Besteman traces how militarization and securitization reconfigure older forms of white supremacy and deploy them in new contexts to maintain this racialized global order. Whether using the language of security, military intervention, surveillance technologies, or detention centers and other forms of incarceration, these projects reinforce and consolidate the global north's political and economic interests at the expense of the poor, migrants, refugees, Indigenous populations, and people of color. By drawing out how this new form of apartheid functions and pointing to areas of resistance, Besteman opens up new space to theorize potential sources of liberatory politics.

Catherine Besteman is Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College and author of Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine, published by Duke University Press.

Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gernot Wagner, "Geoengineering: The Gamble" (Polity, 2021)

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Stabilizing the world's climates means cutting carbon dioxide pollution. There's no way around it. But what if that's not enough? What if it's too difficult to accomplish in the time allotted or, worse, what if it's so late in the game that even cutting carbon emissions to zero, tomorrow, wouldn't do?

Enter solar geoengineering. The principle is simple: attempt to cool Earth by reflecting more sunlight back into space. The primary mechanism, shooting particles into the upper atmosphere, implies more pollution, not less. If that doesn't sound scary, it should. There are lots of risks, unknowns, and unknowables.

In Geoengineering: The Gamble (Polity, 2021), climate economist Gernot Wagner provides a balanced take on the possible benefits and all-too-real risks, especially the so-called "moral hazard" that researching or even just discussing (solar) geoengineering would undermine the push to cut carbon emissions in the first place. Despite those risks, he argues, solar geoengineering may only be a matter of time. Not if, but when.

As the founding executive director of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program, Wagner explores scenarios of a geoengineered future, offering an inside-view of the research already under way and the actions the world must take to guide it in a productive direction.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David B. Goldstein, "The End of Genetics: Designing Humanity's DNA" (Yale UP, 2022)

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Since 2010 it has been possible to determine a person's genetic makeup in a matter of days at an accessible cost for many millions of people. Along with this technological breakthrough there has emerged a movement to use this information to help prospective parents "eliminate preventable genetic disease." As the prospect of systematically excluding the appearance of unwanted mutations in our children comes within reach, David B. Goldstein examines the possible consequences from these types of choices.

Engaging and accessible, The End of Genetics: Designing Humanity's DNA (Yale UP, 2022) is a clarion call for responsible and informed stewardship of the human genome provides an overview of what we do and do not know about human genetics and looks at some of the complex, yet largely unexplored, issues we must be most careful about as we move into an era of increasing numbers of parents exercising direct control over the genomes of their children.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Are We Entering a "Neo-Medieval" Era?: A Conversation with Greg Lewicki

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 04:00:00 -0000

Our world is being marked by a transition of epochs towards a more “Neo-Medieval” era. What is even meant by “Neo-Medieval”? Greg Lewicki argues that “Neo-Medieval” is characterized by seven megatrends that are shaping our world in this direction which will be the subject of discussion in this episode. Of course, by invoking the term medieval, this has nothing to do with the stereotype of the so-called “Dark Ages” that dominates popular imagination.

Greg Lewicki is a foresight and communications consultant as well as a philosopher. A graduate of the London School of Economics with a focus on game theory as well as Maastricht University with a focus on the future of science. He is currently a non-residential fellow at the Polish Economic Institute (Warsaw) and research fellow at the War Studies University (Warsaw).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Rob Dunn, "A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species" (Basic Book, 2021)

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Our species has amassed unprecedented knowledge of nature, which we have tried to use to seize control of life and bend the planet to our will. In A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species (Basic Book, 2021), biologist Rob Dunn argues that such efforts are futile. We may see ourselves as life's overlords, but we are instead at its mercy. In the evolution of antibiotic resistance, the power of natural selection to create biodiversity, and even the surprising life of the London Underground, Dunn finds laws of life that no human activity can annul. When we create artificial islands of crops, dump toxic waste, or build communities, we provide new materials for old laws to shape. Life's future flourishing is not in question. Ours is.

As ambitious as Edward Wilson's Sociobiology and as timely as Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, A Natural History of the Future sets a new standard for understanding the diversity and destiny of life itself.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of the Brain: A Conversation with Daniel Graham

Tue, 31 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

When people describe the brain they often compare it to a computer. In fact, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has defined the field for decades now. And in many ways, it works – the are many respects in which the brain is like a computer. But there are other aspects of the brain which are not captured by the computer metaphor which is why the neuroscientist Daniel Graham is suggesting another paradigm for understanding the brain. In his book An Internet in Your Head: A New Paradigm for How the Brain Works (Columbia UP, 2021), he argues that the brain is a communication system, like the internet.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, "Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World" (Oneworld, 2021)

Mon, 30 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World (Oneworld, 2021), Dr. Clive Hamilton and Dr. Mareike Ohlberg explores how the Chinese Communist Party is determined to reshape the world in its image.

The book details China’s decades-long infiltration of the West threatens democracy, human rights, privacy, security and free speech. Throughout North America and Europe, political and business elites, Wall Street, Hollywood, think tanks, universities and the Chinese diaspora are being manipulated with money, pressure and privilege. In this book, the authors reveal the myriad ways the CCP is fulfilling its dream of undermining liberal values and controlling the world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Yanis Varoufakis, "Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present" (Melville House, 2020)

Mon, 30 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

What would a fair and equal society look like? In Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present (Melville House Publishing, 2020), theworld-renowned economist and bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis presents his radical and subversive answer. Imagine it is now 2025 and that years earlier, in the wake of the world financial crisis of 2008, a new post-Capitalist society had been born. In this ingenious book, Yanis Varoufakis draws on the greatest thinkers in European culture from Plato to Marx, as well as the great thought-experiments of science fiction, to offer us a dramatic and tantalising glimpse of a brave new world where the principles of democracy, equality and justice are truly embedded in our economy. Through the eyes of three characters - a liberal economist, a radical feminist and a left-wing technologist - we come to see what would be needed to forge such a world but also at what cost. This transformative vision forces each of us to confront the profound questions and trade-offs that underpin all societies- how do we balance freedom with fairness? How do we unleash the best that humanity has to offer without opening the door to the worst? Another Now offers answers to some of the most pressing questions of today. It also challenges us to consider how far we are willing to go in pursuit of our ideals.

Shu Cao Mo 's interests span continental philosophy, existential psychology and history of performance art. She previously served as the Asia representative for a global traveling university. She holds an Ed.M. in Arts in Education from Harvard and a B.A. in Political Philosophy and Theater from Duke. Twitter @Mo2Cao

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ilana M. Horwitz, "God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mon, 30 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success (Oxford University Press, 2022), Ilana M. Horwitz offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers' religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. Religious students orient their life around God so deeply that it alters how they see themselves and how they behave, inside and outside of church.

Ilana M. Horwitz is an Assistant Professor and Fields-Rayant Chair of Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Paul Morland, "Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers" (Picador, 2022)

Wed, 25 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans.

The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway.

Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers (Picador, 2022) ranges from the countries of West Africa where the tendency towards large families is combining with falling infant mortality to create the greatest population explosion ever witnessed, to the countries of East Asia and Southern Europe where generations of low birth-rate and rising life expectancy are creating the oldest populations in history. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way – portents for still larger migrations ahead – which are radically changing the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of many societies across the globe, and in their turn creating political reaction that can be observed from Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump. Finally, he looks at the two underlying motors of change – remarkable rises in levels of education and burgeoning food production – which have made all these epochal developments possible.

Tomorrow’s People provides a fascinating, illuminating and thought-provoking tour of an emerging new world. Nobody who wants to understand that world should be without it.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success" (Public Affairs, 2022)

Wed, 18 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Immigration is one of the most fraught, and possibly most misunderstood, topics in American social discourse—yet, in most cases, the things we believe about immigration are based largely on myth, not facts. Using the tools of modern data analysis and ten years of pioneering research, Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success (Public Affairs, 2022) provides new evidence about the past and present of the American Dream, debunking myths fostered by political opportunism and sentimentalized in family histories. They make a powerful case for four key facts:

Children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially those of poor immigrants, do better economically than children of U.S.-born residents.
Immigrants accused of lack of assimilation (such as Mexicans today and the Irish in the past) actually assimilate fastest.
Immigration changes the economy in unexpected positive ways and staves off the economic decline that is the consequence of an aging population.
Closing the door to immigrants harms the economic prospects of the U.S.-born—the people politicians are trying to protect.

Using powerful story-telling and unprecedented research employing big data and algorithms, interviewee Leah Boustan and her co-author Ran Abramitzky are like dedicated family genealogists but millions of times over. They provide a new take on American history with surprising results, especially how comparable the “golden era” of immigration is to today, and why many current policy proposals are so misguided.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of Human Fertility: A Conversation with R. John Aitken

Tue, 17 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Human fertility rates are declining fast and in twenty years or so the global population will go down fast – not just in affluent countries but in the world as a whole. While many may welcome that outcome, Professor John Aitken who has just written The Infertility Trap: Why Life Choices Impact Your Fertility and Why We Must Act Now (Cambridge UP, 2022), argues that a rapid fall in the numbers of people on earth could cause havoc.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David M. Peña-Guzmán, "When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Tue, 17 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Are humans the only dreamers on Earth? What goes on in the minds of animals when they sleep? When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (Princeton UP, 2022) brings together behavioral and neuroscientific research on animal sleep with philosophical theories of dreaming. It shows that dreams provide an invaluable window into the cognitive and emotional lives of nonhuman animals, giving us access to a seemingly inaccessible realm of animal experience.

David Peña-Guzmán uncovers evidence of animal dreaming throughout the scientific literature, suggesting that many animals run “reality simulations” while asleep, with a dream-ego moving through a dynamic and coherent dreamscape. He builds a convincing case for animals as conscious beings and examines the thorny scientific, philosophical, and ethical questions it raises. Once we accept that animals dream, we incur a host of moral obligations and have no choice but to rethink our views about who animals are and the interior lives they lead.

A mesmerizing journey into the otherworldly domain of nonhuman consciousness, When Animals Dream carries profound implications for contemporary debates about animal cognition, animal ethics, and animal rights, challenging us to regard animals as beings who matter, and for whom things matter.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Will Kinney, "An Infinity of Worlds: Cosmic Inflation and the Beginning of the Universe" (MIT Press, 2022)

Mon, 16 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the beginning was the Big Bang: an unimaginably hot fire almost fourteen billion years ago in which the first elements were forged. The physical theory of the hot nascent universe--the Big Bang--was one of the most consequential developments in twentieth-century science. And yet it leaves many questions unanswered: Why is the universe so big? Why is it so old? What is the origin of structure in the cosmos? In An Infinity of Worlds: Cosmic Inflation and the Beginning of the Universe (MIT Press, 2022), physicist Will Kinney explains a more recent theory that may hold the answers to these questions and even explain the ultimate origins of the universe: cosmic inflation, before the primordial fire of the Big Bang.

Kinney argues that cosmic inflation is a transformational idea in cosmology, changing our picture of the basic structure of the cosmos and raising unavoidable questions about what we mean by a scientific theory. He explains that inflation is a remarkable unification of inner space and outer space, in which the physics of the very large (the cosmos) meets the physics of the very small (elementary particles and fields), closing in a full circle at the first moment of time. With quantum uncertainty its fundamental feature, this new picture of cosmic origins introduces the possibility that the origin of the universe was of a quantum nature.

Kinney considers the consequences of eternal cosmic inflation. Can we come to terms with the possibility that our entire observable universe is one of infinitely many, forever hidden from our view?

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sam Tatam, "Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking Ancient Innovation to Solve Tomorrow's Challenges" (Harriman House, 2022)

Wed, 11 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

When faced with new challenges, it’s easy to feel our solutions need to be equally unprecedented. We think we need a revolution. But what if this is a big mistake?

In Evolutionary Ideas, Sam Tatam shows how behavioral science and evolutionary psychology can help us solve tomorrow’s challenges, not by divining something the world has never seen, but by borrowing from yesterday’s solutions – often in the most unexpected ways.

Just as millions of years of evolution have helped craft the wing and dorsal fin, thousands of engineers, designers, marketers, and advertisers have toiled to solve many of the problems you face today. Over time, through intent, design, social learning and sheer luck, we have found what works.

Armed with an enhanced ability to see these patterns in human innovation, we can now systematically approach the creative process to develop more effective ideas more readily and rapidly.

Sam Tatam's book Evolutionary Ideas: Unlocking Ancient Innovation to Solve Tomorrow's Challenges (Harriman House, 2022) explores five of the most critical challenges we face today, and we learn how to ‘breed’ more effective solutions from those that have survived. The result is a dynamic and exciting way of solving problems and supercharging creativity – for anyone in any endeavor.

John Emrich has worked for decades in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment advisory industry called Kick the Dogma. john@ktdpod.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Richard Schwartz, "No Bad Parts: How the Internal Family Systems Model Changes Everything" (Sounds True, 2021)

Fri, 06 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today I interview Richard Schwartz. His friends know him as Dick. And while this is my first time speaking with him, I can’t help but feel friendly toward him. Dick is the creator of Internal Family Systems or IFS, an extraordinary and paradigm-shifting therapeutic model that changes not only the way we envision healing, but also the person being healed. Full disclosure: I am currently working with a therapist who uses IFS in their approach, and it’s been healing and revelatory, which is why I’m very excited to share this conversation with you, where we explore personal and cultural healing, the innate goodness of our humanity, and our connection with one another and the world around us. Dick is the author of several books. He’s taught around the world. He’s the founder of the IFS Institute, which offers resources and training for professionals and the general public. And he’s just written the new book No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model (Sounds True, 2021). Enjoy my conversation with Dick Schwartz.

Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nate G. Hilger, "The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis" (MIT Press, 2022)

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Few people realize that raising children is the single largest industry in the United States. Yet this vital work receives little political support, and its primary workers—parents—labor in isolation. If they ask for help, they are made to feel inadequate; there is no centralized organization to represent their interests; and there is virtually nothing spent on research and development to help them achieve their goals. It’s almost as if parents are set up to fail—and the result is lost opportunities that limit children’s success and make us all worse off. In The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis (MIT Press, 2022), Nate Hilger combines cutting-edge social science research, revealing historical case studies, and on-the-ground investigation to recast parenting as the hidden crucible of inequality.

Parents are expected not only to care for their children but to help them develop the skills they will need to thrive in today’s socioeconomic reality—but most parents, including even the most caring parents on the planet, are not trained in skill development and lack the resources to get help. How do we fix this? The solution, Hilger argues, is to ask less of parents, not more. America should consider child development a public investment with a monumental payoff. We need programs inspired by Medicare—call them Familycare—to drive this investment. To make it happen, parents need to become an interest group that can wield its political power on behalf of children—who will always be the largest bloc of disenfranchised people in this country.

The Parent Trap exposes the true costs of our society’s unrealistic expectations around parenting and lays out a profoundly hopeful blueprint for reform.

Nate Hilger is a Harvard and Stanford-trained economist who has worked as a professor of economics at Brown University and an economist and data scientist in Silicon Valley. While in academia he was a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and continues to hold an affiliation with the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown. In 2020 he served as a lead policy consultant on early childhood and non-K12 child development issues for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.

His academic research on child development and inequality has been published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics and other leading peer-reviewed journals, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major media outlets. He lives with his wife and son in Redwood City, California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Pamela Hieronymi, "Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

An innovative reassessment of philosopher P. F. Strawson's influential "Freedom and Resentment" P. F. Strawson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his 1962 paper "Freedom and Resentment" is one of the most influential in modern moral philosophy, prompting responses across multiple disciplines, from psychology to sociology.

In Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals (Princeton UP, 2020), Pamela Hieronymi closely reexamines Strawson's paper and concludes that his argument has been underestimated and misunderstood. Line by line, Hieronymi carefully untangles the complex strands of Strawson's ideas. After elucidating his conception of moral responsibility and his division between "reactive" and "objective" responses to the actions and attitudes of others, Hieronymi turns to his central argument. Strawson argues that, because determinism is an entirely general thesis, true of everyone at all times, its truth does not undermine moral responsibility. Hieronymi finds the two common interpretations of this argument, "the simple Humean interpretation" and "the broadly Wittgensteinian interpretation," both deficient. Drawing on Strawson's wider work in logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, Hieronymi concludes that his argument rests on an implicit, and previously overlooked, metaphysics of morals, one grounded in Strawson's "social naturalism." In the final chapter, she defends this naturalistic picture against objections. Rigorous, concise, and insightful, Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals sheds new light on Strawson's thinking and has profound implications for future work on free will, moral responsibility, and metaethics. The book also features the complete text of Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment."

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jonathan Beller, "The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2021)

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (Duke UP, 2021) Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression-language, image, music, communication-into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John A. List, "The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale" (Currency, 2022)

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Most economists would argue that policies and business strategies are most likely to succeed if they are evidence-based, with their efficacy demonstrated empirically by randomized controlled trials before they are implemented at scale. John List spearheaded the introduction of field experiments in economics, publishing a raft of influential studies with this approach, and using his research insights to help shape both government policy and business strategy. He has learned a thing or two along the way. In The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale (Currency, 2022), he draws upon his own experiences and his research to show all the ways in which an idea that “works” in a field experiment can fall flat when rolled out at a larger scale. This book provides tremendous insight into both the value of field experiments and the careful attention to detail needed to ensure that they teach us the right lessons.

John List is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He has also served as Chief Economist at tech economy pioneers Uber and Lyft, and recently agreed to take on the same role at an established linchpin of the middle-American retail, Walmart.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, "Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The past two decades have witnessed sluggish economic growth, mounting inequality, dysfunctional competition, and a host of other ills that have left people wondering what has happened to the future they were promised. Restarting the Future reveals how these problems arise from a failure to develop the institutions demanded by an economy now reliant on intangible capital such as ideas, relationships, brands, and knowledge.

In this groundbreaking and provocative book, Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake argue that the great economic disappointment of the century is the result of an incomplete transition from an economy based on physical capital, and show how the vital institutions that underpin our economy remain geared to an outmoded way of doing business. The growth of intangible investment has slowed significantly in recent years, making the world poorer, less fair, and more vulnerable to existential threats. Haskel and Westlake present exciting new ideas to help us catch up with the intangible revolution, offering a road map for how to finance businesses, improve our cities, fund more science and research, reform monetary policy, and reshape intellectual property rules for the better.

Drawing on Haskel and Westlake’s experience at the forefront of finance and economic policymaking, Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy (Princeton UP, 2022) sets out a host of radical but practical solutions that can lead us into the future.

John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the finance/investment space called Kick the Dogma.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro, "The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

This is an age of crisis. That much we can agree on. But a crisis of what? And how do we get out of it? Many on the right call for tax cuts and deregulation. Others on the left rage against the top 1 percent and demand wholesale economic change. Voices on both sides line up against globalization: restrict trade to protect jobs. In The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It (Harvard UP, 2020), two leading political analysts argue that these views are badly mistaken.

Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro focus on what really worries people: not what the rich are making but rather their own insecurity and that of people close to them. Americans are concerned about losing what they have, whether jobs, status, or safe communities. They fear the wolf at the door. The solution is not protectionism or class warfare but a return to the hard work of building coalitions around realistic goals and pursuing them doggedly through the political system. This, Graetz and Shapiro explain, is how earlier reformers achieved meaningful changes, from the abolition of the slave trade to civil rights legislation. The authors make substantial recommendations for increasing jobs, improving wages, protecting families suffering from unemployment, and providing better health insurance and child care, and they guide us through the strategies needed to enact change.

These are achievable reforms that would make Americans more secure. The Wolf at the Door is one of those rare books that not only diagnose our problems but also show us how we can address them.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Lene Andersen, "Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World" (Nordic Bildung, 2019)

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0000

So what is metamodernity you may ask, and what does it have to do with systems thinking and cybernetics? Well, I recently had a chance to find out for myself during my conversation with Lene Rachel Andersen about her book Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World (Nordic Bildung, 2019). The short answer is metamodernity is a systems perspective; "it is about seeing the world as a process and not as fixed circumstances, a world in which there are not isolated phenomena but where everything is interconnected and interdependent..." (p. 94). The book's premise is that as our old understandings and the answers we get from them are insufficient, the ways we are used to reacting and behaving do not work well anymore either. Our cultural compass cannot contain and judge the world properly because the challenges we are facing were not a part of our world when we came of age and learned what the world was like.

More than a cultural trend (or 'ism'), metamodernity is a meaning-making code—one that encompasses cultural codes from every epoch of the human experience. Andersen argues that "we need metamodern minds that can relate to the intimate indigenous, the existential premodern, the democratic & scientific modern, and the deconstructing postmodern simultaneously" (p. 128). It is only through this synthesis and adoption of the metamodern code, she stresses, that we'll have the capacity to make good decisions to guide the necessary changes to our current systems and institutions. The 'hyper-modern' alternative is not a good one; think: much an exaggerated version of what will turn out to be mere glimpses of what we're seeing right now—such as rise in authoritarianism, surveillance society, extreme inequality, and of course, climate change.

Metamodernity provides us with a framework for understanding ourselves and our societies in a more complex way. Metamodernity is a way of strengthening local, national, continental, and global cultural heritage among all. It thus has the potential to dismantle the fear of losing one's culture as the global economy as well as the internet and exponential technologies are disrupting our current modes of societal organization and governance. Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World is thought-provoking and a wonderful complement to many of the books I've covered in previous episodes. I hope you enjoy listening to my conversation with Lene, and I invite you to check out the rest of her work at https://www.lenerachelandersen.com/.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz, "Tractatus Politico-Philosophicus: New Directions for the Future Development of Humankind" (Routledge, 2019)

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

"Our time is the age of postmodernity and of the clash of epochs. But a new age of humanity is rising. It is evolutionity or the evolutionary epoch which replaces modernity and postmodernity." Such is the powerful argument of W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz in his book Tractatus Politico-Philosophicus: New Directions for the Future Development of Humankind (Routledge, 2017). Within this major paradigm shift that is underway, many fundamental principles about the world will either have to be deeply questioned or reaffirmed in the case of those virtues that have been long forgotten. The ultimate goal will be the further development of humanity into a more "happy society".

W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz is a philosopher and political theorist. He is considered one of the most renowned intellectuals in his native Poland. He received his doctorate at the University of Oxford. In the early 1980's, he was a student leader in Poland's Solidarity movement, and was then awarded a scholarship of the Leadership Development Office of the Presbyterian Church (USA). He is the author of five books, including On the History of Political Philosophy (Routledge, 2016).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of Rational Decision Making: A Discussion with Olivier Sibony

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this podcast Owen Bennett-Jones discusses the future of rational decision making with Professor Olivier Sibony who after 25 years with McKinsey & Company in France, is now at HEC Paris and the Saïd Business School in Oxford University. In 2021 he co-wrote the book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Little, Brown Spark, 2021) with Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Kahneman. For those trying to resist the illogicalities of the post truth world, the idea of rational decision-making is perhaps more important than ever. Yet the challenge to rationality comes not only from social media driven myths becoming accepted truths, but also bias and randomness in decision-making.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

N. J. Enfield, "Language Vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists" (MIT Press, 2022)

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Nick Enfield’s book, Language vs. Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists (MIT Press, 2022), argues that language is primarily for social coordination, not precisely transferring thoughts from one person to another. Drawing on empirical research, Enfield shows that human lexicons the world over are far more coarse-grained than our perceptual faculties. Yet, at the same time, languages vary in the structure and sophistication of their representations. This means that, for instance, how different languages carve up the world influences not only how their speakers talk about the world, but also how they think about it. The book explores a range of linguistic phenomena, from lexical diversity to linguistic framing to the effects of narrative. As a result of understanding how language shapes our understanding of reality, Enfield argues that we can make more informed—and more ethical—decisions about our own language use, as individuals and communities.

Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Oded Galor, "The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality" (Dutton Books, 2022)

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Nothing has had a more profound impact on the lives of humans than economic growth. Thus, understanding economic growth is, on its own, understanding the essence of humanity. This is the objective of The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality (Dutton, 2022) by Oded Galor. A fascinating book that explores the universal forces behind economic growth and prosperity. With a marvelous exhibition of historical context, empirical evidence, and theoretical insights, Galor provides a comprehensive explanation of how humanity moved from stagnation to growth.

In addition, building on his lifetime's investigation, Galor provides in The Journey of Humanity a brilliant and extensive explanation of why some societies have been more successful than others in improving the wellbeing of their populations. This explanation, full of historical and anthropological color, is deeply rooted in a carefully crafted exploration of the institutional, cultural, and environmental context that different societies across the globe have been exposed over the centuries.

Overall, Galor’s book is a unique and masterful piece that everyone who is interested in the deep roots of the modern world must read.

Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Kate Crawford, "The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence" (Yale UP, 2021)

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? In The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale University Press, 2021), Kate Crawford reveals how this planetary network is fuelling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased racial, gender, and economic inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of research, award‑winning science, and technology, Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the energy and minerals needed to build and sustain its infrastructure, to the exploited workers behind “automated” services, to the data AI collects from us.

Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms, Crawford offers us a political and a material perspective on what it takes to make artificial intelligence and where it goes wrong. While technical systems present a veneer of objectivity, they are always systems of power. This is an urgent account of what is at stake as technology companies use artificial intelligence to reshape the world.

Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Future of Consciousness: A Discussion with Eva Jablonka

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

What makes a living body conscious? What is consciousness and are there different types of it? These questions have been studied by Professor Eva Jablonka from the Cohn Institute for the History of Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Much of her early work was on epigenetic inheritance which poses questions such as whether learned behaviour can be passed on from one generation to the next and that has led her to think about whether it’s possible to take an evolutionary approach to consciousness.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Daniel Chirot, "You Say You Want a Revolution?: Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Why have so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times ended in bloody tragedies? And what lessons can be drawn from these failures today, in a world where political extremism is on the rise and rational reform based on moderation and compromise often seems impossible to achieve? In You Say You Want a Revolution?: Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences (Princeton University Press, 2020), Daniel Chirot examines a wide range of right- and left-wing revolutions around the world--from the late eighteenth century to today--to provide important new answers to these critical questions.

From the French Revolution of the eighteenth century to the Mexican, Russian, German, Chinese, anticolonial, and Iranian revolutions of the twentieth, Chirot finds that moderate solutions to serious social, economic, and political problems were overwhelmed by radical ideologies that promised simpler, drastic remedies. But not all revolutions had this outcome. The American Revolution didn't, although its failure to resolve the problem of slavery eventually led to the Civil War, and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was relatively peaceful, except in Yugoslavia. From Japan, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia to Algeria, Angola, Haiti, and Romania, You Say You Want a Revolution? explains why violent radicalism, corruption, and the betrayal of ideals won in so many crucial cases, why it didn't in some others--and what the long-term prospects for major social change are if liberals can't deliver needed reforms.

Daniel Chirot is the Herbert J. Ellison Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Washington.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sean Kelly, "Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation" (Integral Imprint, 2020)

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Sean Kelly, professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), about his 2021 book Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation (Integral Imprint, 2020). Along with his abiding interest in the work of Jung, Hegel, and Edgar Morin, Kelly’s current research areas include the evolution of consciousness, integral ecologies, and transpersonal and integral theory. In Becoming Gaia, he draws upon an impressive range of scholarship from such fields as Big History, comparative religion, transpersonal psychology, and integral philosophies. Regular listeners may find Kelly’s work a wonderful complement to some of the other authors and topics we’ve shared on this channel. I found the book—and our chat—fascinating.

Kelly is not alone in suggesting we are living in end times. With climate chaos, an accelerating mass extinction, and signs of civilizational collapse, the Earth community is being drawn into a planetary near-death experience! These end times, however, also mark the threshold of new planetary identity in the making. Kelly reveals the features of this new identity and invites us to consciously participate in its making. Guided by the ideal of Gaia as "concrete universal," Kelly offers compelling insights on the nature of an emerging world spirituality that some describe as a second Axial Age—on the elements of a complex-integral ethics for the Planetary Era, and on the role of the death/rebirth archetype for understanding the charged field of contemporary climate activism.

The book culminates with an inspiring meditation on the possibility, in these end times, of a third way beyond both hope and despair. In contrast to the restrictive anthropocentrism and technocentrism of mainstream discourse around the Anthropocene, Kelly speaks instead of the Gaianthropocene as our new geological epoch. It is an epoch where, even and especially as we face the fires of planetary initiation, we can awaken to our deeper nature as living members of Gaia, the living Earth in and through whom we have our being.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

William R. Miller, "On Second Thought: How Ambivalence Shapes Your Life" (Guilford, 2021)

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The rich inner world of a human being is far more complex than either/or. You can love and hate, want to go and want to stay, feel both joy and sadness. In On Second Thought: How Ambivalence Shapes Your Life (Guilford, 2021), psychologist William Miller--one of the world's leading experts on the science of change--offers a fresh perspective on ambivalence and its transformative potential in this revealing book. Rather than trying to overcome indecision by force of will, Dr. Miller explores what happens when people allow opposing arguments from their “inner committee members” to converse freely with each other. Learning to tolerate and even welcome feelings of ambivalence can help you get unstuck from unwanted habits, clarify your desires and values, explore the pros and cons of tough decisions, and open doorways to change. Vivid examples from everyday life, literature, and history illustrate why we are so often "of two minds," and how to work through it.

William R. Miller, PhD, is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Charles R. Shipan and Craig Volden, "Why Bad Policies Spread (and Good Ones Don't)" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Building on a deep theoretical foundation and drawing on numerous examples, Volden and Shipan examine how policies spread across the American states in Why Bad Policies Spread (and Good Ones Don't) (Cambridge University Press, 2021). The authors argue that for good policies to spread while bad policies are pushed aside, states must learn from one another. The three ingredients for this positive outcome are observable experiments, time to learn, and favorable incentives and expertise among policymakers. Although these ingredients are sometimes plentiful, the authors also note causes for concern, such as when policies are complex or incompatible with current practices, when policymakers give in to underlying political biases, or when political institutions lack the capacity for cultivating expertise. Under such conditions, states may rely on competition, imitation, and coercion, rather than learning, which can allow bad policies, rather than good ones, to spread. Volden and Shipan conclude with lessons for reformers and policymakers and an assessment of the overall argument based on state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Craig Volden is a Professor of Public Policy and Politics, with appointments in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics. He is Co-Director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking, and has published numerous articles in such journals as: American Political Science Review; American Journal of Political Science; Journal of Politics; Legislative Studies Quarterly; Public Administration Review; Journal of Public Policy; and Publius: The Journal of Federalism.

Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Tony Veale, "Your Wit Is My Command: Building AIs with a Sense of Humor" (MIT Press, 2021)

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

For fans of computers and comedy alike, an accessible and entertaining look into how we can use artificial intelligence to make smart machines funny.

Most robots and smart devices are not known for their joke-telling abilities. And yet, as computer scientist Tony Veale explains in Your Wit Is My Command (MIT Press, 2021), machines are not inherently unfunny; they are just programmed that way. By examining the mechanisms of humor and jokes—how jokes actually works—Veale shows that computers can be built with a sense of humor, capable not only of producing a joke but also of appreciating one. Along the way, he explores the humor-generating capacities of fictional robots ranging from B-9 in Lost in Space to TARS in Interstellar, maps out possible scenarios for developing witty robots, and investigates such aspects of humor as puns, sarcasm, and offensiveness.

In order for robots to be funny, Veale explains, we need to analyze humor computationally. Using artificial intelligence (AI), Veale shows that joke generation is a knowledge-based process—a sense of humor is blend of wit and wisdom. He notes that existing technologies can detect sarcasm in conversation, and explains how some jokes can be pre-scripted while others are generated algorithmically—all while making the technical aspects of AI accessible for the general reader. Of course, there's no single algorithm or technology that we can plug in to make our virtual assistants or GPS voice navigation funny, but Veale provides a computational roadmap for how we might get there.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Raghuveer Parthasarathy, "So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The form and function of a sprinting cheetah are quite unlike those of a rooted tree. A human being is very different from a bacterium or a zebra. The living world is a realm of dazzling variety, yet a shared set of physical principles shapes the forms and behaviors of every creature in it. So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World (Princeton UP, 2022) shows how the emerging new science of biophysics is transforming our understanding of life on Earth and enabling potentially lifesaving but controversial technologies such as gene editing, artificial organ growth, and ecosystem engineering.

Raghuveer Parthasarathy explains how four basic principles—self-assembly, regulatory circuits, predictable randomness, and scaling—shape the machinery of life on scales ranging from microscopic molecules to gigantic elephants. He describes how biophysics is helping to unlock the secrets of a host of natural phenomena, such as how your limbs know to form at the proper places, and why humans need lungs but ants do not. Parthasarathy explores how the cutting-edge biotechnologies of tomorrow could enable us to alter living things in ways both subtle and profound.

Featuring dozens of original watercolors and drawings by the author, this sweeping tour of biophysics offers astonishing new perspectives on how the wonders of life can arise from so simple a beginning.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Aubrey Clayton, "Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

There is a logical flaw in the statistical methods used across experimental science. This fault is not a minor academic quibble: it underlies a reproducibility crisis now threatening entire disciplines. In an increasingly statistics-reliant society, this same deeply rooted error shapes decisions in medicine, law, and public policy with profound consequences. The foundation of the problem is a misunderstanding of probability and its role in making inferences from observations.

Aubrey Clayton traces the history of how statistics went astray, beginning with the groundbreaking work of the seventeenth-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and winding through gambling, astronomy, and genetics. Clayton recounts the feuds among rival schools of statistics, exploring the surprisingly human problems that gave rise to the discipline and the all-too-human shortcomings that derailed it. He highlights how influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures developed a statistical methodology they claimed was purely objective in order to silence critics of their political agendas, including eugenics.

Clayton provides a clear account of the mathematics and logic of probability, conveying complex concepts accessibly for readers interested in the statistical methods that frame our understanding of the world. He contends that we need to take a Bayesian approach--that is, to incorporate prior knowledge when reasoning with incomplete information--in order to resolve the crisis. Ranging across math, philosophy, and culture, Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science (Columbia UP, 2021) explains why something has gone wrong with how we use data--and how to fix it.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Neil Vallelly, "Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness" (MIT Press, 2021)

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility--by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves--we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness (MIT Press, 2021), social and political theorist Neil Vallelly eloquently tells the story of how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximization and the common good.

Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms--including the futilitarian condition, homo futilitus, and semio-futility--to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness.

This urgent and provocative book chimes with the mood of the time by at once mapping the historical relationship between utilitarianism and capitalism, developing an original framework for understanding neoliberalism, and recounting the lived experience of uselessness in the early twenty-first century. At a time of epoch-defining disasters, from climate emergencies to deadly pandemics, countering the futility of neoliberal existence is essential to building an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future.

Neil Vallelly is a political and social theorist based at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research has appeared in journals such as Rethinking Marxism, Angelaki, and Poetics Today, and magazines, including New Internationalist and ROAR. In 2022, he will take up a two-year Rutherford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at Otago, working on a history of capitalism and migrant detention. An Italian translation of Futilitarianism will be published in March 2022.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Helga Nowotny, "In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms" (Polity, 2021)

Thu, 20 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Helga Nowotny about her new book In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms (Polity, 2021).

One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI - and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to understand how it affects us.

At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when we forget that that we humans have created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to reappropriate control and transform it into care.

As we try to adjust to a world in which algorithms, robots and avatars play an ever-increasing role, we need to understand better the limitations of AI and how their predictions affect our agency, while at the same time having the courage to embrace the uncertainty of the future.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Bradley Schurman, "The Super Age: Decoding Our Demographic Destiny" (Harper Business, 2022)

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Societies all over the world are getting older, the result of the fact that we are living longer and having fewer children. At some point in the near future, much of the developed world will have at least twenty percent of their national populations over the age of sixty-five. Bradley Schurman calls this the Super Age. Today, Italy, Japan, and Germany have already reached the Super Age, and another ten countries will have gone over the tipping point in 2021. Thirty-five countries will be part of this club by the end of the decade. This seismic shift in the world population can portend a period of tremendous growth--or leave swaths of us behind.

In The Super Age: Decoding Our Demographic Destiny (Harper Business, 2022), Schurman explains how changing demographics will affect government and business and touch all of our lives. Fewer people working and paying income taxes, due to outdated employment and retirement practices, could mean less money feeding popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare--with greater numbers relying on them. The forced retirement or redundancy of older workers could impact business by creating a shortage of workers, which would likely drive wages up and result in inflation. Corporations, too, must rethink marketing strategies--older consumers are already purchasing the majority of new cars, and they are a growing and vitally important market for health technologies and housing. Architects and designers must re-create homes and communities that are more inclusive of people of all ages and abilities.

If we aren't prepared for the changes to come, Schurman warns, we face economic stagnation, increased isolation of at-risk populations, and accelerated decline of rural communities. Instead, we can plan now to harness the benefits of the Super Age: extended and healthier lives, more generational cooperation at work and home, and new markets and products to explore. The choice is ours to make.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Charles Foster, "Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Elizabeth A. Povinelli, "Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism" (Duke UP, 2021)

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (Duke UP, 2021), Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes the climatic, environmental, viral, and social catastrophe present as an ancestral catastrophe through which that Indigenous and colonized peoples have been suffering for centuries. In this way, the violence and philosophies the West relies on now threaten the West itself. Engaging with the work of Glissant, Deleuze and Guattari, Césaire, and Arendt, Povinelli highlights four axioms of existence-the entanglement of existence, the unequal distribution of power, the collapse of the event as essential to political thought, and the legacies of racial and colonial histories. She traces these axioms' inspiration in anticolonial struggles against the dispossession and extraction that have ruined the lived conditions for many on the planet. By examining the dynamic and unfolding forms of late liberal violence, Povinelli attends to a vital set of questions about changing environmental conditions, the legacies of violence, and the limits of inherited Western social theory. Between Gaia and Ground also includes a glossary of the keywords and concepts that Povinelli has developed throughout her work.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert W. Baloh and Robert E. Bartholomew, "Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria" (Copernicus, 2020)

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

It is one of the most extraordinary cases in the history of science: the mating calls of insects were mistaken for a “sonic weapon” that led to a major diplomatic row. Since August 2017, the world media has been absorbed in the “attack” on diplomats from the American and Canadian Embassies in Cuba. While physicians treating victims have described it as a novel and perplexing condition that involves an array of complaints including brain damage, the authors present compelling evidence that mass psychogenic illness was the cause of “Havana Syndrome.”

This mysterious condition that has baffled experts is explored across 11-chapters which offer insights by a prominent neurologist and an expert on psychogenic illness. A lively and enthralling read, the authors explore the history of similar scares from the 18th century belief that sounds from certain musical instruments were harmful to human health, to 19th century cases of “telephone shock,” and more contemporary panics involving people living near wind turbines that have been tied to a variety of health complaints. The authors provide dozens of examples of kindred episodes of mass hysteria throughout history, in addition to psychosomatic conditions and even the role of insects in triggering outbreaks.

Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria (Copernicus, 2020), is a scientific detective story and a case study in the social construction of mass psychogenic illness.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Seth David Radwell, "American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation" (Greenleaf, 2021)

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Why are Americans so angry? American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation (Greenleaf, 2021) explores history to find the answer to a divided America

Two disparate Americas have always coexisted. In this thoroughly researched, engaging and story of our nation’s divergent roots, Seth David Radwell clearly links the fascinating history of the two American Enlightenments to our raging political division. He also demonstrates that reasoned analysis and historical perspective are the only antidote to irrational political discourse.

“Did my vision of America ever exist at all, or was it but a myth?” Searching for a fresh and distinctive perspective on the recent corrosion of our civic life, Radwell’s very personal and yet broadly shared question propelled his search back to the nation’s founding for a fresh and distinctive perspective on the recent corrosion of its civic life - and led to a surprising discovery. Today’s battles reflect the fundamentally divergent visions of our country that emerged at the nation’s founding and have been vying for prominence ever since. The founding principles that shaped the United States may be rooted in the Enlightenment era. But the origin of our dual Americas is a product of two distinct Enlightenments - Radical and Moderate.

Radwell shows the impact of this schism on American history from the early expansion of the U.S. through Jim Crow and The Age of Trumpism.

In an optimistic final section, Radwell lays out an analysis of our current governmental structure and a plan to move forward, arguing that it is only by embracing Enlightenment principles that we can build a civilized, progressive, and tolerant society - where Americans can firmly ground their different views in rationality.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. We invite your comments and suggestions: reneeg@vanleer.org.il.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Andrew Zitcer, "Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Have you ever stopped to think about your local grocery cooperative and what makes it different than, say Safeway or Giant or Whole Foods? That is, if you have a grocery cooperative in your neighborhood – they are neither ubiquitous nor evenly distributed. They do, however, offer perhaps the most visible model of how economic practices can exist outside the central dogma of capitalism.

In Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Andrew Zitcer uses the travails and triumphs of four non-traditional organizations to create a compelling argument for a better, more equitable way to organize social and economic practices. His portraits of two grocery co-ops and a dance collective in Philadelphia, as well as a national acupuncture multistakeholder cooperative, ground his theory in the real world where ordinary people sweat, argue, stock shelves, heal each other, and make art. But his interlocutors have an underlying passion – to create a place where cooperation, rather than competition, is the guiding principle. This approach to social practice has deep implications for the creation of a more equitable and just society. Zitcer’s personal immersion in his research yields a “loving critique” of his four case studies and offers a realistic optimism for our post-pandemic world.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gabriel Yoran, "The Interfact: On Structure and Compatibility in Object-Oriented Ontology" (Open Humanities Press, 2021)

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Objects in object-oriented ontology (OOO) are mysterious and inexhaustible entities. But since OOO grants ontological priority to objects, it should have an easy time referring to objects. But this is not the case.

In The Interfact: On Structure and Compatibility in Object-Oriented Ontology (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Yoran researches the question of how OOO refers to an object’s haecceity, its “thisness.” He starts with an investigation into OOO’s eponymous practice, object-oriented programming (OOP) and identifies not just a plethora of parallels, but finds OOP’s concept of interfaces (as structured ways of object confrontation in time) a promising tool to describe both the rift between all objects and their relative stability.

Yoran then extends Harman’s fourfold diagrams to reflect the linkages between fourfolds, revealing that objects necessarily are parts of other objects. This phenomenon, which he calls out-of-phase objects, reveals links to Simondon’s notion of compatibilisation.

Yoran argues that objects are necessarily integrated into a fabric of interconnected fourfolds as well as component-compound relations. This structure solves the problem of object identification, by recognizing the object-fourfolds as overlaps, a mutually stabilizing structure which allows for reproducible object confrontation in time, or facts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Roger Mac Ginty, "Everyday Peace: How So-Called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Roger Mac Ginty's book Everyday Peace: How So-Called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict (Oxford UP, 2021) focuses on how individuals and communities navigate through, and out of, conflict. Through theory and concept-building, and empirical examples, it investigates the pro-peace tactical agency deployed by individuals and communities in conflict-affected contexts. It examines how compassion, humanity, civility, and solidarity can take root in unlikely circumstances - even in the midst of war - and the possibility of everyday peace scaling-up and out to disrupt violent conflict. The book develops a number of key concepts, including Everyday Peace Power and Conflict Disruption, to help us understand how everyday 'small peace' actions can accumulate into movements and processes that may have wider significance. As well as a detailed conceptualisation of everyday peace, the book is interested in how local-level peace might connect with other levels (the national, international, and transnational) and uses the notion of circuitry to explain how different levels of society might influence one another. In an unusual departure for Peace and Conflict Studies, the book draws on World War One and Two memoirs and personal diaries to investigate the possibility of everyday peace in extreme circumstances (such as the battlefield) but also to illustrate that many of the possibilities and challenges associated with everyday peace are in fact timeless.

Christopher P. Davey is Visiting Assistant Professor at Clark University's Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Erin Cech, "The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality" (U California Press, 2021)

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Should we love work? In The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality (U California Press, 2021), Erin Cech, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, demonstrates how having passion for work fosters and reinforces a wide range of social inequalities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and data analysis, the book combines qualitative and quantitative data to elaborate and theorise ‘the passion principle’ that underpins how the more advantaged justify the inequalities associated with education and the labour market. Alongside revealing who benefits, and who suffers, from the ideology that people must be passionate about work, the book gives strategies and ideas on how to challenge and change the passion principle. The book will be essential reading across academia and for anyone interested in contemporary working life.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jeremy Lent, "The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find our Place in the Universe" (New Society, 2021)

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of Systems and Cybernetics I had the pleasure of spending an hour with Jeremy Lent, talking with him about his newest book The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. Lent is a former Tech CEO, and is founder of The Liology Institute. His previous book The Patterning Instinct prompted The Gaurdian’s George Monbiot to comment that “almost every page caused me to rethink what I held to be true.” I’m right there with you George – I had the same reaction to this book. The Web of Meaning offers a compelling foundation for a new story of interconnectedness, showing how, as our civilization unravels, another world is possible. Lent investigates humanity's age-old questions — Who am I? Why am I? How should I live? — from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom.

Jeremy and I had a fun time discussing our favorite systems thinkers from Bateson to Wiener, to Maturana and Macy. We agreed upon our preference for Margulis’s cooperation theory — “life did not take over the world by combat but by networking” — over Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’. And how do spirituality and ancient knowledge systems fit into the systems conversation? Lent writes that “…we can define spirituality as seeking meaning in the coherent connections between things, rather than in the things themselves. In this sense, spirituality and systems thinking are intrinsically aligned”. Amazing. I am confident readers will have their own Monbiot reaction and make their own connections — facilitated by Lent’s wise insights throughout the book.

Listening to this conversation will provide a mere appetizer for readers who want to explore “patterns of sustainable flourishing” and explore questions like what is humanity’s role? I encourage diving into Lent’s work and asking: “can we complete, through conscious tending, what Tao and Te have generated since life began… to use the unique features of conceptual consciousness to integrate with nature rather than try to conquer her?”. Toward the symbiocene. Just imagine.

Kevin Lindsay is a 25+ year Silicon Valley software product strategist and marketer, and graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jason Lyall, "Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Why do some armies fare better than others on the battlefield? In Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War (Princeton UP, 2020), Jason Lyall argues that a state's prewar treatment of ethnic groups within its population determine subsequent battlefield performance. Treating certain ethnic groups as second-class citizens, either by subjecting them to state-sanctioned discrimination or, worse, violence, undermines interethnic trust, fuels grievances, and leads victimized soldiers to subvert military authorities once war begins. The author tests this argument using Project Mars, a new dataset on conventional wars fought since 1800. Combining historical comparisons and statistical analysis, he also marshals evidence from nine wars, ranging from the Eastern Fronts of World Wars I and II to less familiar wars in Africa and Central Asia, to illustrate inequality's effects. Divided Armies was awarded the 2021 Peter Katzenstein Book Prize, the 2020 Joseph Lepgold Prize, and was named a "Best of 2020" book by Foreign Affairs.

Jason Lyall is the inaugural James Wright Chair of Transnational Studies and Associate Professor in the Government department. He also directs the Political Violence FieldLab at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding. His research examines the effects and effectiveness of political violence in civil and conventional wars. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Politics, and World Politics, among others. He has received funding from AidData/USAID, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the MacArthur Foundation, the Folke Bernadotte Academy, and the United States Institute of Peace. He has conducted fieldwork in Russia and Afghanistan, where he served as the Technical Adviser for USAID's Measuring the Impact of Stabilization Initiatives (MISTI) project during 2012-15. He was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2020.

Aditya Srinivasan assisted with this episode.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Paul Collier, "The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties" (Harper, 2019)

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of Britain and other Western societies: thriving cities versus the provinces; the high-skilled elite versus the less educated. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical, reciprocal obligations to others that were crucial to the rise of post-war prosperity — and are inherently aligned with how humans are meant to live: in a friendly, collaborative community. So far these rifts have been answered only by ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right across much of Europe.

Sir Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties (Harper, 2019), winner of the 2019 Handelsblatt Prize, provides a diagnosis for how these anxieties have arrived, alongside a pragmatic and ambitious prescription for how we can address them. In our conversation, we trace these anxieties of 21st century capitalism back to their ethical, economic, and social roots and discuss ideas to rebuild reciprocal obligations in our society, paving the way to more sustainable, more kind, and more successful future of capitalism.

Paul is currently Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and a Director of the International Growth Centre in London. He is a world-renowned development economist, working with governments around the world; an award-winning author, notably writing The Bottom Billion, on how the world’s poorest countries can achieve prosperity, and most recently Greed is Dead, with Sir John Kay; and frequently writes for magazines such as Prospect and the New Statesman.

Host, Leo Nasskau, is an expert on the future of work and interviews authors writing about public policy and political economy — particularly how capitalism can be reformed to deliver sustainable prosperity for all.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Eva von Redecker, "Praxis and Revolution: A Theory of Social Transformation" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The concept of revolution marks the ultimate horizon of modern politics. It is instantiated by sites of both hope and horror. Within progressive thought, “revolution” often perpetuates entrenched philosophical problems: a teleological philosophy of history, economic reductionism, and normative paternalism. At a time of resurgent uprisings, how can revolution be re-conceptualized to grasp the dynamics of social transformation and disentangle revolutionary practice from authoritarian usurpation?

Eva von Redecker reconsiders critical theory’s understanding of radical change in order to offer a bold new account of how revolution occurs. She argues that revolutions are not singular events but extended processes: beginning from the interstices of society, they succeed by gradually re-articulating social structures toward a new paradigm. Developing a theoretical account of social transformation, Praxis and Revolution incorporates a wide range of insights, from the Frankfurt School to queer theory and intersectionality. Its revised materialism furnishes prefigurative politics with their social conditions and performative critique with its collective force.

Von Redecker revisits the French Revolution to show how change arises from struggle in everyday social practice. She illustrates the argument through rich literary examples—a ménage à trois inside a prison, a radical knitting circle, a queer affinity group, and petitioners pleading with the executioner—that forge a feminist, open-ended model of revolution.

Praxis and Revolution: A Theory of Social Transformation (Columbia UP, 2021) urges readers not only to understand revolutions differently but also to situate them elsewhere: in collective contexts that aim to storm manifold Bastilles—but from within.

Eva von Redecker is a German critical theorist and public philosopher, currently based at the University of Verona as the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship. She was previously a research associate at Humboldt University of Berlin and she has also taught at Goethe University Frankfurt and the New School.

Lucy Duggan is a writer and translator. She is the author of the novel Tendrils (2014).

Fulya Pinar is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on alternative economies, refugee care, and migration in Turkey.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Josep M. Coll, "Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking: The Natural Path to Sustainable Transformation" (Routledge, 2021)

Fri, 19 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

I recently sat down with Josep M. Coll to discuss his new book Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking: The Natural Path to Sustainable Transformation (Routledge, 2021). This book is the latest and final in a series published by Routledge that includes titles by some brilliant systems thinkers I have had the fortune to interview previously on this podcast (Managing Creativity, Córdoba-Pachón; Systems Thinking for Turbulent Times, Hodgson, Part 1 & Part 2; and The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking, Ison and Straw). Series editor Gerald Midgley refers to this collection as "an essential reference point for anyone looking for innovative ways to effect systemic change, or engaging with complex problems". And Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking is the icing on the cake!

Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking explores a radical new conception of business and management. It is grounded on the reconnection of humans with nature as the new competitive advantage for living organizations and entrepreneurs that aspire to regenerate the economy and drive a positive impact on the planet, in the context of the Anthropocene. Organizations, today, struggle in finding a balance between maximizing profits and generating value for their stakeholders, the environment and the society at large. This happens in a paradigm shift characterized by unprecedented levels of exponential change and the emergence of disruptive technologies. Adaptability, thus, is becoming the new business imperative. How can, then, entrepreneurs and organizations constantly adapt and, at the same time, design the sustainable futures they'd like?

This book explores the benefits of applying Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking to sustainable management. Grounded in Taoist and Zen Buddhist philosophies, it offers a modern scientific perspective fundamentally based on the concepts of bio-logical adaptability and lifefulness amidst complexity and constant change. The book introduces the new concept of the Gaia organization as a living organism that consciously helps perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. It is subject to the natural laws of transformation and the principles of oneness, emptiness, impermanence, balance, self-regulation and harmonization. Readers will find applied Eastern systems theories such as the Yin-Yang and the Five Elements operationalized through practical methodologies and tools such as T-Qualia and the Zen Business model. They are aimed at guiding Gaia organizations and entrepreneurs in leading sustainable transformations and qualifying economic growth.

Highly actionable, the book offers a vital toolkit for purpose-driven practitioners, management researchers, students, social entrepreneurs, systems evaluators and change-makers to reinvent, create and mindfully manage sustainable and agile organizations that drive systemic transformation.

Kevin Lindsay is a 25+ year Silicon Valley software product strategist and marketer, and graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding, "Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth" (Zone Book, 2021)

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space, and it remains the only human-made object to have left the solar system. The Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecrafts contained world music and sounds of Earth to represent humanity to any extraterrestrial civilizations. Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth (Zone Books, 2021) ask big questions: Can music live up to its reputation as the universal language in communications with the unknown? How do we fit all of human culture into a time capsule that will barrel through space for tens of thousands of years? And last but not least: Do aliens have ears?

In this conversation, we chat with the authors Daniel Chua, the Chair Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong, and Alex Rehding, a Professor of Music at Harvard University, and focus on the primacy of repetition and difference in music. Additionally, we discuss the underlying assumptions and exceptions humans have about music and the unknown alien listeners to the Golden Record. We also highlight the goal to establish and make accessible an Intergalactic Music Theory of Everything to turn everyone, no matter what their planet of origin is, into a music theorist.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Steve Katsouros, "Come to Believe: How Jesuits Are Reinventing Education (Again)" (Orbis, 2017)

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Father Steve Katsouros, founder and CEO of the Come To Believe Network, shares the inspirational story of the founding of Arrupe College at Loyola University Chicago which has been recognized as a national model for increasing the college graduation rates for low-income students of color. Arrupe operates as a two-year, liberal arts college within the University that has been able to quadruple the national graduation rate for high-need students to obtain an associate’s degree by integrating a set of best practices: a year-round cohort, intensive faculty advising, wraparound support services and building a strong sense of community. Fr. Katsouros left Arrupe last year to found the Come to Believe Network that is now seeking to replicate the Arrupe model nationally with partner universities. He is also the author of Come to Believe: How Jesuits Are Reinventing Education (Again) (Orbis, 2017).

David Finegold is the president of Chatham University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever, "Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In their open-access publication, Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations (Oxford University Press, 2021), Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever argue that philosophers of language can contribute to a deeper understanding of artificial intelligence. AIs known as “neural nets” are becoming commonplace and we increasingly rely on their outputs for action-guidance, as when an AI like Siri hears your question and says, “There’s a pizza shop on the corner.” Our use of words like “says” suggests an important question: do AIs literally say anything? Should we understand their outputs as utterances with meaningful content? And if so, what makes that content meaningful, and how is it related to the processes which result in that output? Cappelen and Dever take up these questions and propose a framework for answering them, abstracting from existing externalist approaches to develop a “de-anthropocentrized” externalism for AI. The book introduces readers not only to issues in AI surrounding its content and interpretation, but also to concepts in philosophy of language which may be relevant to these issues, serving as an invitation for further investigation by philosophers and programmers alike.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Edward Slingerland, "Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization" (Hachette, 2021)

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Ever since Noah exited the ark, human beings have been wanting to get drunk and high.

Why?

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (Hachette, 2021) is the latest attempt to answer that question.

Drunk elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Slingerland shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve several distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. Our desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We would not have civilization without intoxication.

From marauding Vikings and bacchanalian orgies to sex-starved fruit flies, blind cave fish, and problem-solving crows, Drunk is packed with case studies and science, as well as practical takeaways for individuals and communities. The result is a captivating and long overdue investigation into humanity's oldest indulgence—one that explains not only why we want to get drunk, but also how it might actually be good for us to tie one on now and then.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Tony Nader, "One Unbounded Ocean of Consciousness: Simple Answers to the Big Questions of Life" (Penguin Random House, 2021)

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Tony Nader, MD, PhD, a medical doctor trained at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD in neuroscience) and globally recognized expert in the science of consciousness and human development. His training includes internal medicine, psychiatry, and neurology. He's the successor to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the head of the Transcendental Meditation organization globally. He was appointed assistant director of clinical research at MIT, and was a clinical research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He conducted research in neurochemistry and neuroendocrinology; the relationship between diet, age, behavior, mood, seasonal influences, and hormonal activity; and the role of neurotransmitter precursors in medicine.

Dr. Nader has shared his expertise at academic institutions such as Harvard Business School on The Neuroscience of Transcendence, Stanford University, where he gave talks in a series entitled “Hacking Consciousness.” as well as the keynote speaker for a conference at the House of Commons, British Parliament where his unique expertise in the knowledge of East and West has also been recognized by the National Health Service. His research has been published in Neurology, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, Journal of Gerontology, Progress in Brain Research, and other journals.

In his new book, One Unbounded Ocean of Consciousness: Simple Answers to the Big Questions of Life (Penguin Random House, 2021), Dr. Nader comprehensively examines what scientists call the “hard” problem of What is consciousness? He unpacks this abstract question for both a general audience and experts in the field by investigating consciousness in terms of human physiology, quantum mechanics in physics, and the more ancient Vedic science. Dr. Nader is bringing the science of consciousness to new audiences and expanding the understanding of the relationship between mind and body, consciousness, and physiology and the furthest reaches of human potential.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alex Pentland and Alexander Lipton, "Building the New Economy: Data As Capital" (MIT Press, 2021)

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Data is now central to the economy, government, and health systems—so why are data and the AI systems that interpret the data in the hands of so few people? Alex Pentland and Alexander Lipton's Building the New Economy: Data As Capital (MIT Press, 2021) calls for us to reinvent the ways that data and artificial intelligence are used in civic and government systems. Arguing that we need to think about data as a new type of capital, the authors show that the use of data trusts and distributed ledgers can empower people and communities with user-centric data ownership, transparent and accountable algorithms, machine learning fairness principles and methodologies, and secure digital transaction systems.

It's well known that social media generate disinformation and that mobile phone tracking apps threaten privacy. But these same technologies may also enable the creation of more agile systems in which power and decision-making are distributed among stakeholders rather than concentrated in a few hands. Offering both big ideas and detailed blueprints, the authors describe such key building blocks as data cooperatives, tokenized funding mechanisms, and tradecoin architecture. They also discuss technical issues, including how to build an ecosystem of trusted data, the implementation of digital currencies, and interoperability, and consider the evolution of computational law systems.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Paulina Ochoa Espejo, "On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn?

Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then we can either have democratic legitimacy, or inclusion of different civic identities—but not both. The resulting politics creates mass xenophobia, migrant-bashing, hoarding of natural resources, and border walls.

To escape all this, Paulina Ochoa Espejo's book On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place (Oxford UP, 2020) presents an alternative model. Drawing on an intellectual tradition concerned with how land and climate shape institutions, it argues that we should not see territories as pieces of property owned by identity groups. Instead, we should see them as watersheds: as interconnected systems where institutions, people, the biota, and the land together create overlapping civic duties and relations, what the book calls place-specific duties.

This Watershed Model argues that borders are justified when they allow us to fulfill those duties; that border-control rights spring from internationally-agreed conventions—not from internal legitimacy; that borders should be governed cooperatively by the neighboring states and the states system; and that border redrawing should be done with environmental conservation in mind. The book explores how this model undoes the exclusionary politics of desert islands.

Tejas Parasher is Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King’s College, University of Cambridge.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale, "The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In The Better Angels of Our Nature Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argued that modern history has witnessed a dramatic decline in human violence of every kind, and that in the present we are experiencing the most peaceful time in human history. But what do top historians think about Pinker's reading of the past? Does his argument stand up to historical analysis?

In Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale's book The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence (Bloomsbury, 2021), seventeen scholars of international stature evaluate Pinker's arguments and find them lacking. Studying the history of violence from Japan and Russia to Native America, Medieval England and the Imperial Middle East, these scholars debunk the myth of non-violent modernity. Asserting that the real story of human violence is richer, more interesting and incomparably more complex than Pinker's sweeping, simplified narrative, this book tests, and bests, 'fake history' with expert knowledge.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Marco Dondi, "Outgrowing Capitalism: Rethinking Money to Reshape Society and Pursue Purpose" (Fast Company Press, 2021)

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

It's time to rethink how we create and allocate money

In Outgrowing Capitalism: Rethinking Money to Reshape Society and Pursue Purpose (Fast Company Press, 2021), Marco Dondi sheds light on the fact that most people do not have the economic security to focus on purpose and life fulfillment. He proposes that this is not the way things have to be; there is an alternative.

In a quest to change our economic system to cater for everyone, he identifies deep issues in how money is created and allocated and connects these to capitalism. He shows that the assumptions and circumstances that made capitalism a success are no longer true today and then describes a new socio-economic model, Monetism.

Dondi's solution is to provide a pragmatic roadmap to institutionalize Monetism and solve societal issues that seemed as permanent as time.

Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Claudia Goldin, "Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.

Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed—and the barriers they faced—in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are “greedy,” paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women’s advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic’s silver lining.

Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity (Princeton UP, 2021) explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Vincent Ialenti, "Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now" (MIT Press, 2020)

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Based on twelve years of anthropological exploration, Vincent Ialenti's Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now (MIT Press, 2020) is an engaging guide on deep time learning to reorient our understanding of time and space. As each chapter begins with creative vignettes to capture the reader's imagination and empathy and concludes with five to six reflective "reckonings," the book focuses on Finland's nuclear waste experts whose daily lives revolve around considerations of the far-flung futures and deep pasts. The main goal of chapters one and two is to pursue independent, expert-inspired, long-termist learning. The book's second goal, captured in chapters three and four, is to encourage support for highly trained, too often ignored, long-termist experts. By combating the deflation of expertise by weaving together chains of generational knowledge, Deep Time Reckoning advocates for one route of spirited and adventurous learning to rescue hopes of a safe tomorrow from the Earth's current ecological death spiral.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alvin E. Roth, "Who Gets What--and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design" (HMH, 2015)

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design (Mariner Books, 2015), Nobel Memorial Prize Winner Alvin Roth explains his pioneering work in the study of matching markets such as kidney exchange, marriage, job placements for new doctors and new professors, and enrollments in schools or colleges. In these markets, “buyers” and “sellers” must each chose the other, and getting the prices right is only a small part of what makes for a successful transaction, if cash is even involved at all. Roth’s work has led the way in taking microeconomics outside the halls of academic theory to become a practical “engineering” tool for policymakers and businesses.

In our interview, we range far beyond the examples from the book to discuss the implications of his work for the design of tech’s market-making “platform” businesses like Airbnb, Amazon, Lyft, or Uber, the challenges he faces when countries or people view some kinds of transactions as “repugnant” or morally unacceptable, and the reasons why San Francisco’s school district (unlike Boston’s or New York’s) chose not to implement the un-gameable school choice plan his team devised for them.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized.

Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Joshua Preiss, "Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century" (Taylor & Francis, 2020)

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, Joshua Preiss' book Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century (Taylor & Francis, 2020) calls for renewed political and policy commitment to "just work."

Such a commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair.

Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy.

A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Samuel Gershman, "What Makes Us Smart: The Computational Logic of Human Cognition" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

At the heart of human intelligence rests a fundamental puzzle: How are we incredibly smart and stupid at the same time? No existing machine can match the power and flexibility of human perception, language, and reasoning. Yet, we routinely commit errors that reveal the failures of our thought processes. What Makes Us Smart: The Computational Logic of Human Cognition (Princeton UP, 2021) makes sense of this paradox by arguing that our cognitive errors are not haphazard. Rather, they are the inevitable consequences of a brain optimized for efficient inference and decision making within the constraints of time, energy, and memory--in other words, data and resource limitations. Framing human intelligence in terms of these constraints, Samuel Gershman shows how a deeper computational logic underpins the "stupid" errors of human cognition.

Embarking on a journey across psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and economics, Gershman presents unifying principles that govern human intelligence. First, inductive bias: any system that makes inferences based on limited data must constrain its hypotheses in some way before observing data. Second, approximation bias: any system that makes inferences and decisions with limited resources must make approximations. Applying these principles to a range of computational errors made by humans, Gershman demonstrates that intelligent systems designed to meet these constraints yield characteristically human errors.

Examining how humans make intelligent and maladaptive decisions, What Makes Us Smart delves into the successes and failures of cognition.

Robert Tosswill is a student the Master of Logic (MoL) program at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Giorgio Vallortigara, "Born Knowing: Imprinting and the Origins of Knowledge" (MIT Press, 2021)

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Why do newborns show a preference for a face (or something that resembles a face) over a nonface-like object? Why do baby chicks prefer a moving object to an inanimate one? Neither baby human nor baby chick has had time to learn to like faces or movement. In Born Knowing: Imprinting and the Origins of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2021), neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara argues that the mind is not a blank slate. Early behavior is biologically predisposed rather than learned, and this instinctive or innate behavior, Vallortigara says, is key to understanding the origins of knowledge.

Drawing on research carried out in his own laboratory over several decades, Vallortigara explores what the imprinting process in young chicks, paralleled by the cognitive feats of human newborns, reveals about minds at the onset of life. He explains that a preference for faces or representations of something face-like and animate objects--predispositions he calls "life detectors"--streamlines learning, allowing minds to avoid a confusing multiplicity of objects in the environment, and he considers the possibility that autism spectrum disorders might be linked to a deficit in the preference for the animate. He also demonstrates that animals do not need language to think, and that addition and subtraction can be performed without numbers. The origin of knowledge, Vallortigara argues, is the wisdom that humans and animals possess as basic brain equipment, the product of natural history rather than individual development.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Bob Quinn and Liz Carlisle, "Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food" (Island Press, 2019)

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

How can farmers adapt to climate changes? How can regenerative farmers have livelihoods that nourish themselves and their communities? How can we break free of the commodity mindset and rethink the US food system? Bob Quinn’s remarkable memoir of his decades living and working on a Montana farm offers unique insights into all of these pressing questions, with creativity, intelligence, and a healthy dash of humor.

Quinn is a farmer and sustainable business leader. He founded a regional mill for organic and heritage grains, an organic snack company, a biofuel business, Montana’s first wind farm, and Kamut International. Kamut, an ancient grain Quinn revived from a pint jar of seed found in a neighbor’s basement, is now grown on 100,000 acres of certified organic cropland and made into over 3,500 products worldwide.

In Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food (Island Press, 2019), co-written with Liz Carlisle, he shares the stories of these innovative projects. Through his narrative, Quinn offers readers an insightful ground-level look at the history of the organic food movement, as well as hope for the future.

Bob Quinn, PhD is a leading green businessman, with successful ventures in both organic agriculture and renewable energy. Raised on a 2,400 acre wheat and cattle ranch in Montana, Quinn earned a Ph.D. in plant biochemistry at UC Davis before coming home to farm in 1978. He served on the first National Organic Standards Board, which spurred the creation of the USDA’s National Organic Program, and has been recognized with the Montana Organic Association Lifetime of Service Award, The Organic Trade Association Organic Leadership Award, and Rodale Institute’s Organic Pioneer Award. Bob remains active in research, and has co-authored pioneering studies on the nutritional benefits of ancient grain.

Susan Grelock Yusem, PhD is an independent researcher trained in depth psychology, with an emphasis on community, liberation, and eco-psychologies. Her work centers around interconnection and encompasses regenerative food systems, the arts and conservation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Caitlin Petre, "All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Over the past 15 years, journalism has experienced a rapid proliferation of data about online reader behavior in the form of web metrics. These newsroom metrics influence which stories are written, how news is promoted, and which journalists get hired and fired. Some argue that metrics help journalists better serve their audiences. Others worry that metrics are the contemporary equivalent of a stopwatch-wielding factory manager. In All the News That's Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists (Princeton UP 2021), Caitlin Petre offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at how metrics are reshaping the work of journalism.

The book is based on Petre's interviews and ethnographic observations at Chartbeat, Gawker, and the New York Times. Across the organizations, she finds that newsroom metrics are a powerful form of managerial surveillance and discipline. However, unlike the manager's stopwatch that preceded them, digital metrics are designed to gain the trust of wary journalists by providing a habit-forming user experience that mimics key features of addictive games. She details how metrics intersect with newsroom hierarchies and norms, as well as how their ambiguity leads to seemingly arbitrary interpretations of success. As performance analytics spread to virtually every professional field, Petre's findings speak to the future of expertise and labor relations in contexts far beyond journalism.

Caitlin Petre is an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. Jenna Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast.

Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Juha Kaakinen: Homelessness, a Solvable Problem

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Howard speaks to Juha Kaakinen, CEO of Y-Foundation, a global leader in implementing the "Housing First principle" and a clear example of how genuine progress can be made in concretely addressing homelessness.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Stephen J. Pyne, "The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next" (U California Press, 2021)

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Stephen J. Pyne's new book The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next (U California Press, 2021) tells the story of what happened when a fire-wielding species, humanity, met an especially fire-receptive time in Earth's history. Since terrestrial life first appeared, flames have flourished. Over the past two million years, however, one genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the world. We developed small guts and big heads by cooking food; we climbed the food chain by cooking landscapes; and now we have become a geologic force by cooking the planet.

Some fire uses have been direct: fire applied to convert living landscapes into hunting grounds, forage fields, farms, and pastures. Others have been indirect, through pyrotechnologies that expanded humanity's reach beyond flame's grasp. Still, preindustrial and Indigenous societies largely operated within broad ecological constraints that determined how, and when, living landscapes could be burned. These ancient relationships between humans and fire broke down when people began to burn fossil biomass—lithic landscapes—and humanity’s firepower became unbounded. Fire-catalyzed climate change globalized the impacts into a new geologic epoch. The Pleistocene yielded to the Pyrocene.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Hans Gersbach, "Redesigning Democracy: More Ideas for Better Rules" (Springer, 2018)

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

For three decades, Hans Gersbach has been using economic analysis and tools to explain and improve political behaviour.

His academic career began just as history was supposed to be ending with the victory of liberal democracy. Today, as a string of books argue – most recently Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum (Penguin, 2020) and Our Own Worst Enemy by Tom Nichols‎ (OUP USA, 2021) – things look rather different.

Gersbach’s mission to optimise democracy and reduce the disenchantment that feeds extremism has never been more salient.

His Redesigning Democracy: More Ideas for Better Rules (Springer, 2017) may be four years old but he has continued publishing papers developing the book’s ideas on political contracts, re-election thresholds, optimal term lengths, pendular voting, "Catenarian" fiscal discipline, and even incentive pay for policymakers. Another book is only a matter of time.

Hans Gersbach holds the Chair of Macroeconomics, Innovation and Policy at ETH Zurich and previously taught at Heidelberg and Basel.

*The author's own book recommendations are Voting Procedures Under a Restricted Domain: An Examination of the (In)Vulnerability of 20 Voting Procedures to Five Main Paradoxes by Dan Felsenthal and Hannu Nurmi (SpringerBriefs in Economics, 2019), and A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr. by Sylvia Nasar (Simon & Schuster, 1998).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley advisors (a division of Energy Aspects).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Anil Seth, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness" (Dutton, 2020)

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Anil Seth's quest to understand the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the most exciting contributions to twenty-first-century science.

An unprecedented tour of consciousness thanks to new experimental evidence, much of which comes from Anil Seth's own lab. His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness.

Seth's work has yielded new ways to communicate with patients previously deemed unconscious, as well as promising methods of coping with brain damage and disease. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (Dutton, 2020) sheds light on the future of AI and virtual/augmented reality, adds empirical evidence to cutting-edge ideas of how the brain works, and ushers in a new age in the study of the mystery of human consciousness. Being You is a life-changing existential insight into being you.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Benjamin Ho, "Why Trust Matters: An Economist's Guide to the Ties That Bind Us" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Do you trust corporations? Do you trust politicians? Do you trust the science? Does anyone trust anyone anymore?

In Why Trust Matters: An Economist's Guide to the Ties That Bind Us (Columbia UP, 2021), Professor Ben Ho reveals the surprising importance of trust to how we understand our day-to-day economic lives. Starting with the earliest societies and proceeding through the evolution of the modern economy, he explores its role across an astonishing range of institutions and practices, surveying and synthesizing research across economics, political science, psychology, and other disciplines, and presents his own cutting-edge behavioral economics research on the role of apologies in restoring trust. He argues that we trust far more than we may realize, and that mostly this is a good thing.

Check out the New Yorker's review of the book.

Ben Ho is an associate professor at Vassar College. Ho applies economic tools like game theory and experimental design to topics like apologies, trust, identity, inequality and climate change. Before Vassar, he taught MBA students at Cornell, served as lead energy economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and worked/consulted for Morgan Stanley and several tech startups. Professor Ho also teaches at Columbia University where he is a faculty affiliate for the Center for Global Energy Policy. His work has been featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Ho holds seven degrees from Stanford and MIT in economics, education, political science, math, computer science and electrical engineering.

Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gary Shiffman, "The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jason M. Kelly, "Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China's Capitalist Ascent" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

We think we know the history of China’s opening to the outside world. Maoist China was closed off, until Deng Xiaoping decided to reform the economy and open up to international trade, leading to the economic powerhouse we see today.

Except Deng’s opening was built upon an existing foundation of international trade, as shown by Professor Jason Kelly’s Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent (Harvard University Press, 2021)

Jason M. Kelly is a historian of modern China with interests in Chinese foreign relations during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, commerce and diplomacy, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian international history. He is currently an assistant professor in the Strategy & Policy Department at the U.S. Naval War College and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.

The views he expressed in this interview are his own, and not those of the U.S. Naval War College.

We’re joined in this interview by fellow NBN host Sarah Bramao-Ramos. Sarah is a PHD candidate at Harvard University that studies Qing China and, like Jason, is a graduate associate at the Fairbank Center.

Today, the three of us talk about trade policy in Maoist China, and what that means for our understanding of the country’s attitude towards both the capitalist and socialist worlds. We also discuss what this history may mean for how we understand China’s attitude towards trade today.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David Potter, "Disruption: Why Things Change" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 12 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to David Potter about his new book Disruption: Why Things Change (Oxford UP, 2021).

Disruption is about radical change-why it happens and how. Drawing on case studies ranging from the fourth century AD through the twentieth century, we look at how long-established systems of government and thought are challenged, how new institutions are created and new ideas become powerful. While paying attention to the underlying political, intellectual, economic and environmental sources of social disruption, we will see that no matter what similarities there might be between forces that shake different societies, these underlying factors do not dictate specific outcomes. The human actors are ultimately the most important, their decisions drive the conclusions that we see over time. Through our case studies we can explore successful and unsuccessful decision making, and the emergence of the ideas that conditioned human actions. We'll explore the development of Islam and of Christian doctrine, of constitutional thought, of socialism and social Darwinism. We'll look at how these ideas, all of them emerging on the fringes of society became central.

Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern Eureaopn history at the University of Florida. He can be reached at crsbb32@ufl.edu or on twitter @craig_sorvillo

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, "When Maps Become the World" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

There are maps of the Earth’s landmasses, the universe, the ocean floors, human migration, the human brain: maps are so integral to how we interact with the world that we sometimes forget that they are not the world. In When Maps Become the World (University of Chicago Press), Rasmus Grunfeldt Winther considers how maps get made, used, and abused, and how processes and problems from cartography can be found in the ways we create and use scientific theories. Winther, who is professor of humanities at the University of California – Santa Cruz, shows how “pernicious reification” – taking the map or model for what it represents -- can arise in science, and he argues for a form of pluralism about our understanding of the world, called contextual objectivity, that lies between realism and constructivism. The maps and drawings filling the book highlight Winther’s discussion and illustrate the power that maps and theories have to shape the way we think about the world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Chiara Marletto, "The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals" (Viking, 2021)

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

There is a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely neglected. They are central to the understanding of physical reality both at an everyday level and at the level of the most fundamental phenomena in physics, yet have traditionally been assumed to be impossible to incorporate into fundamental scientific explanations. They are facts not about what is (the actual) but about what could be (counterfactuals).

According to physicist Chiara Marletto, laws about things being possible or impossible may generate an alternative way of providing explanations. This fascinating, far-reaching approach holds promise for revolutionizing the way fundamental physics is formulated and for providing essential tools to face existing technological challenges–from delivering the next generation of information-processing devices beyond the universal quantum computer to designing AIs. Each chapter in The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals (Viking, 2021) delineates how an existing vexed open problem in science can be solved by this radically different approach and it is augmented by short fictional stories that explicate the main point of the chapter. As Marletto demonstrates, contemplating what is possible can give us a more complete and hopeful picture of the physical world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

James Ladyman and K. Wiesner, "What Is a Complex System?" (Yale UP, 2020)

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

While i find it pretty easy to recognize when i'm reading articles in complexity science, i've never been satisfied by definitions of complexity and related concepts. I'm not alone! Researchers' own attempts to define complex systems incorporate a mix of folk wisdom and fraught assumptions anchored to a menagerie of contested examples. The field was ripe for a 2013 article proposing a unified account of complexity, and it's no less ripe today for this book-length expansion.

In What Is a Complex System? (Yale UP, 2020), philosopher of science James Ladyman and physicist and mathematician Karoline Wiesner systematically interrogate popular definitions. They break the most commonly cited features into three bins: truisms on which there is universal agreement, the conditions necessary for complexity to arise, and various emergent products of complexity. A key insight of their account, for me, was to understand emergence as a relation between features rather than one feature among many.

The book is compact, accessible, and at times profound. Indeed, James and Karoline bring the lessons of their account to some of the most consequential complex systems of our time, including Earth's climate and biosphere as well as our global social media ecosystem. I was honored to host them in conversation on this episode, and i encourage listeners to pick up the book itself for deeper dives into the topics we discussed.

James Ladyman is professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol and works mainly in the philosophy of science. Karoline Wiesner is professor of physics at the University of Potsdam and uses information theory to understand complex systems.

Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robin Derricourt, "Creating God: The Birth and Growth of Major Religions" ( Manchester UP, 2021)

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

What do we really know about how and where religions began, and how they spread?

Robin Derricourt considers the birth and growth of several major religions, using history and archaeology to recreate the times, places and societies that witnessed the rise of significant monotheistic faiths. Beginning with Mormonism and working backwards through Islam, Christianity and Judaism to Zoroastrianism, Creating God: The Birth and Growth of Major Religions ( Manchester UP, 2021) opens up the conditions that allowed religious movements to emerge, attract their first followers and grow. Throughout history there have been many prophets: individuals who believed they were in direct contact with the divine, with instructions to spread a religious message. While many disappeared without trace, some gained millions of followers and established a lasting religion. Derricourt considers and gives new insights on the origins of major religions and raises essential questions about why some succeeded where others failed. And who does not want to know that!

Robin Derricourt is an Honorary Professor of History in the School of Humanities at the University of New South Wales and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He holds a PhD in archaeology from the University of Cambridge. His previous books include Inventing Africa: History, Archaeology and Ideas (2011), Antiquity Imagined: The Remarkable Legacy of Egypt and the Ancient Near East (2015) and Unearthing Childhood: Young Lives in Prehistory (2018), which received the PROSE Award for Archaeology and Ancient History.

Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nichola Raihani, "The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World" (St. Martin's Press, 2021)

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Cooperation is the means by which life arose in the first place. It’s how we progressed through scale and complexity, from free-floating strands of genetic material, to nation states. But given what we know about the mechanisms of evolution, cooperation is also something of a puzzle. How does cooperation begin, when on a Darwinian level, all that the genes in your body care about is being passed on to the next generation? Why do meerkat colonies care for one another’s children? Why do babbler birds in the Kalahari form colonies in which only a single pair breeds? And how come some coral wrasse fish actually punish each other for harming fish from another species?

A biologist by training, Raihani looks at where and how collaborative behavior emerges throughout the animal kingdom, and what problems it solves. In The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World (St. Martin's Press, 2021), she reveals that the species that exhibit cooperative behavior–teaching, helping, grooming, and self-sacrifice–most similar to our own tend not to be other apes; they are birds, insects, and fish, occupying far more distant branches of the evolutionary tree. By understanding the problems they face, and how they cooperate to solve them, we can glimpse how human cooperation first evolved. And we can also understand what it is about the way we cooperate that has made humans so distinctive–and so successful.

Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, "A Glossary of Urban Voids" (Jovis Verlag, 2020)

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Sergio Lopez-Pineiro about his new book, A Glossary of Urban Voids (2020). It's one of the more fascinating books I've encountered in some time. And I say "encountered" because it's not only a book, in the traditional sense of something you read, but also a keen intellectual and aesthetic experience: the very design of the book and its use of the glossary as a form open up exciting ways of thinking and seeing. And this is very much to the point for Lopez-Pineiro, because the urban void about which he writes is a phenomenon that resists definition. It is, in his words, "unspecified and underspecified." And that's exactly what makes it so intriguing. Join me in hearing Lopez-Pineiro show us how some of the most seemingly overlooked and neglected areas of our urban environments may end up being the most crucial for our freedoms and our possibilities.

Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Tyson Yunkaporta, "Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World" (HarperOne, 2021)

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Although it is not described as such anywhere in the book, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (HarperOne, 2021) is indeed a systems-thinking book—one that offers a much-needed fresh perspective. Tyson Yunkaporta stands on the shoulders of who we should consider the original systems thinkers: Indigenous elders—the keepers & teachers of ancient knowledge—to show us that by “emphasizing community and connection over individualism and fragmentation—and by cultivating respect for the land—we can address the urgent challenges we face”.

Readers of systems literature will notice familiar themes such as non-linearity, complexity, cause-and-effect and the role of the observer in a system. Each chapter of this paradigm-shifting book starts with some yarning and 'sand talk'— invoking an Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge. The table of contents is a beautiful compilation of Yunkaporta’s sand talk carving illustrations.

Tyson Yunkaporta offers that there is much to be learned from Indigenous 'knowledge systems', but expressses worry about borrowed ideas getting "tangled and twisted in marketplace of civilization"—and suggests that "symbiotic dances" must instead occur between Indigenous and non-Indigenous systems. The result of such an "interaction of multitude of agents in a sustainable system of emergent entities" could be positive and productive. Tyson Yunkaporta is an arts critic, and researcher—and a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. This is his first book.

Kevin Lindsay is a 25+ year Silicon Valley software product strategist and marketer, and graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Kevin is interested in complexity and paradox, and the power of systems thinking to help us understand and tackle the big messes humanity created and is now dealing with. Kevin has been an NBN host since July 2020.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Hélène Landemore, "Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Students of American history know that the framers of the Constitution were deeply concerned that the United States would founder on the shoals of mob rule. They designed a system meant to ensure rule by an elected elite, a republic rather than a democracy. While democratic elements have been introduced over the past two centuries, that basic structure still stands.

In Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton UP, 2020), Landemore argues that it is time to create a more truly democratic system, one in which elections do not play a major role. While she thinks it unlikely that the national arena is necessarily the best place to start implementing such changes, she does see opportunities for creating local assemblies or “mini-publics” where citizens chosen by lot would deliberate on and enact policies and laws. She points out that hundreds of experiments in this direction have been initiated in the past two decades, and she lays down principles and approaches that make the likelihood of success greater. Her work is profoundly optimistic about the potential for citizens from all walks of life to participate in governing their society.

Jack Petranker, MA, JD, is the founder and Senior Teacher at the Center for Creative Inquiry and the Director of the Mangalam Research Center. www.jackpetranker.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Margaret MacMillan, "War: How Conflict Shaped Us" (Random House, 2020)

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

“…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

-Isaiah 2:4

The instinct to fight may be innate in human nature, but war—organized violence—comes with organized society. War has shaped humanity’s history, its social and political institutions, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, and some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject, not least because it brings out both the vilest and the noblest aspects of humanity.

Margaret MacMillan looks at the ways in which war has influenced human society and how, in turn, changes in political organization, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight. War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Random House, 2020) explores such much-debated and controversial questions as: When did war first start? Does human nature doom us to fight one another? Why has war been described as the most organized of all human activities? Why are warriors almost always men? Is war ever within our control?

Drawing on lessons from wars throughout the past, from classical history to the present day, MacMillan reveals the many faces of war—the way it has determined our past, our future, our views of the world, and our very conception of ourselves.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Susan Crane, "Nothing Happened: A History" (Stanford UP, 2021)

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and to remember that "nothing happened"? Why might we feel as if "nothing is the way it was"? This book transforms these utterly ordinary observations and redefines "Nothing" as something we have known and can remember.

"Nothing" has been a catch-all term for everything that is supposedly uninteresting or is just not there. It will take some—possibly considerable—mental adjustment before we can see Nothing as Susan A. Crane does here, with a capital "n." But Nothing has actually been happening all along. As Crane shows in her witty and provocative discussion, Nothing is nothing less than fascinating.

When Nothing has changed but we think that it should have, we might call that injustice; when Nothing has happened over a long, slow period of time, we might call that boring. Justice and boredom have histories. So too does being relieved or disappointed when Nothing happens—for instance, when a forecasted end of the world does not occur, and millennial movements have to regroup. By paying attention to how we understand Nothing to be happening in the present, what it means to "know Nothing" or to "do Nothing," we can begin to ask how those experiences will be remembered.

In Nothing Happened: A History (Stanford UP, 2021), Susan A. Crane moves effortlessly between different modes of seeing Nothing, drawing on visual analysis and cultural studies to suggest a new way of thinking about history. By remembering how Nothing happened, or how Nothing is the way it was, or how Nothing has changed, we can recover histories that were there all along.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, "Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 04:00:00 -0000

In an age characterized by rampant anti-intellectualism, Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her 'Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University' (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) charges the academy with thinking constructively rather than competitively, building new ideas rather than tearing old ones down. She urges us to rethink how we teach the humanities and to refocus our attention on the very human ends that the humanities can best serve. One key aspect of that transformation involves fostering generous thinking, a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, and collaboration over competition.

Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Tom Eisenmann, "Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success" (Currency, 2021)

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Why do many startups fail? Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School realised that even he didn’t really know the answer, despite a lifetime teaching entrepreneurship, and decided to write a book to answer exactly that question. You can hear him go into detail on the NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership Channel interviewed by experienced entrepreneurs Richard Lucas and Kimon Fountoukidis. Whether you want to start a business one day, or just have better conversations with people who are in business, don’t miss this “book of the day” podcast. He draws attention to a critical gap in the Lean Startup methodology which can save both dollars and time if correctly applied. This idea alone makes the podcast worth listening to.

The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee.

In this episode we do go a little further into Tom’s background that normal, and give an entrepreneurial take on his ideas.

He does a great job of explaining his ideas, and there is much for any entrepreneur to learn.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn't answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success (Currency, 2021), Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures.

* Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder's talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly.

* False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to "fail fast" and to "launch before you're ready," founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions.

* False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand.

* Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to "get big fast," hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures.

* Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both.

* Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong.

About our guest

Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, he’s led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes.

About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter Linkedin

Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here,

About Richard Lucas Twitter Linkedin

Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here,

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jonathan Rauch, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth" (Brookings, 2021)

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In recent years Americans have experienced a range of assaults upon the truth. In The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings Institution Press, 2021), Jonathan Rauch describes the various ways in which our understanding of truth has come under attack, and the mechanisms that exist to fight back. As Rauch explains, the challenge of determining truth is as old as civilization itself, with the system we use today a product of concepts formulated in the 17th and 18th centuries. Today this system faces an unprecedented challenge created by the digital revolution, which has inverted the social incentives on which the reality-based community depends and fractured reality for millions of people. The consequences of this today can be seen today in both the numerous agenda-driven disinformation campaigns and the coercive conformity of “cancel culture” that challenges diversity of thought. Yet for all of the threats posed to the Constitution of Knowledge, Rauch argues that within it are contained the tools with which people can fight back successfully in order to maintain our social system for turning disagreement into truth.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

James M. Banner Jr., "The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History" (Yale UP, 2021)

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In recent years the phrase “revisionist history” has emerged as a label for politically-correct reexaminations of an unalterable understanding of our past. As James M. Banner, Jr. demonstrates in his book The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History (Yale UP, 2021), such a definition ignores how historical knowledge in the West has always been fluid and subject to reinterpretation by scholars. As Banner illustrates, such revisionism occurs in a variety of ways and can reflect everything from the discovery of new information to the reconsideration of the past from different perspectives the present. These approaches are evident even in the earliest works of history, and reflect the changes that have taken place in civilization over time. By addressing recent public controversies at which revisionism was at the heart, Banner shows that It is through this process that we better understand who we are today and the course we will take as a society going forward.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Skylar Tibbits, "Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today’s researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way we build and collaborate with our environment. Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution (Princeton UP, 2021) is a provocative guide to this emerging, often mind-bending reality, presenting a bold vision for harnessing the intelligence embedded in the material world.

Drawing on his pioneering work on self-assembly and programmable material technologies, Skylar Tibbits lays out the core, frequently counterintuitive ideas and strategies that animate this new approach to design and innovation. From furniture that builds itself to shoes printed flat that jump into shape to islands that grow themselves, he describes how matter can compute and exhibit behaviors that we typically associate with biological organisms, and challenges our fundamental assumptions about what physical materials can do and how we can interact with them. Intelligent products today often rely on electronics, batteries, and complicated mechanisms. Tibbits offers a different approach, showing how we can design simple and elegant material intelligence that may one day animate and improve itself—and along the way help us build a more sustainable future.

Compelling and beautifully designed, Things Fall Together provides an insider’s perspective on the materials revolution that lies ahead, revealing the spectacular possibilities for designing active materials that can self-assemble, collaborate, and one day even evolve and design on their own.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gregg D. Caruso, "Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

According to an intuitive view, those who commit crimes are justifiably subject to punishment. Depending on the severity of the wrongdoing constitutive of the crime, punishment can be severe: incarceration, confinement, depravation, and so on. The common thought is that in committing serious crimes, persons render themselves deserving of punishment by the State. Punishment, then, is simply a matter of giving offenders their just deserts. Call this broad view retributivism. What if retributivism’s underlying idea of desert is fundamentally confused? What if persons lack the kind of free will that would make them deserving of punishment in the sense that retributivism requires?

This is the central question of Gregg Caruso’s new book, Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice (Cambridge, 2021). After arguing against the idea that persons can be deserving of punishment in the retributivist’s sense, Caruso develops an alternative approach to criminal behavior that he called the Public-Health Quarantine Model.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Shai Reshef: Founding President, University of the People

Mon, 31 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Shai Reshef shares the remarkable story of the creation of the University of the People, which has grown from an initial small class of students in 2008 to over 55,000 low-income students all over the world today. Reshef founded University of the People after a successful career as an educational technology entrepreneur, setting out to leverage these technologies to launch the world’s first free US-accredited asynchronous online university with a goal of serving the 100 million+ talented young people who lack access to a quality education. The University of the People has been able to make remarkable progress toward this ambitious goal by adopting a peer learning model overseen by a huge volunteer faculty workforce. It offers undergraduate and Master’s degrees in the high-demand areas of Business, Nursing, and Computer Science; courses are free, but students who want college credit pay for the final proctored assessment, with the cost of a full degree about $4800 and scholarships to support those who can’t afford that.

David Finegold is the president of Chatham University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Linda Colley, "The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World" (Liveright, 2021)

Wed, 26 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Linda Colley is a luminary in the fields of British and imperial history, and the Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. Her captivating new book The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (Liveright, 2021) narrates a sweeping global history of written constitutions from the 18th to the 21st century. Bold, imaginative, and strikingly original, it challenges established accounts and uncovers the close connection between constitution-making and warfare. Colley brings to the fore historiographically neglected sites and actors, from Catherine the Great to Sierra Leone's James Africanus Beale Horton and Tunisia's soldier-constitutionalist Khayr-al-Din. The monograph focuses on the myriad ways in which constitutions crossed boundaries and intersected with wider political, cultural, and socioeconomic forces in all corners of the globe. By displaying both the emancipatory and the repressive effects of modern constitutions, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen retells the serpentine story of successful and failed attempts to redefine the functions and limits of state governments.

Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

William D. Nordhaus, "The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Mon, 24 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Can classical economics help figure out climate change and support policies that slow global warming? Yale Sterling Professor of Economics William Nordhaus thinks so. In his new book, The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World (Princeton UP, 2021), Nordhaus tackles the "externality" that is pollution and carbon emissions. By making several adjustments to how we treat this externality in economic terms, it can be brought back into the "system" whereby sensible regulation, market relations, and innovation can lead to markedly lower levels of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The most important of those adjustments is getting the price of carbon right. In many parts of the world, there is no formal price of carbon. Setting it at $40 per ton (or higher) will not be easy, not least because competing nation-states will need to agree to and abide by a universal carbon tax.

Despite these challenges, Nordhaus ends on an optimistic note. We have the means, we have the technology.... And as an example, he points to how a Covid vaccine was developed in record time after adjustments to the system of incentives and regulations.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves...

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David R. Boyd, "The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution That Could Save the World" (ECW Press, 2017)

Tue, 18 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Palila v Hawaii. New Zealand’s Te Urewera Act. Sierra Club v Disney. These legal phrases hardly sound like the makings of a revolution, but beyond the headlines portending environmental catastrophes, a movement of immense import has been building ― in courtrooms, legislatures, and communities across the globe. Cultures and laws are transforming to provide a powerful new approach to protecting the planet and the species with whom we share it.

Lawyers from California to New York are fighting to gain legal rights for chimpanzees and killer whales, and lawmakers are ending the era of keeping these intelligent animals in captivity. In Hawaii and India, judges have recognized that endangered species ― from birds to lions ― have the legal right to exist. Around the world, more and more laws are being passed recognizing that ecosystems ― rivers, forests, mountains, and more ― have legally enforceable rights. And if nature has rights, then humans have responsibilities.

In The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution That Could Save the World (ECW Press, 2017), noted environmental lawyer David Boyd tells this remarkable story, which is, at its heart, one of humans as a species finally growing up. Read this book and your world view will be altered forever.

David R. Boyd is an environmental lawyer, professor, and advocate for recognition of the right to live in a healthy environment. Boyd is the award-winning author of eight books, including The Optimistic Environmentalist, and co-chaired Vancouver’s Greenest City initiative with Mayor Gregor Robertson. He lives on Pender Island, B.C. For more information, visit DavidRichardBoyd.com.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Bobby C. Lee, "The Promise of Bitcoin: The Future of Money and How It Can Work for You" (McGraw-Hill Education, 2021)

Tue, 18 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

I spoke with Bobby Lee about his book 'The promise of Bitcoin: The Future of Money and How It Can Work for You' (McGraw-Hill, 2021).

Bobby Lee is a very interesting character, among the leading figures in the field of cryptocurrency. He is the founder and CEO of Ballet, a cryptocurrency startup. He is the cofounder of BTCC, the longest-running bitcoin exchange and leading financial platform worldwide. He also serves on the board of the Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has built wider awareness of bitcoin, one of the industry’s most influential groups. Before founding BTCC, Lee was vice president of technology of Walmart. Previously, Lee was a software engineer at Yahoo!, where he led the development of the earliest online communities.

We started the conversation mentioning the mysterious figure of Satoshi Nakamoto. We covered the actions currently being taken by central banks in the field and we spoke about the case of China. We also discussed why criminals are interested in using Bitcoin.

The book is a very good tool for those like me who were only vaguely aware of the cryptocurrency sector. Bobby offers a compelling argument for how this digital currency could impact the global economy. A financial revolution is materializing before our eyes. The way individuals, organizations, and governments conduct transactions—from purchasing a book online to acquiring major corporations to delivering billions in financial aid—will look vastly different in the near future. According to Bobby, Bitcoin is spearheading this transformation and may be the best investment opportunity of our time, yet most people have yet to understand its promise.

In this book, Lee, one of the earliest, most successful pioneers in the cryptocurrency space, debunks myths and dispels fears that surround Bitcoin, arguing that this rational, logical system is superior to traditional monetary systems. He cites signs of Bitcoin’s widening acceptance: a growing community of users worldwide and multiple initiatives for investing in and holding bitcoin among major financial services organizations and institutional investors who control trillions in assets. Lee offers a primer on the best strategies for investing in this digital currency. He discusses the pros and cons, and covers the complicated yet more profitable method of acquiring bitcoin, mining. He offers predictions for the future, including price, trajectory, use, and participation in the larger economy—as well as developments in regulation, technology, business, and society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael D. Gordin, "On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Mon, 17 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Everyone has heard of the term "pseudoscience", typically used to describe something that looks like science, but is somehow false, misleading, or unproven. Many would be able to agree on a list of things that fall under its umbrella-- astrology, phrenology, UFOlogy, creationism, and eugenics might come to mind. But defining what makes these fields "pseudo" is a far more complex issue. It has proved impossible to come up with a simple criterion that enables us to differentiate pseudoscience from genuine science. Given the virulence of contemporary disputes over the denial of climate change and anti-vaccination movements--both of which display allegations of "pseudoscience" on all sides-- there is a clear need to better understand issues of scientific demarcation.

On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (Oxford UP, 2021) explores the philosophical and historical attempts to address this problem of demarcation. This book argues that by understanding doctrines that are often seen as antithetical to science, we can learn a great deal about how science operated in the past and does today. This exploration raises several questions: How does a doctrine become demonized as pseudoscientific? Who has the authority to make these pronouncements? How is the status of science shaped by political or cultural contexts? How does pseudoscience differ from scientific fraud?

Michael D. Gordin both answers these questions and guides readers along a bewildering array of marginalized doctrines, looking at parapsychology (ESP), Lysenkoism, scientific racism, and alchemy, among others, to better understand the struggle to define what science is and is not, and how the controversies have shifted over the centuries. On the Fringe provides a historical tour through many of these fringe fields in order to provide tools to think deeply about scientific controversies both in the past and in our present.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Simon Critchley, "Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us" (Vintage, 2020)

Fri, 14 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Simon Critchley's Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (Vintage, 2020) does not offer a comprehensive theory of tragedy. Instead, it takes issue with the bland simplifications that philosophers have offered in place of a robust engagement with tragedies, plural. Critchley examines Nietzche's wishful speculation on the origin of tragedy, Aristotle's dry and under-examined notion of catharsis, and Plato's excessive hatred of tragedy, finding that each attempt to find an essence of tragedy ignores the fact that tragedy as a form is uninterested in tidy endings or comforting morals. Critchley insists we go back to the experience of theatre in search of what Anne Carson calls a "more devastating" account of what it's like to watch these plays, which somehow resonate with us after more than two thousand years.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Tim Jackson, "Post Growth: Life after Capitalism" (Polity, 2021)

Fri, 07 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

I spoke with Prof. Tim Jackson about his latest book: Post Growth, Life after Capitalism, published by Polity Books in 2021.

The book starts with a reflection on the event of the past few months. The success in 2019 of the school strikes for climate, the attention that Greta Thunberg received even in Davos, and the arrival of the pandemic that changed our priorities. Even the 2009 crisis challenged the degrowth movement when we experienced the consequences of the recession. I have asked how do we keep the focus on sustainability?

This book and his work in general are about the need for a change in our economic paradigms. But we are still tied to old ideas and institutions. Keynes that many progressive politicians and economists frequently refer to, cannot be really claimed to be offering revolutionary ideas for our times. Still, the book mentions an essay by Keynes from 1930 where he appears clearly interested in what should come after the immediate actions (growth) needed to overcome the great depression.

We discussed how the shift in economic paradigm can follow different patterns in the rich nations and in the developing ones. Finally, referring to the final chapter, 'Dolphins in Venice', we talked about what could happen at the end of the pandemic to our cultural and consumption preferences.

Capitalism is broken. The relentless pursuit of more has delivered climate catastrophe, social inequality and financial instability—and left us ill prepared for life in a global pandemic. Weaving together philosophical reflection, economic insight and social vision, Tim Jackson’s passionate and provocative book dares us to imagine a world beyond capitalism—a place where relationship and meaning take precedence over profits and power. Post Growth is both a manifesto for system change and an invitation to rekindle a deeper conversation about the nature of the human condition.

Dr Tim Jackson holds degrees in mathematics (MA, Cambridge), philosophy (MA, Uni Western Ontario) and physics (PhD, St Andrews). He is Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity and Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey in the UK.

Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Peter Godfrey-Smith, "Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind" (FSG, 2020)

Mon, 03 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Dip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom—the Metazoa—they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds.

In his acclaimed 2016 book, Other Minds, the philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith explored the mind of the octopus—the closest thing to an intelligent alien on Earth. In Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind (FSG, 2020), Godfrey-Smith expands his inquiry to animals at large, investigating the evolution of subjective experience with the assistance of far-flung species. As he delves into what it feels like to perceive and interact with the world as other life-forms do, Godfrey-Smith shows that the appearance of the animal body well over half a billion years ago was a profound innovation that set life upon a new path. In accessible, riveting prose, he charts the ways that subsequent evolutionary developments—eyes that track, for example, and bodies that move through and manipulate the environment—shaped the subjective lives of animals. Following the evolutionary paths of a glass sponge, soft coral, banded shrimp, octopus, and fish, then moving onto land and the world of insects, birds, and primates like ourselves, Metazoa gathers their stories together in a way that bridges the gap between mind and matter, addressing one of the most vexing philosophical problems: that of consciousness.

Combining vivid animal encounters with philosophical reflections and the latest news from biology, Metazoa reveals that even in our high-tech, AI-driven times, there is no understanding our minds without understanding nerves, muscles, and active bodies. The story that results is as rich and vibrant as life itself.

Peter Godfrey-Smith is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He is the author of the bestselling Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, which has been published in more than twenty languages. His other books include Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lakatos Award.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Melvin Konner, "Believers: Faith in Human Nature" (Norton, 2019)

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Believers: Faith in Human Nature (Norton, 2019) is a scientist's answer to attacks on faith by some well-meaning scientists and philosophers. It is a firm rebuke of the "Four Horsemen"--Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens--known for writing about religion as something irrational and ultimately harmful. Anthropologist Melvin Konner, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew but has lived his adult life without such faith, explores the psychology, development, brain science, evolution, and even genetics of the varied religious impulses we experience as a species.

Conceding that faith is not for everyone, he views religious people with a sympathetic eye; his own upbringing, his apprenticeship in the trance-dance religion of the African Bushmen, and his friends and explorations in Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and other faiths have all shaped his perspective. Faith has always manifested itself in different ways--some revelatory and comforting; some kind and good; some ecumenical and cosmopolitan; some bigoted, coercive, and violent. But the future, Konner argues, will both produce more nonbelievers, and incline the religious among us--holding their own by having larger families--to increasingly reject prejudice and aggression.

A colorful weave of personal stories of religious--and irreligious--encounters, as well as new scientific research, Believers shows us that religion does much good as well as undoubted harm, and that for at least a large minority of humanity, the belief in things unseen neither can nor should go away.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Herbert Terrace, "Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can" (Columbia UP, 2019)

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Through discussion of his famous 1970s experiment alongside new research, in Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can (Columbia University Press, 2019), Herbert Terrace argues that, despite the failure of famous attempts to teach primates to speak, from these efforts we can learn something important: the missing link between non-linguistic and linguistic creatures is the ability to use words, not to form sentences. Situating language-learning as a capacity gained through conversation, not primarily representing internal thought, Terrace takes naming as the first step towards language. By drawing on research in developmental psychology, paleoanthropology, and linguistics, Terrace builds a case for understanding human language as grounded in social interaction between mother and child, rather than an inevitable, asocial result of a person’s development.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matthew O. Jackson, "The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors" (Vintage, 2019)

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Philip N. Howard, "Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives" (Yale UP, 2020)

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Technology is breaking politics - what can be done about it? Artificially intelligent "bot" accounts attack politicians and public figures on social media. Conspiracy theorists publish junk news sites to promote their outlandish beliefs. Campaigners create fake dating profiles to attract young voters. We live in a world of technologies that misdirect our attention, poison our political conversations, and jeopardize our democracies. With massive amounts of social media and public polling data, and in-depth interviews with political consultants, bot writers, and journalists, Philip N. Howard offers ways to take these "lie machines" apart. Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives (Yale UP, 2020) is full of riveting behind the scenes stories from the world's biggest and most damagingly successful misinformation initiatives--including those used in Brexit and U.S. elections. Howard not only shows how these campaigns evolved from older propaganda operations but also exposes their new powers, gives us insight into their effectiveness, and shows us how to shut them down.

As dangerous as things are now, they will only get worse; the enormous flood of data coming from the so-called Internet of Things, along with the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence, will make disinformation easier to generate and disseminate and much harder to spot and remove. Howard tackles the tough task of suggesting the changes that are needed to create a radically redesigned social media ecosystem that would reinforce, rather than erode, democracy.

Medha Prasanna is an MA candidate at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Her current research focuses on International Organizations and Human Rights Law. You can learn more about her here or email her medp16@gwu.edu

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Frank Ruda, "Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism" (U Nebraska Press, 2016)

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Frank Ruda's book Abolishing Freedom. A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism (University of Nebraska Press 2016) presents a compelling reading of authors diverse as Martin Luther, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Freud. They grapple with the limits of human freedom, and obviously so. Because we understand freedom - at least since Aristotle - as a capacity or a capability to choose freely between different options. Expressed with a formulation of Harry Frankfurt: "An action is free only if the agent could have done otherwise." However, Ruda - who is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee - shows that this intuitive and classical formulation of freedom of choice is deceptive. It suggests that we can choose the amount of freedom we want to live up to in the same way in which we can choose between tea or coffee. But this is a trivialization of freedom. We do not get up in the morning determined to be more free this week than last week. And one reason for this is that freedom is not at our disposal. As such it touches upon questions of fate and predestination. Philosophers from Luther to Hegel and from Descartes to Freud know this. They conceptualize through the concept of freedom a point of negativity, or – metaphorically speaking – a ground zero of human agency and autonomy. This is why topics such as fatalism, predestination, morality or divine providence, to name just a few, guide the argument of the book: to abolish freedom for the sake of freedom.

The Interview is conducted by Dominik Finkelde SJ, Professor of Philosophy at the Munich School of Philosophy and Sophie Adloff, student of philosophy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Avi Loeb, "Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth" (Houghton Mifflin, 2021)

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star. Avi Loeb, an astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization.

In Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth (Houghton Mifflin, 2021), Loeb takes readers inside the thrilling story of the first interstellar visitor to be spotted in our solar system. He outlines his controversial theory and its profound implications: for science, for religion, and for the future of our species and our planet. A mind-bending journey through the furthest reaches of science, space-time, and the human imagination, Extraterrestrial challenges readers to aim for the stars--and to think critically about what's out there, no matter how strange it seems.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Edward Ashford Lee, "The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines" (MIT Press, 2020)

Fri, 02 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines (MIT Press, 2020), Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that we are less in control of the trajectory of technology than we think. It shapes us as much as we shape it, and it may be more defensible to think of technology as the result of a Darwinian coevolution than the result of top-down intelligent design. Richard Dawkins famously said that a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. Is a human a computer's way of making another computer? To understand this question requires a deep dive into how evolution works, how humans are different from computers, and how the way technology develops resembles the emergence of a new life form on our planet.

Lee presents the case for considering digital beings to be living, then offers counterarguments. What we humans do with our minds is more than computation, and what digital systems do--be teleported at the speed of light, backed up, and restored--may never be possible for humans. To believe that we are simply computations, he argues, is a "dataist" faith and scientifically indefensible. Digital beings depend on humans--and humans depend on digital beings. More likely than a planetary wipe-out of humanity is an ongoing, symbiotic coevolution of culture and technology.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Eugenia Cheng, "x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender" (Basic Book, 2020)

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

From its more mainstream, business-focused and business-friendly “Lean In” variants, to more radical, critical and intersectional understandings of feminism, the past decade has seen a flourishing of discussion from those proposing and critiquing different schools of thought for the way we think about gender in society.

Dr. Eugenia Cheng’s addition to this conversation is x+y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender (Basic Books, 2020). She applies insights gained from her mathematical background to propose a new way to talk about gender and to propose an alternative: the terms “ingressive” and “congressive” behavior.

In this interview, Dr. Cheng and I talk about what we gain from bringing a mathematical understanding to questions of social relations and structures. We talk about how she rethinks “gender”, and the new terms she proposes in her book. We end with a short discussion of whether these insights are applicable to conversations about other demographic and social identifiers.

Dr. Eugenia Cheng is a mathematician and concert pianist. She is Scientist In Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a PhD in pure mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Alongside her research in Category Theory and undergraduate teaching her aim is to rid the world of “math-phobia”. She was an early pioneer of math on YouTube and her videos have been viewed over 15 million times to date. Her other books are How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics (Basic Books: 2016), which was featured on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics (Basic Books: 2017) which was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize in 2017 and The Art of Logic in an Illogical World (Basic Books: 2018)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of x+y. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Luke Russell, "Being Evil: A Philosophical Perspective" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Evil is among our everyday moral concepts. It is common to hear politicians and others condemn certain acts, purposes, people, or even populations as evil. But what does it mean to say that something is evil? Is the evil simply the exceedingly wrong? Is evil rather a distinctive kind of wrongness? Is it a kind of wrongness at all? Are acts evil regardless of the motives of those who commit them, or are people the things that are fundamentally evil (or not)?

It takes only a few simple questions to complicate our familiar conception of evil. That’s partly the point of Luke Russell’s fascinating book, Being Evil: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford UP, 2020). In it, he takes the reader through a careful analysis of the concept of evil. Along the way, he develops and defends his own conception of what evil is.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John Durham Peters et al., "Action at a Distance" (Meson Press, 2020)

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an ‘acting at a distance,’ an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediality of transmission. Action at a Distance (Meson Press, 2020) this crucial phenomenon thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial.

Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality: John Durham Peters looks at episodes of simultaneity and synchronization. Christina Vagt discusses the agency of computer models against the backdrop of aesthetic theories by Henri Bergson and Hans Blumenberg, and Florian Sprenger discusses early electrical transmissions through copper wire and the temporality of instantaneity.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice often with a focus on film and television studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Eric Hayot, "Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Scientists have scientific reason and use the scientific method. Humanists have... Emotion? Close reading? Not so, argues Eric Hayot in

Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan (Columbia UP, 2021). Contrary to popular belief, the humanities involve both reasoning and methods. Humanist reason, Hayot shows, is philosophically and historically grounded and applicable to almost every discipline. Part history of philosophy, part methods handbook, and part manifesto, Humanist Reason will change the way we advocate for the humanities in the twenty-first century.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jeremy DeSilva, "First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human" (Harper, 2021)

Fri, 12 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Blending history, science, and culture, a stunning and highly engaging evolutionary story exploring how walking on two legs allowed humans to become the planet’s dominant species.

Humans are the only mammals to walk on two, rather than four legs—a locomotion known as bipedalism. We strive to be upstanding citizens, honor those who stand tall and proud, and take a stand against injustices. We follow in each other’s footsteps and celebrate a child’s beginning to walk. But why, and how, exactly, did we take our first steps? And at what cost? Bipedalism has its drawbacks: giving birth is more difficult and dangerous; our running speed is much slower than other animals; and we suffer a variety of ailments, from hernias to sinus problems.

In First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human (Harper, 2021), paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva explores how unusual and extraordinary this seemingly ordinary ability is. A seven-million-year journey to the very origins of the human lineage, First Steps shows how upright walking was a gateway to many of the other attributes that make us human—from our technological abilities, our thirst for exploration, our use of language–and may have laid the foundation for our species’ traits of compassion, empathy, and altruism. Moving from developmental psychology labs to ancient fossil sites throughout Africa and Eurasia, DeSilva brings to life our adventure walking on two legs.

Delving deeply into the story of our past and the new discoveries rewriting our understanding of human evolution, First Steps examines how walking upright helped us rise above all over species on this planet.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Roland T. Rust and Ming-Hui Huang, "The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Ming-Hui Huang about her book (coauthored with Roland T. Rust), The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)

This episode covers the movement of the economy from brawn to brains to hearts. Put another way, the focus here is on the movement from the Physical Economy (farming, factories, etc.) to the Thinking Economy to now the dawning of the Feeling Economy. In the near-term future, artificial intelligence (AI) will handle the thinking tasks and humans on the job will focus on adding value through empathy and their interpersonal skills. The episode explores everything from workers re-skilling, cross-skilling and up-skilling to handle this change, to the impact of this change to being feeling-centric on our politics, educational practices, and the expectations of consumers. Of special note is that the new economic era may privilege female “soft” skills over the “hard” skills men are known by and often more comfortable with.

Ming-Hui Huang holds a number of posts. She’s a Distinguished Professor at National Taiwan University; a fellow of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC); an International Research Fellow of the Centre for Corporate Reputation, University of Oxford, UK; and a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Center for Excellence in Service, University of Maryland, USA. She is also the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Service Research.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ronald J. Deibert, "Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society" (House of Anansi, 2020)

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Ronald Deibert is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the Director of The Citizen Lab, a public interest research organization that uncovers privacy and human rights abuses on the internet.

In his latest book, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (House of Anansi Press, 2020), Deibert unites a growing corpus of academic literature on the perils of surveillance capitalism to show how today’s data-hungry communications technologies have poisoned our political institutions, our minds, and even our environment. Deibert believes that it is not too late to rescue our politics from our technology, and he argues that the answer lies not in silicon or code but age-old political principles. Look to Montesquieu, not Zuckerberg, Deibert tells us, if you want to find a stable framework for digital governance in the 21st century.

On this episode, in addition to all the above, Professor Deibert and I explore the economic engines of surveillance capitalism, the dangers of ritualistic privacy policies, the internet’s immense carbon footprint, and the importance of data privacy law, among other topics.

John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Simon Baron-Cohen, "The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention" (Allen Lane, 2020)

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Why are humans alone capable of invention? This question is relevant to every human invention, from music to mathematics, sculpture and science, dating back to the beginnings of civilization. In The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention, Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University, presents a new theory of human invention. His unexpected claim is that understanding autistic people — specifically their unstoppable drive to seek patterns, a characteristic of the condition — is the key to understanding both the ancient origins and the modern flowering of human creativity.

In The Pattern Seekers, Simon Baron-Cohen’s goal is two-fold: to provide an answer to the long-standing question about human invention and to understand the role that autistic people played in the evolution of human invention. His higher message is to change the way our society views and treats autistic people. “Among the new generation of hypersystemizers will be some of the great inventors of our future…If we acknowledge that some autistic people were and still are the drivers of the evolution of science, technology, art, and other forms of invention, their future can be different.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Emmanuel Kreike, "Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature (Princeton UP, 2021), Emmanuel Kreike offers a global history of environmental warfare and makes the case for why it should be a crime. The environmental infrastructure that sustains human societies has been a target and instrument of war for centuries, resulting in famine and disease, displaced populations, and the devastation of people’s livelihoods and ways of life. Scorched Earth traces the history of scorched earth, military inundations, and armies living off the land from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, arguing that the resulting deliberate destruction of the environment—"environcide"—constitutes total war and is a crime against humanity and nature.

In this sweeping global history, Emmanuel Kreike shows how religious war in Europe transformed Holland into a desolate swamp where hunger and the black death ruled. He describes how Spanish conquistadores exploited the irrigation works and expansive agricultural terraces of the Aztecs and Incas, triggering a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions. Kreike demonstrates how environmental warfare has continued unabated into the modern era. His panoramic narrative takes readers from the Thirty Years' War to the wars of France's Sun King, and from the Dutch colonial wars in North America and Indonesia to the early twentieth-century colonial conquest of southwestern Africa. Shedding light on the premodern origins and the lasting consequences of total war, Scorched Earth explains why ecocide and genocide are not separate phenomena, and why international law must recognize environmental warfare as a violation of human rights.

Dr. Emmanuel Kreike is a professor of history at Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. in African history from Yale University (1996) and a Dr. of Science (PhD) in Tropical Forestry from the School of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University (2006), the Netherlands. His research and teaching interests focus on the intersection of war/violence, population displacement, environment, and society.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

R. A. Woldoff and R. C. Litchfield, "Digital Nomads: In Search of Freedom, Community, and Meaningful Work in the New Economy" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In the space of a few weeks this spring, organizations around the world learned that many traditional, in-person jobs could, in fact, be performed remotely. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, however, some individuals were already utilizing new options for personal mobility and online work to strike out on their own.

In the new book, Digital Nomads: In Search of Freedom, Community, and Meaningful Work in the New Economy (Oxford UP, 2020), Rachael A. Woldoff and Robert C. Litchfield examine the growing demographic of individuals disaffected by the daily grind of office work who have left the U.S. and Europe to work remotely from low-cost global hubs around the world. These “digital nomads” seek out communities of like-minded unconventional people—what they call a tribe—in places like Indonesia, Thailand, Colombia, Mexico, or Portugal. Taking advantage of advancements in mobility, technology, and telecommunication, digital nomads are venturing around the world in search of a new way of living and working.

Through dozens of interviews and several stints living in a digital nomad hub in Bali, Indonesia, Woldoff and Litchfield show why digital nomads leave their conventional lives behind, arguing that the creative class and Millennial workers, though successful, often feel that “world class cities” and desirable jobs are anything but paradise. Digital Nomads follows these new workers through their transitions into freelancing, entrepreneurship, and remote work, and explains how digital nomads create fluid, intimate communities abroad.

Complete with a preface that addresses how COVID-19 is inevitably changing the landscape of work, Digital Nomads offers insight into the new ways people are balancing freedom, work, community, and creative fulfillment in the digital age.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael J. Sandel, "The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?" (FSG, 2020)

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the American credo that you can make it if you try. The consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fueled populist protest and extreme polarization, and led to deep distrust of both government and our fellow citizens--leaving us morally unprepared to face the profound challenges of our time.

World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success--more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility and solidarity, and more affirming of the dignity of work. The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? (FSG, 2020) points us toward a hopeful vision of a new politics of the common good.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at VanLeerIdeas@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Daniel Oberhaus, "Extraterrestrial Languages" (MIT Press, 2019)

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In Extraterrestrial Languages (MIT Press 2020), Daniel Oberhaus tells the history of human efforts to talk to aliens, but in doing so, the book reflects on the relationship between communication and cognition, the metaphysics of mathematics, about whether dolphins have a language, and more. The challenge of communicating with extraterrestrials forces scientists and linguists to consider a range of problems. Would these listeners recognize radio signals as linguistic? How would they decode and interpret them? Would ETs even have linguistic capacities to begin with? Oberhaus shares the stories of, and theoretical bases for, a range of attempts to communicate with ETs, along the way tackling fundamental questions in linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, science, and even art.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert Baker, "The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution" (MIT Press, 2019)

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

We live in an age of moral revolutions in which the once morally outrageous has become morally acceptable, and the formerly acceptable is now regarded as reprehensible. Attitudes toward same-sex love, for example, and the proper role of women, have undergone paradigm shifts over the last several decades. In this book, Robert Baker argues that these inversions are the product of moral revolutions that follow a pattern similar to that of the scientific revolutions analyzed by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book, The Structure of Moral Revolutions: Studies of Changes in the Morality of Abortion, Death, and the Bioethics Revolution (MIT Press, 2019).

After laying out the theoretical terrain, Baker develops his argument with examples of moral reversals from the recent and distant past. He describes the revolution, led by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, that transformed the postmortem dissection of human bodies from punitive desecration to civic virtue; the criminalization of abortion in the nineteenth century and its decriminalization in the twentieth century; and the invention of a new bioethics paradigm in the 1970s and 1980s, supporting a patient-led rebellion against medical paternalism. Finally, Baker reflects on moral relativism, arguing that the acceptance of "absolute" moral truths denies us the diversity of moral perspectives that permit us to alter our morality in response to changing environments.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Paul Davies, "The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

What is life? For generations, scientists have struggled to make sense of this fundamental question, for life really does look like magic: even a humble bacterium accomplishes things so dazzling that no human engineer can match it. Huge advances in molecular biology over the past few decades have served only to deepen the mystery. In this penetrating and wide-ranging book, world-renowned physicist and science communicator Paul Davies searches for answers in a field so new and fast-moving that it lacks a name; it is a domain where biology, computing, logic, chemistry, quantum physics, and nanotechnology intersect. At the heart of these diverse fields, Davies explains, is the concept of information: a quantity which has the power to unify biology with physics, transform technology and medicine, and force us to fundamentally reconsider what it means to be alive—even illuminating the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe.

From life’s murky origins to the microscopic engines that run the cells of our bodies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life (U Chicago Press, 2020) journeys across an astounding landscape of cutting-edge science. Weaving together cancer and consciousness, two-headed worms and bird navigation, Davies reveals how biological organisms garner and process information to conjure order out of chaos, opening a window onto the secret of life itself.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, "Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on narratives of family and individual experiences with neurological disorders, paired with texts by neuroscientists and psychiatrists, to decenter the brain and expose the ableist biases in the dominant thinking about personhood.

Unraveling articulates a novel cybernetic theory of subjectivity in which the nervous system is connected to the world it inhabits rather than being walled off inside the body, moving beyond neuroscientific, symbolic, and materialist approaches to the self to focus instead on such concepts as animation, modularity, and facilitation. It does so through close readings of memoirs by individuals who lost their hearing or developed trauma-induced aphasia, as well as family members of people diagnosed as autistic--texts that rethink modes of subjectivity through experiences with communication, caregiving, and the demands of everyday life.

Arguing for a radical antinormative bioethics, Unraveling shifts the discourse on neurological disorders from such value-laden concepts as "quality of life" to develop an inclusive model of personhood that honors disability experiences and reconceptualizes the category of the human in all of its social, technological, and environmental contexts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ian Ayres and Fredrick E. Vars, "Weapon of Choice: Fighting Gun Violence While Respecting Gun Rights" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In the United States, gun violence is in a state of national crisis, yet efforts to reform gun regulation face significant political and constitutional barriers. In this innovative book, Ian Ayres and Fredrick E. Vars put forward creative and practical solutions, proposing legislative reform which will reduce gun deaths.

Theirs is a libertarian 'bottom-up' approach which seeks to empower those most at risk by allowing individuals a choice to opt in to common-sense gun regulation for themselves. At the same time, the genius of Weapon of Choice: Fighting Gun Violence While Respecting Gun Rights (Harvard University Press, 2020) is that the proposals do not infringe the individual freedoms of gun ownership protected by the second amendment.

Ayres and Vars put forward practical solutions which, where adopted, will cause an immediate reduction in lives lost as a result of gun violence. Their work is empirically grounded and provides a roadmap for legislators and policy makers who wish to keep people safe by reducing gun deaths.

Ian Ayres is the William K. Townsend Professor of Law and Professor of Management at Yale University. He is the author of many books, including the New York Times bestseller Super Crunchers. He is a contributor to Forbes, NPR's Marketplace, and the New York Times.

Fredrick E. Vars is the Ira Drayton Pruitt, Sr., Professor of Law at the University of Alabama, where he specializes in mental health law. He works with numerous suicide-prevention organizations and is a member of the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Gun Violence.

Jane Richards is in the final stages of completing her doctoral thesis on the application of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to the insanity defence and its disposition orders at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Carl R. Trueman, "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution" (Crossway, 2020)

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

“My aim is to explain how and why a certain notion of the self has come to dominate the culture of the West, why this self finds its most obvious manifestation in the transformation of sexual mores, and what the wider implications of this transformation are and may well be in the future.” So writes Carl Trueman in the introduction to his 2020 book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway Books, 2020)

This is a book that progressives should read in order to better understand how social conservatives perceive the massive societal changes, particularly in the realm of sexual politics and identity, of the last 60 years or so.

It is a book that social conservatives, particularly Christian ones, should read so as to understand the sexual revolution and, in particular, the normalization of transgenderism. Trueman argues that transgenderism cannot be properly understood without a grasp of a centuries-long transformation in how people in Western societies came to understand the nature of human selfhood.

Trueman charts the rise of expressive individualism and how that worldview affects nearly every niche of our lives.

He writes, “The sexual revolution does not simply represent a growth in the routine transgression of traditional sexual codes or even a modest expansion of the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable sexual behavior; rather, it involves the abolition of such codes in their entirety. More than that, it has come in certain areas, such as that of homosexuality, to require the positive repudiation of traditional sexual mores to the point where belief in, or maintenance of, such traditional views has come to be seen as ridiculous and even a sign of serious mental or moral deficiency.”

Trueman elucidates in depth the ideas of three philosophers of the modern condition: Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre. He traces as well the impact on our own times of a range of thinkers and movements including Rousseau, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, the Romantics, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, Freud, surrealism, Hugh Hefner, Anthony Kennedy, Peter Singer, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, and LGBTQ+ activists.

Whatever your political or religious views, this book will endow you with an understanding of the origins of current and future debates about free speech and religious liberty and to judge the merits of the arguments of both sides with humanity.

Give a listen.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Richard Seymour, "The Twittering Machine" (Verso, 2020)

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.

The Twittering Machine (Verso, 2020) is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think.

Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Glenn Sauer, "Points of Contact: Science, Religion, and the Search for Truth" (Orbis Books, 2020)

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

As a scientist and practicing Catholic, Dr. Sauer brings a unique perspective to several of the important issues related to finding a space for dialogue between the at times opposing fields of science and religion. Drawing on insights from Darwin, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Kuhn, and many others, Dr. Sauer presents a powerful and important framework for reconciling the historically changing divide between science and religion. His take is that we need to encourage a stance of intellectual humility on all sides of the discussion as a means for finding common ground--or at least identifying points where we can have fruitful exchanges of ideas about how scientific and religious perspectives can coexist without ongoing conflict. Points of Contact: Science, Religion, and the Search for Truth (Orbis Books, 2020) will be valuable to people who inhabit both sides of this divide and has the potential to generate more openness about what can be radically different ways of seeing the world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Andrew Liu, "Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India" (Yale UP, 2020)

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

After water, tea is the most widely consumed drink in the world. It is beloved by consumers in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and it comes in a bewildering array of varieties: from the cheap sachet of finely ground English black tea to fermented bricks of pu’er from Yunnan province. This beverage also has a fascinating place in the global history of science and capitalism. At the turn of the first millennium, it was prized as a medical concoction in southwestern China, and it became a ubiquitous beverage throughout the Chinese empire during the Tang Dynasty, when its spread coincided with the rising popularity of Buddhism. By the fifteenth century, the preparation of modern loose-leaf tea began to emerge, while the seventeenth century witnessed its ascent as major export commodity for the early Qing Empire, becoming enmeshed in a global circuit of bullion, commodities, and people. Then, during the 19th century, tea became absolute staple in Europe, especially among industrial workers in England, who sweetened the drink with cane sugar imported from the Caribbean. Anxious to stop hemorrhaging bullion to China and eager to assert its imperial self-sufficiency, the British empire fought two Opium Wars that severely weakened the Qing. Around the same time, English capitalists also began to export Chinese workers and knowledge to newly acquired colonial possessions in the Assam region of what is now Northeastern India. It was this aggressive push to begin cultivating tea as a British export commodity in South Asia that gave rise to the global competition between British India and China referenced in the title of Andrew B. Liu’s book: Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (Yale University Press, 2020).

Liu’s book offers a fascinating new history of this ubiquitous beverage, leveraging its production, consumption, and global circulation to offer a fresh and compelling account of capitalist accumulation. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style plantations. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism, one that explicitly highlights global competition and coerced labor as a driving force in economic development.

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here, or find him on twitter here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael E. McCullough, "The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code" (Basic Books, 2020)

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Why Give a Damn About Strangers? In his book The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code (Basic Books, 2020), Michael E. McCullough explains.

McCullough is a professor of psychology at the University of California San Diego, where he directs the Evolution and Human Behavior laboratory. Long interested in prosocial behavior and morality, he’s conducted research on forgiveness, revenge, gratitude, empathy, altruism, and religion. His other books include Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. This episode covers four evolved human instincts related to empathy; why “natural selection is a penny-pincher; and seven hinges of history that explain the historical progression of empathy—culminating in today’s Age of Impact.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Philip Jenkins, "Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions" (Baylor UP, 2020)

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In his new book Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions (Baylor University Press, 2020), Philip Jenkins maps the demographic revolution that has taken hold of many countries around the globe in recent decades and explores the implications for the future development of the world’s religions.

Demographic change has driven the secularization of contemporary Western Europe, where the revolution began. Jenkins shows how the European trajectory of rapid declines in fertility is now affecting much of the globe. The implications are clear: the religious character of many non-European areas is highly likely to move in the direction of sweeping secularization. And this is now reshaping the United States itself.

This demographic revolution is reshaping Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism. In order to accommodate the new social trends, these religions must adapt to situations where large families are no longer the norm. Each religious tradition will develop distinctive emphases concerning morality, gender, and sexuality, as well as the roles of clergy and laity in the faith’s institutional structures.

Radical change follows great upheaval and the tidal shift is well underway, Jenkins argues. In his new book, he describes this ongoing phenomenon and envisions our collective religious future.

Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University and Emeritus Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities with Penn State. He received his PhD in history from Cambridge and has published 29 books, which have been translated into sixteen languages. The Economist magazine has called him “one of America’s best scholars of religion.”

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Joan Scott, "On the Judgment of History" (Columbia UP, 2020)

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Joan Scott’s groundbreaking work in gender and French history is essential reading for any aspiring historian. Indeed, she last joined us on New Books in French Studies to talk about her 2017 book Sex and Secularism. But her latest work, On the Judgment of History (Columbia UP, 2020), is a markedly different endeavor.

Drawing on three starkly different case studies from modern history, Scott critically examines the widely held belief that history, as the final arbiter of truth, will eventually redeem us. In doing so, she tears apart assumptions that underlie our understanding of history. Scott challenges us to question the persistence of structures of power and the very idea of the nation-state, while encouraging us to rethink whether there truly is such a thing as the judgment of history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Margaret Heffernan, "Uncharted: How to Map and Navigate the Future Together" (Simon and Schuster, 2020)

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Today I spoke with Dr Margaret Heffernan about her latest book, Uncharted: How to Map and Navigate the Future Together (Simon and Schuster, 2020). Margaret produced programmes for the BBC for 13 years. She then moved to the US where she became a businesswomen. She is the author of six books and a successful TED Talk speaker. She is also a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath.

In her 2012 TED Talk, ‘Dare to disagree’, she told the story Alice Stewart. This is the story of how clear, certain medical data, are not always enough to change rapidly our professional rules and personal habits.

In her 2019 TED Talk she argued that the more we rely on technology to make us efficient, the fewer skills we have to confront the unexpected. That’s why we need less technology and ‘more messy human skills - imagination, humility, bravery - to solve problems in business, government and life in an unpredictable age’.

In her new book, she explores the people and organizations who aren’t daunted by uncertainty: ‘We are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future. But the complexity of modern life won’t allow that; experts in forecasting are reluctant to look more than 400 days out’.

Uncertainty is clearly an important construct in both macroeconomics and behavioural economics. This book starts with an anecdote on the early life of a great American economist, Irving Fisher. His swimming accident and the discovery of his tuberculosis contributed to the development his research interest in stability and monetary economics.

Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to friendships, this refreshing book challenges us to resist the false promises of technology and efficiency and instead to mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in.

Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milano-Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Co-operative economy and collective ownership. Currently he is associate editor of The Review of Evolutionary Political Economy (REPE)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jeremy England, "Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things" (Basic Books, 2020)

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

“How did life begin? Most things in the universe aren't alive, and yet if you trace the evolutionary history of plants and animals back far enough, you will find that, at some point, neither were we. Scientists have wrestled with the problem through the ages, and yet they still don’t agree on what kind of answer they are even looking for. But in 2013, at just 30 years old, physicist Jeremy England published a paper that has utterly upended the ongoing study of life’s origins.

In Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things (Basic Books, 2020), England presents, for the first time for a general audience, his groundbreaking theory of dissipative adaptation. Described simply, in any disordered system, matter clumps together and breaks apart mostly randomly. But some of the clumps that form momentarily dissipate more energy, and these structures are less likely to fall apart. Over time, they become better at both withstanding the disorder surrounding them and creating copies of themselves. From this deep insight, grounded in thermodynamics, England isolates the emergence of the first life-like behaviors. As he shows, rather than being a stroke of miraculous luck, life-like fine-tuning can emerge in matter under a variety of fairly generic experimental conditions.

In this fascinating account, England walks readers through a range of different concepts in physics and biology to sketch out his novel description of how life might emerge. One of the beauties of his approach is the way it matches recognizably with the messy complexity of the everyday world, from the way sleet slides down a windshield in cold rain to how salt and pepper grains dance together in a pan of heated oil.

But that is not the whole story. While the difference between being alive or not may seem as obvious as night and day, physics does not in fact make a clear distinction. That, as England argues, is a matter of perspective, and throughout the book he describes what he sees as the remarkable synergy between the account of life’s origins given by physics, and the account given in the Hebrew Bible. In so doing, England reckons with what, if anything, science can really tell us about life’s great mysteries.

Full of scientific and philosophical insight, Every Life is on Fire is a singular book from one of the most exciting physicists of his generation.

Jeremy England is senior director in artificial intelligence at GlaxoSmithKline, principal research scientist at Georgia Tech, and is the former Thomas D. & Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. He was a Rhodes Scholar, a Hertz Fellow, and was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 Rising Stars in Science. He lives in Brookline, MA.

Galina Limorenko is a post-doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. You can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

R. Pollin and N. Chomsky, "Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet" (Verso, 2020)

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

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 their policy prescriptions.

Economist Robert Pollin has teamed up with Noam Chomsky to produce a manifesto for the New Green Deal in Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (Verso). Their plan attempts to keep the planet from heating up too much while simultaneously redressing the economic wrongs that they blame substantially on unfettered capitalism.

Not everyone will agree that eco-socialism is the answer to global warming, but all participants in the debate will want to understand the wide range of policy proposals that are being brought to the table.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.

Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics and founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @HistoryInvestor or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David Haig, "From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life" (MIT Press, 2020)

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In his book, From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life (MIT Press), evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning.

Natural selection is a process without purpose, yet gives rise to purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. Haig proposes that the key to this is the origin of mutable “texts” that preserve a record of what has worked in the world, in other words: genes. These texts become the specifications for the intricate mechanisms of living beings.

Haig draws on a wide range of sources to make his argument, from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment to the work of Jacques Derrida to the latest findings on gene transmission, duplication, and expression.

Genes and their effects, he explains, are like eggs and chickens. Eggs exist for the sake of becoming chickens and chickens for the sake of laying eggs. A gene's effects have a causal role in determining which genes are copied. The gene persists if its lineage has been consistently associated with survival and reproduction. Organisms can be understood as interpreters that link information from the environment to meaningful action in the environment.

Meaning, Haig argues, is the output of a process of interpretation; there is a continuum from the very simplest forms of interpretation, found in single RNA molecules near the origins of life, to the most sophisticated, like those found in human beings. Life is interpretation—the use of information in choice.

David Haig is George Putnam Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Because he is a theorist, his research is wide and varied, working on everything from maternal-fetal conflict in human pregnancy to the evolution of plant life cycles. He has a particular interest in genetic conflicts within individual organisms, as exemplified by genomic imprinting.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matthew Yglesias, "One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger" (Portfolio, 2020)

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

What would actually make America great? More people.

If the most challenging crisis in living memory has shown us anything, it’s that America has lost the will and the means to lead. From one of our foremost policy writers, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger (Portfolio) is the provocative yet logical argument that if we aren’t moving forward, we’re losing.

Vox founder Matthew Yglesias invites us to think bigger, while taking the problems of decline seriously. What really contributes to national prosperity should not be controversial: supporting parents and children, welcoming immigrants and their contributions, and exploring creative policies that support growth—like more housing, better transportation, improved education, revitalized welfare, and climate change mitigation. Drawing on examples and solutions from around the world, Yglesias shows not only that we can do this, but why we must.

Making the case for massive population growth with analytic rigor and imagination, One Billion Americans issues a radical but undeniable challenge: Why not do it all, and stay on top forever?

Matthew Yglesias is a founder of Vox, a host of the podcast The Weeds, and the author of the book The Rent is Too Damn High (Simon & Schuster, 2012). He lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter. Website.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. A Maine native, he lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David J. Hand, "Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters (Princeton University Press, 2020) is unique in this genre for its focus on those data that aren't collected or don't get analyzed. More than an introduction to missingness and how to account for it, this book proposes that the whole of data analysis can benefit from a "dark data" perspective—that is, careful consideration of not only what is seen but what is unseen. David assembles wide-ranging examples, from the histories of science and finance to his own research and consultancy, to show how this perspective can shed new light on concepts as classical as random sampling and survey design and as cutting-edge as machine learning and the measurement of honesty. I expect the book to inspire the same enjoyment and reflection in general readers as it is sure to in statisticians and other data analysts.

Suggested companion work: Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.

Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jered Rubin, "Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge UP, 2020) addresses one of the big questions in economics and economic history: why did the modern economy emerge in northwestern Europe at some point in the 17th or 18th century but not in the Middle East? After all, for centuries following the spread of Islam, the Middle East was far ahead of Europe – on both technological and economic terms.

Jared Rubin argues that the religion itself is not to blame; the importance of religious legitimacy in Middle Eastern politics was the primary factor. In much of the Muslim world, religious authorities were given an important seat at the political bargaining table, which they used to block important advancements such as the printing press and usury. In Europe, however, the Church played a weaker role in legitimizing rule, especially where Protestantism spread (indeed, the Reformation was successful due to the spread of printing, which was blocked in the Middle East). It was precisely in those Protestant nations, especially England and the Dutch Republic, where the modern economy was born.

In this interview, Jared shares with us his opinions on a wide range of topics – from the work of Jared Diamond and the theories of Max Weber, to his serendipitous journey in academia that led him to write his first book.

Joshua Tham is an undergraduate reading History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include economic history, sociolinguistics, and the "linguistic turn" in historiography.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Christopher Newfield, "The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

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 higher education.

He argues that since roughly the 1980s, American public universities have entered into a devolutionary cycle of defunding brought about by privatization. The influence of private sector practices on public higher education, Newfield argues, has fundamentally shifted the view of higher education in American society from a public good to a private good.

Despite this bleak assessment, Newfield’s book provides a roadmap for how to fix this crisis in public higher education. A central component of his plan is recognizing the university as a public good by acknowledging its wide range of benefits to society and democracy more generally.

Newfield’s book will interest scholars from many disciplines, including higher education, U.S. political history, and the history of inequality in America.

Christopher Newfield is a professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Saqib Iqbal Qureshi, "The Broken Contract: Making Our Democracies Accountable, Representative, and Less Wasteful" (Lioncrest, 2020)

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

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 own bubble, detached from us?

In reality, our democracy is not performing as it should, which has left us fed up with a system we no longer trust. Moreover, we lack a mechanism to fix what’s broken, because there is no incentive for politicians and civil servants to make government more accountable, efficient, and representative.

Saqib Iqbal Qureshi is calling on his fellow citizens to assert their voice in the dialogue of democracy. In The Broken Contract: Making Our Democracies Accountable, Representative, and Less Wasteful (Lioncrest Publishing, 2020), he puts forth solutions—many involving easy-to-implement technologies. It’s up to us to turn the ship around. If you’re looking for the best way to start a conversation with your elected and unelected officials, this is the book you need.

Saqib Iqbal Qureshi is a Fellow of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he completed his undergraduate and PhD degrees.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, "Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

College courses in Ethics tend to focus on theories of the moral rightness or wrongness of actions. This emphasis sometimes obscures the fact that morality is a social project: part of what makes a decent and stable society possible is that we uphold standards of conduct. We call out bad behavior, blame wrongdoers, and praise those who do the right things. We apologize and forgive in public ways. In short, we hold one another responsible. Again, this is all necessary. However, we are all familiar with the ways in which the acts associated with upholding morality can go wrong. For instance, blame can be excessive, apologies can be patronizing, and so on. Another way in which things can go wrong is when people wield morality opportunistically – for self-aggrandizement, or to elevate themselves in the eyes of others.

In Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk (Oxford University Press, 2020), Brandon Warmke and Justin Tosi call this broad type of moral breakdown grandstanding. Their book examines the different kinds of grandstanding, demonstrates why grandstanding is morally bad, and proposes some tips for avoiding it.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Eric Holthaus, "The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming" (HarperOne, 2020)

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

We sit at the beginning of what could be “both a truly terrifying and a golden era in humanity.” In The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming (HarperOne, 2020), leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”–Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face.

This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed in the face of the coming calamities. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to reaffirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.

Eric Holthaus is the leading journalist on all things weather and climate change. He has written regularly for the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Grist, and The Correspondent, where he currently covers our interconnected relationship with the climate. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

George Lawson, "Anatomies of Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The success of populist politicians and the emergence of social justice movements around the world, and the recent demonstrations against police violence in the United States, demonstrate a widespread desire for fundamental political, economic, and social change, albeit not always in a leftwards direction. What can movements and parties that hope to bring about fundamental social change learn from the past?

In Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019), George Lawson analyzes revolutionary episodes from the modern era (beginning with the Glorious Revolution of 1688) to discern how geopolitics, transnational circulation of ideas and people, organizational capabilities, and contingent choices come together to shape the emergence of revolutionary situations and the trajectories and outcomes of revolutions. He also explains why more moderate negotiated revolutions have been more common than far-reaching social revolutions since the 1980s.

Finally, he suggests that the key for social movements to take advantage of systemic crises that could provide openings for revolutionary situations to emerge is the ability of opposition groups to form cohesive political organizations without succumbing to the authoritarianism and the “ends justify the means” logic that turned revolutionary forces into violent, authoritarian regimes in the past.

George Lawson is Associate Professor, Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nathan G. Alexander, "Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914" (NYU Press, 2019)

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Is modern racism a product of secularization and the decline of Christian universalism? The debate has raged for decades, but up to now, the actual racial views of historical atheists and freethinkers have never been subjected to a systematic analysis.

In his new book, Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914, Nathan Alexander sets out to correct the oversight. The book centres on Britain and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when popular atheist movements were emerging and skepticism about the truth of Christianity was becoming widespread.

This newly embraced secularization created a paradox. How could Western civilization represent the pinnacle of human progress, as most white atheists accepted, when the majority of these societies still believed in Christianity? The result of this tension was a profound ambivalence regarding issues of racial and civilizational superiority. At times, white atheists assented to scientific racism and hierarchical conceptions of civilization; at others, they denounced racial prejudice and spoke favorably of non-white, non-Western civilizations.

Covering racial and evolutionary science, imperialism, slavery, and racial prejudice in theory and practice, Alexander’s book provides a much-needed account of the complex and sometimes contradictory ideas espoused by the transatlantic community of atheists and freethinkers. It also reflects on the social dimension of irreligiousness, exploring how working-class atheists’ experiences of exclusion could make them sympathetic to other marginalized groups.

Nathan Alexander is a Canadian historian, researching the history of race and racism, and the history of atheism and secularization. He finished his PhD at the University of St Andrews in the UK and was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies with the University of Erfurt, Germany.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

James C. Scott, "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States" (Yale UP, 2017)

Thu, 04 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

We are schooled to believe that states formed more or less synchronously with settlement and agriculture. In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017), James C. Scott asks us to question this belief. The evidence, he says, is simply not on the side of states. Stratified, taxing, walled towns did not inevitably appear in the wake of crop domestication and sedentary settlement. Only around 3100 BCE, some four millennia after the earliest farming and settling down, did they begin making their presence felt. What happened in these four millennia is the subject of this book: a deep history by “a card-carrying political scientist and an anthropologist and environmentalist by courtesy”, which aims to put the earliest states in their place.

James Scott joins us for the fourth episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to talk about state fragility and state persistence from Mesopotamia to Southeast Asia, the politics of cereal crops, domestication and reproduction, why it was once good to be a barbarian, the art of provocation, the views of critics, and, human and animal species relations and zoonoses in our epidemiological past and pandemic present.

To download or stream episodes in this series please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science.

Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

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, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)

Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.

John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

B. Earp and J. Savulescu, "Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships" (Stanford UP, 2020) )

Mon, 11 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Consider a couple with an infant (or two) whose lives have become so harried and difficult the marriage is falling apart. Would it be ethical for them to take oxytocin to help them renew their emotional bonds, or would this be an unethical evasion of the hard work that keeping a marriage going requires? What if someone has sexual desires that they consider immoral – should they be able to take a drug to suppress those desires, or alternatively can society force them to? Debates about the ethics of using drugs for enhancement rather than treatment usually focus on the individual, such as doping in sports.

In Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships (Stanford University Press, 2020), Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu consider the case for using drugs to alter our love relationships. Earp, who is Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and and Health Policy at Yale University, and Savulescu, the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, note that drugs that alter sexual desire and attachment are already available, although are restricted or illegal. What is needed, they argue, is more research into the interpersonal effects of drugs, and more discussion of the ethics of their use for non-medical purposes. Let’s turn to a fascinating interview on a complex topic with no easy answers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Yael Tamir, "Why Nationalism?" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Mon, 04 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Around the world today, nationalism is back—and it’s often deeply troubling. Populist politicians exploit nationalism for authoritarian, chauvinistic, racist, and xenophobic purposes, reinforcing the view that it is fundamentally reactionary and antidemocratic.

But Yael (Yuli) Tamir makes a passionate argument for a very different kind of nationalism—one that revives its participatory, creative, and egalitarian virtues, answers many of the problems caused by neoliberalism and hyperglobalism, and is essential to democracy at its best. In Why Nationalism? (Princeton University Press, 2019), she explains why it is more important than ever for the Left to recognize these qualities of nationalism, to reclaim it from right-wing extremists, and to redirect its power to progressive ends.

Far from being an evil force, nationalism’s power lies in its ability to empower individuals and answer basic human needs. Using it to reproduce cross-class coalitions will ensure that all citizens share essential cultural, political, and economic goods. Shifting emphasis from the global to the national and putting one’s nation first is not a way of advocating national supremacy but of redistributing responsibilities and sharing benefits in a more democratic and just way. In making the case for a liberal and democratic nationalism, Tamir also provides a compelling original account of the ways in which neoliberalism and hyperglobalism have allowed today’s Right to co-opt nationalism for its own purposes.

Provocative and hopeful, Why Nationalism is a timely and essential rethinking of a defining feature of our politics.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, Middle East television commentator, and host of the Van Leer Series on Ideas with Renee Garfinkel

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

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 scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.

The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Wade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020)

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity―but we don't. Where is everybody? In Extraterrestrials (MIT Press, 2020), science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Valerie Hansen, "The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World -- and Globalization Began" (Scribner, 2020)

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Globalization is a modern phenomenon with a longer past than most people realize. As Valerie Hansen explains in her book The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began (Scribner, 2020), globalization became a reality a millennia ago when a series of unrelated events established the framework for a truly global pathway. Key to this, she demonstrates, were the Vikings, whose voyages westward from Greenland connected people from Afro-Eurasia to the Western Hemisphere for the first time in thousands of years. There they came into contact with peoples who already forging connections that could stretch across the Americas, as seen in the archaeological record today. The trade she chronicles involved many commodities, from cloth, beads, and amber to gold, ivory, and slaves, all of which often crossed considerable distances to find markets in various parts of the world. Hansen uses the development of the trade during this period to examine the establishment of both new bonds and new boundaries throughout the globe, ones that continue to define the world as we know it today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Thomas Piketty, "Capital and Ideology" (Harvard UP, 2020)

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations - Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time

Thomas Piketty, the French economist, was dubbed the modern Marx by The Economist in the wake of his bestselling Capital in the 21st Century, which presented historical data reaching back to the eighteenth century and focused on the dynamics of the distribution of wealth and income and the destabilizing force represented by: r > g – that is, the private rate of return on capital over time can be much higher than the rate of growth of income and output. Readers noted however, in addition to pointing out this ‘central contradiction of capitalism’ Professor Piketty was also clear that the purpose of social science is not to produce mathematical certainties that substitute for inclusive democratic debate. More importantly, he made the case for the progressive taxation of capital, and among many other things for going back to using the term ‘political economy’ for the field of economics – all of which did not render his analysis Marxist, although admittedly, the label made for more catchy magazine column titles in 2014.

Six years in the making Piketty has extended the hopeful reach of his analysis by including a much larger global sampling of historical data – not just Western market economies this time, and by expanding the focus to include the political and ideological in his comparative analysis of capital accumulation and ‘inequality regimes’. The professor does so with the same underlying optimism and realistic eye on promoting the social learning process in which we all find ourselves as individuals within various cultures and societies. Enter his expanded interdisciplinary contribution to comparative political economy – Capital and Ideology (Harvard University Press, 2020) – essential reading.

Thomas Piketty is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, and a Director of The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences.

Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

K. Aronoff, et al., "A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal" (Verso, 2019)

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

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 combating climate change, it stunned a number of people due to its enormous ambition, including massive overhauls of our energy systems, as well as providing housing and healthcare for everyone. Naturally a piece of legislation this large raised a number of questions, which is what my guests today are here to discuss. I recently had the pleasure of talking with Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Thea Riofrancos, the authors of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso, 2019). The book is short and accessible, written for everyone interested in understanding this vital piece of legislation, so if you are like me and you don’t understand the fine details of climate economics, you can still pick this up and gain a sense of what is to be done. The book also features a short forward by Naomi Klein, who has been tracking the relationship between economic and climate politics for some time.

Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) is a fellow at the Type Media Center and a Contributing Writer at the Intercept. She is the co-editor of We Own the Future and author of The New Denialism. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, In These Times, and Dissent

Alyssa Battistoni (@alybatt) is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and an editor at Jacobin. Her writing has appeared the Guardian, n+1, The Nation, Jacobin, In These Times, Dissent, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Daniel Aldana Cohen (@aldatweets) is an assistant professor of sociolgy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Nature, The Nation, Jacobin, Public Books, Dissent, and NACLA.

Thea Riofrancos (@triofrancos) is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College, and is the author of Resource Radicals. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, n+1, Jacobin, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Dissent, and In These Times. She serves on the steering committee of DSA’s Ecosocialist Working Group.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

V. Hudson, D. Bowen, P. Nielsen, "The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide" (Columbia UP, 2020)

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Global history records an astonishing variety of forms of social organization. Yet almost universally, males subordinate females. How does the relationship between men and women shape the wider political order? Valerie M. Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen's new book The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide (Columbia University Press, 2020) is a groundbreaking demonstration that the persistent and systematic subordination of women underlies all other institutions, with wide-ranging implications for global security and development.

Incorporating research findings spanning a variety of social science disciplines and comprehensive empirical data detailing the status of women around the globe, the book shows that female subordination functions almost as a curse upon nations. A society’s choice to subjugate women has significant negative consequences: worse governance, worse conflict, worse stability, worse economic performance, worse food security, worse health, worse demographic problems, worse environmental protection, and worse social progress. Yet despite the pervasive power of social and political structures that subordinate women, history—and the data—reveal possibilities for progress.

The First Political Order shows that when steps are taken to reduce the hold of inequitable laws, customs, and practices, outcomes for all improve. It offers a new paradigm for understanding insecurity, instability, autocracy, and violence, explaining what the international community can do now to promote more equitable relations between men and women and, thereby, security and peace. With comprehensive empirical evidence of the wide-ranging harm of subjugating women, it is an important book for security scholars, social scientists, policy makers, historians, and advocates for women worldwide.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Samuel Gregg, "Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization" (Gateway, 2019)

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

So what is Western Civilization, anyway? The term itself is under assault from progressives, as if the very notion is somehow passé and is not inclusive enough in a globalized world.

But, the fact is, our daily lives in the U.S and throughout much of the world are governed by core values and concepts that grow out of two inextricably linked aspects of the human condition: faith and reason. You don’t have to be a religious person to benefit from gaining an understanding of how the pairing of reason and faith is one of the hallmarks of Western Civilization and is unique to it.

In his illuminating 2019 work of intellectual history, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (Gateway, 2019), Samuel Gregg demonstrates that key features of what we call the West--from the market economy to scientific advancement and the quest for human freedom and justice--are rooted in the relationship between faith and reason. He shows, for example, that the Enlightenment has been misleadingly portrayed as almost wholly anti-religious in nature whereas many of its leading figures were in fact deeply devout and welcomed the development of new fields of study and were, indeed, often pioneers in them.

Gregg examines key historical events such as the Regensburg Lecture delivered in 2006 by Pope Benedict XVI (and which led to mass demonstrations and riots in parts of the Muslim world) and the origins of the idea of a reasoning, reasonable God in ancient Judaism and early Christianity in order to argue that Western Civilization is worth preserving in an era of Jihadism and other mortal threats to values we all cherish such as religious freedom, freedom of speech, and human rights and dignity.

In his book, Gregg compellingly argues that a renewed commitment to the foundational linkage of faith and reason is not only possible but imperative for everyone on the planet who does not wish to live under tyranny. Give a listen.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sir John Redwood, "We Don't Believe You: Why Populists and the Establishment See the World Differently" (Bite-Sized Books, 2019)

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In We Don't Believe You: Why Populists and the Establishment See the World Differently (Bite-Sized Book, 2019), Sir John Redwood gives us fresh insights into why the populist movements and parties have been winning elections. He looks at how the experts and narrative pushed out by the established elites on both sides of the Atlantic have met with disbelief as well as with strong opposition. He shows how great parties have been all but destroyed as election winning forces as new movements and people sweep them aside.

From the establishment himself as an expert and a member of one of the traditional parties, he seeks to show how the sensible elites adjust and respond to new moods and new ideas instead of confronting or denying them. In too many cases a rigid and unhappy elite just keeps shouting back the same things people do not want to hear.

One of the worst features of what is happening is the inability of the two sides to understand each other or to work together. The establishment shows scorn for the populists and keeps reasserting the same policies and attitudes as if nothing had happened. The populists show they do not believe the analysis let alone the prescription of established institutions and governments, and seek to sweep them all away.

Can the main institutions of the western world adapt in time to the new mood?

Sir John Redwood is Conservative MP for Wokingham in the UK, first elected in 1987. He was formerly Secretary of State for Wales in John Major's Cabinet, and twice a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party in the 1990s. He is also a Distinguished fellow of All Souls, Oxford and the author of 23 books on a wide range of subjects, from atheism in early modern British history, to 21st century economics, to politics and government. He always has very insightful and often bold things to say on all these topics.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

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 rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction.

The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Olivier Roy, "Is Europe Christian?" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Olivier Roy, who is professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, is one of the most influential analysts of religion and secularisation in late modernity. Today he joins us to talk about his new book, Is Europe Christian?, which was published by Hurst in 2019 and Oxford University Press in 2020. Roy wrote the book to intervene in contemporary debates among European populists who lay claim to the Christian heritage of Europe without often embracing its values. This important new book is some ways a meditation on the success of the countercultural values of the 1960s, which have become so embedded in the legal and political cultures of late modernity as to be virtually unassailable, even by conservative forces that campaign against them. What does the success of 1960s values mean for the reiteration of religious identities? And how have the European churches responded to the appropriation of their heritage by political forces who may not adopt or even approve of the moral values they espouse? Professor Roy’s new book is an important contribution to a very difficult discussion.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

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 McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Douglas Murray, "The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity" (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019)

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

International bestselling author Douglas Murray examines in his latest book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019) the twenty-first century's most divisive issues: sexuality, gender, technology and race. He reveals the astonishing new culture wars playing out in our workplaces, universities, schools and homes in the names of social justice, identity politics and intersectionality.

Murray argues that we are living through a postmodern era in which the grand narratives of religion and political ideology have collapsed. In their place have emerged a crusading desire to right perceived wrongs and a weaponization of identity, both accelerated by the new forms of social and news media. Narrow sets of interests now dominate the agenda as society becomes more and more tribal--and, as Murray shows, the casualties are mounting, threatening the real gains that have been made by these very struggles.

Douglas Murray is an author and journalist based in Britain. He has been a contributor to the Spectator since 2000 and has been Associate Editor at the magazine since 2012. He has also written regularly for numerous other outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Sunday Times, the Sun, Evening Standard and the New Criterion. He is a regular contributor to National Review and has been a columnist for Standpoint magazine since its founding.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Lee Drutman, "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

There are quite a few authors writing about the problems facing American democracy and how best to solve those problems. Many of the problematic issues devolve to the question of representation – and how to shift or change the American political system so that it better represents the voters themselves and the plurality of perspectives and opinions across the country. Lee Drutman’s new book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America (Oxford UP, 2020) dives into both the problems with the current political dynamic and the possible solutions. As the title indicates, Drutman’s analysis investigates the current binary “doom loop” of two internally consistent parties, and the elected officials who rarely have to compromise within the Madisonian system set up to compel compromise. Drutman’s examination takes the reader through the historical shifts in terms of the parties themselves and American political development, and how Americans have come to find themselves in this “doom loop.” Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop also explores contemporary “toxic politics” and the existential threat that every election seems to pose for parties, partisans, those in elected office, and ultimately for the country itself and public policies. Ultimately, Drutman proposes a number of reforms that, without amending the Constitution, could, as he says, break this doom loop and open up opportunities for more actual representation. Following the examples of a number of cities in the U.S. and the state of Maine, Drutman posits that electoral reform, especially options like ranked choice voting, would shift the dynamic during campaigns, and would lead to coalition building and compromise by lawmakers and elected officials in office. The final section of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America makes the case for how a multiparty system in the United States would work without amending the political institutions established by the Constitution. This is, ultimately, an optimistic book with a variety of proposals designed to untangle some of the persistent knots within the American political system.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matthew Gutmann, "Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short" (Basic Books, 2019)

Wed, 12 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Matthew Gutmann is professor of anthropology at Brown University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

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 working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you.

Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Neil McArthur, "Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications" (MIT Press, 2017)

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Sexbots are coming. Given the pace of technological advances, it is inevitable that realistic robots specifically designed for people's sexual gratification will be developed in the not-too-distant future. Despite popular culture's fascination with the topic, and the emergence of the much-publicized Campaign Against Sex Robots, there has been little academic research on the social, philosophical, moral, and legal implications of robot sex. Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications (MIT Press, 2017), edited by Neil McArthur and John Danaher, fills the gap, offering perspectives from philosophy, psychology, religious studies, economics, and law on the possible future of robot-human sexual relationships.

Contributors discuss what a sex robot is, if they exist, why we should take the issue seriously, and what it means to “have sex” with a robot. They make the case for developing sex robots, arguing for their beneficial nature, and the case against it, on religious and moral grounds; they consider the subject from the robot's perspective, addressing such issues as consent and agency; and they ask whether it is possible for a human to form a mutually satisfying, loving relationship with a robot. Finally, they speculate about the future of human-robot sexual interaction, considering the social acceptability of sex robots and the possible effect on society.

John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

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 share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.

However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.

In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jonathan Rothwell, "A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

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 least of all, what to do about it. Join us to hear Jonathan Rothwell talk about his new book, A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), which pushes back against some of the conventional wisdom about the sources of inequality to offer his own provocative diagnosis of the problem and proposed remedies for it.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Richard Robb, "Willful: How We Choose What We Do" (Yale UP, 2019)

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Tired of the mechanical, narrowly rational human behavior of the Chicago school, but not exactly comforted by the emphasis on irrational activity in behavioral economics? So am I. Richard Robb, professor at Columbia and fund manager, offers a third way. In Willful: How We Choose What We Do (Yale University Press, 2019), Robb develops the notion of "for itself" behavior and decision making that can't be reduced to the algorithms of calculating machines, or even those that are adjusted for human foibles. Willful is not a comprehensive theory of decision making, but an effort to reinsert some element of humanity into explanations of how individuals and groups act. It is a work along the lines of "life is a journey, not a destination" but one well enriched by a wide reading of ancient and modern philosophers.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

What are Empires and Why do they Matter?

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

You hear a lot about "empires," but what are they? Do they still exist? And why does it matter? Today I talked to Jeremy Black about empires, historical and present. Jeremy has thought deeply about empires, and written a lot about them. We discussed them from, if not every angle, at least a good number of them. It turns out (as you might expect) that there are empires and there are empires... Listen in.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert Talisse, "Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

In the United States in particular, there is almost no social space today, whether that’s Thanksgiving dinner or going shopping, that has not become saturated with political meaning. In Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in Its Place (Oxford University Press, 2019), Robert Talisse argues that contrary to what many democratic theorists have argued, democracy is something we can do too much of – and that it is in fact being overdone. Talisse, who is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, notes that features of everyday life are overwhelmingly transformed into expressions of political identity, and argues that this transformation undermines democracy itself, since it undermines our capacity for civic friendship, or the capacity to see our political rivals as our equals. His book is a provocative contribution to discussion among political theorists about the problems facing contemporary democracy; from a practical standpoint, he also suggests that a way to counter this situation is to consciously seek out social interactions where politics is off the table.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John Gribbin, "Six Impossible Things: The ‘Quanta of Solace’ and the Mysteries of the Subatomic World" (Icon Books, 2019)

Tue, 05 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Today's podcast is on the book Six Impossible Things: The ‘Quanta of Solace’ and the Mysteries of the Subatomic World (Icon Book, 2019) by the noted author John Gribbin. Although there have been a number of good books on quantum mechanics, this short book is my favorite, and I recommend it highly. The book details the central mystery of quantum mechanics, and outlines several interpretations that have been proposed. I’ve never seen these interpretations so clearly and succinctly stated, and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how physicists have tried to come to grips with one of the Universe’s most perplexing mysteries.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing

Sun, 03 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

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 called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.

How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

C. Strachan and L. Poloni-Staudinger, "Why Don′t Women Rule the World?: Understanding Women′s Civic and Political Choices" (Sage, 2019)

Wed, 09 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Why Don′t Women Rule the World?: Understanding Women′s Civic and Political Choices (Sage, 2019) is a comprehensive and useful addition to the established literature on women and politics. This book, authored by four political scientists with a diversity of training and expertise, delves into a broad and extensive overview of the issues that have long surrounded women in civic life and in pursuing positions of power and leadership. J. Cherie Strachan and Lori M. Poloni-Staudinger, Shannon L. Jenkins, Candice D. Ortbals start with an anthropological understanding of how and where sex-specific societal roles were established, leading to the establishment of patriarchal structures and societal norms, and how these structures, norms, expectations, and roles have long kept women out of the public sphere. The thrust of Why Don’t Women Rule the World? is to help students and scholars understand women and politics, analyzing the limits that women have faced, and exploring how and where these limits have been dismantled and where they still remain. While the book is generally focused on women and politics in the United States, it is not limited to this perspective, and ably integrates comparative analyses and global examples of women and politics. The book also provides “ambition activities” at the end of each chapter, allowing readers, especially students, to consider their own capacities within the context of the information and knowledge they are learning about throughout the book. This is an excellent textbook for anyone teaching or working within the field of women and politics, but it is also accessible and useful for general readers who want to learn more about women and politics.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Judith Grisel, "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Doubleday, 2019)

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Harriet Washington, "A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind" (Little, Brown Spark, 2019)

Mon, 09 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

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 Native Americans. So argues science writer Harriet Washington in A Terrible to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind (Little, Brown Spark 2019). While acknowledging IQ is a biased and flawed metric, she contends it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Using copious data and synthesizing a generation of studies, Washington calculates the staggering, population-scale neurological effects of marginalized communities having been forced to live and work in landscapes of waste, pollution, and insufficient sanitation services. She investigates heavy metals, neurotoxins, asthma, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and even pathogens as drags on cognitive development to explain why communities of color are disproportionately affected—and what can be done to remedy this devastating problem.

Harriet A. Washington has been the Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, and a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law. She is the author of Deadly Monopolies, Infectious Madness, and Medical Apartheid, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Charles King, "Gods of the Upper Air: How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century" (Doubleday, 2019)

Wed, 04 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

American anthropologists consider Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead to be foundational figures, but outside the academy few people know the details of their ideas. In this new volume, Charles King provides a carefully-researched and beautifully-written history of the Boas Circle that everyone will enjoy reading. King covers the period from Boas's birth to the publication of Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, combining the personal and intellectual histories of authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and of course Boas himself. Above all, Gods of the Upper Air: How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century(Doubleday, 2019) is a reminder of the central ideas of Boasian anthropology: a recognition that gender roles and racial assumptions are cultural constructions and not biological facts, and that we must be willing to question our own comfortable assumptions while the same time recognising the validity of careful scientific work. In an America where racial intolerance is on the rise, it seems likely that the insights of the Boasians will be as relevant in 2020 as they were in 1920, which makes it all the more important to revisit these seminal figures.

In this episode of the podcast Charles talk to host Alex Golub about the romantic and professional drama of the Boasians, the need for a science that can be self-critical without abandoning self-confidence, the continuing legacy of race in the United States, and how and why Charles wrote such a wide-ranging history of anthropology.

Charles King is a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University. He is the author of six previous books, including Midnight at the Pera Palace, which received the French Prix du livre de voyage; and Odessa, winner of a National Jewish Book Award.

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of the article "Welcoming the New Amateurs: A future (and past) for non-academic anthropologists" as well as other books and articles.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Cyril Ghosh, "De-Moralizing Gay Rights: Some Queer Remarks on LGBT+ Rights Politics in the US" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Fri, 09 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In his book, De-Moralizing Gay Rights: Some Queer Remarks on LGBT+ Rights Politics in the US(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Cyril Ghosh interrogates three arenas of debate over LGBT+ rights in the contemporary American landscape—debates over and critiques of pinkwashing, the recent US Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), and Kenji Yoshino’s concept of gay covering. Ghosh is associate professor of political science at Wagner College and was the original host of the New Books in Political Science podcast.

In each case, Ghosh identifies a tension in the promotion of LGBT+ rights, from both liberal and radical perspectives, demonstrating that these discourses often (re/)produce their own assimilationist logics. Drawing on queer theoretical frameworks, Ghosh ultimately argues for an approach to theorizing rights that takes seriously the project of resisting and dismantling assimilationist demands.

The podcast is co-hosted by Heath Brown and Emily Crandall.

Heath Brown is associate professor of public policy at the City University of New York, John Jay College and The Graduate Center. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown

Emily K. Crandall holds a PhD in Political Science from the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Beckley, "Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World's Sole Superpower" (Cornell UP, 2018)

Wed, 07 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The United States has been the world's dominant power for more than a century. Now many analysts and commentators believe that other countries such as China are rising and the United States is in decline. Is the era of American hegemony over? Is America finished as a superpower?

In his superb and learned book, Unrivaled: Why America Will remain the World's Sole Superpower(Cornell University Press, 2018), Michael Beckley, Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tufts University cogently argues that the United States has unique advantages over other nations that, if used wisely, will allow it to remain the world's sole superpower throughout this century. We are not living in a transitional, post-hegemonic, pluralist era. Instead, we are in the midst of what he calls the unipolar era―a period as singular and important as any epoch in modern history. This era, Beckley contends, will endure because the US has a much larger economic and military lead over its closest rival, China, than most people think and the best prospects of any nation to amass wealth and power in the decades ahead.

Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Professor Beckley’s book covers hundreds of years of great power politics and develops new methods for measuring power and predicting the rise and fall of nations. According to Chatham House’s International Affairs, Unrivaled, “is by far the most comprehensive analysis to date on the power dynamics of the international system and clearly debunks the established narrative on US decline”. By documenting long-term trends in the global balance of power and explaining their implications for world politics, the book provides guidance for policymakers, businesspeople, and scholars alike.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Stefan Al, "Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies" (Island Press, 2018)

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Stefan Al, PhD, is a native of the Netherlands, a low-lying county that would not exist without flood protection, is an architect, urban designer, and infrastructure expert at global design at Kohn Pedersen Fox in New York. He has served as a TED resident, advisor to the United Nations High Level Political Forum on sustainable development and Professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania.

Adapting Cities to Sea Level Rise: Green and Gray Strategies(Island Press, 2018) is a tool kit for adapting and managing sea level rise and storm events for metropolitan cities and smaller communities. It’s a “how to” guide to create better comprehensive strategies and ideas for implementation. The beautiful and simple diagrams illustrate the difference responses possible for cities and the pros and cons of each. The book makes the argument that collaboration is the key to finding successful solutions for all stakeholders.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Violet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found" (Doubleday, 2019)

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Doubleday, 2019), Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria and Constantinople, to Baghdad in 800, and then to Renaissance Venice in the 15th century. Moller demonstrates how tenuous were the chances of such ancient works’ survival, from the depredations of invading armies to the hazards of fire and flooding, to the problems of translation through multiple languages over the centuries. The migration of ancient texts from Greece to the Middle East and back to medieval Europe is a fascinating story of how knowledge was preserved when certain conditions were met, such as political stability, the willingness of itinerant scholarly “manuscript hunters” to risk life and limb to find obscure, ancient texts, and the openness to tolerate and embrace knowledge derived from other cultures and civilizations. Moller’s book is the story of how the texts upon which the modern world was built were acquired through fortuitous accident and scholarly diligence.

Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John Quiggen, "Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Mon, 29 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Trying to follow the key macroeconomic debates that are swirling around DC, CNBC, the WSJ and the NYT? If you are but don't want to go back to graduate school or re-open your college macroeconomics textbook, John Quiggen has a solution. His Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly (Princeton University Press, 2019) achieves several goals. First, it frames the current debates, providing a concise, well-written history of macroeconomics and the key twists and turns in economic policy that have brought us to our current state of (general) disagreement on economic policy. Second, he structures his view of macroeconomics as a rebuttal to a 1946 book by Henry Hazlitt in 1946 called Economics in One Lesson. Seventy years later, Quiggin counters Hazlitt's view that markets are "correct," in that their prices accurately reflect opportunity costs for buyers and sellers. Quiggen's second lesson highlights the externalities and factors that distort those opportunity costs and lead to suboptimal outcomes such as extended unemployment, excessive income inequality, and the seemingly intractable problem (from an economics perspective) of pollution. In the final portion of his book, Quiggen argues what policies he thinks would make markets work better by generating a more accurate understanding of opportunity costs. To some, his prescriptions will look like the program of the Left. The great irony is that his goal is to make markets function better, not rid us of them. Whether you agree with his prescriptions are not, this is a very interesting book and a great way for non-economists to get up to speed on current debates and policy issues without having to do a single test for statistical significance or worry about heteroscedasticity.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David R. Montgomery, "Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life" (W. W. Norton, 2018)

Fri, 26 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (W. W. Norton & Co., 2018), Dr. David R. Montgomery portrays hope amidst the backdrop that for centuries, agricultural practices have eroded the soil that farming depends on, stripping it of the organic matter vital to its productivity. Once a self-proclaimed dark green eco-pessimist, Dr. Montgomery finds this new hope as he travels the world, meeting farmers at the forefront of an agricultural movement to restore soil health. Readers join him driving passed no-till, precision agriculture fields in Kansas to walking around The Centre for No-Till Agriculture in Kumasi, Ghana. Each step of the way we are reminded that adopting the three tenets of conservation agriculture—ditching the plow, planting cover crops, and growing a diversity of crops—is the solution to align agricultural production and environmental outcomes. Throughout the book, evidence mounts -- maybe farmers and ranchers can feed the world, cool the planet, reduce pollution, and return profitability to the farm.

What’s unique and refreshing, Dr. Montgomery cuts through the typical debates about conventional versus organic farming. Instead, Montgomery explores why practices based on the principles of conservation agriculture help restore soil health and fertility – naturally reducing the reliance on herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.

Chris Gambino works at the intersection of science and policy in hopes of creating more informed decision-making.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Paul Sutter, "Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence" (Prometheus, 2018)

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence (Prometheus, 2018), Paul Sutter presents an in-depth yet accessible tour of the universe for lay readers, while conveying the excitement of astronomy.How is a galaxy billions of lightyears away connected to us? Is our home nothing more than a tiny speck of blue in an ocean of night? In this exciting tour of a universe far larger than we can imagine, cosmologist Sutter emphasizes how amazing it is that we are part of such a huge, complex, and mysterious place. Through metaphors and uncomplicated language, Sutter breathes life into the science of astrophysics, unveiling how particles, forces, and fields interplay to create the greatest of cosmic dramas. Touched with the author's characteristic breezy, conversational style--which has made him a breakout hit on venues such as The Weather Channel, the Science Channel, and his own popular Ask a Spaceman! podcast--he conveys the fun and wonder of delving deeply into the physical processes of the natural universe. He weaves together the past and future histories of our universe with grounded descriptions of essential modern-day physics as well as speculations based on the latest research in cosmology. Topics include our place in the Milky Way galaxy; the cosmic web--a vast web-like pattern in which galaxies are arranged; the origins of our universe in the big bang; the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy; how science has dramatically changed our relationship to the cosmos; conjectures about the future of reality as we know it; and more.For anyone who has ever stared at the starry night sky and wondered how we humans on Earth fit into the big picture, this book is an essential roadmap.

Sutter's Your Place in the Universe is the best summary of the history of cosmology and present-day cosmological thinking I’ve read since Isaac Asimov wrote The Universe half a century ago. Not only is it a fabulous book, but it’s written in a style that may result in its author being summoned to Hollywood to write sitcoms in his spare time. Truly enjoyable reading on the Universe's most interesting subject.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Donald Stoker, "Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Yuen Yuen Ang, "How China Escaped the Poverty Trap" (Cornell UP, 2016)

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

I spoke with Dr Yuen Yuen Ang, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She published in 2016 a great new book How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell University Press, 2016). This is a very original and non-conformist book on China. It is also an important contribution to political economy and to development economics.

We started with the origin of her book and a brief definition of ‘poverty trap’. Her book explains what went right in China and how other developing countries could follow a similar approach to reform and institutional transition.

We discussed why traditional contributions such as those by Acemoglu and Robinson cannot explain the success of China’s reform. On the one hand, the fail to understand Chinese reforms, including political ones under Deng, on the other hand, they are biased. They were developed looking at traditional western development paths that cannot and should not be treated as a universal recipe for any other country in the world.

We discussed about property rights, transitional institutions and the performance evaluation system of local cadres. The author defines China as an ‘autocracy with democratic characteristics’ and, since Deng, the systematic evaluation of local political leaders worked well as a proxy of democratic control.

We also discussed how China avoided the mistakes of the Russian transition. And we learnt how China traditionally is not monolithic in its economic policy because allows decentralization and experimentation.

The book is very strong in its theoretical framework but is also based on an extensive fieldwork across three provinces that exemplify the diversity within the Chinese sub-continent and the act of balancing between uniformity and variety, center and periphery.

We concluded talking about the challenges ahead for China and the next books being prepared by prof. Yuen Yuen Ang. A great book, and I hope a good podcast too.

Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Joan Wallach Scott, "Sex and Secularism" (Princeton UP, 2017)

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Joan Wallach Scott’s contributions to the history of women and gender, and to feminist theory, will be familiar to listeners across multiple disciplines. Her latest book, Sex and Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2017) is a compelling analysis of the discourse of secularism in the modern democratic (imperial) nation-states of “the West”. A profound challenge to assumptions that secularism has come with the assurance of gender equality, the book moves from the processes of secularization of the nineteenth century, through the era of the Cold War, and on to the notion of a “clash of civilizations” that continues to inform and shape the politics of gender and the gendering of politics in our current moment.

Revisiting decades of scholarship by historians and theorists of gender, religion, the family, and politics, the first three chapters of the book trace persistent and emergent forms of gender inequality that accompanied the insistence on a separation of Church and state in nineteenth-century sites committed to modernity and forms of liberal democracy. Examining the identification of women with religion; the substitution of biological rationales for religious justifications of gendered hierarchies across multiple domains; and the history of women’s suffrage in secular states, this first section of the book synthesizes as it analyzes in order to reveal the ways and reasons secularism did not bring about women’s equality. Subsequent chapters of the book move from the imbrication of gender and secularism during the Cold War to a critique of a “sexual emancipation” that would eventually fixate on Islam as the “enemy” of a secular “West”. Moving from France to other states in Europe, to the United States, and back again, Sex and Secularism will change the way readers (and listeners!) think about the politically powerful and gendered keywords of the book’s title.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for New Books in French Studies, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Christian List, "Why Free Will is Real" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 11:35:00 -0000

Given our modern scientific view of the world, how is freedom of the will possible? That is the classical problem of free will. Strategies for addressing this problem include the flat denial of free will, as well as various attempts to render free will consistent with a physically deterministic world. Among these latter, there’s a tendency to redefine free will in a way that dissolves the apparent tension between freedom and determinism.

In his new book, Why Free Will is Real (Harvard University Press, 2019), Christian List defends a robust conception of free will according to which it requires intentional agency, alternative possibilities, and causal control. He argues that humans indeed have free will, and this free will is consistent with a naturalistic and scientific world view.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jonathan D. T. Ward, "China's Vision of Victory" (Atlas Publishing, 2019)

Fri, 28 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Someday we may say that we never saw it coming. After seventy-five years of peace in the Pacific, a new challenger to American power has emerged, on a scale not seen since the Soviet Union at its height. With a deep if partially contrived sense of national destiny, the Chinese Communist Party is guiding a country of 1.4 billion people towards what it calls "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," and, with it, the end of an American-led world. The order which since 1945, has insured the greatest period of peace and prosperity in world history. Will this generation of Americans witness the final act for America as a hegemonic superpower? Can American ingenuity, confidence, and will power outcompete the long-term strategic thinking and planning of China's Communist Party? These are the challenges that will shape the next decade and more. Dr. Jonathan D. T. Ward’s China's Vision of Victory (Atlas Publishing, 2019) brings the reader to a new understanding of China's planning, strategy, and ambitions. A China specialist, with a doctorate from Oxford, where we studied with well-known China scholar, Rana Mitter, Dr. Ward’s provides what the Financial Times calls a ‘stimulating’ and “powerful” narrative which explores with unusual depth and insight the dangers to world peace of a Peoples Republic which is becoming completely unmoored to the peaceful regulation of international relations. “From seabed to space, from Africa to the Arctic, from subsurface warfare to the rise of China's global corporations", this book will illuminate for the reader the new great game of our lifetimes, and how our adversary sees it all.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Morgan Marietta, "One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Wed, 26 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

American society is deeply divided at this moment—not just on values and opinions but on basic perceptions of reality. In their latest book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2019), Morgan Marietta and David Barker attribute such division to the natural human tendency towards having different versions of reality. They introduce the concept of ‘dueling fact perceptions’ based on years of research, and for our interview, Morgan Marietta explains how they arrived at such conclusions and their implications for our country’s future. We have a sobering conversation about how fact-checking and greater education will not fix the problem of dueling fact perceptions, and we address the importance of trust—in our politicians, media, and other information sources—can ultimately shape how we use information to advance our beliefs. This interview is essential for those seeking to making sense of our current political climate and will provide realistic but thoughtful answers to many of your persistent questions about it.

Morgan Marietta is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he studies the political consequences of belief. His prior books include The Politics of Sacred Rhetoric: Absolutist Appeals and Political Influence, and A Citizen’s Guide to American Ideology: Conservatism and Liberalism in Contemporary Politics. He and co-author David Barker write the "Inconvenient Facts" blog at Psychology Today.

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is also a university psychologist at Florida International University’s Counseling and Psychological Services Center, where he coordinates the eating disorders service. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (Routledge, 2018).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Ruse, "A Meaning to Life" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 04:00:00 -0000

Does human life have any meaning? Does the question even make sense today? For centuries, the question of the meaning or purpose of human life was assumed by scholars and theologians to have a religious answer: life has meaning because humans were made in the image of a good god. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution changed everything, however, and the human organism was seen to be more machine than spirit. Ever since, with the rise of science and decline of religious belief, there has been growing interest––and growing doubt––about whether human life really does have meaning. If it does, where might we find it?

Historian and philosopher of science Michael Ruse investigates this question in his new book A Meaning to Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) asking whether we can find a new meaning to life within Darwinian views of human nature. Rather than promoting a bleak nihilism, many Darwinians think we can convert Darwin into a form of secular humanism. Ruse explains, in a tradition going back to the time of Darwin himself, positive meaning is found in continuing and supporting the upwards path of life provided by the process of evolution itself. However, this is a false turn, he argues, because there is no real progress in the evolutionary process. Rather, meaning in the Darwinian age can be found if we turn to a kind of Darwinian existentialism, seeing our evolved human nature as the source of all meaning, both in the intellectual and social worlds. Ruse argues that it is only by accepting our true nature, evolved over millennia, that humankind can truly find what is meaningful.

Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. He has written or edited more than fifty books, including Darwinism as Religion, The Philosophy of Human Evolution, The Darwinian Revolution, and On Purpose.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mary Kate McGowan, "Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Fri, 31 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

We’re all familiar with the ways in which speech can cause harm. For example, speech can incite wrongful acts. And I suppose we’re also familiar with contexts in which a person who occupies a position of authority can harm others simply by speaking – as when a boss announced and thereby institutes a discriminatory office policy. In such cases, the announcement is itself a harm in addition to the harm of the instituted policy – the boss’s announcement constitutes a harm and does not only cause harm. Once we’ve see the ways in which authoritative speech can constitute harm, we might look for mechanisms other than speaker authority by means of which speech can be constitutively harmful.

In her new book, Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm (Oxford University Press, 2019), Mary Kate McGowan identifies a previously overlooked mechanism by which speech can be harm. On her analysis, one needn’t be positioned in an authoritative role to speak in ways that constitute harm. Rather, everyday communicative acts can constitute – and not simply cause – harm.

Mary Kate is the Margaret Capp Distinguished Alumna Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. She works primarily in metaphysics, philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of law.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Brian A. Jackson, "Practical Terrorism Prevention" (RAND Corporation, 2019)

Thu, 30 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Practical Terrorism Prevention: Reexamining U.S. National Approaches to Addressing the Threat of Ideologically Motivated Violence (RAND Corporation, 2019), examines past countering-violent-extremism (CVE) efforts, evaluates Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and interagency efforts to respond to ideological radicalization to violence, and recommends strengthening programs focused on non-law enforcement means to address the threat of terrorism.

The authors (Brian A. Jackson, Ashley L. Rhoades, Jordan R. Reimer, Natasha Lander, Katherine Costello, and Sina Beaghley) found that current terrorism prevention capabilities are relatively limited. Most initiatives are implemented locally or outside government, and only a subset receive federal support. Among interviewees in law enforcement, government, and some community organizations, there is a perceived need for a variety of federal efforts to help strengthen and broaden local and nongovernmental capacity. However, doing so will be challenging, since concerns about past counterterrorism and CVE efforts have significantly damaged trust in some communities. As a result, terrorism prevention policy and programs will need to focus on building trust locally, and designing programs and federal activities to maintain that trust over time.

This books available open access here.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Zachary Kramer, "Outsiders: Why Difference is the Future of Civil Rights" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Mon, 27 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Outsiders: Why Difference is the Future of Civil Rights(Oxford University Press, 2019) by Zachary Kramer (Oxford University Press, 2019) sets forth an imaginative critique of the way that civil rights law currently fulfills its mission. Using stories that lucidly illustrate the gap between the aspiration of civil rights law and the lived reality, Professor Kramer proposes a new approach. Drawing on existing protections for disability and for religious practice, Professor Kramer outlines the way that a right to personality, combined with an accommodation-focused inquiry, could update and refresh our approach to civil rights.

Zachary Kramer is Associate Dean of Faculty, Professor of Law, and Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.

Künga Tenje is an independent librarian in Virginia.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, "How Democracies Die" (Crown, 2018)

Thu, 23 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Daniel Ziblatt has done a lot of interviews since the release of How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018) the bestselling book he co-wrote with Steven Levitsky. But we asked him a question he’d never gotten before — about a line toward the end of the book when he refers to democracy as “grinding work.”

The idea that democracy isn’t easy is a central theme of this podcast. As How Democracies Die illustrates, it’s much easier to succumb to the power of an autocratic leader than it is to stand up and protect the institutions that serve as the guardrails of democracy. Ziblatt, a professor of government at Harvard, talks about how the book came about and the impact it’s had since it was released earlier this year.

Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Crystal Abidin, "Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online" (Emerald Publishing, 2018)

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

What does it mean to be famous on the Internet? How do people become Internet celebrities, and what can that celebrity be used to do? Dr. Crystal Abidin offers anthropological insight into these questions in her book Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018). Drawing on case studies from around the world, Dr. Abidin identifies the qualities that contribute to the making of internet celebrity. She explains how some internet celebrities become professional influencers and explores the global implications of the influencer industry. This accessibly written book is aimed at popular audiences and will be indispensable for undergraduate courses about digital culture, for academics who want a clear and cogent introduction to internet celebrity, and for anyone who wants to understand the online worlds in which we increasingly live.

Dannah Dennis is an anthropologist currently working as a Teaching Fellow at New York University Shanghai. You can find her on Twitter @dannahdennis.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Christopher Preston, "The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World" (MIT Press, 2018)

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

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 -- our period in time where there are no longer places on Earth untouched by humans -- is not only how much impact humans have had, but how much deliberate shaping humans will do. To help us understand the Synthetic Age, Dr. Preston details the emerging fields of study and accompanying technologies that may allow for a world designed by humans. He walks us through the advent of nano-scale technologies to the possibilities of deliberate marco-level ecosystem and atmospheric management.

What’s more, we’re not only faced with a plethora of possibility, but journey through historical and ongoing debates regarding the ethics of it all. In fact, The Synthetic Age, is part history of emerging technologies, part mini-biography of all the key persons involved, and part window into the continued ethical debate among enthusiasts and precautionary voices. By the end, the reader is well informed on what lies ahead and is left with a charge – become engaged. After all, as Dr. Preston offers, the thing that should scare us the most about the Synthetic Age, is not the technologies themselves, but prospect of these world-shaping decisions not being made democratically. The questions that arise are too important to be left to the engineers.

Chris Gambino works at the intersection of science and policy in hopes of creating more informed decision-making.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Laurence Cox, "Why Social Movements Matter: An Introduction" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018)

Mon, 08 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

In his book Why Social Movements Matter: An Introduction (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), Senior Lecturer Laurence Cox, from Maynooth University, highlights how social movements have shaped the world we live in and their importance for today’s social struggles. He also explores the complex relationship between progressive social movements and political parties, as well as the interactions between movements and intellectuals. The book is written in an engaging way and will also trigger the interest of the general publics interested in social movements and progressive politics.

Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Brad Stoddard and Craig Martin, “Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Clichés” (Bloomsbury, 2017)

Wed, 03 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

You’ve heard them all before. “Religions are Belief Systems.” “Religion is a Private Matter.” “I'm spiritual but not religious.” Our culture is full of popular stereotypes about religion, both positive and negative. Many people uncritically assume that religion is intrinsically violent, or that religion makes people moral, or that it is simply “bullshit.” In Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Clichés (Bloomsbury, 2017), edited by Brad Stoddard, Assistant Professor at McDaniel College, and Craig Martin, Associate Professor at St. Thomas Aquinas College, several clichés are understood within a social and historical context, which enables us to see how they are produced and what makes them effective. In our conversation we explore several of these stereotypes, what makes them possible and desirable for communities that reproduce and curate them, secularization theory, the role of atheism, liberal political discourse about religion, critical thinking, and how “Stereotyping Religion” works in the classroom.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Hannon, "What is the Point of Knowledge? A Function-First Epistemology" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

Epistemologists working traditional modes have sought to discover the necessary and sufficient conditions under which one has knowledge. This has led to several tricky philosophical problems. Perhaps most notorious of these are the problems concerning skepticism. It seems that any analysis of knowledge admits of cases where the analysis is satisfied and yet knowledge has not been secured. This has led some philosophers to seek some other starting point for epistemology. Perhaps one should begin with the anti-skeptical premise that there are clear cases of knowledge, and then attempt from there to provide analyses of its constituent elements – belief, justification, evidence, and so on. Alas, this approach also has invited difficulties.

In What is the Point of Knowledge? A Function-First Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2019), Michael Hannon takes a different approach. He argues that the place to begin in epistemology is with the question of the function of knowledge. Or, more precisely, he proposes to begin with an examination of the function of the concept of knowledge, the purpose for the sake of which we evaluate others as knowers. The result is a “function-first” epistemology.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jules Evans, "The Art of Losing Control: A Philosopher's Search for Ecstatic Experience" (Canongate Books, 2017)

Thu, 28 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

People have always sought ecstatic experiences - moments where they go beyond their ordinary self and feel connected to something greater than them. Such moments are fundamental to human flourishing, but they can also be dangerous. Beginning around the Enlightenment, western intellectual culture has written off ecstasy as ignorance or delusion. But philosopher Jules Evans argues that this diminishes our reality and denies us the healing, connection and meaning that ecstasy can bring.

In his book, The Art of Losing Control: A Philosopher's Search for Ecstatic Experience (Canongate Books, 2017) he sets out to discover how people find ecstasy in a post-religious culture, how it can be good for us, and also harmful. Along the way, he explores the growing science of ecstasy, to help the reader - and himself - learn the art of losing control.

Evans’ exploration of ecstasy is an intellectual and emotional odyssey drawing on personal experience, interviews, and readings from ancient and modern philosophers. From Aristotle and Plato, via the Bishop of London and Sister Bliss, radical jihadis and Silicon Valley transhumanists, The Art of Losing Control is a funny and thought-provoking journey through under-explored terrain, which Evans creatively maps out like a tour through a festival, with stops at the major pavilions along the way. [complete with a cutely drawn festival map at the front of the book]

Jules Evans is policy director at the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, which was published in 19 countries and was a Times Book of the Year. Evans has written for The Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Spectator and WIRED and is a BBC New Generation Thinker. He also runs the London Philosophy Club, the world’s biggest philosophy club.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

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 contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.

You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Janis Powers, "Health Care: Meet The American Dream" (River Grove Books, 2018)

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 11:00:00 -0000

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 but implementing those fixes are unrealistic. In the book Health Care: Meet The American Dream (River Grove Books, 2018), Janis Powers offers a solution that is truly based on the American dream. In her solution she aims to eliminate health insurance and Medicare with her Longitudinal Health Care Plans. She feels insurance plans are obsolete but that the private sector is what should be driving healthcare innovation. Her Dream Plan focuses more on preventative care while shifting more outcome accountability to the patient. She envisions a more market-based economy for healthcare goods and services. In this interview you will see how Janis envisions a road forward for American health care.

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 11:00:00 -0000

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race.

Throughout the study, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Thus constituted, these categories are then used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaffirms that insight by examining the era before the dominance of biological discourses. Race has always been about strategically creating a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. By exploring race in the European middle ages, Heng lays bare the skeleton of racial thinking as a sorting mechanism, a structural relationship for the management of human differences.

In Heng's hands, the tools of critical race studies make it possible to name the systems and atrocities of the Middle Ages for what they were, revealing race-making before the modern vocabulary of race coalesced. Bringing together a group of specialized archives that aren't usually in conversation, Heng in many cases allows the medieval past to powerfully testify to the pre-modern history of race-formation, racial administration, and racist exploitation and oppression.

Beginning with the violent and sweeping anti-Semitism of thirteenth century England, showing the ways that Jews became the template by which other races were measured, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages launches a careful exposure of the way that minority groups were (and are) manipulated to create the sense of a national majority. A short but potent comparison to the English treatment of Irish subjects drives the analysis home.

A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast and as research lead for Unobscured Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him chasing the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jonathan Birch, "The Philosophy of Social Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2017)

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 11:00:00 -0000

It seems to go against evolutionary theory for an individual to give up its own chances at reproducing in order to increase the fitness of others. Yet social behavior is found throughout nature, from bacteria and social insects to wolves, whales, and of course humans. What makes self-sacrifice to any degree even possible, given that self-interested behavior is the default? In The Philosophy of Social Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2017), Jonathan Birch critically examines the conceptual foundations of social evolution theory, considering debates about kin vs. group selection, cultural as well as genetic transmissible bases of inheritance, and inclusive vs. neighbor-modulated fitness. Birch, an associate professor at the London School of Economics, also discusses the view of multicellular organisms as societies of cells, and extends the concept of genetic relatedness to cultural relatedness by means of common cultural traits.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gary Metcalf, "Social Systems and Design" (Springer Verlag, 2014)

Mon, 04 Feb 2019 11:00:00 -0000

In the opening chapter of his edited volume, Social Systems and Design, out from Springer in 2014, Gary Metcalf asks if it is possible to establish ethical “first principles” for the design of social systems. Inspired by his mentor, Bela Banathy (a giant of the systems field), and pondering the potential levels of influence we might actually have over the evolutionary development of the social systems in which we are all embedded, Metcalf provocatively asks what sorts of goals should we set for ourselves and what sorts of means should we use to achieve them. In the subsequent eight chapters, a host of systems thinking luminaries including Alexander Christakis, Peter Jones, Merrelyn Emery, Thomas Flanagan and Raul Espejo (of Project Cybersyn fame) offer probing and detailed contributions to the search for answers to these questions. Along the way, readers will gain an acquaintance with the concepts behind Dialogical Design Science, Co-Laboratories of Democracy, Third Phase Science, Open Systems Theory and much more. This volume is a trans-disciplinary feast of some of the most progressive thinking going on in the systems field regarding such issues as sustainability, governance of the commons, and the maintenance and expansion of democracy. My conversation with editor, Gary Metcalf, is no less engaging and thought provoking.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Leigh Goodmark, "Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence" (U California Press, 2018)

Mon, 04 Feb 2019 11:00:00 -0000

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 1980s interpersonal/domestic violence has been treated as a criminal act enforced by the institutions of American criminal justice. But too seldom have we asked if this approach has actually worked. In her powerful and provocative new book, Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence (University of California Press, 2018), Leigh Goodmark asks us to evaluate the effects of criminalizing domestic violence and to consider what might be gained by thinking about interpersonal violence as a problem of economics, public health, community, and human rights.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matthew Longo, "The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Mon, 04 Feb 2019 11:00:00 -0000

In his new book, Matthew Longo takes the reader on an unusual journey, at least within political theory, since his work combines a normative political theory approach with an ethnographic approach to understand both the conceptual and actual issue of borders as spaces that separate and distinguish states and nations, and individuals and citizens. The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is not simply about the border because, as the book makes clear, borders are in no way simple, and what Longo has pursued in his work is the complexity that encompasses the theoretical idea of the border but also how and why borders are more diverse in understanding than we often ascribe to them. Longo interrogates what a border actually is, noting that the space itself is not quite the thin line between states that we often assume it to be, but a physical area that is co-administered by bordering nations, often collaboratively, thus blurring the line or space of sovereignty. Threaded throughout the book is the ongoing question of what constitutes citizenship, since borders and citizenship are braided together though the structures of the state, and the considerations of who is and is not permitted membership within a state. Longo has also included a substantial exploration of the role of technology and data in the actual understanding of how border security works in practice. This section of the analysis is particularly important to consider because, according to Longo, the focus on the individual and their data profile, shifts the understanding of state sovereignty and the responsibility for definitions of citizenship. This book is incredibly topical in a variety of areas, not least in the way that it contributes to our thinking about the border itself as a space and as a concept, the role of the state, and the growing domain of data and technology and how they are shaping ideas of citizenship.

This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John Torpey, "The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental" (Rutgers UP, 2017)

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 11:00:00 -0000

Since its initial postulation by Karl Jaspers, the concept of an “axial age” in the development of human thought and religion has exerted enormous influence in the fields of history and sociology. In The Three Axial Ages: Moral, Material, Mental (Rutgers University Press, 2017), John Torpey develops the concept further by identifying two additional axial points in human history following upon the first, “moral” age. Torpey identifies the second of these ages the “material” age, which lasted from approximately 1750 until 1970. Characterized by unprecedented advances in economic development, it fueled enormous population growth and fostered a hedonistic attitude towards the very idea of consuming material goods. This was subsequently superseded by the final axial age, one in which the focus shifted towards thinking about thinking, and a greater emphasis upon sustainability rather than just consumption. As Torpey concludes, whether this age will address successfully the problems of our time remains to be seen, though success will be defined by drawing upon the achievements of the axial ages that preceded our current one.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Maria Kronfeldner, "What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept" (MIT Press, 2018)

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 11:00:00 -0000

Much of the debate about the roles of nature vs. nurture in the development of individual people has settled into accepting that it's a bit of both, although what each contributes to a given trait or feature, how much, and they interact are still matters of dispute. In What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept(MIT Press, 2018), Maria Kronfeldner critically examines instead the 'nature' side of this dichotomy: what exactly is a human "nature"? Is it some kind of fixed human essence, a statistical norm, a normative ideal of how a human being ought to be? Kronfeldner, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Central European University in Budapest, argues against an essentialist view of nature, and replaces it with three concepts – descriptive, classificatory, and explanatory natures – that can do the various jobs that we want a "nature" concept to do without contributing to dehumanization, as the essentialist concept frequently has.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 13:04:00 -0000

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-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with!

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Steven Shaviro, “Discognition” (Repeater Books, 2016)

Tue, 20 Nov 2018 11:00:27 -0000

Steven Shaviro’s book Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016) opens with a series of questions: What is consciousness? How does subjective experience occur? Which entities are conscious? What is it like to be a bat, or a dog, a robot, a tree, a human being, a rock, a star, a neutrino? Discognition looks at a series of fascinating science fiction narratives – in some cases reading philosophical or scientific literature as speculative fiction – to raise important questions about consciousness and sentience and to help readers understand the significance of those questions for how we live with ourselves and each other. In addition to opening up some wonderfully thoughtful and provocative works of science fiction, the book also models a transdisciplinary mode of scholarship that is as inspiring as it is effective.

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Paul Cartledge, “Democracy: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2016)

Mon, 14 May 2018 10:00:00 -0000

The Western concept of democracy has a lineage dating back to the classical world. Paul Cartledge’s book Democracy: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2016) details its origins in ancient Greece and its evolution of it as a theory over the course of the 2,500 years since then. As he explains, what people think of as “classical Greek” democracy was primarily the Athenian concept of it, which was one of several versions that emerged during the Hellenic era. Though typically viewed as at its peak during the days of the Athenian empire, Cartledge sees the “golden age” of democracy as taking place in the 4th century BCE rather than in the preceding one, a shift which attests to the endurance of democracy as a governing system. It was during Roman times when the practice of democracy declined, to the point where it was often seen as a failed or impractical system during the Middle Ages. It was not until the 17th century when democracy staged a comeback in the West, with its advocates in the 18th and 19th centuries championing it as the best possible form of government – a status it continues to hold in the West even with the strains it faces today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

B.J. Mendelson, “Privacy: And How to Get It Back” (Curious Reads, 2017)

Thu, 03 May 2018 10:00:01 -0000

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, advocacy groups and individual citizens are demanding that action be taken to protect their valuable data. But what does this sporadic noise amount to? B.J. Mendelson in his book Privacy: And How to Get It Back (Curious Reads, 2017) argues that a complacent citizenry and the overly-intimate relationship that corporations have with government has led to massive breaches of people’s privacy. Mendelson humorously explains the way people’s data is used and abused as he tracks the long history of government surveillance leading to an explanation of, what he believes, could be the solution to the abuse of people’s privacy.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Bruce Clarke, “Neocybernetics and Narrative” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

Thu, 22 Mar 2018 10:00:00 -0000

As Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science at Texas Tech University, Bruce Clarke has spent the last decade-plus publishing groundbreaking scholarship introducing the application of second-order systems theory to the analysis of literature and media more broadly. The staggering scope of Clarke’s multidisciplinary erudition is on full display in the monograph, Neocybernetics and Narrative, out from University of Minnesota Press in 2014. In picking up Niklas Luhmann’s neologism “neocybernetics” in place of a more standard second-order cybernetic label, Clarke carves out a theoretical continuum for his thinking that runs along a trajectory from Heinz von Foerster’s notions of the observer, through George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition, and right up to, and including, Niklas Luhmann’s controversial extension of autopoiesis theory to metabiotic social systems; a theoretical move most often excluded from more orthodox second-order cybernetic thinking. The formidable theoretical apparatus he has assembled allows Clarke to frame the reader of literary texts as an observer of semantic structures facilitating the psychic construction of possible worlds of meaning, and to examine literary texts themselves as forms of communicative action that continue the autopoiesis of meaning-constituted social systems along the lines of Luhmann’s tripartite process of information, utterance, and understanding. From this launch-pad, Clarke takes us on a stratospheric ride with stops on a variety of fascinating landscapes including the media theory of Friedrich Kittler, the socio-technical explorations of Bruno Latour, and encounters with artistic works as diverse as Virgina Woolf’s iconic modernist novel, Mrs. Dalloway and James Cameron’s quasi-Gaian special effects blockbuster motion picture, Avatar. As a result, Clarke has given arts and humanities scholars an entirely new set of tools with which to think about artistic production, reception, and mediation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Thomas Mira y Lopez, “The Book of Resting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead” (Counterpoint Press, 2017)

Wed, 28 Feb 2018 11:00:04 -0000

We’ve all participated in the rituals of the dead at some time or another in our lives, going to funerals and wakes, visiting loved ones in cemeteries. Some of us may even have a plan for when we pass away, ourselves. But few of us have considered the myriad of ways we memorialize our deceased, and what compels us to honor and remember our dead in ways we don’t often do for the living.

In his debut essay collection, The Book of Resting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead from Counterpoint Press, author Thomas Mira y Lopez examines how we memorialize those we’ve lost. In the wake of his fathers untimely death, Mira y Lopez navigates a complicated relationship with grief, taking the reader along on a walk through the memorial trees in Central Park, a drive over the Sonoran desert to Alcor’s Cryonics preservation facility, a trek across the ocean to the catacombs under Rome, the lonely canals of Venice, and countless cemeteries.

As with any good book of the dead, Mira y Lopez’s work serves as a kind of Memento Mori, concerned primarily with the living left behind—how we grieve those we’ve lost and come to terms with our own mortality and the inevitability of death.

Here to discuss his collection on the New Books Network today, please welcome Thomas Mira y Lopez.

Zoe Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBN interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Ruse, “On Purpose” (Princeton UP, 2017)

Mon, 12 Feb 2018 11:00:53 -0000

Can we live without the idea of purpose? Should we even try to? Immanuel Kant thought we were stuck with purpose, and while Darwin’s theory of natural selection profoundly shook the idea, it was unable to kill it. In fact, the belief in teleology seems to be making a comeback today, as both religious proponents of intelligent design and even some prominent secular philosophers argue that any explanation of life without the idea of purpose is missing something essential. In his book On Purpose (Princeton University Press, 2017), Michael Ruse explores the history of the idea of purpose in philosophical, religious, scientific, and historical thought, from ancient Greece to the present. He argues that three distinct ideas about purpose have been at the heart of Western thought for more than two thousand years and then traces their profound and fascinating implications. Along the way, Ruse takes up tough questions about the purpose of life and whether would be possible to have meaning without it, revealing that purpose is still a vital and pressing issue.

Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. In addition to On Purpose, he has written or edited more than fifty books, including Darwinism as Religion, The Philosophy of Human Evolution, and The Darwinian Revolution.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Andrew Keen, “How To Fix The Future” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018)

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 11:00:36 -0000

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 going “Digital Revolution,” you would certainly get the impression that a Brave New World is emerging, one nothing like anything that we’ve seen before. And, in a way, this is true: we—meaning humans—have never lived in an environment with smartphones, social media, and the firehose of “information” that is the Internet. We’re always on and always connected in a way we have never been before.

But, as Andrew Keen points out in his smart new book How To Fix The Future (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018), there is also a sense in which we have been here before, namely, in the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th century. Then, too, technology and new forms of organization upended the way almost everyone in the industrializing world lived. (For more, see Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Emile Durkheim, unless you like poets, in which case you should just read the British Romantics.) Some made dire predictions, others said heaven was around the corner. There was lots of suffering and, well, lots of progress. What we did, Keen points out, is essentially tame the Industrial Revolution such that it served humanity rather than humanity serving it. He says we can do the same with the Digital Revolution, and he tells us how. Listen in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Christian B. Miller, “The Character Gap: How Good Are We?” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Sat, 13 Jan 2018 19:25:21 -0000

Are we good people? Or do we just think we are? In his new book The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (Oxford University Press, 2017), author Christian B. Miller tackles these questions and more, breaking down what character is, how to measure it, and how to distinguish good from bad moral behavior. In our interview, Miller talks to us about finding his way into this area of study and what research says about our tendencies to display our best and worst qualities. His insights and findings offer us the chance to better understand whats going on when we witness ourselves, our loved ones, and even our highest-ranking leaders behaving in ways that run against consciously-held morals. They also offer pathways for developing and inspiring more upstanding behavior.

Christian B. Miller is A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and Director of the Character Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 75 papers as well as two books with Oxford University Press,Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013) and Character and Moral Psychology (2014). He is also the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (Oxford University Press), and several other volumes.

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image, and relationship issues. He is a graduate of the psychoanalytic training program at William Alanson White Institute, where he also chairs their monthly LGBTQ Study Group.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Kate Manne, “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Mon, 25 Dec 2017 19:25:00 -0000

Kate Manne is an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University. As a feminist and moral philosopher, Manne examines an idea that has been inadequately addressed in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2017). She argues that misogyny is on the wane as a working concept and situates her analysis in recent news stories and events. She offers a definition that is not psychological but rather considers it a system of social control. Manne brings a fresh analysis to our understanding of “misogyny” and the related term “sexism.” Misogyny is selective because it targets those who fail to uphold the patriarchal standards of a woman’s place in a masculine world and works as the policing and enforcement branch of the ideology of sexism. Women caught in “asymmetrical moral support” roles are expected to offer respect, deference, admiration, and gratitude to favorably situated men and provide, especially elite men, with comfort, care, and sexual and emotional labor in many different situations. Misogyny shows up in conversation; office politics; and the dispensation of favors flowing from a man’s relative status, wealth, or celebrity. Rewards come to those who comply. In this scenario, women act as human givers rather than full and equal human beings. Manne’s book is one for the moment.

This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Owen Flanagan, “The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Fri, 15 Dec 2017 13:30:00 -0000

What is it to be moral, to lead an ethically good life? From a naturalistic perspective, any answer to this question begins from an understanding of what humans are like that is deeply informed by psychology, anthropology, and other human-directed perspectives as these are constrained by evolution. In The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility (Oxford University Press, 2017), Owen Flanagan sets out to clarify the landscape of moral possibility for actual human beings. He defends a perspective on human morality that he describes as an “oughtology” based in naturalism, gleaned from comparing Western, Chinese, and Indian moral traditions. Flanagan, a professor of philosophy at Duke University, considers how diverse moral traditions converge on some features basic to moral psychology, such as compassion, yet differ in other ways, such as whether anger is a justified and beneficial moral emotion or whether it should be extirpated. He also examines different views of the self, including the Buddhist view in which there is no self.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Zek Valkyrie, “Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline” (Praeger, 2017)

Fri, 15 Dec 2017 13:29:36 -0000

Zek Valkyrie teaches at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. His new book, Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline (Praeger, 2017), takes readers into the world of electronic games and the complex social relationships that they create. With the mainstream reader in mind, it serves as a primer for anyone interested in the how and why of gaming, as well as a solid introduction to social science concepts generally. The book does not presume apologetics for video games—to be sure, the author takes a direct approach to discussing the myriad social problems inherent in the medium. Along with the many positives to collaborative and competitive online play, major topics include sexism, masculinity, various gamer stigmas, identity formation, and consumption, among others. In this conversation we touch of all of these, as well as the books origins, how the author was able to include student work in the final publication, and his award-winning teaching methods.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jo Littler, “Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power, and Myths of Mobility” (Routledge, 2017)

Fri, 17 Nov 2017 20:22:22 -0000

How does the idea of ‘meritocracy’ serve to reinforce social inequality?

In Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility (Routledge, 2017) Dr Jo Littler, Reader in Culture and Creative Industries at City, University of London analyses the history of the term, the political project it has been associated with, and the cultural manifestations of its neo-liberal form. The book charts the early, critical and satirical, origins of the idea, mapping its co-option by right wing governments within a project of state transformation and the end of social democracy. Allied to the genealogy of the idea, and the politics of inequality to which it is attached, the book details various manifestations of meritocratic culture that serve to exclude and divide. Here there are rich case studies of inequality of class, gender and ethnicity, ranging from #Damonsplaining, through ‘mumpreneurs’ to normcore plutocrats. Ranging widely, but theoretically grounded, the book is essential reading for anyone wanting to know how our current discourses of fairness have ended up supporting growing social inequality.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Theodore Vial, “Modern Religion, Modern Race” (Oxford UP, 2016)

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 15:42:27 -0000

The categories religion and race share a common genealogy. The modern understanding of these terms emerges within the European enlightenment but grasping their gradual production requires us to investigate further. In Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford University Press, 2016), Theodore Vial, Professor at Iliff School of Theology, argues that the intersection of religion and race can be better understood by looking at the work of nineteenth-century German romantics. In the post-enlightenment period religion becomes a racialized category. Vial examines the writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Max Muller, and Johann Gottfried Herder in order to outline the linked nature of race and religion as social categories. He puts their definitions and positions to work to determine the conceptual framework these authors deploy for theorizing difference. In our conversation we discuss Immanuel Kant on race, Schleiermacher as theologian and scholar of religion, the symbolic power of Max Muller within contemporary Religious Studies, the role of language and nation in the construction of religion and race, W. E. B. Du Bois, theological anthropology, analyzing Australian aborigines, and the legacy of nineteenth-century German constructions of race and religion for Religious Studies today.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Andrew Copson, “Secularism: Politics, Religion, and Freedom” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 15:22:00 -0000

Secularism is an increasingly hot topic in public, political, and religious debate across the globe. It is embodied in the conflict between secular republics—from the US to India—and the challenges they face from resurgent religious identity politics; in the challenges faced by religious states like those of the Arab world from insurgent secularists; and in states like China where calls for freedom of belief are challenging a state-imposed non-religious worldview. In Secularism: Politics, Religion, and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2017), Andrew Copson tells the story of secularism, taking in momentous episodes in world history, such as the great transition of Europe from religious orthodoxy to pluralism, the global struggle for human rights and democracy, and the origins of modernity.

Andrew Copson is Chief Executive of Humanists UK (formerly the British Humanist Association). He became Chief Executive in 2010 after five years coordinating Humanists UKs education and public affairs work. He is also President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). His writing on humanist and secularist issues has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, and New Statesman as well as in various journals. Copson has represented Humanists UK and the humanist movement extensively in national news including on BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky, as well as on programs such as Newsnight, The Daily Politics, the Today programme, Sunday Morning Live, and The Big Questions.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski, “Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:00:05 -0000

Beer has been a part of human civilization dating back to its beginnings. In summarizing the role it has played over the millennia, Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski’s book Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World (Oxford University Press, 2017) reveals how the evolving roles the beverage has played exposes broader trends in the economy and society. As Briski explains in this podcast, while beer has been consumed since at least as early as Sumerian times, it wasn’t until the addition of hops as a preservative by brewers in Europe during the Middle Ages that beer became commercially viable. The development of the industry reflected more general trends, from the economies of scale that took place during the Industrial Revolution to the impact of television on small brewers in the United States in the mid-20th century. Today the industry is characterized both by a few multinational conglomerates and numerous craft brewers whose products provide a diverse counterpoint from the mass-produced lagers of the large companies. Briski reveals how these products reflect the different trends of consumption throughout the world, from the increased focus upon quality consumption in the United States and western Europe to the rapid expansion of beer consumption in places like Russia, China, and Brazil.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

James L. Kugel, “The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 10:00:13 -0000

In a career spanning several decades, James L. Kugel has illuminated the Hebrew Bible from the perspectives of both a biblical scholar of enormous skill and eloquence and as an engaged and imaginative reader. In The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), Kugel, Starr Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University, consults not only biblical scholarship but neuroscience and anthropology to examine the relationship between conceptions of self and conceptions of God. The way these conceptions shift over time, and the way biblical text itself reflects on these changes, shed new light on changing notions of self and God, and the relationship between these changes.

David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Brian Clegg, “Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives” (Icon Books, 2017)

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 21:02:54 -0000

Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives (Icon Books, 2017), by Brian Clegg, is a relatively short book about a subject that has emerged only recently, but is rapidly becoming a significant force in the evolution of society. Most of us have heard the term “big data,” but many of us erroneously assume that its just a lot of little data. It’s considerably more than that, and Big Data, which is an easy and fun read, serves as a terrific introduction to a topic which has an ever-increasing impact on many aspects of our lives.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ron Edwards, “The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau” (Oxford UP, 2016)

Fri, 25 Aug 2017 15:36:10 -0000

As I was reading Ron Edward’s fascinating and far-reaching new book, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau (Oxford University Press, 2016), I had a flashback. I must have been about seven. I was watching a film adaptation of H.G. Well’s classic work of science fiction, The Island of Doctor Moreau. It’s about a doctor who takes animals and tries to make them human by surgically alerting them. I don’t remember much about the movie–I think Burt Lancaster played Moreau–but what I remember is that the story really creeped me out. It stayed with me for a long time. And, even now, as I remember those half-man, half-beasts that populate Dr. Moreau’s island, I’m creeped out. The feeling is something like a primordial shiver. Now you may attribute that feeling to the sensitivity of a seven-year-old, and that’s probably right: what were my parents thinking letting me watch a horror movie at that age? Edwards, however, has a different answer, one based on Well’s original story. It’s that these man-beasts that Wells imagines force us to realize us that we are, in our essence, animals. This realization is something that, as a culture and as individuals, we don’t like to contemplate. It unnerves us. It creeps us out. And that’s what Edward’s book explores: it is, among other things, a case against human exceptionalism, one that asks us not only to rethink our animal selves, but also our relationship to those other creatures who share our animality.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert Wright, “Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment” (Simon and Schuster, 2017)

Fri, 25 Aug 2017 10:58:56 -0000

All “true believers” believe their beliefs are true. This is particularly true of true religious believers: for Christians, Christianity is the true religion, for Jews, Judaism is the true religion, for for Muslims, Islam is the true religion. Few true believer, however, would make the claim that their religion is “scientifically true”; religion, after all, is a matter of faith, and faith and science are somewhat different things.

But that’s the claim Robert Wright is making in his thought-provoking, well-reasoned, and thoroughly-researched book Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (Simon and Schuster, 2017). Well, sort of. Wright makes clear that he’s talking about Buddhism as a spiritual practice, not a religious dogma. He purposefully leaves aside the supernatural aspects of Buddhist belief–gods, devils, miracles, unseen realms and such–and focuses on what Buddhist meditators believe and do to reach “enlightenment.” And what he proposes is that Buddhism as practiced by these Buddhists is well suited to ease the pain caused by evolved human psychology.

Wright’s book is heavily informed by his reading of evolutionary psychology, and particularly the notion that natural selection “designed” (a metaphor, to be sure) the human mind to work in ways that are not always to our hedonic benefit. Natural selections, he says, “designed” our minds to make our bodies reproduce, not to make us “happy,” “content,” or “satisfied.” If making us unhappy gets us to reproduce more often, then unhappy it’s going to be. And often is.

Wright–to my mind, convincingly–argues that a Buddhist worldview and practice allows us to see the evolved nature of our minds as they really are, to see through (if not control) the often harmful impulses produced by those minds, and to make us and those around us better people. Essentially he says ‘Given the particular way our minds evolved, Buddhism is ‘true’ in that it is a balm for human suffering.’

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Brian Clegg, “The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe” (Icon Books, 2017)

Thu, 29 Jun 2017 18:12:12 -0000

Brian Clegg is one of England’s most prolific and popular writers on science. His latest work, The Reality Frame: Relativity and Our Place in the Universe (Icon Books, 2017), covers Einstein’s Theories of Relativity and a whole lot more. Simply as an exposition of Einstein’s theories, the book is excellent its beautifully organized and delivered, with Clegg’s usual clarity and insight. But what makes the book transcend the usual work on this subject is that Clegg looks at relativity as a concept that can help us understand what distinguishes humanity as a species, and where our species fits into the Universe. Einstein himself would have enjoyed participating in a discussion of this fascinating topic, and may well have shared some of Clegg’s points of view.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ronald A. Lindsay, “The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can’t Tell Us What to Do” (Pitchstone Publishing, 2014)

Fri, 23 Jun 2017 19:34:54 -0000

For the first time in human history, a significant percentage of the world’s population no longer believes in God. While its true that some societies are even seeing nonbelievers outnumber believers, it is extremely unlikely that we will see a total collapse of religion in the foreseeable future. This is why, according to Dr. Ronald A. Lindsay, countries across the globe must learn to carefully manage the societal mix of religious and irreligious in order to meet the challenge of this unprecedented demographic shift and new form of sectarian discord. In his book, The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can’t Tell Us What to Do (Pitchstone Publishing, 2014), Lindsay makes the case for the necessity of a discourse for morality and ethics that does not rely on the competing narratives of the world’s religions. He joins us today to explain how such a language of common morality can be found and why it’s so important.

Dr. Ronald A. Lindsay was until very recently the president and CEO of the Centre for Inquiry and its affiliates, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, where he continues on as a senior research fellow. He has a PhD in philosophy from Georgetown University, with a concentration in bioethics, and a JD from the University of Virginia. He also has a background in law and policy related to the exercise or abstention from religious practices in government funded contexts.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Beau Lotto, “Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently” (Hatchette Books, 2017)

Tue, 30 May 2017 10:00:13 -0000

We may think we see the world as it is, but neuroscience proves otherwise. Which is a good thing, according to neuroscientist and author Beau Lotto. In his new book Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently (Hatchette Books, 2017), Lotto explains the mechanisms underlying our difficulty apprehending the world accurately, their implications for our relationships with one another and the world, and the creative potential that is unleashed when we embrace uncertainty and doubt. These issues come to life in our interview, as we discuss his discoveries in and out of the lab and their application to everyday experiences.

Beau Lotto is a neuroscientist specializing in the biology and psychology of perception with more than 25 years experience conducting research on human perception and behavior and over 60 publications. He is Professor at University of London (Goldsmiths) and visiting scholar at New York University, as well as founder and CEO of the Lab of Misfits, a creative agency grounded in principles of perception. Follow Beau on Twitter.

Listen to the interview by clicking below. To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here.

Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jon Mills, “Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality” (Routledge, 2016)

Sun, 21 May 2017 12:57:57 -0000

There are many fronts in the argument against the existence of a god or gods and veracity of religious narratives. Some familiar approaches are to critique the philosophical underpinnings of religious ideology or to make a case from the perspective of scientific evidence and the physical laws of reality. Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality (Routledge, 2016), written by Dr. Jon Mills, argues from the perspective of psychology and posits that god is a psychological creation signifying ultimate ideality. In other words, He is the ultimate wish fulfillment, the forgiving all-powerful father you always wanted, the absolution of all your fears, the antidote to death. Mills writes that the conception of god is the manifestation of humanity’s denial and response to natural deprivation. He promotes secular humanism and a personal search for the numinous as a positive, life-affirming alternative.

Dr. Jon Mills is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, active clinical psychologist, as well as Professor of Psychology & Psychoanalysis at the Adler Graduate Professional School in Toronto. He is the author and editor of many books and recipient of awards, including the the Otto Weininger Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in 2015, given by the Canadian Psychological Association.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ralph Young, “Dissent: The History of an American Idea” (NYU Press, 2015)

Fri, 19 May 2017 10:00:01 -0000

Ralph Young is a professor of history at Temple University. His book Dissent: The History of an American Idea (New York University Press, 2015) provides a fast-paced four hundred years people’s history of dissenters in America and the role they played from early New England settlements to Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. From Shay’s rebellion in the late eighteenth century to contemporary gay rights and anti-globalist movements, dissenters built their politic on the nations founding as a project of dissent. As a group, they were committed to actualizing the lofty ideals embedded in the founding documents by extending equality and freedom to women, slaves, Indians, workers and other excluded groups. In times of crisis, dissenters called the nation back to its promise even as conservative forces resisted change. Some dissenters, celebrated as heroes, called the nation to its highest ideals; others remain lost to history or vilified. American history seen from the vantage point of those who stood against the status quo illuminates the important role dissent has played in the nation’s political and social development. Young offers an abundance of examples of how political, religious, economic and social protest shape the nation and possibilities of further change.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Sharrona Pearl, “Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other” (U. Chicago Press, 2017)

Thu, 18 May 2017 18:56:55 -0000

Sharrona Pearl‘s new book is an absolute pleasure to read. Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (The University of Chicago Press, 2017) looks closely at facial allotransplantations (FAT), commonly known as face transplants, in order to offer a careful and fascinating study of the stakes for changing the face, and the changing stakes for the face. Troubling the indexical relationship between the face and character and reminding us that “[t]he self has always been a set of choices,” Pearl explores face transplantation as it relates to cosmetic surgery and whole-organ transplants, the cinema of the 1960s, television shows, and more. She carefully and sensitively takes us into the debates among surgeons, bioethicists, and journalists that circled the first partial face transplant of Isabelle Dinoire in 2005, and offers a way toward a philosophical approach that brings together Levinas with the kind of (Deleuzian) subjectivity that allows for individuality through constant change and understands the self to be constantly in a process of becoming. The final chapter of the book also situates the analysis within larger contexts of online subjectivities and work with facial and bodily manipulation by artists and performers. It’s sparklingly written and well worth a read!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Carrie Jenkins, “What Love is: And What it Could Be” (Basic Books, 2017)

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 11:35:33 -0000

Carrie Jenkins‘ new book is a model for what public philosophy can be. Beautifully written, thoughtful, and compellingly and carefully argued, What Love Is: And What it Could Be (Basic Books, 2017) invites us to think openly and critically about romantic love: what it is, what it could be, and why it is crucial for us to ask these questions and come to our own answers. Engaging the work of bell hooks, Bertrand Russell, Simone de Beauvoir, and more, Jenkins argues that love has a dual nature both social and biological and the book develops that position while offering a critical perspective on the arguments and evidence proposed by scientists, philosophers, and other interlocutors on whose work Jenkins builds. Romantic love is in the process of changing, suggests Jenkins, and the norm of monogamy could be one of the features in flux. The work offers a critique of amatonormativity including the assumed norm of monogamous dyads as the basis of romantic relationships while leaving readers with a take-home message that is simultaneously generous, bold, and inspiring: think about love for yourself.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Benjamin Hale, “The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature” (MIT Press, 2016)

Sat, 15 Apr 2017 10:00:49 -0000

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 environmental consequences of our actions and minimize the bad ones. An environmental activist turned academic philosopher, Benjamin Hale argues against this dominant consequentialist approach towards environmentalism in favor of a Kantian view. In The Wild and the Wicked: On Nature and Human Nature (MIT Press, 2016), Hale, who is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at the University of Colorado-Boulder, argues that we ought to act in environmentally friendly ways because it is the right thing to do. On his view, environmentally friendly action is motivated by reflecting on our reasons for acting, guided by a concern that our actions be acceptable to a wide range of parties. In this accessible discussion intended for a wide audience, Hale provides a fresh philosophical grounding for thinking about human action and inaction regarding the environment.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Cristina Bicchieri, “Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms” (Oxford UP, 2017)

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 10:00:58 -0000

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 close of a musical performance. Some of these collective behaviors are cases of imitation, of doing what others do. In other cases, the behavior is driven by individuals’ expectations about what certain people both do and believe others should do. When confronting real-world cases where groups act in ways that are problematic and harmful, it matters a great deal which kind of mechanism underlies the behavior. This is especially the case for those who seek to change the groups’ behavior.

In Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms (Oxford University Press, 2017), Cristina Bicchieri (University of Pennsylvania) lays out a nuanced theory of group behavior, establishes means for measuring individuals’ sensitivity to social norms, and explores the ways in which interventions can be designed to change social norms. The book grows out of her collaboration with UNICEF and other NGO’s devoted to initiating social change in the developing world. The details of Bicchieri’s theory of social norms are explored in her Coursera courses on “Social Norms, Social Change I” and “Social Norms, Social Change II.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco, “The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture” (Routledge, 2016)

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 14:00:01 -0000

The wish to transcend one’s mortality, and the anxiety associated with being unable to do so, are universal human experiences. People deal with these in their idiosyncratic ways, often by transgressing rules and boundaries that serve as the parameters of civilized human coexistence. Technological advances expand our capacities for transcending our limitations, especially when they allow us to objectify other humans and humanize our objects. Such forms of perversion are the subject of Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco’s new book, The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Routledge, 2016). In my interview with Knafo, we explore her redefinition of perversion and her view on its current and future manifestations and what it implies for the survival of humanity.

Danielle Knafo is a professor in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Long Island University and faculty member and supervisor in New York University’s postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. She has lectured internationally and published extensively, including her prior book, Dancing with the Unconscious, published in 2012 also by Routledge.

Listen to the interview by clicking below. To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Todd McGowan, “Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets” (Columbia UP, 2016)

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 12:36:27 -0000

Todd McGowan‘s Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (Columbia University Press, 2016) elegantly employs psychoanalytic thinking to unpack the lure of capitalism. He argues that we are drawn to capitalism because, under an overt promise to bring us what we want, it gives us what we need: lack.

Every commodity disappoints. And that’s the point.

Satisfaction, that moment when all is well and good, flutters rapidly, blessedly away. What is so great, so crucial, about lack? Though we pine for relief, nothing kills desire like abundance. (Spoiler alert: should there be an equitable redistribution of wealth, we would still suffer a hunger for the lost object which, according to McGowan, not employing Kleinian thinking, was never attainable in the first place.) If we did not experience ourselves as missing something we might never get out of bed–and, as clinicians know, why it can be purely ruinous to gratify a depressive patient.

You buy those boots, the ones you had to have, and within moments of wearing them, your heart sinks. That car you finally got your hands on? Driving it out of the lot you wonder, “should I have just leased it?” Desire is an engine best run on less than half a tank.

The paradox of capitalism, the way it lets us down, gets a full treatment here. Capitalism reclines on McGowan’s couch and he offers it a few interpretations that shake loose its obsessional and hysterical tendencies. He works with capitalism effectively, not arousing its defenses, because he understands it as caught in a trap of its own making. Embracing Beyond The Pleasure Principle and Lacanian thinking, he asks capitalism how come the ends are more important than the means, and doesn’t it miss the sublime? He also treats the reader, reminding us that we need to not have what we want in order to get what we need.

The interview sails along, if I say so myself, and, given the political surround, offers a good conversation to get into. The author would love to hear from us and has asked that I post his email right here, todd.mcgowan@uvm.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Berit Brogaard, “On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion” (Oxford UP, 2015)

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 11:00:00 -0000

Why is falling in love so exciting and painful at the same time? And what explains our longing for people who are bad for us or no longer love us back? In her book On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2015), philosopher and cognitive scientist Berit Brogaard tackles these and other difficult questions through the lenses of biochemistry, philosophy, and psychology. She argues that love is an emotion to which humans can become addicted but which they also possess the power to overcome. In our interview, we discuss cutting-edge ways of conceptualizing romantic love as well as practical, real-life strategies for navigating its many ups and downs.

Berit Brogaard is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Brogaard Lab for Multisensory Research at University of Miami, as well as Professor of Philosophy at University of Oslo. She answers letters from love-stricken readers on her Psychology Today webpage The Mysteries of Love. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David Rosen and Aaron Santesso, “The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood” (Yale UP, 2013)

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 17:38:59 -0000

“Surveillance and literature, as kindred practices, have light to shed on each other.”

When David Rosen and Aaron Santesso considered the discipline of surveillance studies in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001, they saw contributions from political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, and engineers, but found that “the distinctive and necessary contribution of the humanities as such to this conversation” had “largely gone unarticulated” (5). The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood (Yale University Press, 2013) is a wide ranging, deeply researched, and compellingly argued corrective to that lacuna that places humanistic thought, and in particular literary history, in complex and satisfying conversation with the disciplines working to theorize surveillance for our moment.

Arguing that “the ultimate target of all surveillance activity: the individual self” is best approached as a knot of questions rather than a stable given, Rosen and Santesso offer an account of “the ways that conceptions of selfhood have changed over time” (8). Working across modes and genres, their argument spans from the early modern period to the present day, along the way challenging current discussions of the role of literature in culture and the myth of interpretive competence that lies behind much thinking about surveillance.

Through careful examination of diverse texts, from Locke’s Essay on Toleration through Orwell’s oeuvre and Tolkien’s novels to Enemy of the State and other films from our own era, Rosen and Santesso demonstrate that the “hermeneutic problems of surveillance are also literary problems” (13). Engaging thinkers who have attempted to grapple with the power of narrative to shape our lives–Swift, Bentham, Mill, Weber, Adorno, Habermas, Foucault, Baudrillard, and others–Rosen and Santesso essentially set out to rethink modernity, exploring “the effects that fiction has on reality,” and finally offering us a new way of understanding how and why we watch and read our neighbors (9).

Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, eds “Digital Sociologies” (Policy Press, 2016)

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 17:37:49 -0000

How do we do sociology in the digital era? In Digital Sociologies (Policy Press, 2016) Jessie Daniels, Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, Karen Gregory a Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, have brought together a wealth of scholarship to explore the challenge of digital. The book engages with a range of theoretical questions, including challenging the digital/traditional sociology binary, the role of institutions, digital’s impact on eduction, the racialized practices of Twitch, the meaning of motherhood, the quantified self, the question of the body, and the digital sociological imagination. The eclectic range of scholars, offering perspectives from across the academic life course and deploying examples from across the world, create an important intervention into our understanding of this emerging, and perhaps as a result of this book, established, field of study. Ultimately the book is a call for a new community of scholars to engage with this most important element of contemporary life.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John Hadley, “Animal Property Rights: A Theory of Habitat Rights for Wild Animals” (Lexington Books, 2015)

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 17:36:56 -0000

John Hadley’s Animal Property Rights: A Theory of Habitat Rights for Wild Animals (Lexington Books, 2015) presents a novel approach to addressing habitat and biodiversity loss: extending liberal property rights to wildlife. Hadley argues that a guardianship system could effectively protect the rights of wild animals to resources in the territories they inhabit. In turn, the guardians of particular animals or a particular species could challenge land use plans that might threaten the ability of these animals to meet their basic needs.

Though grounded in philosophical theory, Hadley’s focus is pragmatic. He is interested in producing an institutional design that could be effectively incorporated into policy and practice. His proposal also aims to solve some key problems in wildlife conservation. It bridges the seemingly divergent interests of environmentalists focused on the protection of the collective (e.g., ecosystems) and those of animal rights proponents focused on the survival of individuals. Here, common ground is found in habitat protection, a shared value that reconciles the differences between these groups. Hadley’s proposal also ensures animals become vocal stakeholders in land use and conservation initiatives, able to compete with agendas that might be incompatible with animal or habitat protection. It also begins to overcome the anthropocentrism that (perhaps inevitably) pervades conservation practice. By determining animal property rights boundaries on the basis of territorial behavior, Hadley’s proposal privileges animal actions and interactions over human-centric interests. Although their rights would be advocated by a human guardian in a person-centered legal system, if implemented, this theory would ensure the interests of wild animals are taken seriously. This is a book of critical relevance to those interested in issues of human-wildlife conflict, biodiversity protection, and human/nonhuman relationships.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alan J. Levinovitz, “The Limits of Religious Tolerance” (Amherst College Press, 2016)

Sat, 14 Jan 2017 09:59:07 -0000

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 man’s religion or faith.” I imagine that many Americans agreed with Trump on this score. But is Trump’s “radical tolerance” position really sensible? Can’t someone reasonably and respectfully say to another “Gee, I think you’ve got that particular point of scripture wrong” or even “I think your faith is, well, misguided for reasons X, Y an Z”?

In his thought-provoking book The Limits of Religious Tolerance (Amherst College Press, 2016), Alan J. Levinovitz argues that we can and indeed must question religion, both our own and everyone else’s. How else, he asks, are we to understand why we and our fellow citizens believe what we say we believe? To be sure, Levinovitz advises that we only engage in critical discussions of religion in certain, well-defined contexts: churches, synagogues, mosques and such are good places to practice religion, not debate it. In contrast, Levinovitz proposes, universities–places defined by rational investigation and (in theory) civil discussion–are perfect for debates about religion. And, Levinovitz continues, institutions of higher education should do everything in their power to encourage it.

Thanks to Amherst College Press, Levinovitz’s wonderful book is available free for download here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nicholas A. John, “The Age of Sharing” (Polity Press, 2016)

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 22:27:38 -0000

In his new book The Age of Sharing (Polity Press, 2016), the sociologist and media scholar Nicholas A. John documents the history and current meanings of the word sharing, which he argues, is a central keyword of contemporary media discourse. John interrogates the rhetorical work that sharing does as a practice, a form of communication and a business model. He argues that in the last decade, sharing has come to dominate the way we think about our online activities, and indeed, the way we live. He demonstrates, how the therapeutic culture that defined the twentieth century, now shapes how we perceive and discuss our personal and economic interactions both online and offline. Moreover, it was the therapeutic discourse that informed and energized the shift from sharing as a distributive practice of material objects to the ethos of sharing as caring. John combines a close analysis of social media sites such as Facebook and businesses such Airbnb with a linguistic analysis of the genealogy of the concept of sharing, the unknown history of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the subculture of hackers to explain the ascent of sharing as a daily practice and coveted social currency. Nicholas A. John is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Tal Zalmanovich is a historian of modern Britain and media. She’s currently researching the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, and the impact its activists had on domestic politics in Britain. Prior to being an academic, Tal was a journalist. Podcasting is the fruitful convergence of the two. You can contact Tal at tal.zalmanovich@mail.huji.ac.il.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Matthew MacWilliams, “The Rise of Trump: America’s Authoritarian Spring” (Amherst College Press, 2016)

Sat, 22 Oct 2016 10:47:09 -0000

NB: Because Amherst College Press is open-access, this book is available free for download here.

Just when I thought I had a pretty good handle on the ways and means of American politics, Donald Trump “happened.” I watched with amazement as he insulted just about every establishment figure in the US–including the untouchable war-hero and senator John McCain!–and alienated large swathes of the American electorate–hispanics, women, people who think it’s important to be polite. And yet he rose; millions of right-thinking Americans continued to vote for him through the primaries and support him after he won them. Every time I said, “Well, that’s it, his run is over,” he trundled on, accompanied by a devoted, Trump-loving “base.”

I don’t think I’m alone in my confusion about the Trump phenomenon, and I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to know how Trump did what he did. Happily, the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams provides some answers in his excellent, short book The Rise of Trump: America’s Authoritarian Spring (Amherst College Press, 2016). What’s especially nice about MacWilliam’s work is that it’s based on evidence and logic, not partisanship and vitriol. What MacWilliams discovered is, well, surprising: there are, he shows, a goodly number of Americans who possess values that can only really be be called “Authoritarian,” and those Americans who have these values overwhelming support Trump. What’s most interesting is that these values were, in a sense, always there; they were, however, largely unrepresented among Americans’ political choices. Trump was, if not exactly the first (remember Pat Buchanan?), then the most expert at presenting them and “activating” the Authoritarian impulse in this reasonably large cohort of Americans. Trump uncovered or exposed Americans’ latent Authoritarianism. What the political parties will do with it now that it’s there for the taking is anybody’s guess.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

McKenzie Wark, “Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene” (Verso, 2015)

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 21:56:14 -0000

McKenzie Wark’s new book begins and ends with a playful call: “Workings of the world untie! You have a win to world!” Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso, 2015) creates a conversation between work from two very different Soviet and American contexts. After guiding readers through the work and theories of Alexander Bogdanov, whose focus on the importance of labor in organizing knowledge forms a central thread through the book as a whole, Wark traces some of those notions in the writing of novelist and utopian Andrey Platonov. The second half of the book extends the conversation into science studies, beginning in a chapter that considers the work of Feyerabend, Haraway, Barad, and Edwards in light of Bogdanov and Platonov’s approaches to labor and knowledge, and continuing into a chapter devoted to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. The result is a fascinating treatment of the centrality of labor and the importance of the not-necessarily-human to understanding and theorizing the Anthropocene. (As Wark reminds us, Labor is the mingling of many things, most of them not human.) The entire book is highly recommended, and for the STS-minded among us the third chapter of the book would make an especially useful assignment in a discussion group or seminar devoted to contemporary theory and/in STS.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Martha Nussbaum, “Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice” (Oxford UP, 2016)

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 10:00:38 -0000

Anger is among the most familiar phenomena in our moral lives. It is common to think that anger is an appropriate, and sometimes morally required, emotional response to wrongdoing and injustice. In fact, our day-to-day lives are saturated with inducements not only to become angry, but to embrace the idea that anger is morally righteous. However, at the same time, were all familiar with the ways in which anger can go morally wrong. We know that anger can eat away at us; it can render us morally blind; it can engulf our entire lives. So one might wonder: What exactly is the point of anger?

In Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Oxford University Press, 2016), Martha Nussbaum argues that, in its most familiar forms, anger is not only pointless, but morally confused and pernicious. Drawing lessons from the Stoics, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Nussbaum advocates replacing anger with forms of generosity, friendship, justice, and kindness. She develops her critique of anger across the spectrum of human experience, from the intimate, to the interpersonal, and eventually the political. Along the way, she proposes important revisions to common ideas about punishment, justice, and social reform.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Samantha Barbas, “Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America” (Stanford Law Books, 2016)

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 10:00:39 -0000

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 this endeavor from the perspective of a legal and cultural historian, tracking the correlation between a growing American image consciousness and the rise of laws, such as the tort of invasion of privacy and damages for emotional distress, which enabled individuals to control and defend their public persona.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Peter Harrison, “The Territories of Science and Religion” (U. of Chicago Press, 2014)

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:28:19 -0000

Contemporary debates would lead you to believe that science and religion are eternally at odds with each other. In The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Peter Harrison,Director, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Queensland, interrogates the modern assumptions behind this viewpoint and delineates the story of the categories science and religion. He shows that understanding these concepts divided as distinct realms of inquiry is a relatively recent history, politically shaped, and often accidental in its construction. In reality, what we conceptualize as these two separate spheres of life were intimately bound up with one another, often in concert in social life. Harrison also warns us about the consequences of projecting our contemporary conceptual spheres back through the past. In our conversation we discuss ancient Greek philosophy, early Christian thought, natural theology and natural philosophers, conceptions of progress, forms of charity, the professionalization of science, and the creation of scientists.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Lance deHaven-Smith, “Conspiracy Theory in America” (U of Texas Press, 2014)

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 12:18:46 -0000

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 in the Declaration of Independence has been replaced by today’s blanket condemnation of conspiracy beliefs as ludicrous by definition. Lance deHaven-Smith reveals that the term “conspiracy theory” entered the American lexicon of political speech to deflect criticism of the Warren Commission and traces it back to a CIA propaganda campaign to discredit doubters of the commissions report. For this NBN interview, Lance and Jasun discuss the book and the wider implications of what Lance calls State Crimes Against Democracy (SCAD), cultural engineering, and how, when the ruling elite move, they create their own reality.

Lance deHaven-Smith is Professor in the Reubin O’D. Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University. A former President of the Florida Political Science Association, deHaven-Smith is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Battle for Florida, which analyzes the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Jasun Horsley is the author of Seen & Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist and several other books on “extra-consensual perceptions.” He has a weekly podcast called The Liminalist: The Podcast Between and a blog. For more info, go to http://auticulture.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Ho-fung Hung, “The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World” (Columbia UP, 2016)

Wed, 18 May 2016 10:15:53 -0000

Ho-fung Hung‘s new book has two main goals: to to outline the historical origins of Chinas capitalist boom and the social and political formations in the 1980s that gave rise to this boom, and to explore the global effects of Chinas capitalist boom and the limit of that boom. In doing so, The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World (Columbia UP, 2016) offers a timely and provocative account of the emergence and transformations of capitalism in modern China, and of the consequences of its entanglements with the rest of the world for the global political economy. In addition to an in-depth assessment of the Chinese economy, readers will find fascinating discussions of Chinas relations with Africa and Latin America, as well as some thoughtful comparative considerations. Hung’s book traces the rise of capitalism in China from the seventeenth century through today, and uses this historical grounding to point to possible futures. The China boom, Hung maintains, is destined to collapse.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Emily Troscianko, “Kafka’s Cognitive Realism” (Routledge, 2014)

Mon, 02 May 2016 10:46:40 -0000

In her first monograph, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (Routledge, 2014), Emily Troscianko set out to answer a brief, cogent question: “Why is Kafka so brilliant? Why do I still want to read his work after all this time? It’s a good question. Even today, Kafka’s fiction retains a felt strangeness, the “Kafkaesque,” a quality Dr. Troscianko calls “both compelling and unsettling.” His stories have had an enduring readership, sustaining critical attention for over a century. This was what Troscianko wanted a better explanation for.

In the book, Troscianko finds that explanation from theories current in the cognitive sciences. She approaches Kafkas fiction (and what is Kafkaesque about it) as a realistic depiction of visually perceived space. In other words, for Troscianko, Kafka’s fiction works by simulating fictional places, people and phenomena as real, as happening in real visual space, according to how vision actually works. This seems, in part at least, to explain Kafka’s hold on us. And think: If the fictional realities of Kafka are lifelike in their fidelity to real lived experience, how strange when they gradually warp, and shift to become something more dreamlike, or unbelievable.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alfie Bown, “Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism” (Zero Books, 2015)

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 15:38:06 -0000

What is enjoyment and what can contemporary critical theory tell us about it? In Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism (Zero Books, 2015), Alfie Bown, a lecturer at Hang Seng Management College and co-editor of Everyday Analysis and the Hong Kong Review of Books, talks through the political potential of new forms of enjoyment. Using Candy Crush Saga, Football Manager, Gangnam Style, Game of Thrones, and the act of reading critical theory itself, the book argues we need to take enjoyment seriously. Enjoyment is understood in relation to work and capitalism, unpacking ideas of productive and unproductive enjoyment and how they might serve or subvert power and control in modern life. The book will be of interest to scholars across philosophy, literary studies, and the social sciences, alongside anyone with a smart phone, tablet or love of the television box set!

Dave OBrien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr Peter Matthews). He tweets@Drdaveobrien

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman, “Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy” (Bloomsbury, 2016)

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 15:32:20 -0000

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 Deadly Spin, and is a regular contributor for the Huffington Post and HealthInsurance.org. Penniman is the executive director of Issue One.

In Nation on the Take, Potter and Penniman catalogue the enormous amount of money spent on politics in the U.S. Over $6 billion spent on the 2012 election and over $3 billion spent annually on lobbying. From lobbying to campaign contributions, they argue that big money has corrupted the countrys democratic institutions altering everything from health care to food to banking. But Potter and Penniman arent cynics, they suggest that numerous legislative and legal fixes could greatly change the direction the country is headed.

This podcast interview was recorded by Heath Brown, assistant professor of public policy, City University of New York, John Jay College and The Graduate Center. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Heather Boushey, “Finding Time: The Economies of Work-Life Conflict” (Harvard UP, 2016)

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:06 -0000

Heather Boushey has written Finding Time: The Economies of Work-Life Conflict (Harvard University Press, 2016). Boushey is Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

How should policy-makers respond to the fact that women now make at least a quarter of the earnings in more than two-thirds of families with children and, in many households, women bring in more than half of the earned income? In Finding Time, Boushey offers a round-map for policy-makers to adjust social policy for these positive changes in the economy and U.S. workforce. Paid sick days, paid family and medical leave, scheduling predictability, limiting overwork, and elder care are all options on the agenda that many states and localities have implemented. Boushey argues for a more comprehensive approach to social policy that draws on what has been learned about effective policy making and the reality of the 21st century economy.

This podcast was hosted by Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, John Jay College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. You can follow him on Twitter @heathbrown.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Simon Critchley, “ABC of Impossibility” (Univocal Publishing, 2015)

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 14:42:09 -0000

From its opening fragment on “Fragments” to its “Possibly dolorous tropical lyrical coda,” Simon Critchley‘s new book is a pleasure to hold in the hand and the mind. ABC of Impossibility (Univocal Publishing, 2015) is a collection of fragments and a catalog of “impossible objects”: poetry, America, emptiness, indirection, money, and more. Thoughts and jokes and quotes and small essays ranging from one line to several pages are arranged in a sequence that plays with unusual juxtapositions and acts as a form of “counterpoint,” riffing on and playing off of the work of Pessoa and Augustine and Rousseau and Blake and Heidegger and others. This is a thoughtful and playful book about time, and the sea, and humor, and loss, and slavery, and the importance of unlearning. Highly recommended!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Amy Allen, “The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory” (Columbia UP, 2016)

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 13:07:57 -0000

How can we de-colonize critical theory from within, and reimagine the way it grounds its normative claims as well as the way it relates to post- and de-colonial theory? Amy Allen (Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Penn State University) takes up this project in her book The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Columbia Univ. Press, 2016). The work challenges the way that the Frankfurt School of critical theory constructs and deploys concepts of normativity, history, and progress, in the process offering rich interpretations of JÃ¼rgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst. Allen then turns to the work of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault in order to articulate a different perspective on these issues, one that enables a radical self-critique and de-colonization of critical theory. She concludes by exploring alternative means for critical theory to justify its normative claims as a way for it to more deeply engage with post- and de-colonial theory.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Timothy Snyder, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” (Tim Duggan Books, 2015)

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 07:39:30 -0000

It’s rare when an academic historian breaks through and becomes a central part of the contemporary cultural conversation.

Timothy Snyder does just this with his book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015). He does so by boldly arguing that we don’t really understand what happened during the Holocaust. He argues in favor of an emphasis on ideology with Adolf Hitler at the center. But he also stresses the importance of the experience of occupation and the role of state structures, incentives and punishments. It was, he suggests, the persistence or disappearance of states that made all the difference in the way the Holocaust emerged over time.

Because of our misunderstanding of the nature of the Holocaust, we’ve misunderstood the lessons that it should teach us. Because the world of our time rhymes with that of the Holocaust, this misunderstanding poses real threats to our world.

It’s a tremendous book, fully worth of the extensive praise it has received. It will no doubt lead to many conversations among holocaust and genocide scholars alike.

We only had time to touch on the big themes of the book in this interview. Hopefully you’ll get a feel for the flavor of his argument and why it’s so challenging to the discipline.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jennifer Mittelstadt, “The Rise of the Military Welfare State” (Harvard UP, 2015)

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 14:19:44 -0000

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? Jennifer Mittelstadt tells us how these stark lines were drawn between the military and the civilian economy – and on how military welfare affects us all. Jennifer Mittelstadt is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Harvard University Press, 2015). You can read more about her research here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Saba Mahmood, “Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report” (Princeton UP, 2015)

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 12:04:10 -0000

It is commonly thought that violence, injustice, and discrimination against religious minorities, especially in the Middle East, are a product of religious fundamentalism and myopia. Concomitantly, it is often argued, that more of secularism and less of religion represents the solution to this problem. In her stunning new book Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton University Press, 2015), Saba Mahmood, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, brings such a celebratory view of secularism into fatal doubt. Through a careful and brilliant analysis, Mahmood convincingly shows that far from a solution to the problem of interreligious strife, political secularism and modern secular governance are in fact intimately entwined to the exacerbation of religious tensions in the Middle East. Focusing on Egypt and the experience of Egyptian Copts and Bahais, Mahmood explores multiple conceptual and discursive registers to highlight the paradoxical qualities of political secularism, arguing that majority/minority conflict in Egypt is less a reflection of the failure of secularism and more a product of secular discourses and politics, both within and outside the country. In our conversation, we touched on the salient features of this book such as the concept of political secularism and its applicability to a context such as Egypt, the genealogy of minority rights and religious liberty in the Middle East, discourses of minority rights and citizenship in relation to the Egyptian Copts, the discourse of public order and the regulation of Bahai religious identity and difference in Egypt, secularism, family law, and sexuality and the category of secularity and particular understandings of time, history, and scripture brought into view by the controversy generated in Egypt by the novel Azazeel. This theoretically rigorous book is also wonderfully written, making it particularly suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses on Islam, the Middle East, secularism, religion and politics, gender and sexuality, and theories and methods in religion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jason W. Moore, “Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital” (Verso, 2015)

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 13:31:35 -0000

In Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015), author Jason W. Moore seeks to undermine popular understandings of the relationship among society, environment, and capitalism. Rather, than seeing society and environment as acting on an external, nonhuman nature, Moore wants us to recognize capitalism-in-nature. For Moore, seeing society and environment as separate has hampered clear thinking on the problems we face, such as climate change or the end of cheap nature, as well as political solutions to these issues. His book is an analysis of the interrelationship of capitalism and nature over the past few centuries as well as a critique of important environmental concepts such as the Anthropocene.

Moore is assistant professor of sociology at SUNY-Binghamton and coordinator of the World Ecology Research Network. This book is a product of over a decade of research and writings on world ecology and evidence of his wide-ranging scholarship.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Carlos Fraenkel, “Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World” (Princeton UP, 2015)

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 06:00:19 -0000

We tend to think of Philosophy as a professional academic subject that is taught in college classes, with its own rather specialized problems, vocabularies, and methods. But we also know that the discipline has its roots in the Socratic activity of trying to incite debate and critical reflection among our fellow citizens. That is, we acknowledge that, apart from its existence as a technical discipline, Philosophy is a kind of civic activity that, we hope, can help us to address life’s biggest questions, even when we find ourselves deeply divided over their answers. In Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World (Princeton University Press, 2015), Carlos Fraenkel tells the tale of his attempts to recapture Philosophy’s Socratic dimension. He recounts his adventures in doing philosophy in nonstandard contexts, with atypical interlocutors, and in unfamiliar places. Along the way, we see a hopeful and encouraging vision of philosophy emerge as a collection of rational techniques and intellectual virtues that can, indeed, rescue our individual and collective lives from impending incivility.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Philip Roscoe, “A Richer Life: How Economics Can Change the Way We Think and Feel” (Penguin, 2015)

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 14:44:23 -0000

So many of our social questions are now the subject of analysis from economics. In A Richer Life: How Economics can Change the Way We Think and Feel (Penguin, 2015), Phillip Roscoe, a reader at the University of St Andrew’s School of Management, offers a critique of the long march of economics into social life. The book covers a vast range of social examples, including dating, organ transplantation, and education, alongside accessible engagements with historical and contemporary economic theory. Using personal examples as well as academic expertise, Roscoe’s book offers a primer in the social cost of economics, as well as what we can do to resit and challenge economistic modes of thought.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nancy Bauer, “How to Do Things With Pornography” (Harvard UP, 2015)

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 06:00:21 -0000

We live in a world awash with pornography, in the face of which anti-porn feminist philosophizing has not had much impact. In How to Do Things With Pornography (Harvard University Press, 2015), Nancy Bauer takes academic philosophy to task for being irrelevant and argues that philosophers should emulate Socrates in giving people reasons to reflect on their settled views. Bauer, who is professor of philosophy and dean of academic affairs for arts and sciences at Tufts University, considers the sexual objectification of women in contemporary society from several overlapping angles. She discusses the sense of empowerment that young women feel in today’s ‘hookup culture’ and defends a radical new reading J.L. Austin’s work on language that is at odds with the standard interpretation behind prominent feminist critiques of pornography. She also considers how white male dominance in academic philosophy has contributed to its lack of effectiveness, while applauding recent efforts by some to increase its diversity and its engagement with the public.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Lisa Tessman, “Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality” (Oxford UP, 2015)

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 06:00:36 -0000

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 indeed is some one thing that she ought to do. And if she were indeed to do this thing, she would thereby morally succeed. But we know from experience that our moral lives involve moral dilemmas. These are cases in which it seems that moral success is not possible because every action available to us is morally wrong, even unacceptable. In such cases, morality requires what is impossible: no matter what one does, one acts as one ought not to act.

In Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2015), Lisa Tessman proposes an original account of impossible moral demands, and forcefully argues for an approach to moral theory that can recognize their normative authority.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Colin Milburn, “Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter” (Duke UP, 2015)

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 13:30:06 -0000

Colin Milburn’s wonderful new book looks carefully and imaginatively at the relationship between nanotechnology and play. Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) considers the many ways in which the research methods of nanotech and related fields blend with the practices of gaming, fiction, and fantasy in a world where scientists become gamers and gamers become scientists, a world filled with nanocars, nanotoilets, nanotaurs (nano-scale Minotaurs!), and nanopants. Milburn explores the spaces of this world, from islands to Second Life to a NanoCity. Incorporating chapters that are counted in binary (0000, 0001, 0010, 0011, etc.) and clues to a game hidden inside the narrative (!), Milburn’s book embodies the kind of play that the book explores. It’s a fun and fabulous work that blends literature, STS, and history.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jeffery S. Gurock, “The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967” (Rutgers UP, 2015)

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 09:53:01 -0000

In The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967 (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Jeffrey S. Gurock, the Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, imagines an alternate history of American Jewry had there been no Holocaust. Contributing to the increasingly popular genre of alternate history, Gurock uses historical sources to create a plausible, but fictional, narrative about mid-century American Jews, their relationship with their coreligionists in Europe and Israel, and their acceptance in American society (or lack thereof). Each chapter in Gurock’s tale ends a short section that describes what really happened.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jon Birger, “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game” (Workman Publishing Company, 2015)

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 11:13:24 -0000

In Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game (Workman Publishing Company, 2015), Jon Birger, an award-winning journalist and contributor to Fortune magazine, explores the social implications of dating markets with a shortage of college-educated men.

Birger argues that demographics, not values, affect dating and marriage. Our discussion focuses on his investigation of how gender ratios in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community can explain the “Shidduch crisis.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Eric H. Cline, “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” (Princeton University Press, 2014)

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 10:31:52 -0000

It quickly sold out in hardback, and then, within a matter of days, sold out in paperback. Available again as a 2nd edition hardback, and soon in the 10th edition paperback with a new Afterword by the author, Eric H. Cline‘s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press, 2015) is THE must have, must read book of 2014, and 2015. Why? Because it’s serious archaeology, history and anthropology, but it reads like a mystery novel. The prose is superb; so good that it’s hard to put down. Homer wrote about the Age of Olympians: Zeus and Apollo, Odysseus, Achilles and Hector. Cline writes about the Minoans and Mycenaeans, the Trojans and the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians. And both epics, one mythology and one history, are about the same extraordinary time.

Cline recreates the late Bronze Age in fascinating detail and then describes its utter and complete destruction. City after city, empire after empire, civilization after civilization: annihilated to extinction, one right after another, and in a shockingly short amount of time. What caused a catastrophe so extreme that the First Dark Age descended over the world: a mysterious invading culture–the Sea People, plague and pestilence, earthquake, climate change, all of the above? 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed discusses each possibility in turn. A great interview with a world-class researcher–it easily could have gone for three-hours.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Eugene Thacker, “Horror of Philosophy” (Zero Book, 2011-2015)

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 06:00:59 -0000

Eugene Thacker‘s wonderful Horror of Philosophy series includes three books – In the Dust of this Planet (Zero Books, 2011), Starry Speculative Corpse (Zero Books, 2015), and Tentacles Longer than Night (Zero Books, 2015) – that collectively explore the relationship between philosophy (especially as it overlaps with demonology, occultism, and mysticism) and horror (especially of the supernatural sort). Each book takes on a particular problematic using a particular form from the history of philosophy, from the quaestio, lectio, and disputatio of medieval scholarship, to shorter aphoristic prose, to productive “mis-readings” of works of horror as philosophical texts and vice versa. Taken together, the books thoughtfully model the possibilities born of a comparative scholarly approach that creates conversations among works that might not ordinarily be juxtaposed in the same work: like Nishitani, Kant, Yohji Yamamoto, and Fludd; or Argento, Dante, and Lautramont. Though they explore topics like darkness, pessimism, vampiric cephalopods, and “black tentacular voids,” these books vibrate with life and offer consistent and shining inspiration for the careful reader. Anyone interested in philosophy, theology, modern literature and cinema, literatures on life and death, the history of horror…or really, anyone at all who appreciates thoughtful writing in any form should grab them – grab all of them! – and sit somewhere comfy, and prepare to read, reflect, and enjoy.

For Thacker’s brand-new book Cosmic Pessimism (published by Univocal with a super-groovy black-on-black cover) go here. Thacker is co-teaching a course with Simon Critchley on “Mysticism” at the New School for Social Research this fall 2015. You can check out the description here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael L. Satlow, “How the Bible Became Holy” (Yale UP, 2014)

Thu, 17 Sep 2015 12:22:23 -0000

In How the Bible Became Holy (Yale University Press, 2014), Michael L. Satlow, a professor of religious studies and Judaic studies at Brown University, explores how an ancient collection of obscure writing became, over the course of centuries, “holy.” We take for granted that texts have power, but that idea was not always so obvious to people.

Satlow traces the story of how the Bible became the foundational, authoritative text of Judaism and Christianity.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Cass Sunstein, “Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice” (Oxford UP, 2015)

Tue, 01 Sep 2015 06:00:29 -0000

The political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s ability to select one’s own path in life – to choose one’s occupation, one’s values, one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, and so on – without the intrusion or supervision of others. John Stuart Mill, who held a version of this view, argued that it is in choosing for ourselves that we develop not only self-knowledge, but autonomy and personality. Yet we now know that the image of the individual chooser that Mill’s view seems to presuppose is not quite accurate. It is not only the case that environmental factors of various kinds exert a great but often invisible influence over our choices; we must also contend with the limits of our cognitive resources. Sometimes, having to choose can be a burden, a hazard, and even an obstacle to liberty.

In Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice (Oxford University Press, 2015), Cass Sunstein examines the varied phenomena of choice-making. Bringing a range of finding from behavioral sciences, Sunstein makes the case that sometimes avoiding or delegating choice is an exercise of individual freedom.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Christine Desan, “Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism” (Oxford UP, 2015)

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 14:34:32 -0000

Christine Desan, teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory at Harvard Law School. In this podcast we discuss her new book, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Per the books jacket, “Money travels the modern world in disguise. It looks like a convention of human exchange – a commodity like gold or a medium like language. But its history reveals that money is a very different matter. It is an institution engineered by political communities to mark and mobilize resources. As societies change the way they create money, they change the market itself – along with the rules that structure it, the politics and ideas that shape it, and the benefits that flow from it. One particularly dramatic transformation in money’s design brought capitalism to England. For centuries, the English government monopolized money’s creation. The Crown sold people coin for a fee in exchange for silver and gold. “Commodity money” was a fragile and difficult medium; the first half of the book considers the kinds of exchange and credit it invited, as well as the politics it engendered. Capitalism arrived when the English reinvented money at the end of the 17th century. When it established the Bank of England, the government shared its monopoly over money creation for the first time with private investors, institutionalizing their self-interest as the pump that would produce the money supply. The second half of the book considers the monetary revolution that brought unprecedented possibilities and problems. The invention of circulating public debt, the breakdown of commodity money, the rise of commercial bank currency, and the coalescence of ideological commitments that came to be identified with the Gold Standard – all contributed to the abundant and unstable medium that is modern money. All flowed as well from a collision between the individual incentives and public claims at the heart of the system. The drama had constitutional dimension: money, as its history reveals, is a mode of governance in a material world. That character undermines claims in economics about money’s neutrality. The monetary design innovated in England would later spread, producing the global architecture of modern money.”

Some of the topics we cover are:

* How the work’s assertion that money is a mode of governance in a material world undermines claims in economics about money’s neutrality.

* The “free minting” system and why legal enforcement was essential to it.

* The radical redesign of money that began in the 17th century.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Tom Jackson, “Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again” (Bloomsbury, 2015)

Wed, 19 Aug 2015 16:17:19 -0000

Tom Jackson‘s Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again (Bloomsbury, 2015) is a completely engrossing look into the history and technology of refrigeration. This book reads like an expanded chapter of James Burke’s classic book Connections.Refrigeration is not only one of the most important foundation stones of our technological society, it’s also one that we take for granted. It’s hard to say which is more interesting; the realization that people were aware of a cooling method almost two millennia before the birth of Christ, the history of refrigeration from the Middle Ages to the present, or the possibilities for refrigeration technology in the world of the future. Chilledis a fascinating look into one of the most amazing and important technologies that man has ever developed.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

William Davies, “The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being” (Verso, 2015)

Tue, 18 Aug 2015 17:12:19 -0000

Are you happy? In his new book The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (Verso, 2015), William Davies, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, critically investigates this question. The book offers skepticism towardsthe demand that economy and society be happy, skepticism founded in an interrogation of the practices of contemporary government and businesses. A whole range of our everyday experiences, including ‘nudges’ for citizens and staff, the perverse incentives of metrics, through tothe consequences of how psychiatry classifies depression, are subject to critical scrutiny.Moreover, the book acts as a primer on economics, psychology and organizational theory, clearly articulating the roots and the consequences of our current economic and social settlement. The book concludes with the possibility of a more democratic way of organizing the world, in contrast to our impersonal, oppressive, and data driven present. Dr Davies is a co-director of Goldsmiths’ Political Economy Research Centre and blogs at Potlatch.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gyanendra Pandey, “A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States” (Cambridge UP, 2013)

Fri, 14 Aug 2015 18:13:42 -0000

A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is the latest book by Gyanendra Pandey. The book analyses prejudice and democracy through a comparison of African Americans and Indian Dalits. Pandey’s method of exploring these disparate populations and enormously complex themes, is to focus on particular case studies that are at once both very private and public, and thus allow for a truly unique, subtle and delicate analysis of what would be unwieldy topics in another’s hands. Simultaneously small and large, the book’s protagonists and author’s questions remain in the reader’s mind, long after putting down the book.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Craig Martin, “Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie” (Bloomsbury, 2014)

Tue, 04 Aug 2015 11:43:39 -0000

Whether you need help being more focused at work, are having a spiritual crisis, or want to understand how you can change your inner self for the better, the popular self-help and spiritual well-being market has got you covered. In Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie (Bloomsbury, 2014), Craig Martin, Associate Professor of Religious Studies St. Thomas Aquinas College, examines the rhetoric of individualism at root in these works and popular conceptions of ‘spirituality’ or individual religion. He demonstrates that individual religion has been placed within sets of dichotomies, communal vs. individual, tradition vs. choice, organized religion vs. spirituality, that establish the continuing conversations about contemporary spirituality. Overall, he argues that many spirituality and related self-help discourses recommend quietism, consumerism, and worker productivity, which reproduce the status quo within neoliberal capitalism. In our conversation we discuss the relationship between individuals and communities, the role of human agency, experience, ideology, contemporary fiction, Durkheim, William James, Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and the joys of reading Deepak Chopra.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John H. Walton, “The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate” (IVP Academic, 2015)

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 18:30:34 -0000

For centuries the story of Adam and Eve has resonated richly through the corridors of art, literature, and theology. But, for most modern readers, taking it at face value is incongruous. New insights from anthropology and population genetics–let alone evolutional biology–complicate any attempt to reconcile them with a biblical account of human origins. Indeed, for many Christians who want to take seriously the authority of the Bible, insisting on a literal understanding of Genesis 2-3 looks painfully like a “tear here” strip between faith and science.

Who were the historical Adam and Eve? What if we’ve been reading Genesis–and its claims regarding material origins–wrong? In what cultural context was this couple, this garden, this tree, this serpent portrayed? Following his groundbreaking Lost World of Genesis One, John Walton explores the ancient Near Eastern context of Genesis 2-3, creating space for a faithful reading of Scripture along with full engagement with science for a new way forward in the human origins debate.

John Walton is a professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College in Illinois and an editor and writer of Old Testament comparative studies and commentaries. Throughout his research, Walton has focused his attention on comparing the culture and literature of the Bible and the ancient Near East. He has published dozens of books, including Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Eisenbrauns, 2011), The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (IVP, 2009), and Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (Baker Books, 2006).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis, “The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

Tue, 21 Jul 2015 12:47:06 -0000

Who were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old Europe? Weed-smoking drug dealers rolling across Eurasia in a cannabis-induced haze? Or slow-moving but inexorable farmers from Anatolia?

These are just some of the many possibilities discussed in the scholarly literature. But in 2012, a New York Times article announced that the problem had been solved, by a team of innovative biologists applying computational tools to language change. In an article published in Science, they claimed to have found decisive support for the Anatolian hypothesis.

In their book, The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis make the case that this conclusion is premature, and based on unwarranted assumptions. In this interview, Asya and Martin talk to me about the history of the Indo-European homeland question, the problems they see in the Science article, and the form that a good theory of Indo-European origins needs to take.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

William Elliott III and Melinda Lewis, “Real College Debt Crisis” (Praeger, 2015)

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 23:59:21 -0000

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 University of Kansas, explore the landscape of the US higher education student loan situation in The Real College Debt Crisis: How Student Borrowing Threatens Financial Well-Being and Erodes the American Dream (Praeger 2015). Using real-life examples along with academically rooted studies, the authors attempt to answer the question, “Does the student who goes to college and graduates but has outstanding student debt achieve similar financial outcomes to the student who graduates from college without student debt?”

Co-author Melinda Lewis joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. You can also find the authors on Twitter at @melindaklewis and Dr. Elliott’s organization at @AssetsEducation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Kocku von Stuckrad, “The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800-2000” (De Gruyter, 2014)

Mon, 06 Jul 2015 14:54:41 -0000

Science and religion are often paired as diametric opposites. However, the boundaries of these two fields were not always as clear as they seem to be today. In The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800-2000 (De Gruyter, 2014), Kocku von Stuckrad, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, demonstrates how the construction of what constitutes ‘religion’ and ‘science’ was a relational process that emerged with the competition between various systems of knowledge. In this book, von Stuckrad traces the transformation and perpetuation of religious discourses as a result of their entanglement with secular academic discourses. In the first half of the book, he presents the discursive constructions of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ through the disciplines of astrology, astronomy, psychology, alchemy, chemistry, and scientific experimentation more generally. The second half of the book explores the power of academic legitimization of knowledge in emerging European modernities. Here, the discursive entanglements of professional and participant explanations of modern practices shaped and solidified those realities. Key figures in the history of the field of Religious Studies, such as Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade, played instrumental roles in legitimizing the authority of mysticism, goddess worship, and shamanism. Ultimately, what we discover is that ‘religion’ and ‘science’ are not so much distinctive spheres but elastic systems that arise within the particular circumstances of secular modernity. In our conversation we discussed discursive approaches to the study of religion, the Theosophical Society, marginalized forms of knowledge, the occult sciences, Jewish mysticism, secularization, nature-focused spiritualities, experiential knowledge, pagan religious practices, and ‘modern’ science.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Iain W. Provan, “Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters” (Baylor UP, 2014)

Mon, 06 Jul 2015 11:29:53 -0000

The Old Testament is often maligned as an outmoded and even dangerous text. Best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins, Karen Armstrong, and Derrick Jensen are prime examples of those who find the Old Testament to be problematic to modern sensibilities. In his new book Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Baylor UP, 2014), Iain W. Provan counters that such easy and popular readings misunderstand the Old Testament. He opposes modern misconceptions of the Old Testament by addressing ten fundamental questions that the biblical text should–and according to Provan does–answer: questions such as “Who is God?” and “Why do evil and suffering mark the world?” By focusing on Genesis and drawing on other Old Testament and extra-biblical sources, Seriously Dangerous Religion constructs a more plausible reading. As it turns out, Provan argues, the Old Testament is far more dangerous than modern critics even suppose.

Since 1997, Iain Provan has been the Marshall Sheppard Professor of Biblical Studies at Regent College, located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is a co-author, with V. Philips Long and Tremper Longman, of A Biblical History of Israel (John Knox Press, 2003), and the author of Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was (Baylor University Press, 2013). Provan received his MA in Medieval history and archaeology from Glasgow University, his BA in theology from London Bible College, and his PhD from Cambridge University. His academic teaching career has taken him to King’s College London, the University of Wales, and the University of Edinburgh, where he was a senior lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament Studies. Provan is an ordained minister of the Church of Scotland; a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge; and the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

James Laine, “Meta-Religion: Religion and Power in World History” (U of California Press, 2015)

Tue, 23 Jun 2015 14:52:42 -0000

Most world religions textbooks follow a structure and conceptual framework that mirrors the modern discourse of world religions as distinct entities reducible to certain defining characteristics. In his provocative and brilliant new book Meta-Religion: Religion and Power in World History (University of California Press, 2015), James Laine, Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College challenges this dominant paradigm of world religions textbooks by showcasing an approach that instead focuses on the interaction of religion and power across time and space. At once ambitious and lucid, Meta-Religion narrates the story of the complex intersection of religion and politics in multiple moments, places, and traditions. A hallmark of this book is the way it engages the religious and political history of Islam and Muslim societies in conversation with other religious traditions. What emerges from this exercise is a rich and fascinating picture of the complicated and at times conflicting ways in which religiously diverse and plural societies have been managed through particular political arrangements and ideologies in different historical moments. In our conversation we talked about the idea of meta-religion, different varieties of meta-religion in India, Rome, and China, the marginalization of Islam and Muslim history in Euro-American world historical periodizations, Meta-Religion in Muslim history, Akbar and his experimentation with meta-religion, and meta-religion in the modern and contemporary context. This book will be of great interest to specialists in Islamic Studies and other scholars of religion and religious history; it will also make an excellent text for courses on Islam and world history, Introduction to Religion, and on theories and methods in Religious Studies.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nick Sousanis, “Unflattening” (Harvard UP, 2015)

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 13:02:18 -0000

Nick Sousanis‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking or teaching about the relationships between text, image, visuality, and knowledge. Unflattening (Harvard University Press, 2015) uses the medium of comics to explore “flatness of sight” and help readers think and work beyond it by opening up new perceptive possibilities. It proposes that we think about unflattening as a “simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing,” and beautifully embodies what it can look like to make that happen. Readers will find thoughtful reflections on the possibilities and constraints afforded by working and thinking with different kinds of verbal and visual language, including a consideration of comics as “an amphibious language of juxtapositions and fragments,” and some wonderful work on storytelling and imagination. The book includes a wonderful “Notes” section that offers some background on the inspiration behind many of the images (including Flatland, Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, Deleuze & Guattari, and many others) a bibliography for further reading, and a series of maps of the structure of the book when it was a work-in-progress. It’s a fabulous book that is a pleasure to read and deserves a wide readership.

For more on Nick’s work on Unflattening and beyond, check out his website: http://spinweaveandcut.com/. For listeners and readers interested in teaching with the book, check out this site: http://scholarlyvoices.org/unflattening/index.html

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

J. Bronsteen, C. Buccafusco, and J. S. Masur, “Happiness and the Law” (U Chicago Press, 2014)

Tue, 12 May 2015 16:11:05 -0000

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 should consider happiness when determining the best ways to effectuate law. In this podcast Buccafusco, Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Empirical Studies of Intellectual Property at the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College, shares some of the following aspects of the book:

* How hedonic psychology measures human happiness and some of the things these studies have revealed

* The author’s new approach to evaluating laws called “well-being analysis”

* Ways the new data on happiness has revealed a need to rethink criminal punishment

* What the future holds for happiness research

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robin Grier and Jerry F. Hough, “The Long Process of Development” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

Mon, 11 May 2015 15:19:59 -0000

According to a popular saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.” As concernswhat economists and political scientists call “development”–that is, progress towards libertyand prosperity–the saying seems to be true. As a general rule, the countries that were relatively free and relatively prosperous 100 years ago are the ones that are relatively free and relatively prosperous today.200 years ago? Yes, more or less. 300 years ago? Well, probably. 400 years ago? A good argument could be made…

Why? According to one argument, the difference is caused by the rich praying on the poor. In a word, imperialism. But if you survey countries around the world, it’s not clear whether imperialism (and colonization) hurt or helped development. The Spanish thoroughly imperialized Mexico, and it’s pretty prosperous; no one really got into the interior of Africa and it’s not. And what are we to make of developmental differences within, say, prosperous Europe? No real imperialism there; a lot of bloody war, but no imperialism as such. Germany is free and prosperous. Russia is not free and not prosperous. Why is that?

In their impressive and refreshing bookThe Long Process of Development: Building Markets and States in Pre-industrial England, Spain and their Colonies (Cambridge University Press, 2014),Jerry F. Hough and Robin Grier argue that it’s not so much imperialism that impedes development, but style of governance and, especially, time. If autocratic governments do nothing buttake rents, thesocieties they rule will not develop, not ever, no matter how long or hard the governmentstry to development them. If they are even semi-popular and pro-trade, they will develop, though it will take a very, very long time. There’s no magic built. You can’t simply import democracy and capitalism and hope for a rapid transitionto freedom and prosperity.The process of development takes centuries.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Eben Kirksey, “The Multispecies Salon” (Duke University Press, 2014)

Sun, 10 May 2015 22:31:38 -0000

Eben Kirksey‘s wonderful new volume is an inspiring introduction to a kind of multispecies ethnography where artists, anthropologists, and others collaborate to create objects and experiences of great thoughtfulness and beauty. Growing out of a traveling art exhibit of the same name, The Multispecies Salon (Duke University Press, 2014) curates a collection of works that explore three major questions: “Which beings flourish, and which fail, when natural and cultural worlds intermingle and collide?” “What happens when the bodies of organisms, and even entire ecosystems, are enlisted in the schemes of biotechnology and the dreams of biocapitalism?” “…In the aftermath of disasters…what are the possibilities of biocultural hope?” Pioneering a style of collaboration inspired by Michel de Certeau’s notion of “poaching,” the contributions to the volume span essays on bioart and matsutake worlds, recipes for human-milk cheese and acorn mush, ruminations on the production of assmilk soap and on the nature and importance of hope, considerations of the brittlestar and the art of Patricia Piccinini, and much more. This is a volume that I will be returning to, recommending, and assigning for years to come.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Thom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014)

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 11:25:10 -0000

Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and collectively enable us to explore and re-imagine what, where, and how extinction is, and why that matters. Van Dooren emphasizes the importance of storytelling to understanding and inhabiting the world, and the book’s five “extinction stories” each bring to life the entanglements of avian, human, and other beings to ask readers to consider a series of questions that can best be explored, understood, and engaged through attentiveness to these entanglements. “What is lost,” van Dooren asks, “when a species, an evolutionary lineage, a way of life, passes from the world?” How does this loss mean, and what does it mean, within the particular multispecies community formed and shaped by that way of life? And how might storytelling, conceived as an act of witnessing, help draw us into new relationships and accountabilities within our multispecies communities? Flight Ways is deeply concerned with the ethical questions that emerge – and that must be sustained – in the course of thinking through these crucial questions, and it is committed to moving us away from a position of human exceptionalism as we work with and inside of that ethical troubling. Deeply interdisciplinary, van Dooren’s book brings together approaches in animal studies and the environmental humanities, but it speaks to and from many more fields.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert W. Gehl, “Reverse Engineering Social Media” (Temple UP, 2014)

Mon, 13 Apr 2015 16:40:23 -0000

Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (University of Utah, Department of Communication) explores the architecture and political economy of social media. Gehl analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The book draws upon software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to contextualize the institutionalization of user labor in our growing social media landscape. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary “Like” consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth. Gehl also goes beyond a critique of these inherently undemocratic systems to outline proposals that can shape our collective online future for the better. An idealized social data system, he argues, should be “decentralized, transparent, encrypted, antiarchival, stored on free hardware, and geared toward collective politics over atomization and depth over immediacy and surfaces.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert Putnam, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” (Simon and Schuster, 2015)

Mon, 23 Mar 2015 06:00:01 -0000

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 written fourteen books including the best-seller, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

Few political scientists command attention like Robert Putnam. For that reason, scholars and the wider public are eager for his take on our current state of affairs. His latest book, Our Kids, paints a grim picture of US life in the twentieth century. The social mobility that Putnam associates with his childhood growing up in Ohio is largely gone, replaced by deep income inequality and increasingly rigid class boundaries. Putnam demonstrates this with a combination of individual stories and supporting social science evidence all that point to education (or inadequate education) as the key determining factor. But in the end Putnam is not a pessimist, instead he sees opportunities for social change. The book ends with a series of recommendations, most non-political, but all aimed to address the country’s mobility problem.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Rick Strassman, “DMT and the Soul of Prophecy” (Park Street Press, 2014)

Sun, 15 Mar 2015 06:01:51 -0000

DMT and the Soul of Prophecy:A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible (Park Street Press, 2014) asks a number of provocative questions about drugs, consciousness, prophecy, and the Hebrew Bible–with attention to how a particular chemical can help us understand mystical experience. DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is a molecule endogenous to several mammals including humans, as well as the active psychedelic ingredient in a number of plant species around the world–most notably in an Amazonian brew called ayahuasca. Rick Strassman‘s first book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, showcases his research in the 1990s at the University of New Mexico, during which he injected several volunteers with DMT as part of a government-sanctioned research project. During the trials, volunteers experienced a number of similar phenomena, such as communication with other-than-human beings, out-of-body experiences, and geometrically complex closed-eye visuals. DMT and the Soul of Prophecy complements Strassman’s first book, but it also stands on its own and gives enough context of his DMT research to make sense of his arguments about prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. The new monograph aims to further interpret the data from Strassman’s experiments in the 90s, by arguing that the notion of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible offers a compelling model for what happens in the DMT state. One might ask, then, if the Hebrew prophets were affected by DMT. Although it’s not possible to know for sure, and Strassman doesn’t claim that they were, he nonetheless draws significant parallels between DMT experiences and prophetic states in the Hebrew Bible. At the cross-section of biology, psychology, and religious studies, Strassman’s monograph is sure to spark provocative conversations about the relationship between religion, drugs, and the politics of research.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Edmund Russell, “Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth” (

Wed, 11 Mar 2015 13:30:40 -0000

Evolution is among the most powerful ideas in the natural sciences. Indeed, the evolutionary theoristTheodosius Dobzhansky famouslysaid nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Yet despite its central place in the life sciences, relatively few geographers employ evolutionary theory in their work. In his new book Evolutionary History:Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Edmund Russell makes a compelling case for why evolution matters for human history. Russell argues that evolution is both important and common. Through a number of case studies, he shows how poaching in Africa led to the evolution of tuskless elephants and intensive fishing fostered the development of smaller salmon and cod. But perhaps more importantly, he shows how anthropogenic, or human shaped, evolution played a pivotal role in two of the fundamental developments of human history: the agricultural and industrial revolutions. His book is a challenge to historians, geographers, and other scholars and the social sciences to recognize the pivotal role evolution has played in human history and to see cultural, political, and economic factors as forces in evolution.

Professor Russell is Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professor of U.S. History at the University of Kansas, and is a leading scholar in the fields of environmental history and the history of technology. His previous book, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring, examined the complicated and fraught relationship between chemical weapons production and insecticide development and the consequences of their use for both humans and nature as a whole.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alexander R. Galloway, “Laruelle: Against the Digital” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 18:41:38 -0000

“The chief aim of [philosopher Francois Laruelle’s] life’s work is to consider philosophy without resorting to philosophy in order to do so.”

What is non-philosophy, what would it look like to practice it, and what are the implications of doing so? Alexander R. Galloway introduces and explores these questions in a vibrant and thoughtful new book. Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) uses Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy as a foundation for considering the philosophical concept of digitality. In a series of ten chapters (plus intro and conclusion) and 14 theses, Galloway offers an exceptionally clear and provocative treatment of digitality as a way of thinking about and with difference. In addition to offering a critical encounter with some of the most fundamental aspects of Laruelle’s work as they open up ways of thinking about identity, distinction, and exchange, the book also contains some wonderful discussions of brightness and obscurity, representation and aesthetics, computation, photography, music, ethics, and capitalism, while putting the work of Laruelle into dialogue with Deleuze, Badiou, Marx, Althusser, and others. It’s an exciting work, and I will be re-reading and thinking with it for some time to come.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Daniel Cloud, “The Domestication of Language” (Columbia UP, 2014)

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 18:35:55 -0000

One of the most puzzling things about humans is their ability to manipulate symbols and create artifacts. Our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom–apes–have only the rudiments of these abilities: chimps don’t have language and, if they have culture, it’s extraordinarily primitive in comparison to the human form. What we have between apes and humans is not really a continuum; it’s a break. So how did this break occur? The answer, of course, is evolutionarily. It stands to Darwinian reason that our distant ancestors must have been selected for symbolic use and cultural production, and it was in this natural selective way that they became human.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but it presents us with another puzzle: why is human language and culture so astoundingly complex? In order to prosper in the so-called “era of evolutionary adaptation,” neither needed to have been complex at all. A Hominin with a smallish fraction of the symbolic and cultural abilities of Homo sapiens would easily have emerged (and maybe did emerge) as a completely dominant alpha predator. Imagine, if you will, a chimp that could talk a bit and produce reasonably effective missile weapons. How much selection pressure would such a talking, armed chimp face? Not much, at least from other animals. Such an Hominin would not, ceteris paribus, need to evolve new and more complex linguistic and cultural abilities and forms.

But complex linguistic and cultural abilities and forms did evolve. So, we have to ask, where do Shakespeare and Large Hadron Colliders come from? Daniel Cloud has an answer: domestication. In his fascinating and thought-provoking new book The Domestication of Language: Cultural Evolution and the Uniqueness of the Human Animal (Columbia University Press, 2014), Cloud argues that over the millennia proto-humans and humans have been selecting mates who were good with symbols and selecting symbols themselves. This process–a kind of runaway sexual selection and domestication–rapidly (in evolutionary time-scales) produced both a huge expensive brain and an ornate culture to match. Listen in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Suzanne Mettler, “Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream” (Basic Books, 2014)

Wed, 09 Jul 2014 06:00:43 -0000

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 adult Americans had college degrees; today the figure is roughly the same. What happened?

In her book Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream (Basic Books, 2014), Suzanne Mettler argues that American students–and particularly those from the lower and lower-middle class–have been priced out of good higher education. Over the past several decades, college tuition has risen far faster than inflation and, of course, the ability of disadvantaged parents and students to pay for it. Mettler points out that the colleges themselves are usually blamed for the spike in tuition, and she agrees that they are to some degree at fault. But she argues that the Federal and State governments are the primary culprits: in the era of growth, they generously supported higher education; today, through neglect or wilful action, they have allowed government support for higher education to dwindle. Federal Pell grants, for example, used to pay for a good chunk of tuition at a four-year state university; now they pay for only a fraction of that cost. States used to give their universities generous support; now these universities are expected to pay much of their own way, usually through increases in tuition.

Mettler points out that for-profit universities have stepped into the breach. They are, she says, innovative, and that’s good. But, according to Mettler, they offer an inferior product at inflated prices, effectively taking tuition dollars away from better and in some cases comparably priced state institutions. And, because they receive a very large proportion of their income from Federal and State tuition grants and loans, they are effectively subsidized by the taxpayer.

Listen into our fascinating discussion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nick Smith, “Justice through Apologies: Remorse, Reform, and Punishment” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 13:33:52 -0000

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 many of our apologies are what might be called “strategic,” that is, designed to do nothing more than placate the person we have wronged and essentially exonerate ourselves? In other word, how many of our apologies are genuine? It’s a good question, but it raises another: what is a genuine apology? Does it involve an admission of guilt, remorse, a promise never to do it (whatever it is) again, compensation for the wrong? That’s a good question too, but it, too, raises a question: how can we tell a strategic apology from a genuine one? Gnashing of teeth? Wailing? Weeping? Statements against interest?

As Nick Smith points out in his insightful Justice through Apologies: Remorse, Reform, and Punishment (Cambridge University Press, 2014), we don’t usually ask any of these questions when giving and taking apologies, and even when we do, our answers don’t make much sense. This thoughtlessness is particularly troublesome when apologies are used or required in high-stakes legal contexts. What can an apology mean when a judge compels a criminal to give one in exchange for a lesser sentence? What can an apology mean when a huge corporation issues one in a civil case knowing full well that doing so will likely reduce the damages it will have to pay? How can an apology be genuine–or even distinguished from a strategic apology–when the apologizer has so much to gain if they apologize and so much to lose if they don’t?

All good questions. Listen in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

William Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon, “The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of Religion” (Oxford UP, 2013)

Fri, 27 Jun 2014 14:50:31 -0000

What brings us together as scholars in Religious Studies? Are the various social phenomena commonly grouped together as religion really that similar? The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” (Oxford University Press, 2012) adds to this ongoing debate over whether ‘religion’ is a useful explanatory term. In general, issues of classification and the constructed nature of the category ‘religion’ are now a repeated themes in many scholars work. William Arnal, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Regina, and Russell T. McCutcheon, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, argue that we need to take our analysis even further and the common practice of historicizing the word ‘religion’ (or the habit of putting the word in quotation marks) generally fails to reveal the ordinariness of these social practices, and thus naturalizes the idea of the sacred. Ultimately, we need to stop employing ‘religion’ as an analytical category because it is a first-order folk classification derived from a particular historical setting. It is our job then to redescribe activity and explain the processes of social classification and identity construction. In our conversation we discuss definitions, Disney World, discursive products, theories of signification, genre, the Cold War, secularism, estrangement, politics, Christian origins, being methodologically self-conscious, graduate study, the Toronto school of Religious Studies, and the relevance of our work’s minutiae in addressing larger educational and disciplinary objectives.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova, “Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis” (MIT, 2014)

Thu, 19 Jun 2014 06:00:26 -0000

The continued growth of online gaming and virtual worlds has effects not only in the analog world, with games and social media organizations taking stock options public, but also in the worlds created online. Many games and platforms allow users to involve themselves in virtual labor, to own property, and most importantly to make purchases. This one of areas where the analog and virtual crossover. And the question for platform providers becomes how to capitalize on user interest while earning money. In the new book Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (MIT 2014), Vili Lehdonvirta, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, at the University of Oxford and Edward Castronova, professor of communications and cognitive science at Indiana University provide a detailed examination of the underpinnings and motivations for the creation of virtual economies. Lehdonvirta and Castronova consider various international examples to provide a comprehensive look at the markets that continue to be embedded into all kinds of online, and offline, interactions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Austin Sarat, “Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty” (Stanford UP, 2014)

Wed, 18 Jun 2014 06:00:24 -0000

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 Sarat shows in his fascinating book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty (Stanford University Press, 2014), these two questions are intimately related. The reason is pretty simple: if the state can’t find a legally and morally acceptable way to execute malefactors, then perhaps we need to ask seriously whether the state should be killing criminals at all. If the means cannot be found, then the end may well be unachievable.

In Gruesome Spectacles, Sarat analyses hundreds of executions in an attempt to assess the degree to which we can kill criminals in legally and morally acceptable ways. What he discovers is that about three in a hundred American executions over the past century or so have gone badly wrong. Criminals who were supposed to have been put to death in a humane way were strangled, decapitated, set on fire, suffocated, and slowly poisoned. Apparently American authorities—however laudable their intentions—have found it quite difficult, practically speaking, to avoid “cruel and unusual punishment” when executing wrongdoers.

It’s important to note that Gruesome Spectacles is not an anti-death penalty book. Sarat’s presentation of botched executions is balanced by consideration of the horrible crimes for which the ultimate penalty was imposed. What Sarat does–and we should thank him for it–is provide hard evidence on a crucial question: can we, realistically speaking, put criminals to death humanely?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Morris B. Hoffman, “The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

Wed, 11 Jun 2014 12:13:19 -0000

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 after a transgression even though “the rules” say we really shouldn’t?

In his fascinating book The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Judge Morris B. Hoffman attempts to answer these questions with reference to evolutionary psychology. As a working judge, Hoffman is in an excellent position to explore the dynamics of our instincts to punish and forgive. We are, he says, evolved to punish “cheaters”–ourselves and others–so as to maintain all-important bonds of trust and cooperation. But we are also evolved not to take punishment too far. When correction becomes too costly, we forgive so as to maintain social solidarity. Listen in to our fascinating discussion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Marci A. Hamilton, “God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

Sat, 07 Jun 2014 12:27:05 -0000

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 the government must permit any religious practice, even one that’s nominally illegal? Clearly not. You can’t shoot someone even if God tells you to. Does it mean, then, that religious liberty is a sort of fiction and that the government can actually closely circumscribe religious practice? Clearly not. The government can’t ban a putatively religious practice just because it’s expedient to do so.

So where’s the line? In God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press, Second Edition, 2014), Marci A. Hamilton argues that it’s shifting rapidly. Traditionally, the government, congress, and courts agreed that though Americans should enjoy extensive religious freedom, that freedom did not include license to do anything the religious might like. A sensible accommodation between church and state had to be made so that both the church and state could do their important work.

According to Hamilton, in recent decades radical religious reformers have mounted a successful campaign to throw the idea of a sensible accommodation out the window. They have expanded the scope of religious liberty and thereby limited the ability of the government to protect citizens generally. In this sense, she says, religion–a force for great social good, in her mind–has been made into an instrument of harm for many Americans. Listen in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John L. Brooke, “Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey” (Cambridge UP, 2014)

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 13:12:35 -0000

Climate change is in the news a lot today. There seems to be little doubt that it’s getting warmer and that, should present trends continue, the warming trend will have “historical” consequences. Things are going to change.

Ever thus. As John L. Brooke shows in his remarkable Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge University Press, 2014), what we might colloquially call “the weather” has been nudging, pushing, and dramatically altering the course of World history for eons. Sometimes it’s dry; sometimes it’s wet. Sometimes it’s hot; sometimes it’s cold. Sometimes the air is good; sometimes it’s bad. There are patterns, as John points out, but there’s also a good degree of unpredictability–it is, after all, the weather. What’s happening right now, though, is not in the slightest unpredictable: if we keep dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it’s going to get hot; if it gets hot, things are going to change–again.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Vincent Mosco, “To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World” (Paradigm Publishers, 2014)

Thu, 29 May 2014 15:18:13 -0000

The “cloud” and “cloud computing” have been buzzwords over the past few years, with businesses and even governments praising the ability to save information remotely and access that information from anywhere. And an increasing number of organizations and individuals are using the cloud almost exclusively for their computing and storage purposes. The question remains, however, whether there is an actual understanding of what the cloud is, and the issues and implications that surround the growth in cloud storage and computing. In To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World, Vincent Mosco, a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Queen’s University, where he was the Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society, describes the political, social, and cultural issues surrounding cloud computing. According to Mosco, “cloud computing serves as a prism that reflects and refracts every major issue in the field of information technology and society.” In To The Cloud, Mosco examines this prism and considers the historic, present day, and future implications of cloud computing.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

danah boyd, “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” (Yale UP, 2014)

Mon, 12 May 2014 15:50:31 -0000

Social media is ubiquitous, and teens are ubiquitous on social media. And this youth attachment to social media is a cause for concern among parents, educators, and legislators concerned with issues of privacy, harm prevention, and and cyberbullying. In her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP, 2014), danah boyd, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Research Assistant Professor at NYU, and Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, demystifies teen use of social media for communication. In particular, boyd uses ethnographic interviewing and observation techniques to examine the how, what and why of youth use of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jennifer Stromer-Galley, “Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age” (Oxford UP, 2014)

Mon, 05 May 2014 06:00:55 -0000

The Oxford University Press series on digital politics has produced several new books that we have featured on the podcast. Interviews with Dave Karpf, Dan Kreiss, and Muzammil Hussain are available in previous podcasts. One of the latest from the series is Jennifer Stromer-Galley new book Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (OUP 2014). Stromer-Galley is associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.

This excellent new book is a bit of a walk down memory lane. Do you remember the early search features on Yahoo! and those slow loading webpages of the late 1990s? Stromer-Galley pieces together the use of the internet from 1996 through 2012. We learn about some of the ways the promise of the internet to democratize the presidential campaign process has largely failed. Presidential websites have nearly always sent information out, but rarely invited information back in. And even when they have, that information has never been as central to the campaign as often promised.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Benjamin Radcliff, “The Political Economy of Happiness” (Cambridge UP, 2013)

Thu, 01 May 2014 15:18:08 -0000

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 one of ideas. And that it is in the worst possible sense, for neither the Democrats nor Republicans seem interested in evidence. They don’t want the facts to get in the way of their arguments.

In his remarkable book The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Benjamin Radcliff provides facts that should help both Democrats and Republicans, despite their many differences, decide how to proceed. He asks a simple, compelling question: do conservative or liberal public policies make people happier? After an extensive and sophisticated analysis of the data, he reaches an equally simple, compelling answer: liberal policies do.

Radcliff is a great friend of the free market; it is obvious, he says, that capitalism is the best economic system we have at our disposal. But he is also pragmatic: all the evidence shows that free markets alone don’t make people as happy as markets combined with robust welfare and labor-protection programs. There is a lesson here for both Democrats and Republicans. Listen up.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” (Henry Holt, 2014)

Sat, 19 Apr 2014 11:32:35 -0000

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 book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt, 2014), explores the five major mass extinction events that have occurred on the Earth over the last half billion years. Kolbert contrasts these Big Five, as they are known, to the sixth mass extinction event, which we are in the midst of today.

This time, instead of a massive asteroid or a sudden glaciation event, humans are the culprit. Travelling with different scientists to remote ecosystems around the world, Kolbert sees evidence of the many ways humans are altering the planet – through climate change, ocean acidification, and the spread of invasive species. By the end of the century, scientists predict we will lose 20 to 50% of all living species.

Kolbert also places this current extinction event in the context of human history: although the rate at which we are driving species extinct has reached an unprecedented pace, humans have been responsible for causing species loss for tens of thousands of years. As Kolbert comments, “We’ve been at this project for a very long time.”

Her book also addresses the paradoxical relationship that humans have with the species we share the planet with, especially the large and charismatic megafauna. Kolbert contrasts our remarkable proclivity to kill off species with some touching examples of the inexplicable lengths we will go to save a species from extinction.

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer with The New Yorker since 1999. She is also the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jennifer Stromer-Galley, “Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age” (Oxford UP, 2014)

Fri, 18 Apr 2014 06:00:46 -0000

Digital Communications Technologies, or DCTs, like the Internet offer the infrastructure and means of forming a networked society. These technologies, now, are a mainstay of political campaigns on every level, from city, to state, to congressional, and, of course, presidential. In her new book, Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (Oxford University Press, 2014), Jennifer Stromer-Galley, an associate professor in the iSchool at Syracuse University, discusses the impact of DCTs on presidential campaigning. In particular, Stromer-Galley takes a historical look at the past five presidential campaigns and the use of the Internet by incumbents and challengers to win the election. The promise of DCTs with respect to political campaigning was greater citizen participation in the democratic process. Stromer-Galley analyzes whether DCTs have lived up to this promise, or if the idea of the Internet promoting great political engagement is merely a myth.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Michael Strevens, “Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal Structure” (Harvard UP, 2013)

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 06:00:26 -0000

When we’re faced with a choice between Door #1, Door #2, and Door #3, how do we infer correctly that there’s an equal chance of the prize being behind any of the doors? How is it that we are generally correct to choose the shorter of two checkout lines in the supermarket when we’re in a hurry? In his new book, Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal Structure (Harvard University Press, 2013), Michael Strevens – professor of philosophy at New York University, argues that we are all equipped with a reliable, probable innate, and not fully conscious skill at probabilistic reasoning—a “physical intuition” that enables us to infer physical probabilities from perceived symmetries. This skill is found in six-month-old infants watching as red and white balls are removed in different proportions from an urn. But it also underlies important advances in the sciences, such as James Clerk Maxwell’s reasoning when he hit upon the correct distribution of velocities of a moving particle in a gas. In this intriguing essay on a very special type of cognitive capacity, Strevens’ defends controversial claims about the rules guiding our reasoning about physical probability, its probable innateness, and its role in science as well as in everyday judgment.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nick Yee, “The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us-and How They Don’t” (Yale UP, 2014)

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 06:00:45 -0000

The image of online gaming in popular culture is that of an addictive pastime, mired in escapism. And the denizens of virtual worlds are thought to be mostly socially awkward teenaged boys. In his new book The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us-and How They Don’t (Yale University Press, 2014), Nick Yee asserts that the common stereotypes of gaming and gamers are not, and have never been, based in fact. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs as they are called, attract a diverse community of users with a range of ages, economic statuses, and motivations for playing. Basing his conclusions on his own research into online gaming and virtual worlds, Yee finds that far from creating separate worlds with new rules for its member, MMORPGs reinforce the social norms from offline society.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nathan Schneider. “God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet” (University of California Press, 2013)

Mon, 07 Apr 2014 12:01:42 -0000

Nathan Schneider‘s monograph, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet (University of California Press, 2013), explores the timeless challenge of how to explain God. Are such explanations rational? Why are some attempts more popular than others? Indeed, can one really “prove” God? Isn’t it called “faith” for a reason? And what does Star Trek have to do with all of this?

In addressing these questions, and many more, Schneider guides the reader through a rich land of storytelling, autobiographical reflections, and clever drawings. As the author submits in the book from its onset, don’t expect to discover which proof is right or why atheists are wrong. It turns out, in any case, that “proof” doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it means. Although proof can mean unimpeachable evidence, a proof can also be a work in progress (e.g., the proof of a text); or it can mean to tackle a challenge (e.g., to prove oneself). As Schneider convincingly argues, moreover, proofs for God have scarcely focused on mitigating doubt. They have been works of devotion and profoundly personal revelations. These proofs have also remained tied intimately to particular socio-historical contexts, but Schneider points out that despite this, the world of proofs is also a world of relationships and shared ideas in which Muslims, Jews, Christians, philosophers, and many others draw upon the ideas of one another. Schneider’s combined background in journalism and academia helps in rendering his complex and sometimes mind-boggling subject digestible to both general and scholarly audiences with polyvalent interests and beliefs about God.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John R. Gillis, “The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Wed, 26 Feb 2014 05:00:12 -0000

Americans are moving to the ocean. Every year, more and more Americans move to–or are born in– the coasts and fewer and fewer remain in–or are born in–the interior. The United States began as a coastal nation; it’s become one again.

According to John R. Gillis‘s provocative new book The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the same may be said of the entire world. Humans, he says, started–or rather quickly became after they evolved in eastern Africa 200,000 ago–a coastal species. We stayed very close to the oceans and seas until the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Thereafter, we moved into various interiors. Now, he says, we are moving back to the shore in force. We are transforming it and, alas, destroying much of it. Gillis calls on us to think of the shore not as a place to settle, but a habitat that is essential to our future prosperity and, one might say, survival. Listen in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John Hibbing et al., “Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences” (Routledge, 2013)

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 06:00:51 -0000

John Hibbing, Kevin Smith, and John Alford are the authors of Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences (Routledge, 2013). Hibbing is professor of political science and psychology at the University of Nebraska, Smith is professor of political science at the University of Nebraska, and Alford is associate professor of political science at Rice University.

Predisposed approaches the difference between liberals and conservatives from the perspective of physiology. Are we predisposed to certain beliefs or to one ideology or another? They answer emphatically “yes”. Those that call themselves liberals and conservative are biologically different in a host of ways that are deeply embedded in our biology.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Joseph Uscinski, “The People’s News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism” (NYU Press, 2014)

Sat, 08 Feb 2014 17:09:49 -0000

“When we criticize the news, who are we really criticizing?”

This is the final question asked by Professor Joseph Uscinski in his book, The People’s News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism(NYU Press, 2014). The answer, Uscinski says in his interview, is us–the consumer. News producers, he writes, are merely responding to the demands of consumers, adjusting news content based on ratings, polls and audience demographics. The People’s News views news through the lens of news as a commodity beholden to market forces, not as a type of media.

Combining the academic disciplines of media effects and political economy, The People’s News is a well-researched and well-reported look at what happens when the concepts of free press and democracy collide.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Brent Nongbri, “Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept” (Yale University Press, 2013)

Sat, 18 Jan 2014 14:52:05 -0000

We all know that religion is a universal feature of human history, right? Well, maybe not. In Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Yale University Press, 2013), Brent Nongbri, Post Doctoral Fellow at Macquarie University, argues that throughout time people have conceptualized themselves in various ways but did not classify what they were doing as religious. As someone who works in the antique period Nogbri found it peculiar to find translations of ancient works referring to religion. In the first half of the book, he examines how and why terms like the Latin religio, Greek threskeia, or Arabic din, are repeatedly rendered as “religion” in translations. He also draws our attention to various births of the modern conception of religion, such as the Maccabean revolt or the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea.

Ultimately, he concludes this phenomena could be more usefully described in other terms. Nongbri explains that in the pre-modern era Christians generally classified others as bad Christians or heathens and not as other religious traditions. The second half of the book contends that religion as an idea has a history and the way we generally understand it today can be traced back to a number of historical events. Nongbri points to the three moments as instrumental in a public of understanding of religion as a universal, private, non-political affair – Christian disunity following the Reformation, increasing colonial encounters with indigenous people, and the formation of Nation-states. He provides ample evidence for these claims through a number of vignettes tracing this transformation over time. With these complex issues surrounding the concept religion we might feel at a loss as to what we should be doing in Religious Studies. Nongbri offers some useful approaches to how we can examine social activities and ideas in the context of this loaded term. In our conversation we discuss definitions, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Manichaeans, Muhammad, John of Damascus, the story of Barlam and Ioasaph, John Locke, the early Muslim community, the World Religions model, the invention of Mesopotamian religion, issues of translation, and Talal Asad.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Helene Landemore, “Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many” (Princeton UP, 2012)

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 10:31:27 -0000

We’re all familiar with the thought that democracy is merely the rule of the unwise mob. In the hands of Plato and a long line of philosophers since him, this thought has been developed into a formidable anti-democratic argument: Only truth or wisdom confer authority, and since democracy is the rule of the unwise, it has no authority. This rough line of argument has proven so formidable, in fact, that many democratic theorists have tried to evade it by explicitly denying that politics has anything to do with wisdom. But another strand of democratic theory takes the argument by the horns and tries to show that democracy is indeed epistemically sound. Some of these views try to show that democracy, warts and all, is yet wiser than the alternatives. But others have proposed a more ambitious reply according to which democracy has a positive epistemic value.

In her new book, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2012), Helene Landemore pursues this more ambitious path. She argues that empirical data pertaining to the epistemic significance of cognitive diversity shows that democracy is uniquely placed to supply distinctive epistemic goods. Along the way, she explores a range of current findings regarding the “wisdom of crowds” and also engages core issues at the heart of normative political theory.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

A. David Redish, “The Mind Within the Brain” (Oxford UP, 2013)

Thu, 17 Oct 2013 12:57:11 -0000

Free will is essential to our understanding of human nature. We are masters of our own fate. We chart our own course. We take our own road. In short, we decide what we are going to do. There seems little doubt that free will is a reality. But how, psychologically and physiologically, does it work? How does free will arise out of what is essentially a biological machine? How do we decide?

That’s the question at the center of A. David Redish‘s fascinating The Mind Within the Brain: How We Made Decisions and How Those Decisions Go Wrong (Oxford UP, 2013). His elegant answer is that on the neurological level, we have a number of discrete decision-making mechanisms. They range (though there is no real order or hierarchy) from completely unconscious and mechanical, as when experience a nerve reflex, to completely explicit and flexible, as when we deliberate about options and choose one. Especially interesting is David’s discussion of what happens when one of these decision-making mechanisms breaks and goes into “failure mode,” namely, the manifestation of common psychological problems such as consistent irrationality, addictive behaviors, and PTSD. Listen in to our fascinating discussion.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gayle Kaufman, “Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Family in the 21st Century” (NYU Press, 2013)

Thu, 19 Sep 2013 14:05:19 -0000

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 balance work and family. The assumption seems to be that fathers either: a) don’t want to “balance” anything; or b)say they want to “balance” work and family but actually don’t, or don’t try very hard to bring it off.

As Gayle Kaufman points out in her terrific new book Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Family in the 21st Century (NYU Press, 2013), both of these assumptions are, well, wrong. Most American fathers want to play an active role in their family’s lives, and particularly in the rearing of their children. They face the same challenge as their working wives: how to have rich working lives and nurture their families all at the same time. In Superdads, Kaufman tries to figure out how and to what extent they are finding a good “balance.” Her answers are sobering for those wishing to “have it all.” In the lives of most men, somethings got to give. Listen to the interview and find out what.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mary Eberstadt, “How the West Really Lost God” (Templeton Press, 2013)

Sat, 07 Sep 2013 19:07:59 -0000

There are a lot of theories that attempt to explain how Westerns came to leave their churches in great numbers. Some focus on ideas, particularly the idea that believing in God made no sense because the evidence for the existence of God is (so it’s said) very thin. Proponents of this theory believe that once religious people reasoned their way to irreligion.

According to Mary Eberstadt, reason may account for some “secularization,” but hardly accounts for very much of it. In How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization (Templeton Press, 2013), she proposes that Westerns “lost God” because the families in which they lived–the main transmission belts for religious beliefs–were transformed by other factors (urbanization, industrialization, etc.). As families became smaller and more fragmented, they ceased to transmit religious beliefs and habits to their younger members. Listen in to this fascinating interview.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jerome Kagan, “The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development” (Basic Books, 2013)

Mon, 02 Sep 2013 14:25:49 -0000

On the day you were born, you arrived with your own unique biology and into your own unique social and cultural context. It would have been impossible to predict on that day how your life would unfold, or exactly the person you would become in the future. Why? Because there are so many complex and interrelated factors in the development of each and every human being. In his new book, The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development (Basic Books, 2013) world-renowned psychology professor Jerome Kagan tackles some of the most fascinating and important questions about what makes a human a human, and how we become who we are over the course of our lives. He draws from his decades of experience in developmental psychology, as well biology, neuroscience, and even literature and biographies, to inform his nuanced and big-picture view. And never one to shy away from critical thinking, Kagan also provides thoughtful remarks on the limitations of psychology as a field of research. If you want to listen to a person with an amazing mind and decades of experience talk about psychology, this is the interview for you!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Hedrick Smith, “Who Stole the American Dream?” (Random House, 2012)

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 18:02:27 -0000

In the “Great Recession,” millions lost their jobs, retirement savings, and even their houses. The entire middle class was shaken. Yet almost no one has been brought to justice. Quite the opposite: the big banks and investment houses–the places where the perpetrators most likely work and worked–were bailed out by the federal government under the banner of being “too big to fail.” Perhaps it’s the case that we will never know enough about what happened to indict anyone, or at least anyone in the upper reaches of the financial industry. But does that mean we don’t, in a general way, know who was responsible?

Not according to Hedrick Smith. In his new book Who Stole the American Dream? (Random House, 2012), the veteran reporter digs deep into American political and economic history to find out who we should blame for this colossal economic meltdown. What he found is surprising. The roots of the crisis go back farther than most people–experts included–think. Sure the bankers were involved, but so were politicians (including, of all people Jimmy Carter)–a lot of them. According to Smith, there’s plenty of blame to go around, at least in corporate boardrooms and the corridors of power in Washington.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton, “Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality” (Harvard UP, 2013)

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 17:50:43 -0000

One of the basic rules of human behavior is that people generally want to do what their peers do. If your friends like jazz, you’ll probably like jazz. If your friends want to go to the movies, you’ll probably want to go to the movies. If your friends enjoy comic books, you’ll probably enjoy comic books.

The force of peer pressure is likely strongest in high school, but college is not far behind. In their eye-opening book Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Harvard UP, 2013), Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton examine how peer groups and the pressure they create move college students into specific tracks. Though students’ aspirations at the time of entry matter to some extent, the peer groups they join matter much more in terms of outcomes, that is, how they do during their college experience. College students mold themselves to the expectations of their groups. Armstrong and Hamilton also note a distinctive class element in the process of peer group formation and entry. Not everyone gets to belong to any group. Listen in and find out how these groups–which, it should be said,are largely hidden from administrators and professors–maintain socio-economic inequality.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jonathan V. Last, “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Crisis” (Encounter Books, 2013)

Thu, 25 Jul 2013 17:55:36 -0000

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 enough children to replace those of any age who are dying. This means the population of Japan et al. is declining (albeit slowly). But more importantly it means that the “age structure” of countries not at “replacement rate” is headed in the wrong direction: the number of young people is declining and the number of old people is rising. That’s bad because the young people produce all the stuff and also support the old people. Unless the young people become more productive, there’s going to be less stuff for everyone, but particularly for old people.

According to Jonathan V. Last this troubling scenario is precisely what the United States will face if present demographic trends continue. In his fascinating What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Crisis (Encounter Books, 2013), Last crunches the numbers and suggests that the U.S. population, even factoring in immigration, will soon fall below “replacement rate.” The problem is not, Last says, that Americans don’t want children. They do. It’s that having children has become more and more expensive. Americans think they can’t afford children. What can we do about that? Listen in and find out.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Frans De Waal, “The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among Primates” (Norton, 2013)

Wed, 17 Jul 2013 14:10:32 -0000

Humans are quite a bit like chimpanzees, genetically speaking. Of course humans are quite a bit like fruit flies, genetically speaking. But when it comes to behavior, humans are much more like chimpanzees than fruit flies. And so the question arrises: what can we learn about ourselves from chimpanzees? According to the veteran ethologist Frans De Waal, the answer is this: we are not the only species that lives in a moral universe. De Waal should know, because he’s been studying humans and chimpanzees for decades. In his new book The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among Primates (Norton, 2013), De Waal points out that chimpanzees (and bonobos) show nearly the full range of “human” attachments, affects, and emotions. They love, feel loss, sulk, get angry, have fights, and make up. Just as important, they abide by conventional rules that give their groups order and assist cooperation. To De Waal, there is no doubt that all of these primate behavioral traits were evolved. Just so, he says, were they evolved in humans. In the interview we discuss the implications of this viewpoint for human life, and religious faith in particular.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John O. McGinnis, “Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology” (Princeton UP, 2013)

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 15:40:03 -0000

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. One of the “things we do” is governance, that is, the way we organize ourselves politically and, as a result of that organization, provide for the individual and public good. In his fascinating book Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology (Princeton UP, 2013), John O. McGinnis examines the promise and peril of advanced computation and Internet communications for our democracy. The former (promise), he says, is great if we think deeply about the impact of the new media on politics and public policy. He proposed that we take the bull by the horns and experiment with new technology so that governance can become both more democratic and more efficient. He suggests a number of ways in which the potential of the new media can be made to do just this. Listen in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Colin Gordon, “Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality” (Institute for Policy Studies, 2013)

Tue, 25 Jun 2013 17:27:44 -0000

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. But what are the dimensions of inequality in the United States? How have they changed over the past century? Are we living in a new Gilded Age in which the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer?

In his “book” (it’s really an innovative website) Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality (Institute for Policy Studies, 2013), Colin Gordon sets out to answer these questions. Using an interesting array of charts, graphs, and videos, Gordon tells the story of inequality in the U.S. in modern times. Gordon shows that in recent decades the poor have been getting relatively poorer and the rich have been getting relatively richer. The “gap”–already considerable–is growing.

In this interview we discuss growing inequality and the reasons behind it. We also touch on what is perhaps the most important question in the debate: does inequality as it is found in the U.S. really matter economically, spiritually, and politically?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Nicco Mele, “The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath” (St. Martin’s Press, 2013)

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 06:00:20 -0000

Nicco Mele is the author of The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath (St. Martin’s Press, 2013). He is Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Harvard University. Mele writes as a technology expert and as a witness to history. He served as a campaign staffer for the Howard Dean for President Campaign in 2003. He and his colleagues implemented many of the web-based campaign innovations that resulted in President Obama winning the 2008 presidential election and define the modern American political campaign. Mele links that experience with radical social changes brought about by the internet. His title thesis, The End of Big, suggest that big institutions in nearly every sector of our lives (business, government, news) have been eroded and, in some cases, supplanted by smallness. An enthusiast for technology, Mele also cautions against the risks associated with this transformation.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Clive Hamilton, “Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering” (Yale UP, 2013)

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 12:57:34 -0000

It’s getting warmer, there ain’t no doubt about it. What are we going to do? Most folks say we should cut back on bad things like carbon emissions. That would probably be a good idea. The trouble is we would have to cut back on all the good things that carbon emissions produce, like big houses, cool cars, and tasty food imported from far-away places. We don’t want to do that.

So what’s a global citizen to do? One idea is to take control of the environment, engineering-wise. Why cut back when we can simply manage the carbon-cycle a bit like we manage the climate in hothouses? In Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering(Yale UP, 2013), Clive Hamilton surveys the proposals big-thinking engineers have dreamed up to control the carbon-cycle on a truly massive scale. Some are wacky, others less so, but all are, well, very bold. Does any of it make sense? Can any of it be done? Hamilton investigates.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jonathan Rauch, “Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul” (The Atlantic Books, 2013)

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 20:09:54 -0000

Nature or nurture? Inborn or learned? Genetic or extra-genetic? Humans are so complicated that in many cases we can’t really know what is “in us” from the beginning and what is “acquired” as we learn. And even when we find something that is “in us,” we can often find a way to modulate or mask it. Given all this, sometimes the best–and certainly most convincing–evidence that some trait is inborn rather than acquired is simple, honest testimony.

Such is the case, I think, with homosexuality. In Jonathan Rauch‘s remarkable and moving memoir Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul (The Atlantic Books, 2013) the author explores exactly what it was like to deny his own sexual orientation for over two decades. Actually, “deny” is not really the right word, at least for what Rauch did in his early years. To “deny” is to realize the possibility of something and reject it. For much of his early life, Rauch never even entertained the idea he was gay, so he couldn’t very well deny it. It just wasn’t possible. He thought he was just weird.

But as he matured, it did dawn on him that maybe, just maybe, he might be gay. Not surprisingly given the prejudice against homosexuality at the time he was growing up, the very possibility frightened him. He did not want to be gay. Who would want to be gay? Why would you put yourself through that? So he denied it. Until there came a time when he met kind, loving people who told him that he really should and could be who he was. They would help him. And they did. Jonathan Rauch then became what he had never really been–Jonathan Rauch.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850” (Cambridge UP, 2011)

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:25:36 -0000

It’s a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it?

According to Prasannan Parthasarathi, there certainly is. He doesn’t go so far as to say that other proposed explanations are flat out wrong, it’s just that they don’t really focus on the narrow forces that, well, forced English business men to innovate in the 18th century. In Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Parthasarathi says that those forces were economic. English textile merchants were getting trounced by imported Indian cotton. They found that they couldn’t produce cotton goods in the same way the Indians did for all kinds of reasons. So, they had to create a new, more efficient, production process. They did. According to Parthasarath, the “Industrial Revolution” was born out of economic competition and innovation (with, of course, a helping hand from the state). That makes a lot of sense.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Elizabeth H. Pleck, “Not Just Roommates: Cohabitation after the Sexual Revolution” (Chicago UP, 2012)

Fri, 31 May 2013 18:04:47 -0000

Most countries, believing that married people form a kind of demographic and political bedrock, promote marriage (and, of course, child-having within wedlock). Nonetheless, many couples choose to live together before marriage and many choose not to get married at all. Their numbers are increasing all over the developed world at a remarkable rate. Co-habitation is now more than “shacking up”; it’s a common life-choice. In Not Just Roommates: Cohabitation after the Sexual Revolution (Chicago UP, 2012), Elizabeth H. Pleck examines the rise of cohabitation and asks whether cohabiters have not become second class citizens. She says they have and has some suggestions about how to give them the same opportunities those who married have.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Dan Kennedy, “The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age” (UMass Press, 2013)

Wed, 29 May 2013 14:05:24 -0000

Dan Kennedy envisioned a massive book project, a big-picture investigation into current issues facing journalism and media. Instead he found everything he needed in New Haven, Conn., inside the small but productive office of the New Haven Independent.

In The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), Kennedy, assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, researches models of journalism that engage public conversation while producing indispensable local news coverage. Although Kennedy’s work includes insight into numerous organizations, the book focuses primarily on the Independent, a non-profit institution in the historical town of New Haven that includes the New Haven Register, a publication that dates back more than two centuries

Through interviews and research, Kennedy shows that local journalism in the 21st Century can survive and thrive so long as those within an organization are willing to put in the work and develop an understanding of the new tenets of journalism: social engagement, deep community focus, and evolving revenue models

“What you want is sustainability,” Kennedy says. “On the other hand, the New Haven Register traces its roots to Benjamin Franklin in the 1760s. I don’t think that anybody is going to achieve that kind of sustainability anymore, and I’m not even sure it’s desirable. I think we’re going to see things come and go.”

The Wired City is food for the civic minded and news junkies alike. It’s an important work that begins a sketch of what local journalism can and should be.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Douglas Rushkoff, “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now” (Current, 2013)

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:11:53 -0000

Humans understand the world through stories, some short and some long. But what happens when the stories become so short that they, well, aren’t stories at all? In Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Current, 2013), Douglas Rushkoff explores this question. He points out that always-on, always “new” digital communications have essentially locked us into an ever-more data-rich “moment,” one from which we cannot really escape. The past becomes a few minutes ago; the future a few minutes hence. Of course it’s always always been “now” (as Buddhists will tell you), but now the “now” is far more captivating than ever before. What’s it all mean? Rushkoff explains.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Christian Caryl, “Strange Rebels:1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century” (Basic, 2013)

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:22:49 -0000

What do Margaret Thatcher, Ayatollah Khomeini, Deng Xiaoping, and Pope John Paul II have in common? At first thought, you wouldn’t think much. But according to Christian Caryl, they were all radicals who began to change the world in 1979. In Strange Rebels:1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (Basic Books, 2013), Caryl argues that these very different people from these very different places were brought together by one thing: a belief that the future would not be secular and socialist (as most of the old-line socialist and liberal establishment thought), but rather religious and capitalist. The Marxist project in all its forms, they said, had failed. People did not abandon their faiths, nor did they accept socialist economies. They wanted to worship and they wanted to be free. Thatcher, Khomeini, Xiaoping, and John Paul’s reactionary revolution, as it turned out, was successful. We live in the world they helped create.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

James Dawes, “Evil Men” (Harvard UP, 2013)

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:03:57 -0000

This week a Syrian rebel ripped the heart out of a loyalist fighter and ate part of it. You can see it on YouTube. Many people asked “How can people do things like this?” In his new book Evil Men (Harvard UP, 2013), James Dawes explores why people commit horrible atrocities. To get to the root of unbelievable human cruelty, he interviewed Japanese war criminals, asking them why and how they did what they did. The results are surprising, as you will learn in the interview.

By the way, James wrote an excellent op-ed on the Syrian incident here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Thane Rosenbaum, “Payback: The Case for Revenge” (Chicago UP, 2013)

Wed, 08 May 2013 13:05:21 -0000

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 people are treated fairly. When those laws fail and we are treated unfairly, we encounter another human universal–the desire for revenge. If someone pokes you in the eye, more likely than not your first inclination is going to be to poke them in the eye too. That “eye-for-an-eye” logic just feels intuitively fair to us. Yet, our laws–and those of most “civilized” places–explicitly deny victims the right to avenge their injuries. The state has a monopoly on justice, and the state’s justice (theoretically) has nothing to do with revenge. The courts asks victims to check their “irrational” desire for revenge and pursue what is (supposedly) a higher, more “rational” form of justice.

In Payback: The Case for Revenge (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Thane Rosenbaum argues that we’ve gone way too far in our rejection of revenge. By denying the right to revenge, we have essentially asked people to do something that is impossible–squelch their very natural feeling that wrong-doers must pay in equal measure for the harms they brought. In order for the moral universe to be righted, scofflaws must pay–and be seen to have paid–for what they have done. Our laws recognize none of this, says Rosenbaum, and we should do something about it. We need to bring revenge, he argues, back in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Steven J. Harper, “The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis” (Basic Books, 2013)

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:04:16 -0000

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 would probably add that law schools are not that great). Harper’s book, The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis (Basic Books, 2013), is a stem-to-stern indictment of legal education and the legal profession; he argues that the entire system by which we train and employ (or don’t employ) attorneys is broken. Honesty, humility, and public service are out; “truthiness,” hubris, and greed are in. The very idea of what it means to be a lawyer has been corrupted. Happily, Harper has some suggestions about how we might reform the legal industry. This is a terrific and thought provoking book.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jared Diamond, “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?” (Viking, 2012)

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:31:15 -0000

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 critics of modern civilization. Think of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, but one example of a huge modernity-bashing genre. They say, with some justice, that everything from schools, cities, and nation-states to processed foods, modern footwear, and iPads is, to some degree at least, bad for us.

This may be so, but no one to my knowledge except Jared Diamond has explored exactly what we should borrow from our ancient ancestors in order to improve our modern lives. In The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (Viking, 2012), Diamond does just that. He presents a whole list of things that hunter-gathers did somewhat better than “we” (first world, Western types) do. Listen in and find out what they are.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Marlene Zuk, “Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live” (Norton, 2013)

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:28:15 -0000

The Hebrews called it “Eden.” The Greeks and Romans called it the “Golden Age.” The philosophes–or Rousseau at least–called it the “State of Nature.” Marx and Engels called it “Primitive Communism.” The underlying notion, however, is the same: there was a time, long ago, when things were much better than they are today because we were then “in tune” with God, nature, or whatever. Thereafter we “fell,” usually due to our own stupidity, and landed in our present corrupted state.

Today we are told by some that the paleolithic period (roughly 3 million to 10,000 years ago) was, similarly, a time in which we were “in tune” with nature. According to the paleofantasists, we were selected in the paleolithic environment and it is to the Paleolithic environment that we became most “fit.” After the paleolithic, they say, came the fall (domestication, cities, states, industrialization). Today, they continue, we are “out of tune” and, as a result, we are suffering all kinds of nasty consequences.

Or so the story goes. But Marlene Zuk says it just ain’t so. In Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live (W. W. Norton, 2013), she points out that we were always out of tune because evolution makes it impossible to be truly “in tune.” The environment was always changing and we were always changing;the environment is still changing and we are still changing. What is “natural” to us is a kind of moving target. One millenium something seems “natural”; the next millenium not so much. Evolution is a ceaseless and surprisingly rapid process.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Neil Gross, “Why are Professors Liberal and Why do Conservatives Care?” (Harvard UP, 2013)

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:40:35 -0000

Most people think that professors are more liberal, and some much more liberal, than ordinary folk. As Neil Gross shows in his eye-opening Why are Professors Liberal and Why do Conservatives Care? (Harvard UP, 2013), “most people” are right: academia is much more left-leaning than any other major profession in the U.S . But why is this so? As Gross points out, there are a lot of “folk” explanations out there, but none of them holds much water. Gross looks the data (a lot of which he collected himself) and searches for a more compelling explanation. It’s surprising: the fact that most college students think professors are liberal (which is true) makes those among them who are conservative think they will not be welcomed in the profession (which, as it turns out, may not be true). By analogy, men don’t generally become nurses because they think of nursing as a “female” profession. Just so, conservatives don’t become professors because they think of academia as a “liberal” profession. But does it matter that academia is liberal? Listen in and find out.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Stephen T. Asma, “Against Fairness” (University of Chicago, 2013)

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:23:00 -0000

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 ourselves about our ability to treat each others equally, that is, to be “fair?” In his provocative new book Against Fairness (University of Chicago, 2013), Stephen T. Asma makes the case that we have indeed become kind of fairness-mad, and that this madness has led us all to be (at best) hypocrites and (at worst) harmful to ourselves and others. Asma says we should temper our (Western) notion of fairness with one that looks at the causes and benefits of favoritism realistically, and even sympathetically.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert W. McChesney, “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy” (The New Press, 2013)

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:10:08 -0000

Robert W. McChesney, the celebrated political economist of communication, takes the Internet, industry and government head-on in his latest book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (The New Press, 2013). Digital Disconnect builds on McChesney’s previous works, spinning forward his scholarship to construct a remarkably current look at the Internet’s corporate and political landscape. “Almost all of the other books on the Internet, some of which are very good, sort of try to take a larger view of it,” McChesney says during the interview. “Because of where I’m coming from, because of my interests, I think that’s the one thing I could inject that draws from my past research, where I can speak with greater authority, that’s really not talked about by anyone else.” McChesney uses the book to argue that the Internet has become a hub of “numbing commercialism,” largely the result of failed government policies. Writes McChesney: “When the dust clears on this critical juncture, if our societies have not been fundamentally transformed for the better, if democracy has not triumphed over capital, the digital revolution may prove to have been a revolution in name only, an ironic, tragic reminder of the growing gap between the potential and the reality of human society.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky, “How Much is Enough: Money and the Good Life” (Other Press, 2012)

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:08:32 -0000

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, 2012). Their answer to the first question is (to put it in my own words) that we don’t know any better. Our competitive capitalist culture has taught us to work hard so we can earn more. Further, it has taught us that earning more will be “happier.” It won’t, say the Skidelskys. Their answer to the second question is “no,” full stop. What we should do instead is take advantage of our remarkable wealth, work less, and live the good life. What is the “good life?” Listen in and find out.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, “American Umpire” (Harvard UP, 2013)

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:44:39 -0000

Is there an “American Empire?” A lot of people on the Left say “yes.” Actually, a lot of people on the Right say “yes” too. But Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman says “no.” In her stimulating new treatment of the history of American foreign policy American Umpire (Harvard UP, 2013), Hoffman lays out the case that America have never been an “empire” in any real sense. Rather, she says America has been and (for better or worse) still is an “umpire,” making calls according to an evolving set of rules about what makes a legitimate state. She points out that not all of the calls have been good ones–Vietnam and Iraq II being the most obvious examples. Nonetheless, America has long served the world as a kind of fair broker. Whether America should continue in this role is, as she says, an open question. Listen in.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Peter Gray, “Free to Learn” (Basic Books, 2013)

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 06:00:54 -0000

In his book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Gray proposes the following big idea: we shouldn’t force children to learn, rather we should allow them to play and learn by themselves. This, of course, is a radical proposal. But Peter points out that the play-and-learn-along-the-way style of education was practiced by humans for over 99% our history: hunter-gatherers did not have schools, but children in them somehow managed to learn everything they needed to be good members of their bands. Peter says we should take a page out of their book and points to a school that has done just that: The Sudbury Valley School.

(BTW: Peter has some very thoughtful things to say about the way standard schools actually promote bullying and are powerless to prevent it or remedy it once it’s happened. Listen in.)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help” (Basic Books, 2012)

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 13:50:10 -0000

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 following big idea: race preferences in higher education harm those preferred. Their argument is interesting in that it is not premised on the idea that racial preferences are unfair. Rather, they crunch the numbers and show that when good minority students are placed among elite students at elite schools, they often fail; when they are placed among other good students at good schools, they do much better. Students, they say, need to be “matched” with students at their level, not “mismatched” (or, rather, overmatched) with students far above their level. Both Sanders and Taylor are very much in favor of Affirmative Action, though they would like to see it reformed. Listen in and see how.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Lawrence M. Krauss, “A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing” (Atria, 2012)

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 18:18:07 -0000

In A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing (Atria, 2012), Lawrence M. Krauss presents this big idea: something can–and perhaps must–come from nothing. That something is, well, everything–you, me, and the entire universe. If that doesn’t get your attention, nothing will. Of course, as Lawrence explains, nothing usually turns out on close inspection to be something. Listen in and find out how. Lawrence and I also discussed the relationship between science (especially physics) and religion, and in particular the question “What came before that?” and whether said question has any meaning at all. No matter what you believe, I’m sure you’ll find what Lawrence has to say of great interest.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

John Wood, “Creating Room to Read” (Viking Press, 2013)

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:21:30 -0000

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 book is that he doesn’t tell you the “theory” of world-changing (though he does discuss “social entrepreneurship”), he tells you how he did using his own experience. John saw that a lot of people around the world couldn’t read and created an organization to teach them. This involved building a dedicated team, fund-raising, finding out what his clients–illiterate, impoverished children–wanted, and giving it to them in a flexible way. John’s “Room to Read” has built thousands of libraries around the world and taught hundred of thousands of children to read. That’s something.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Alec Foege, "The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great" (Basic Books, 2013)

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 09:00:00 -0000

From its earliest years, the United States was a nation of tinkerers: men and women who looked at the world around them and were able to create something genuinely new from what they saw. Guided by their innate curiosity, a desire to know how things work, and a belief that anything can be improved, amateurs and professionals from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Edison came up with the inventions that laid the foundations for America's economic dominance. Recently, Americans have come to question whether our tinkering spirit has survived the pressures of ruthless corporate organization and bottom-line driven caution. But as Alec Foege shows in The Tinkerers, reports of tinkering's death have been greatly exaggerated.

Through the stories of great tinkerers and inventions past and present, Foege documents how Franklin and Edison's modern-day heirs do not allow our cultural obsessions with efficiency and conformity to interfere with their passion and creativity. Tinkering has been the guiding force behind both major corporate-sponsored innovations such as the personal computer and Ethernet, and smaller scale inventions with great potential, such as a machine that can make low-cost eyeglass lenses for people in impoverished countries and a device that uses lasers to shoot malarial mosquitoes out of the sky. Some tinkerers attended the finest engineering schools in the world; some had no formal training in their chosen fields. Some see themselves as solo artists; others emphasize the importance of working in teams. What binds them together is an ability to subvert the old order, to see fresh potential in existing technologies, and to apply technical know-how to the problems of their day.

As anyone who has feared voiding a warranty knows, the complexity of modern systems can be needlessly intimidating. Despite this, tinkerers can – and do – come from anywhere, whether it's the R&D lab of a major corporation, a hobbyist's garage, or a summer camp for budding engineers. Through a lively retelling of recent history and captivating interviews with today's most creative innovators, Foege reveals how the tinkering tradition remains, in new and unexpected forms, at the heart of American society and culture.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

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)

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 15:37:41 -0000

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? David Linden, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, explains these phenomena in his latest book, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good (Viking, 2011).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

David Wolman, “The End Of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers, and the Coming Cashless Society” (Da Capo Press, 2012)

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 12:31:17 -0000

Many of us in the western world don’t rely on bills and coins as much as we used to, yet the idea of cash money is still an ever-present constant in our minds. How often have you stopped to consider the idea of what “money” actually is on a larger scale, or where our changing habits could lead us? In his book The End of Money – Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers, and the Coming Cashless Society (Da Capo Press, 2012), David Wolman examines our commitment to cash, its advantages and drawbacks, how it facilitates crime and poverty, even its health and environmental issues. With an engaging and accessible style he prompts us to rethink the notion of money, how it works, and what forms it could take in the future.

Wolman starts with a short history of cash, beginning with the official introduction of paper money to the Chinese monetary system in the 13th century and Marco Polo’s reaction to it 100 years later. Next we follow him around the globe to get a cross-cultural picture of cash today – including explorations of the cultural heritage and emotional value of cash, of an increasing trend in developing countries of people using their cellphones to transfer money to both businesses and family, and of counterfeiting and anti-counterfeiting technology. Along the way he enlists a wide variety of people to help illustrate these concepts: a Georgia pastor who views the end of cash as a sign of the End Times, a convicted counterfeiter (or “Monetary Architect”, depending on who you’re talking to), a coin collector with an ambivalent attitude toward coins, and a British “digital money guru” who views money as a menace.

David Wolman is a contributing editor at Wired magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @DavidWolman. He is, in his own words, a “…guy who’s interested in seemingly small, simple, straightforward topics that in fact, when you put them under the microscope, are anything but simple.” This book is an excellent example of that, and an engrossing read. In our interview he spoke of his year-long experiment to go without using coins or bills at all, the meaning of privacy and security as it relates to money in a digital world, and what he sees as the future of “money”.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Mark Stephen Meadows, “We Robot: Skywalker’s Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact” (Lyons Press, 2011)

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 13:39:42 -0000

If technology is the site of digital culture, then robots are the future platforms of our social projections and interactions. In fact, that future is already here in small but fascinating ways. Mark Stephen Meadows is one of a handful of curious authors who have begun to explore the social ramifications of robotic engineering and his book We Robot: Skywalker’s Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) is intended as a lively assessment of those implications and consequences.

The book sees Meadows touring the strange, wonderful, and unnerving production laboratories of Japanese roboticists, lifting unreal loads with the aid of an augmented limb, and being turned on by an uncannily sexy fembot as she smiles at him and moves her android features. In our interview I asked Meadows what we can expect from our machine compatriots of tomorrow, and why human intelligence might be slowly getting written out of the equation for the perfect bot.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Jonathan Metzl, “The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease” (Beacon Press, 2010)

Wed, 04 May 2011 18:25:26 -0000

Schizophrenia is a real, frightening, debilitating disease. But what are we to make of the fact that several studies show that African Americans are two to three times more likely than white Americans to be diagnosed with this malady, and that black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean are six to nine times more likely to be judged schizophrenic than other residents of the United States. Is there a racist–or, at the very least, racialized–element in diagnoses of schizophrenia? According to psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl, the answer is “yes.”

In The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia became a Black Disease (Beacon Press, 2010), Metzl argues that psychiatrists at the height of the Civil Rights movement used the example of supposedly ‘volatile,’ ‘belligerent’ and ‘unstable’ African American men to define schizophrenia. Drawing on a variety of sources–patient records, psychiatric studies, racialized drug advertisements, and metaphors for schizophrenia–Metzl shows how schizophrenia and blackness evolved in ways that directly reflected the white status quo’s anxiety and uneasiness with growing racial tensions and upheaval. Schizophrenia, Metzl explains, went from being a mostly white, middle-class mental illness in the 1950s to one identified with blackness, madness, and civil strife in the decades that followed.

Jonathan Metzl is a contributor to Public Books.

As you listen to the interview take a look at some the pharmaceutical advertisements that Metzl cites in his research, and how schizophrenia went from being code for white and docile, to later black and threatening…

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Francis Fukuyama, “The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution” (FSG, 2011)

Tue, 03 May 2011 20:07:06 -0000

When I was an undergraduate, I fell in love with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In the book Montesquieu reduces a set of disparate, seemingly unconnected facts arrayed over centuries and continents into a single, coherent theory of remarkable explanitory power. Alas, grand theoretical books like Spirit of the Laws are out of fashion today, not only because the human sciences are gripped by particularism (“more and more about less and less), but also because we don’t train students to think like Montesqueiu any more.

In his excellent The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), Francis Fukuyama bucks the trend. Of course, he’s done it before with elegant and persuasive books about the fall of communism, state-building, trust, and biotechnology among other big topics. Here he takes on the emergence of modern political institutions, or rather three modern political institutions: the state, the rule of law, and accountable government. He begins with human nature, takes us through a massive comparison of the political trajectories of world-historical civilizations (Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, European), and, in so doing, tells us why the world political order looks the way it does today. His answers are surprising, and not directly in line with what might be called the “conventional thinking” about these things.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Fred Spier, “Big History and the Future of Humanity” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 16:54:04 -0000

My son Isaiah likes to play the “why” game. Isaiah: “Why is my ice cream gone?” Me: “Because you ate it.” Isaiah: “Why did I eat it?” Me: “Because you need food.” Isaiah: “Why do I need food?” And so on. Isaiah naturally wants to know why things are the way they are. We all do. Most of us, however, are taught that seeking these ultimate answers is quixotic. We say either that there are no ultimate answers or that you’d have to know too many to answer them. In this conception, there either is no story of everything or, if there is, no one can tell it.

Thankfully, Fred Spier disagrees. His path-breaking Big History and the Future of Humanity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) succeeds in sketching the story of everything from the origins of the universe to the reason my son’s ice cream is gone. In around two-hundred lucidly written pages he takes us from the Big Bang, to the separation of matter and energy, to the rise of elementary particles, to the formation of galaxies, solar systems, stars, and planets, to the creation of elements, to the origin of life, to the evolution of biotic complexity, to the emergence of humans, to the origin of society, to the invention of ice cream. What enables him to do this is a simple, unifying theory, namely, that all forms of complexity are the result of energy flowing through matter within certain boundaries (“Goldilocks” conditions). Everything with edges, a shape, parts, or an internal structure is the result of energy flowing through matter within certain boundaries and is only maintained so long as the energy keeps flowing and the boundaries don’t change.

Historiographically, this book takes us into new and promising territory. But even more than that it is timely, for the energy and conditions that maintain our complexity–that is, modern industrial life–are both in jeopardy. We consume much more energy than we produce, and the kind of energy we consume is moving us out of the Goldilocks zone. If unchecked, the result of these two processes is inevitable: a loss of complexity, which is to say the destruction of modern industrial society. That’s something to think about, and maybe even do something about.

Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Azar Gat, “War in Human Civilization” (Oxford UP, 2006)

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:33:50 -0000

Historians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate “drives,” “instincts,” or “motivations.” The reason we hew to the “blank slate” notion perhaps has to do with the fact–and it is a fact–that we see remarkable diversity in the historical record. The past, we say, is a foreign country; they do things differently there. But there are also political reasons to hold to the idea that we have no essence, that everything is “socially constructed.” Where, for example, would modern liberalism be without this concept? If our natures are fixed in some way, then what should we do to improve our lot?

Given the strength and utility of the “blank slate” doctrine, anyone hoping to question it successfully must possess considerable political savvy and, more importantly, an overwhelming mass of evidence. When the first modern challenge was issued–by the Sociobiologists of the 1970s–they had the latter (I would say), but not the former. Happily, their successors–principally the practitioners of “evolutionary psychology”–have both (again, in my opinion). Azar Gat is a good example. In his pathbreaking War in Human Civilization (Oxford UP, 2006), he explains in politically palatable and empirically convincing terms just why, evolutionarily speaking, our evolved natures guided the way we have fought over the past 200,000 years. He rejects the notion that we have anything like a “violence instinct.” Rather, we have a kind of “violence tool,” given to us by natural selection. In certain circumstances, we are psychologically inclined to use it; in others, not. In this way we are no different than many of our fellow species, the primates in particular. Of course, unlike them, our use of collective violence has an (extra-genetic) history. Azar does a masterful job of describing and explaining how, even while our nature has remained the same, the way we fight has changed. And here the news is good: believe it or not, we–humanity as a whole–have been becoming more peaceful over the past 10,000 years, and radically more peaceful (at least in the developed world) over the past 200 years. Azar can explain this too, and does in the interview.

I cannot emphasizeenough how important this book is, both as a model of what I would call “scientifically-informed” history and a sort of guide to those of us who, despite having abandoned the “blank slate,” believe that we have the capacity to create a better world.

Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

P. Bingham and J. Souza, “Death From a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe” (BookSurge, 2009)

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:44:48 -0000

Long ago, historians more or less gave up on “theories of history.” They determined that human nature was too unpredictable, cultures too various, and developmental patterns too evanescent for any really scientific theory of history to be possible. Human history, they said, was chaos.

The problem is that human history isn’t chaos at all. The “hard” human sciences–evolutionary biology and anthropology in particular–have shown that human nature is quite predictable, cultural variability is strictly constrained, and ongoing patterns of social development have ancient roots. Historians can ignore these facts all they like, but that doesn’t make them any the less true. It does, however, impoverish their discipline by ceding the search for a satisfying theory of history to scientists. Neither Paul Bingham nor Joanne Souza are historians. The former is a molecular biologist and the latter an evolutionary psychologist. But they have formulated an elegant theory of human history in Death From a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe (2009). Like any good theory, it explains a lot with a little. To put it briefly, human society has gone from simple/small to massive/complex because humans alone among animals were/are able to suppress intra-group conflicts of interest by means of low-cost coercion. Bingham and Souza point out that the big “jumps” in social size and complexity–the neolithic revolution, the growth of archaic states, the birth of the nation-state, the rise of globalization–have all been associated with the evolution/introduction of new, more powerful coercive abilities. Paradoxically, it was new weapons that created more and better lives over the course of the last several hundred thousand years.

This brief summary cannot do justice to the richness of Bingham’s and Souza’s theory. You need to read it for yourself. When you do, I guarantee you will see the past and present in a new way.

Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Gregory Cochran, “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution” (Basic, 2009)

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:40:55 -0000

First, the conventional wisdom. Because Homo sapiens are a young species and haven’t had time to genetically differentiate, we modern humans are all basically genetically identical. Because Homo sapiens figured out ways to use culture to overcome natural selection, human genetic evolution ceased ages ago. Because Homo sapiens are genetically very similar and not subject to natural selection, the differences that we see today among modern human groups are the result of cultural processes, not genes.

Not so say Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending in their challenging and sure-to-be-controversial new book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (Basic Books, 2009). We are extraordinarily similar genetically, but the minor differences occasionally had very important consequences: a difference of one or two nucleotides–among billions–could mean life or death for entire populations.These minor differences, where advantageous, were selected for and spread in the ordinary natural selective way: if you developed resistance to malaria in the tropics, you survived and your genes were passed on; if not, then not. Finally, these genetic advantages accumulated: populations that had been put under more “pressure” were more robust than those living in relaxed environments.The more robust populations prospered; the less robust did not.

Interesting for the historian will be the point that most of the enhanced “pressure” was due to historical factors. According to Cochran and Harpending, the transition to agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago in particular forced Homo sapiens to do things that they were not “programmed” (so to say) to do. Those who adapted genetically survived; those who did not, did not. Thus Homo sapiens 1.0 (the hunter-gatherer model) evolved into Homo sapiens 2.0 (the farming model). Cochran and Harpending submit that this process–natural selection due to cultural pressure–has been going on quite recently and may be going on today. For example, they propose that historical factors in the European Middle Ages favored the differential reproduction of brainy Ashkenazi Jews, the results of which can be seen in the differential success of their descendants in brainy occupations.

Hackle-raising stuff to be sure. Is any of it true? Listen to the interview, read the book and decide for yourself.

Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

New Books in Big Ideas

Justin Bailey, "An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture" (2026)

Liz Bucar, "Beyond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us" (Penguin, 2026)

Adam Zeman, "The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Melissa Butcher, "The Trouble with Freedom: Love, Hate and America’s Future" (Manchester UP, 2026)

Douglas H. Erwin, "The Origins of the New: Novelty and Innovation in the History of Life, Culture, and Technology" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Ben Collier on Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy

On Our Continuing Age of Oil with Journalist Stanley Reed

On Trump as a “World Historical Individual” with author John B. Judis

The Philosophy of Hope: On Immanence and Transcendence with R.J. Snell

Gist Books: How Print on Demand Creates New Possibilities for the Publishing Industry

César A. Hidalgo, "The Infinite Alphabet: And the Laws of Knowledge" (Allen Lane, 2026)

John Oakes, "The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without" (Avid Reader, 2024)

Bryan Caplan's Case Against Education

Josh Milburn, "Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Nina Bandelj, "Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Gregory T. Chin and Kevin P. Gallagher, "China and the Global Economic Order" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Nick Romeo, "The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy" (PublicAffairs, 2024)

Justin Gregg, "If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity" (Little, Brown, 2022)

Sean Mathews, "The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East" (Hurst, 2025)

Tomer Persico, "In God's Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea" (NYU Press, 2025)

Peter Frankopan, "The Earth Transformed: An Untold History" (Knopf, 2023)

Mike Jay, "Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind" (Yale UP, 2023)

Richard Wolin, "Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology" (Yale UP, 2023)

Kevin J. Mitchell, "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Dagmar Schafer, "Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property" (MIT Press, 2023)

Philippe Huneman, "Why?: The Philosophy Behind the Question" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Graham Harman, "Waves and Stones: The Continuous and the Discontinuous in Human Thought" (Allen Lane, 2025)

Reading the Bible with AI?: A Conversation with John Kaag, Philosopher and Co-Founder of Rebind AI

Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)

On Democracy and Bullshit with Hélène Landemore

The Technological Soul: Alex Priou on Modernity, Ideology, and the Limits of Reason

brian bean, "Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition" (Haymarket, 2025)

Jane G. Goldberg, "Wired for Why: How We Think, Feel, and Make Meaning" (2025)

Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship" (MIT Press, 2025)

Ron Broglio, "Animal Revolution" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

What is Free Speech with Fara Dabhoiwala

Richard Duncan, "The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century" (John Wiley & Sons, 2022)

Sasha Davis, "Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Cass R. Sunstein, "Imperfect Oracle: What AI Can and Cannot Do" (APS Press, 2025)

Jon Mills, "End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)

Peter Lamont, "Radical Thinking: How to See the Bigger Picture" (Swift Press, 2024)

Who Needs College Anymore: Imagining A Future Where Degrees Don’t Matter

Madness & Acute Religious Experiences, with Richard Saville-Smith

Anthony Bonato, "Dots and Lines: Hidden Networks in Social Media, AI, and Nature" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)

David Edmonds, "Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Mark L. Haas, "The Geriatric Peace: Population Aging and the Decline of War" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Donald G. Nieman, "The Path to Paralysis: How American Politics Became Nasty, Dysfunctional, and a Threat to the Republic" (Anthem Press, 2024)

Nick Spencer, "The Landscapes of Science and Religion: What Are We Disagreeing About?" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Walter Scheidel, "What Is Ancient History?" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Jack Buffington, "Environmental Innovation: An Action Plan for Saving the Economy and the Planet by 2050" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)

Mario Livio and Jack Szostak, "Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest for Cosmic Life" (Basic Books, 2024)

Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis eds., "The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (﻿Bristol UP, 2025)

Todd Mcgowan, "Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Every Purchase Matters: How Fair Trade Farmers, Companies, and Consumers are Changing the World

Vijay Selvam, "Principles of Bitcoin: Technology, Economics, Politics, and Philosophy" (Columbia UP, 2025)

David J. Helfand, "The Universal Timekeepers: Reconstructing History Atom by Atom" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Ben Zweibelson, "Reconceptualizing War" (Helion, 2025)

Zack Cooper, "Tides of Fortune: The Rise and Decline of Great Militaries" (Yale UP, 2025)

Judith Grisel, "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Doubleday, 2019)

Lizzie Wade, "Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures" (Harper, 2025)

William Marx, "Libraries of the Mind" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Chris Washington, "Nonbinary Jane Austen" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

The Nomadic Origin of the State

On Bullshit in AI

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, "Classicism and Other Phobias" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Book Talk 67 : The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests" (Columbia UP, 2022)

On Bullshit in Politics

Edward Tenner, "Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences" (APS Press, 2025)

Genocide Studies International Partners with New Books Network

The Truth About Bullshit: Celebrating the 20th Anniversary Edition of On Bullshit with Pamela Hieronymi

Bernd Roeck, "The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Introducing The Critical Edition of the Works of C. G. Jung

Elizabeth N. Saunders, "The Insiders' Game: How Elites Make War and Peace" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Quinn Slobodian and Philip J. Stern on Political Economy

Robert Garland, "What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Peter Allen, "How to Think about Politics: A Guide in Five Parts" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Dennis Ross, "Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Survive in a Multipolar World" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis eds., "The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025)