NBN Book of the Day
1,103 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 11 ratingsThe "NBN Book of the Day" features the most timely and interesting author interviews from the New Books Network delivered to you every weekday.
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Episodes
Colleen M. Grogan, "Grow and Hide: The History of America's Health Care State" (Oxford UP, 2023)
August 02, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesA sweeping history of the American health care state that reveals the public has been intentionally misled about the true role of government. The US government has always invested federal, state and local dollars in public health protection and prevention. Despite this public funding, however, Americans typically believe the current system is predominantly comprised of private actors with little government interference. In Grow and Hide: The History of America's Health Care State (Oxford UP,...
D. J. Taylor, "Orwell: The New Life" (Pegasus Books, 2023)
August 01, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesA fascinating exploration of George Orwell--and his body of work--by an award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, presenting the author anew to twenty-first-century readers. We find ourselves in an era when the moment is ripe for a reevaluation of the life and the works of one of the twentieth century's greatest authors. This is the first twenty-first-century biography on George Orwell, with special recognition to D. J. Taylor's stature as an award-winning biographer and Orwellian. Usin...
Blair Kelley, "Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class" (LIveright, 2023)
July 31, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesIn the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contributions and challenges of the white working class – and this obscures the ways in which Black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities – but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy, and established community. In Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (LIveright, 2023), Dr. Blair LM Kelley restores th...
Phil Klay, "Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War" (Penguin, 2022)
July 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhen Phil Klay left the Marines a decade ago after serving as an officer in Iraq, he found himself a part of the community of veterans who have no choice but to grapple with the meaning of their wartime experiences--for themselves and for the country. American identity has always been bound up in war--from the revolutionary war of our founding, to the civil war that ended slavery, to the two world wars that launched America as a superpower. What did the current wars say about who we are as a ...
Yonatan Adler, "The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal" (Yale UP, 2022)
July 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal (Yale University Press, 2022), Yonatan Adler pursues the societal adoption of recognizable Jewish practices by Judeans in antiquity with the ultimate aim of establishing a particular terminus ante quem (temporal limit before which) these practices must have become widespread. Sifting through both textual and archaeological evidence for the aversion to graven images/figural artwork, dietary restrictions, synagogue worship, cir...
Stephen C. Taysom, "Like a Fiery Meteor: The Life of Joseph F. Smith" (U of Utah Press, 2023)
July 28, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesJoseph F. Smith was born in 1838 to Hyrum Smith and Mary Fielding Smith. Six years later both his father and his uncle, Joseph Smith Jr., the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were murdered in Carthage, Illinois. The trauma of that event remained with Joseph F. for the rest of his life, affecting his personal behavior and public tenure in the highest tiers of the LDS Church, including the post of president from 1901 until his death in 1918. Joseph F. Smith l...
Petra Bueskens, "Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract" (Routledge, 2018)
July 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhy do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated ‘double shift’ that result in widespread calls to either ‘lean in’ or ‘opt out’? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves? In Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract (Routledge, 2018), Pet...
Syed Ali and Margaret M. Chin, "The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You Will Become" (NYU Press, 2023)
July 26, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesFor decades, parents across America have asked their kids, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” The answer is, “Duh, yes.” Peers, as parents well know, have a tremendous impact on who their kids are and what they will become. And even while they insist otherwise, parents know that they’re largely powerless to change this. But the effect of peers is not just a story about kids; peers can also affect adult behavior—they affect what we do and who we are well into old age. Noted soci...
Vincanne Adams, "Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move" (Duke UP, 2023)
July 25, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesVincanne Adams's book Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move (Duke UP, 2023) is part of a broader trend in anthropology that is developing new methods and techniques to study our increasingly polluted and toxic world. Adams takes Glyphosate as a case study and follows this chemical as it moves from the past to the present, from the lab to the dinner table, from outside our bodies, to within our cells to grapple with what it is to live in such an entangled world. Ad...
Kathleen Lubey, "What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest Since the Eighteenth Century" (Stanford UP, 2022)
July 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourKathleen Lubey,'s book What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest Since the Eighteenth Century (Stanford UP, 2022) offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining s...
Sheila Miyoshi Jager, "The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia" (Harvard UP, 2023)
July 23, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesDr. Sheila Miyoshi Jager presents dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars in her new book The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Harvard University Press, 2023). In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized b...
Stefan Rinke, "Conquistadors and Aztecs: A History of the Fall of Tenochtitlan" (Oxford UP, 2023)
July 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFive hundred years ago, a flotilla landed on the coast of Yucatán under the command of the Spanish conquistador Hérnan Cortés. While the official goal of the expedition was to explore and to expand the Christian faith, everyone involved knew that it was primarily about gold and the hunt for slaves. That a few hundred Spaniards destroyed the Aztec empire--a highly developed culture--is an old chestnut, because the conquistadors, who had every means to make a profit, did not succeed alone. They...
Scott A. Mitchell, "The Making of American Buddhism" (Oxford UP, 2023)
July 21, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesScott A. Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs and holds the Yoshitaka Tamai Professorial Chair at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley. He teaches and writes about Buddhism in the West, Pure Land Buddhism, and Buddhist modernism. As of 2010, there were approximately 3-4 million Buddhists in the United States, and that figure is expected to grow significantly. Beyond the numbers, the influence of Buddhism can be felt throughout the culture, with many more people practi...
Scott E. Simon, "Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
July 20, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesSimilar to countries like the US and Canada, Taiwan also has indigenous peoples who've existed before the arrival of colonizers, and continue to grapple with the legacy of colonialism to this day. Scott Simon's Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa (U Toronto Press, 2023) explores lifeworlds, traditions, and political relationships in two of Taiwan's indigenous communities—the Sediq and Truku. Simon is a Professor of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the Uni...
Monica Liu, "Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise" (Stanford UP, 2022)
July 19, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesCommercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5 billion global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes-younger, more physically attractive brides from non-Western countries being paired with older Western men. These ideas are more myth than fact, Monica Liu finds in Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise (Stanford UP, 2022). Her study of China's email-order bride industry offers stories of Chinese wo...
Anne Phillips, "Unconditional Equals" (Princeton UP, 2021)
July 18, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesFor 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 cont...
Michele Meek, "Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies" (Indiana UP, 2023)
July 17, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesTeen films of the 1980s were notorious for treating consent as irrelevant, with scenes of boys spying in girls' locker rooms and tricking girls into sex. While contemporary movies now routinely prioritize consent, ensure date rape is no longer a joke, and celebrate girls' desires, sexual consent remains a problematic and often elusive ideal in teen films. In Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies (Indiana UP, 2023), Michele Meek traces the history of adolescent sexu...
Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, "Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do about It" (Basic Books, 2023)
July 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFrom 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,...
Stephen Bright and James Kwak, "The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts" (The New Press, 2023)
July 15, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesGlenn Ford, a Black man, spent thirty years on Louisiana’s death row for a crime he did not commit. He was released in 2014—and given twenty dollars—when prosecutors admitted they did not have a case against him. Ford’s trial was a travesty. One of his court-appointed lawyers specialized in oil and gas law and had never tried a case. The other had been out of law school for only two years. They had no funds for investigation or experts. The prosecution struck all the Black prospective jurors ...
Jade McGlynn, "Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
July 14, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhy aren't ordinary Russians more outraged by Putin's invasion of Ukraine? Inside the Kremlin's own historical propaganda narratives, Russia's invasion of Ukraine makes complete sense. From its World War II cult to anti-Western conspiracy theories, the Kremlin has long used myth and memory to legitimize repression at home and imperialism abroad, its patriotic history resonating with and persuading large swathes of the Russian population. In Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin's R...
Marco Grasso, "From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis" (MIT Press, 2022)
July 13, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesIn From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis (MIT Press, 2022), Professor Marco Grasso examines the responsibility of the oil and gas industry for the climate crisis and develops a moral framework that lays out its duties of reparation and decarbonization to allay the harm it has done. By framing climate change as a moral issue and outlining the industry's obligation to tackle it, Grasso shows that Big Oil is a central, yet overlooked, agent of clim...
Randall Patnode, "The Synchronized Society: Time and Control From Broadcasting to the Internet" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
July 12, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesThe 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 its...
Eliot Borenstein, "Marvel Comics in The 1970s: The World Inside Your Head" (Cornell UP, 2023)
July 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourI am excited to welcome Eliot Borenstein to the podcast today to discuss his new monograph, Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head, published through Cornell University Press in 2023. Eliot is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. He has published a number of books: Soviet-Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism (Cornell University Press, 2023); Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (Cornell University Press, 2019); ...
Katherine Giuffre, "Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity" (Stanford UP, 2023)
July 10, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesA cultural revolution in England, France, and the United States beginning during the time of the industrial and political revolutions helped usher in modernity. This cultural revolution worked alongside the better documented political and economic revolutions to usher in the modern era of continuous revolution. Focusing on the period between 1847 and 1937, Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Katherine Giuffre examines in depth six of the cu...
Robert Mills, "Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages" (U Chicago Press, 2015)
July 09, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesSeeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago, 2015) explores the relation between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture through the categories of gender and sexuality as we understand them today. Although substantial energy has already been devoted to examining the textual evidence of sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills's aim here is to add a further visual dimension to these discussions in what amounts to the first large-scale comparative analysis of s...
Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell, "Uncomfortably Off: Why Higher-Income Earners Should Care about Inequality" (Policy Press, 2023)
July 08, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesHow can we build a better social and political settlement? In Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care about Inequality (Policy Press, 2023), Marcos González Hernando an Honorary Research Fellow at the UCL Social Research Institute and Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad Diego Portale, and Gerry Mitchell a freelance policy researcher, combine a wealth of quantitative analysis with detailed fieldwork interviews to understand the top 10% of contemporary society. Broadening t...
Andrew Harding, "A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine" (Ithaka, 2023)
July 07, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutesFrom 2-13 March 2022 - only a week into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine - Russian forces tried and failed to take and hold Voznesensk, a small but strategically important town 80 kilometres northwest of Mykolaiv. Looking back, the commander of the 300 professional troops that repulsed the attacks with the help of civilian volunteers concluded that this "one small, decisive and improbable victory … almost certainly saved Ukraine from a larger encirclement and most likely from the prosp...
James Crossland, "The Rise of Devils: Fear and the Origins of Terrorism" (Manchester UP, 2023)
July 06, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesIn the dying light of the nineteenth century, the world came to know and fear terrorism. Much like today, this was a time of progress and dread, in which breakthroughs in communications and weapons were made, political reforms were implemented and immigration waves bolstered the populations of ever-expanding cities. This era also simmered with political rage and social inequalities, which drove nationalists, nihilists, anarchists and republicans to dynamite cities and discharge pistols into t...
Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn C. Higgins, "Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt" (Polity Press, 2023)
July 05, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesWho is believed in our mediated world? In Believability: Sexual Violence, Media and the Politics of Doubt (Polity Press, 2023), Sarah Banet-Weiser, Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and Kathryn Claire Higgins, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communica...
Jennifer Caplan, "Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials" (Wayne State UP, 2023)
July 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn this comprehensive approach to Jewish humor focused on the relationship between humor and American Jewish practice, Jennifer Caplan calls us to adopt a more expansive view of what it means to “do Jewish,” revealing that American Jews have turned, and continue to turn, to humor as a cultural touchstone. Caplan frames Funny, You Don't Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials (Wayne State UP, 2023) around four generations of Jewish Americans from the Silent Gene...
Malcolm F. Purinton, "Globalization in a Glass: The Rise of Pilsner Beer through Technology, Taste and Empire" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
July 03, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesGlobalization in a Glass: The Rise of Pilsner Beer through Technology, Taste and Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Malcolm Purinton charts the spread of Pilsner beer from its inception in 1842 to clearly show the changes wrought by globalization in an age of empire. Its rise was dependent not only on technological innovations and faster supply chains, but also on the increased connectedness of the world and the political and economic structures of empire. Drawing upon a wide range of archival ...
Peggy O'Donnell Heffington, "Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother" (Seal Press, 2023)
July 02, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesIn an era of falling births, it’s often said that millennials invented the idea of not having kids. But history is full of women without children: some who chose childless lives, others who wanted children but never had them, and still others—the vast majority, then and now—who fell somewhere in between. Modern women considering how and if children fit into their lives are products of their political, ecological, and cultural moment. But history also tells them that they are not alone. In Wi...
Kevin J. Elliott, "Democracy for Busy People" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
July 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourJohn 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 ...
Samuel Helfont, "Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order" (Oxford UP, 2023)
June 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe move away from post-Cold War unipolarity and the rise of revisionist states like Russia and China pose a rapidly escalating and confounding threat for the liberal international order. In Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Samuel Helfont offers a new narrative of Iraqi foreign policy after the 1991 Gulf War to argue that Saddam Hussein executed a political warfare campaign that facilitated this disturbance to global nor...
Kaya Sahin, "Peerless Among Princes: The Life and Times of Sultan Süleyman" (Oxford UP, 2023)
June 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourSüleyman, who ruled the Ottoman Empire between 1520 and 1566, was a globally recognized figure during his lifetime. In Peerless Among Princes: The Life and Times of Sultan Süleyman (Oxford University Press, 2023), Kaya Şahin presents the life of this sultan, whose domain extended from Hungary to Iran, and from the Crimea to North Africa and the Indian Ocean. The wealth of his treasury, the strength of his armies, and his personality were much discussed by historians, poets, courtiers, diploma...
Daniel R. Smith, "The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class: Houses, Kinship and Capital Since 1945" (Manchester UP, 2023)
June 28, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesWho are the English upper class? In The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class: Houses, Kinship and Capital Since 1945 (Manchester UP, 2023) Daniel Smith, a lecturer in sociology at Cardiff University, offers an analysis of the role and power of the upper class in English society. Drawing on, and critiquing, sociology, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, the book uses a vast range of methods and examples to tell the story of the continued dominance of English el...
David Wenham, "Jesus in Context: Making Sense of the Historical Figure" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
June 27, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesJesus changed our world forever. But who was he and what do we know about him? David Wenham's Jesus in Context: Making Sense of the Historical Figure (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a concise and wide-ranging engagement with that enduring and elusive subject. Exploring the sources for Jesus and his scholarly reception, he surveys information from Roman, Jewish, and Christian texts, and also examines the origins of the gospels, as well as the evidence of Paul, who had access to the earliest oral tradi...
Stephen Vladeck, "The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic" (Basic Books, 2023)
June 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMany people are familiar with the United States Supreme Court’s merit docket. Each case follows detailed and professional proceedings that include formal written and oral arguments. The justices’ decisions provide lengthy arguments and citations. They are freely available to the public, press, policy-makers, law makers, judges, and scholars. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, they ruled publicly – and the press covered it extensively. But Professor Stephen Vladeck’s new b...
Tom Higham, "The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins" (Yale UP, 2021)
June 24, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesFifty 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. e...
Robert Falconer, "The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession" (Great Mystery Press, 2023)
June 23, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesToday 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 offer...
Anna Della Subin, "Accidental Gods: On Race, Empire, and Men Unwittingly Turned Divine" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)
June 23, 2023 04:00 - 1 hourEver since 1492, when Christopher Columbus made landfall in the New World and was hailed as a heavenly being, the accidental god has haunted the modern age. From Haile Selassie, acclaimed as the Living God in Jamaica, to Britain's Prince Philip, who became the unlikely center of a new religion on a South Pacific island, men made divine—nearly always men—have appeared on every continent. And because these deifications always emerge at moments of turbulence—civil wars, imperial conquest, revolu...
James Hannam, "The Globe: How the Earth Became Round" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
June 22, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesIn The Globe: How the Earth Became Round (Reaktion, 2023), Dr. James Hannam presents a history of how we came to know that the earth is round, rather than flat. The Globe tells the story of humanity's quest to discover the form of the world. Philosophers in ancient Greece deduced the true shape of the Earth in the fourth century BCE; the Romans passed the knowledge to India, and from there it spread to Baghdad and Central Asia. In early medieval Europe, Christians debated the matter but long ...
Lisabeth During, "The Chastity Plot" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
June 21, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesIn The Chastity Plot (U Chicago Press, 2021), Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved, honored, and despised. Obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role in our moral imagination. It has enforced patriarchy’s double standards, complicated sexual relations, and imbedded in Western cu...
The Future of Venture Capitalists: A Discussion with Sebastian Mallaby
June 20, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesBy providing capital to back the ideas and efforts of others, venture capitalists can make absurd amounts of money. But there is another way of looking at it – venture capitalists take huge risks and produce great benefits. Many of the companies we rely on today began with a punt by a venture capitalist. Sebastian Mallaby discusses venture capitalists with Owen Bennett Jones. Mallaby is the author of The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future (Penguin, 2022) among other b...
The History of the American Shopping Mall and Its Cultures
June 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWriter and design critic Alexandra Lange talks about her book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Shopping Mall (Bloombury, 2023), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Meet Me by the Fountain is a history of the American shopping mall from its emergence to recent attempts to reinvent and reconceptualize the shells of “dead” shopping centers. Along the way, it details the mall’s many ironies and contradictions and how it became the center and icon of community and culture, es...
Keith Tribe, "Constructing Economic Science: The Invention of a Discipline 1850-1950" (Oxford UP, 2022)
June 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDuring the late nineteenth century concerns about international commercial rivalry were often expressed in terms of national provision for training and education, and the role of universities in such provision. It was in this context that the modern university discipline of economics emerged. The first undergraduate economics program was inaugurated in Cambridge in 1903; but this was merely a starting point. Constructing Economic Science: The Invention of a Discipline 1850-1950 (Oxford UP, 2...
Chris Manias, "The Age of Mammals: Nature, Development, and Paleontology in the Long Nineteenth Century" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
June 17, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesWhen people today hear "paleontology," they immediately think of dinosaurs. But for much of the history of the discipline, dramatic demonstrations of the history of life focused on the developmental history of mammals. The Age of Mammals: Nature, Development, and Paleontology in the Long Nineteenth Century (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023) examines how nineteenth-century scholars, writers, artists, and public audiences understood the animals they regarded as being at the summit of life. For them, ma...
Chris Impey, "Worlds Without End: Exoplanets, Habitability, and the Future of Humanity" (MIT Press, 2023)
June 16, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutesThe 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 Witho...
Josh Milburn, "Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully" (Oxford UP, 2023)
June 15, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHow 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...
Peter Baldwin, "Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All" (MIT Press, 2023)
June 14, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesA 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...