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Episodes
Agnieszka Pasieka and Paweł Rodak, "Rethinking Modern Polish Identities: Transnational Encounters" (U Rochester Press, 2023)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesAnti-Semitic or philo-Semitic? Backward or modern? Locally rooted or diasporic? “Polishness” is too often flattened to an oversimplified list of either-or propositions. But a critical look at the multiple, contradictory versions of “Polishness” circulating in the modern era helps us to make sense not only of Poland’s past and present, but of a whole host of global problems: from the failures of multiculturalism, to the mutual misunderstandings of different communities claiming the same identi...
Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Trere, "Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power" (MIT Press, 2024)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 39 minutesWhat are the tactics needed for a world of platforms and algorithms? In Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power (MIT Press, 2024), Tiziano Bonini, Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Siena, and Emiliano Treré, a Reader in Data Agency and Media Ecologies at Cardiff University, examine the impact of platforms and algorithms on people, communities, and global social life. The book explores these issues using three case st...
Hala Auji et al., "The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East" (I. B. Tauris, 2023)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesWhat was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (r...
Thomas A. Garrity, "All the Math You Missed (But Need to Know for Graduate School)" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesBeginning graduate students in mathematical sciences and related areas in physical and computer sciences and engineering are expected to be familiar with a daunting breadth of mathematics, but few have such a background. This bestselling book helps students fill in the gaps in their knowledge. Thomas A. Garrity explains the basic points and a few key results of all the most important undergraduate topics in mathematics, emphasizing the intuitions behind the subject. The explanations are accom...
Carl Zimmer, "Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive" (Dutton, 2022)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesCarl 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, an...
Robert K. D. Colby, "An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South" (Oxford UP, 2024)
May 10, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesThe Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery and, after a four-year struggle to become an independent slaveholding republic, died as emancipation dawned. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting th...
Karen Pechilis et al. ed., "Devotional Visualities: Seeing Bhakti in Indic Material Cultures" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
May 09, 2024 08:00 - 45 minutesDevotional Visualities: Seeing Bhakti in Indic Material Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2023) is the first to focus on material visualities of bhakti imagery that inspire, shape, convey, and expand both the visual practices of devotional communities, as well as possibilities for extending the reach of devotion in society in new and often unexpected ways. Communities of interpreters of bhakti images discussed in this book include not only a number of distinctive Hindu bhakti groups, but also artisans, d...
Knocking at the Brothel Door (with Michael John Cusick)
May 09, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesMichael John Cusick argues that our addictions and disordered sexual desires are really a misdirected effort to reach God and live in connection with Him. How can this be? The crude simulation is but at poor substitute for the real thing, for the Truth. Yet in this fallen world, sinners repeatedly fall into the snares. “I do not understand my own actions,”—Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans—"For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” But like the prodigal son in the pig...
What do the PDFs say about this?: Brandon Taylor and Stephanie Insley Hershinow (CH)
May 09, 2024 08:00 - 47 minutesBrandon Taylor practices moral worldbuilding in his fiction—that means an essential piece of these worlds is the “real possibility that someone could get punched in the face.” Brandon, author of the novels Real Life and The Late Americans, joins Stephanie Insley Hershinow for a wide-ranging, engrossing, and often hilarious conversation about the stakes of the novel today. They discuss Brandon’s “Hot Freud Summer,” during which he read all of Sigmund Freud’s essential works, as an example of a...
Steve McCauley excavates John Cheever's "The Five-Forty-Eight" (JP)
May 09, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWe debut a new feature: Recall This Story, in which a contemporary writer picks out a bygone story to read and to analyze. Surely there is no better novelist to begin with than RTB' shouse sage, Steve McCauley. And not just because he's got the pipes to power through a whole fantabulous John Cheever story. "The Five-Forty-Eight" (published in The New Yorker 70 years ago) is about sordidness uncovered, a train, and a face in the dirt. It ticks almost every Cheever box, evoking an infinitude of...
Maggie Messitt, "Newspaper" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
May 09, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesNewspaper (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Maggie Messitt is about more than news printed on paper. It brings us inside our best and worst selves, from censorship and the intentional destruction of historic record, to partisan and white supremacist campaigns, to the story of an instrument that has been central to democracy and to holding the powerful to account. This is a 400-year history of a nearly-endangered object as seen by journalist Maggie Messitt in the two democratic nations she calls home ...
On "Frugality" (kimutz) in Kedoshim
May 09, 2024 08:00 - 25 minutesModya and David focus again this week on kimutz, or frugality, through the lens of the week's Torah portion, Kedoshim (Lev: 19:1-20:27). The central question: what do the priestly and ethical laws teach us about stewardship of our resources, both as individuals and as members of a community living in a covenanted relationship to each other and to God? We hope you enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newboo...
Jeremy Garlick, "Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
May 09, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesChina’s rise to global prominence is a pretty good contender for the most important world development in the past 30 years. But now the question is how Beijing managed to be successful on the international stage–let alone how large that success is—with fierce debates between hawks and doves in the West and elsewhere. Jeremy Garlick tries to offer an explanation of China’s success and how Beijing is trying to remake the international system in Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Glob...
Ian Johnson, "Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future" (Oxford UP, 2023)
May 09, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourEven as most contemporary states look to history in order to legitimize their existence in some way or other, the past – and narrations of it – hold particular weight in China. This is not a new phenomenon, for which pasts to elevate and which to suppress has long been a concern for both intellectuals and those seeking to rule the states and empires which have occupied the space now forming the People’s Republic of China. Today’s Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping is no exception to thi...
Book Banning: A Discussion with Christine Emeran of the National Coalition Against Censorship
May 09, 2024 08:00 - 45 minutesBook bans and book challenges are both on the rise. And they are increasing at unprecedented rates. But why is this happening? Dr. Christine Emeran of the National Coalition Against Censorship joins us to explore what’s driving censorship movements nationwide. In today’s episode, she takes us through politically organized efforts to ban books, and shares the statistics of book challenges and bans. She explores the new strategies used by groups to challenge books (strategies which differ from ...
Mark Dooley, "Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
May 09, 2024 04:00 - 30 minutesRoger Scruton was one of the outstanding British philosophers of the post-war years. Why then was he at best ignored and at worst reviled? In Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach (Bloomsbury, 2024), Mark Dooley brilliantly illuminates Scruton's life and offers careful analysis of his work. Considering how Scruton's conservative instinct was sharpened during the Paris riots of 1968, Dooley explores why Scruton set himself the task of stridently opposing what he termed 'the culture of ...
Lawrence Freedman, "Modern Warfare: Lessons from Ukraine" (Penguin, 2023)
May 08, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesThe foremost authority on modern war in the English-speaking world examines Europe's most important conflict since World War II. More than any other modern war, the fight between Russia and Ukraine has been a tough testing ground for modern weapons and operational concepts. In Modern Warfare: Lessons from Ukraine (Penguin, 2023), Sir Lawrence Freedman assesses the contrasting strategies of the two sides. Ukraine has fought along classical lines, seeking victory through battle. Russia has adop...
Jason F. Moraff, "Reading the Way, Paul, and 'the Jews' in Acts Within Judaism" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
May 08, 2024 08:00 - 27 minutesThe book of Acts is often misunderstood as reflecting anti-Judaism or promoting supersessionism. Jason Moraff, however, argues that Acts binds the Way, Paul, and the Jewish people together in a shared identity. Taking a historically situated approach, Moraff frames Acts' portrayal of the early church and Paul in relation to the Jewish people as participating in internecine conflict regarding the Jewish-tradition-in-crisis after the destruction of the temple. Join us as we speak with Jason Mor...
Battlefield to Big Sky: A Conversation with Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy
May 08, 2024 08:00 - 29 minutesVeteran and entrepreneur Tim Sheehy has led an action-packed life: a 2008 graduate of the Naval Academy, as a Navy SEAL he completed deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan, South America, and the Pacific region, where he earned him multiple combat decorations, including the Bronze Star with Valor for Heroism in Combat and the Purple Heart Medal. After being wounded in combat, he moved to Montana where he founded Bridger Aerospace, an aerial firefighting and aerospace services company based in Belgr...
"Colorado Review" Magazine: A Discussion with Stephanie G’Schwind and Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
May 08, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesStephanie G’Schwind is the editor-in-chief of Colorado Review and the director of the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University. She has edited two anthologies, Man in the Moon: Essays on Father and Fatherhood and Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays, which won the 2018 Colorado Book Award for Anthology. Harrison Canelaria Fletcher is the author of Descanso for My Father, Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams, and Finding Querencia: Essays from in Between. Besides being G’Schwind’s ...
Hemjyoti Medhi, "Gendered Publics: Chandraprava Saikiani and the Mahila Samiti in Colonial Assam" (Oxford UP, 2024)
May 08, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourGendered Publics: Chandraprava Saikiani and the Mahila Samiti in Colonial Assam (Oxford UP, 2024) is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive appraisal of the relatively unexplored but highly impactful women’s associations, the Assam Mahila Samiti (1926 cont.) which led one of the most remarkable women’s movements in colonial India; Sucheta Kripalani praised it as the ‘largest democratic women’s association in India’ in 1949. Central to the Assam Mahila Samiti story is its founding Secretary, the fi...
David Tal, "The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
May 08, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesLaying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States. Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties. Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected ...
Regina Seiwald and Ed Vollans, "(Not) In the Game: History, Paratexts, and Games" (de Gruyter, 2023)
May 08, 2024 08:00 - 25 minutesHow do games represent history, and how do we make sense of the history of games? The industry regularly uses history to sell products, while processes of creation and of promotion leave behind markers of a game’s history. The access to this history is often granted by so-called paratexts, which are accompanying elements orbiting texts. Exploring this fully, case studies in (Not) In the Game: History, Paratexts, and Games (de Gruyter, 2023) move the focus of debate from the games themselves t...
Julia Havas, "Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television" (Wayne State UP, 2022)
May 08, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWhile American television has long relied on a strategic foregrounding of feminist politics to promote certain programming's cultural value, Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television (Wayne State University Press, 2022) by Dr. Julia Havas is the first sustained critical analysis of the twenty-first-century resurgence of this tradition. In Woman Up, Dr. Havas’ central argument is that postmillennial "feminist quality television" springs from a rhetorical subversion of the (much-debated...
Marion R. Casey, "The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image" (NYU Press, 2024)
May 08, 2024 04:00 - 29 minutesMarion Casey is a professor at Glucksman Ireland House at New York University where she also serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies. She has published widely on various aspects of Irish-American history and in 2006 she co-edited Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States with Joe Lee. In this interview, she discusses Her most recent book The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image (NYU Press, 2024), which surveys the changing images of Ir...
Eliza Chan, "Fathomfolk" (Orbit, 2024)
May 08, 2024 04:00 - 37 minutesEliza Chan’s debut novel Fathomfolk (Orbit, 2024) takes place in the semi-submerged city of Tiankawi, where humans and fathomfolk - a collection of peoples including sirens, seawitches, kelpies, and kappas - navigate an increasingly tense political situation. The novel follows half-siren Mira, the recently promoted captain of the border guard and Nami, a young exiled royal from a neighboring city as they push for political change and grapple with the city’s growing violence and social unrest....
Sami Hermez, "My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine" (Redwood Press, 2024)
May 07, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesMy Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Redwood Press, 2024) is a riveting and unapologetic account of Palestinian resistance, the story of one family's care for their land, and a reflection on love and heartache while living under military occupation. In 1967, Sireen Sawalha's mother, with her young children, walked back to Palestine against the traffic of exile. My Brother, My Land is the story of Sireen's family in the decades that followed and their lives in the Palestinian village o...
The Scientific Attitude
May 07, 2024 08:00 - 47 minutesListen to this interview of Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science (Boston University) and Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science (Aspen Institute). We talk about his book The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience (MIT Press, 2019). Lee McIntyre : "Scientists have an enormous role — and I'll even say, a responsibility, to make sure that their work does not end just with the discoveries, but extends, as well,...
Ryan Kenedy, "The Blameless" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)
May 07, 2024 08:00 - 23 minutesIn Ryan Kenedy’s debut novel, The Blameless (University of Wisconsin Press 2023 ) we meet Virginia, an exhausted adjunct professor and divorced mother of an autistic five-year-old, whose father only takes him for one weekend a month. Virginia is lonely and struggling to make a living as an adjunct professor of English. When she learns that the man who murdered her father has been released from prison despite a life sentence, she decides to confront him and mete out his just punishment. She tr...
Kristine Ohkubo and Kanariya Eiraku, "Talking About Rakugo 1: The Japanese Art of Storytelling" (2022)
May 07, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesRakugo is a live performance art that has penetrated the borders of Japan and continues to gain popularity overseas. The rakugo stage once dominated by Japanese raconteurs now features foreign storytellers, as well as Japanese performers, both amateur and professional, who endeavor to entertain us in English. The only requirements for rakugo storytelling are a folding fan, a hand towel, and your imagination! In Talking About Rakugo 1: The Japanese Art of Storytelling (2022), learn what distin...
Lucy Barnhouse, "Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
May 07, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourLucy Barnhouse of Arkansas State University talks with Jana Byars about her new book, Hospitals in Communities of the Late Medieval Rhineland: Houses of God, Places for the Sick, out 2023 with Amsterdam University Press. From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the development of European hospitals was shaped by their claim to the legal status of religious institutions, with its attendant privileges and responsibilities. The questions of whom hospitals should serve and why they should do so have...
Matteo Pangallo and Emily B. Todd, "Teaching the History of the Book" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
May 07, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesEdited by Matteo Pangallo and Emily Todd, Teaching the History of the Book (University of Massachusetts Press 2023) is the first collection of its kind dedicated to book history pedagogy. With original contributions from a diverse range of teachers, scholars, and practitioners in literary studies, history, book arts, library science, language studies, and archives, this volume presents a variety of methods for teaching book history both as its own subject and as an approach to other material....
Andriy Sodomora, "The Tears and Smiles of Things: Stories, Sketches, Meditations" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)
May 07, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesInspired by Virgil’s exquisitely ambivalent phrase “sunt lacrimae rerum” (there are tears of/for/in things), Andriy Sodomora, the Ukrainian “voice” of classical antiquity, has produced a series of original vignettes and essays about things: the big things in our lives (like happiness, loneliness, and aging); the small things we do or see daily, rarely paying attention to them (like a tree’s shadow or the kernels on an ear of corn); and the things (i.e., objects) to which we form connections. ...
Sean Griffin, "The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
May 07, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesDr. Sean Griffin's book, The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus (Cambridge UP, 2019), takes on the question of the source materials for the Primary Chronicle, one of the most important texts for the study of medieval Russia. Griffin argues that key portions of the Chronicle have their origin in Byzantine liturgy. This thesis has broad implications for what is and can be known about the early Rus.' Griffin further argues that Rus' state power had a direct interest in liturgy, and he is...
Ariana Mangual Figueroa, "Knowing Silence: How Children Talk about Immigration Status in School" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
May 07, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesLearning from children about citizenship status and how it shapes their schooling. There is a persistent assumption in the field of education that children are largely unaware of their immigration status and its implications. In Knowing Silence: How Children Talk about Immigration Status in School (U Minnesota Press, 2024), Ariana Mangual Figueroa challenges this “myth of ignorance.” By listening carefully to both the speech and significant silences of six Latina students from mixed-immigrati...
Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha, "Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States" (UNC Press, 2023)
May 07, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Haitian Vodou, spirits impact Black practitioners' everyday lives, tightly connecting the sacred and the secular. As Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha reveals in Vodou En Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States (UNC Press, 2023), that connection is manifest in the dynamic relationship between public religious ceremonies, material aesthetics, bodily adornment, and spirit possession. Nwokocha spent more than a decade observing Vodou ceremonies from Montreal and New York to Mia...
Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education
May 06, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesToday we talked to Joseph Lo Bianco about the edited volume Community and Heritage Languages Schools Transforming Education (Routledge, 2023). The conversation addresses community and heritage language schooling research and practice, and our guest’s long history of important language policy research and activism, as well as the interconnections between the two. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Suppo...
MC Forelle on Cars, Chipification, and Repair
May 06, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourPeoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with MC Forelle, Assistant Professor of Engineering & Society at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at University of Virginia, about their research on the “chipification” of automobiles. MC’s work examines how computerization affects repair and a wide variety of other automotive experiences. In recent years, they have continued broadening out to include electric and autonomous vehicles and the environmental impacts thereof. Lee and MC also c...
Julia G. Young, "Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War" (Oxford UP, 2019)
May 06, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesIn Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War (Oxford University Press, 2019), Julia G. Young reframes the Cristero War as a transnational conflict, using previously unexamined archival materials from both Mexico and the United States to investigate the intersections between Mexico's Cristero War and Mexican migration to the United States during the late 1920s. She traces the formation, actions, and ideologies of the Cristero diaspora--a network of Mexicans across the...
Rustam Alexander, "Gay Lives and ‘Aversion Therapy’ in Brezhnev’s Russia, 1964–1982" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
May 06, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesRustam Alexander's Gay Lives and 'Aversion Therapy' in Brezhnev's Russia, 1964-1982 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) examines the autobiographies and diaries of Soviet homosexual men who underwent psychotherapy during the period from 1970 to 1980 under the guidance of Yan Goland, a psychiatrist-sexopathologist from Gorky. The examination of these unique and little-known documents contributes to our scant knowledge about the practices that many would call a Soviet proto-type of 'aversion therapy'. I...
Hobson’s Choice
May 06, 2024 08:00 - 31 minutesHobson’s Choice (1954) is the perfect example of a very specific genre: the capitalist romance. Filled with a Dickensian love of humanity and featuring one of Charles Laughton’s best performances, it’s a perfect film about a deeply complicated topic: what makes the world go round and how individual family units come together, function, and roll on. Dan compares it to The Honeymooners; Mike compares it to 2001. Give it a listen on your way to Moonraker’s! If you love the film, you’ll want to r...
Dead Air
May 06, 2024 08:00 - 39 minutesOn our first episode of Phantom Power, we ponder those moments when the air remains unmoved. Whether fostered by design or meteorological conditions or technological glitch, the absence of sound sometimes affects us more profoundly than the audible. We begin with author John Biguenet discussing his book Silence (Bloomsbury, 2015) and the relationship between quietude, reading, writing, and the self. Next, we speak to poet and hurricane responder Rodrigo Toscano, who takes us into the forebodi...
Javier Samper Vendrell, "The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic" (U Toronto Press, 2020)
May 06, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe Weimar Republic is well-known for its gay rights movement and recent scholarship has demonstrated some of its contradictory elements. In his recent book entitled The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Javier Samper Vendrell writes the first study to focus on the League for Human Rights and its leader, Friedrich Radszuweit. It uses his position at the center of the Weimar-era gay rights movement to tease out t...
James Wolfinger, "If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia" (Temple UP, 2022)
May 06, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesIf There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia (Temple UP, 2022) provides an in-depth historical analysis of Philadelphia politics from the days of the Great Migration to the present. Philadelphia has long been a crucial site for the development of Black politics across the nation and this volume emphasizes how Black activists have long protested against police abuse, pushed for education reform, challenged job and housing discrimination, and pu...
"The US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV" (Indiana UP, 2022)
May 06, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume IV (Indiana UP, 2022) examines an under-researched segment of the larger Nazi incarceration system: camps and other detention facilities under the direct control of the German military, the Wehrmacht. These include prisoner of war (POW) camps (including camps for enlisted men, camps for officers, camps for naval personnel and airmen, and transit camps), civilian internment and labor camps, work ca...
Sreeparna Chattopadhyay, "The Gravity of Hope" (Crossed Arrows, 2023)
May 06, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesSreeparna Chattopadhyay's book The Gravity of Hope (Crossed Arrows, 2023) is a non-fictional account of women’s lives who sometimes endured, often resisted and ultimately coped with marital violence as best as they could in an informal settlement in northeastern Mumbai. It uses anthropological methods and two decades of research-driven insights to analyse the role of gender, marriage, structural violence, family, and informal and legal institutions in tackling wife abuse in India. In conclusi...
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, "Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
May 05, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1935, two Soviet satirists, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, undertook a 10,000-mile American road trip from New York to Hollywood and back. They immortalised their journey in a popular travelogue entitled One-storied America (published as Little Golden America in the US), a suite of newspaper articles, and a series of photographs. In Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip (Cambridge UP, 2024), Lisa A. Kirschenbaum reconstructs this epic journey, ...
Gretchen Felker-Martin, "Cuckoo" (Tor Nightfire, 2024)
May 05, 2024 08:00 - 22 minutesToday I talked to Gretchen Felker-Martin about Cuckoo (Tor Nightfire, 2024). From Gretchen Felker-Martin, the acclaimed author of Manhunt, comes a vicious new novel about a group of teens who must stay true to themselves while in a conversion camp from hell. Something evil is buried deep in the desert. It wants your body. It wears your skin. In the summer of 1995, seven queer kids abandoned by their parents at a remote conversion camp came face to face with it. They survived--but at Camp Reso...
Francesca Trivellato, "The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society" (Princeton UP, 2019)
May 05, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange had been invented by Jews. In The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), Francesca Trivellato draws upon the economic, cultural, intellectual, and business history of the period to trace the origin of this myth and wh...
Matilda Bickers, "Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex" (PM Press, 2023)
May 05, 2024 08:00 - 38 minutesFiercely intelligent, fantastically transgressive, Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex (PM Press, 2023) is an intimate portrait of the lives of sex workers. A polyphonic story of triumph, survival, and solidarity, this collection showcases the vastly different experiences and interests of those who have traded sex, among them a brothel worker in Australia, First Nation survivors of the Canadian child welfare system, and an Afro Latina single parent raising a radicalized child. Packed w...