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17,840 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★ - 123 ratingsInterviews with Authors about their New Books
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Episodes
Daniel de Visé, "The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic" (Grove Atlantic, 2024)
April 05, 2024 04:00 - 58 minutesThe Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic (Grove Atlantic, 2024) tells the story of the epic friendship between John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the golden era of improv, and the making of a comedic film classic that helped shape our popular culture. “They’re not going to catch us,” Dan Aykroyd, as Elwood Blues, tells his brother Jake, played by John Belushi. “We’re on a mission from God.” So opens the musical action comedy The Blues B...
Stefan Aune, "Indian Wars Everywhere: Colonial Violence and the Shadow Doctrines of Empire" (U California Press, 2023)
April 04, 2024 08:00 - 29 minutesFrom Black Hawk helicopters to the exclamation "Geronimo" used by paratroopers jumping from airplanes, words and images referring to Indians have been indelibly linked with US warfare. In Indian Wars Everywhere: Colonial Violence and the Shadow Doctrines of Empire (U California Press, 2023), Stefan Aune shows how these and other recurrent references to the Indian wars signal a deeper history. Indian Wars function as a shadow doctrine that influences US military violence. The United States' ...
E. G. Condé / Steve Gonzalez on Hurricanes, Fiction, and Speculative Ethnography (EF)
April 04, 2024 08:00 - 37 minutesIn this episode, Elizabeth talks with Steven Gonzalez, anthropologist and author of speculative fiction under the pen name E.G. Condé. They discuss the entanglement of politics, Taíno animism, and weather events in the form of a hurricane named Teddy. Steve describes the suffusion of sound he has experienced in Puerto Rico and the soundlessness at the heart of hurricanes, and tells us about his academic work on data centers, and a collaborative speculative film that imagines a world without c...
Edward Dusinberre, "Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
April 04, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesThe first violinist of the Takács Quartet weaves scholarship on Edward Elgar, Antonin Dvořák, Bela Bartók and Benjamin Britten with a deeply personal evocation of belonging, national identity and the private life of a string quartet. Edward Dusinberre’s Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home (Faber, The University of Chicago Press 2022) alternates traditional musicology with personal reminiscence, situating details of Dusinberre’s English upbringing and current life in Colorado, alongside ...
Use Your Writing to Know Your Research
April 04, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesListen to this interview of Claire Le Goues, Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about writing to present versus writing to express. Claire Le Goues : "Really, the very best natural writers that I've ever had in my group were not native English speakers. Because writing a good paper is very much not about idiomatic or expressive language. I mean, sure, there is a point at which grammar becomes prohibitive to understanding. I mean, it ne...
More on "Righteousness" (Tzedek)
April 04, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesModya and David take a deep dive this week into Shemini (Lev. 9:1-11:47) to explore the content for lessons in tzedek, or righteousness. How might detailed instructions on the way to conduct different ritual sacrifices help build a society that cultivates righteousness and justice? What other middot (character traits) are related to righteousness? This Torah portion also contains the profoundly troubling episode of the deaths of Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, who offer a "strange fire" before...
Louis Howard Porter, "Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination" (Oxford UP, 2023)
April 04, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesBefore Josef Stalin's death in 1953, the USSR had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with noncommunist international organisations. Although it had helped found the United Nations, it refused to join the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other major agencies beyond the Security Council and General Assembly, casting them as foreign meddlers. Under new leadership, the USSR joined UNESCO and a slew of international organisations for the first time, ...
Kyokutei Bakin, "Eight Dogs, Or Hakkenden: Part Two--His Master's Blade" (Cornell UP, 2024)
April 04, 2024 08:00 - 38 minutesGlynne Walley, translator of classic Japanese novel Hakkenden, joins us on the podcast again to talk about his second translated volume: Hakkenden, Part 2: His Master’s Blade (Cornell East Asia Series: 2024). Unlike Part 1—which is all preamble!—in Part 2 we meet some of the fabled eight dog warriors and the Confucian virtues they represent: Shino, for filial piety; Gakuzo, for duty; Dosetsu, for loyalty. There’s betrayal, drama…and a lot of secret, intertwined family relationships. Glynne Wa...
Stylish Academic Writing: A Discussion with Helen Sword
April 04, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesToday’s book is: Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard UP, 2012), by Helen Sword, which dispels the myth that you only get published by writing wordy, impersonal prose. Dr. Sword reveals that journal editors and readers alike welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Her analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a range of fields documents the startling gap between how academics describe good writing, and the prose they actually produce. Too few scholars were...
William S. Waldron, "Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters" (Wisdom Publications, 2023)
April 04, 2024 08:00 - 2 hoursThrough engaging, contemporary examples, Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters (Wisdom Publications, 2023) reveals the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism as a coherent system of ideas and practices for the path to liberation, contextualizing its key texts and rendering them accessible and relevant. The Yogacara, or Yoga Practice, school is one of the two schools of Mahayana Buddhism that developed in the early centuries of the common era. Though it arose in India, Mahayana ...
Patrick Olivelle, "Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King" (Yale UP, 2024)
April 04, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesAshoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King (Yale UP, 2024) is the first biography of the great Emperor Ashoka relying solely on his own words. Ashoka sought not only to rule his territory but also to give it a unity of purpose and aspiration, to unify the people of his vastly heterogeneous empire not by a cult of personality but by the cult of an idea—“dharma”—which served as the linchpin of a new moral order. In this deeply researched book, Patrick Olivelle draws on Ashoka’s inscriptions and on ...
Loren D. Lybarger, "Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile" (U California Press, 2020)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourChicago is home to one of the largest, most politically active Palestinian immigrant communities in the United States. For decades, secular nationalism held sway as the dominant political ideology, but since the 1990s its structures have weakened and Islamic institutions have gained strength. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interview data, Loren D. Lybarger's book Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile (U California Press, 2020) charts the origins of these changes and the multiple effects...
Getting Your Work Read Is As Hard As Getting It Written
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 54 minutesListen to this interview of Diomidis Spinellis, Professor of Software Engineering, Athens University of Economics and Business, and as well Professor of Software Analytics, Delft University of Technology. We talk a lot about audience — especially how to reach them. Diomidis Spinellis: "They say that traveling enriches the mind. I think that the same applies to working outside your own narrow discipline. You get to know different ways of conceptualizing problems, of attacking them — you witnes...
Dominic Boyer, "No More Fossils" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesOur hosts, Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel, sat down with Dominic Boyer to talk about his new book, No More Fossils, which appeared just last year (2023) from the University of Minnesota's "Forerunners" series. We talked at length about his book, its gestation in basic questions about how to divest from fossil energy and fossil culture, and the grounds for optimism about our future. In a wide ranging discussion, we also talked about utopia, our investment in memoir and place-based writing,...
Naomi Cahn, et al., "Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy" (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourA stirring, comprehensive look at the state of women in the workforce--why women's progress has stalled, how our economy fosters unproductive competition, and how we can fix the system that holds women back. In an era of supposed great equality, women are still falling behind in the workplace. Even with more women in the workforce than in decades past, wage gaps continue to increase. It is the most educated women who have fallen the furthest behind. Blue-collar women hold the most insecure an...
Paul Hansen, "Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of Otherness and Security on the Frontiers of Japan" (SUNY Press, 2024)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesAs an ethnography of a Japanese dairy farm while having theoretical values going beyond the specific context, Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of Otherness and Security on the Frontiers of Japan (SUNY Press, 2024) offers a historical and ethnographic examination of the rapid industrialization of the dairy industry in Tokachi, Hokkaido. The book begins with a history of dairy farming and consumption in Hokkaido from a macro perspective, mapping the transition from survival to subsistence and...
Georgia Frank, "Unfinished Christians: Ritual Objects and Silent Subjects in Late Antiquity" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesWhat can we know about the everyday experiences of Christians during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries? How did non-elite men and women, enslaved, freed, and free persons, who did not renounce sex or choose voluntary poverty become Christian? They neither led a religious community nor did they live in entirely Christian settings. In this period, an age marked by “extraordinary” Christians—wonderworking saints, household ascetics, hermits, monks, nuns, pious aristocrats, pilgrims, and bis...
Margaret Price, "Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life" (Duke UP, 2024)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life (Duke University Press, 2024), Margaret Price intervenes in the competitive, productivity-focused realm of academia by sharing the everyday experiences of disabled academics. Drawing on more than three hundred interviews and survey responses, Price demonstrates that individual accommodations--the primary way universities address accessibility--actually impede access rather than enhance it. She argues that the pains and in...
Marc Masters, "High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape" (UNC Press, 2023)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesThe cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities. High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (UNC Press, 2023) charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth o...
Larissa Babij, "A Kind of Refugee: The Story of an American Who Refused to Leave Ukraine" (Ibidem Press, 2024)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesAmerican-born Larissa Babij is at home in Kyiv when Russia launches its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Her grandparents left Ukraine amidst the violence of World War II, and nearly 80 years later, she is fleeing the advancing Russian army. A Kind of Refugee: The Story of an American Who Refused to Leave Ukraine (Ibidem Press, 2024) chronicles the first year of all-out war in Ukraine through vivid dispatches that Babij sent to readers abroad. In cities flooded with refug...
Greg Jarrell, "Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods" (Fortress Press, 2024)
April 03, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesGreg Jarrell's book Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods (Fortress Press, 2024) uncovers how race, geography, policy, and religion have created haunted landscapes in Charlotte, North Carolina, and throughout the United States. How do we value our lands, livelihoods, and communities? How does our theology inform our capacity--or lack thereof--for memory? What responsibilities do we bear toward those who have been harmed, not just by individuals but by our str...
Deborah Kalb, "Off to Join the Circus" (Apprentice House, 2023)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 20 minutesIn Deborah Kalb’s debut adult novel Off to Join the Circus (Apprentice House Press 2023) it’s 2018, Howard Pinsky’s sister Adele, who ran away in 1954, as his parents said, “to join the circus,” is suddenly, 64 years later, in Bethesda wanting to be a part of the family. Howard, now 75 and a retired lawyer married to Marilyn, a retired teacher, spent years researching circuses and trying to find his sister. Now, during a two-week period when their eldest daughter is about to give birth at 46,...
Marie de Vignerot, Richelieu's Forgotten Advisor and Heiress
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesDespite being one of the most influential women of 17th century France, Marie de Vignerot has been largely forgotten. The niece, heiress, and advisor to the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, Marie was deeply motivated by her Catholic faith, yet never re-married after she became a widow at 18. She shaped France and the French empire's political, religious, and cultural life as the unconventional and independent Duchesse d’Aiguillon, a position exceedingly uncommon for a woman to possess in her own ...
Adapting Liu Cixin’s "Three-Body Problem" for Television
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIt’s the UConn Popcast, and today we discuss Netflix’s new screen adaptation of Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s Three Body trilogy. We discuss the battle between the eye and the idea in film and television science fiction, and whether the new show strikes a successful balance. We consider some of the challenges involved in adapting this distinctively Chinese literary work for a non-Chinese audience, and what might have been lost in doing so. And we think more broadly about the genr...
Richard Beaudoin, "Sounds As They Are: The unwritten music in classical recordings" (Oxford UP, 2024)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn a recording, what sounds count as music? Sounds made by a musician's body--including inhales, finger taps, and grunts--have for decades been dismissed as extraneous noises. In Sounds As They Are: The unwritten music in classical recordings (Oxford UP, 2024), author Richard Beaudoin pioneers a field of inquiry into non-notated sounds in recordings of classical music, recognizing often-overlooked sounds made by the bodies of performers and their recording equipment as music. Beaudoin classif...
Erin L. Durban, "The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourEvangelical Christians and members of the global LGBTQI human rights movement have vied for influence in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. Each side accuses the other of serving foreign interests. Yet each proposes future foreign interventions on behalf of their respective causes despite the country’s traumatic past with European colonialism and American imperialism. In The Sexual Politics of the Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti (University of Illinois Press, 2023), author Erin L. Dur...
Nell Freudenberger, "The Limits" (Knopf, 2024)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 54 minutesThe most thrilling work yet from the best-selling, prize-winning author of The Newlyweds and Lost and Wanted, a stunning new novel set in French Polynesia and New York City about three characters who undergo massive transformations over the course of a single year. From Mo'orea, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Tahiti, a French biologist obsessed with saving Polynesia's imperiled coral reefs sends her teenage daughter to live with her ex-husband in New York. By the time fifteen-year-ol...
Rina Verma Williams, "Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in Indian Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2023)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 45 minutesHow has the participation of women in Hindu nationalist politics in India changed over time? More broadly, what has their changing participation meant for women, Hindu nationalism, and Indian democracy? In Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated: Women and Religious Nationalism in Indian Democracy (Oxford UP, 2023), Rina Verma Williams places women's participation in religious politics in India into historical and comparative perspective through a focus on the most important Hindu nationalist ...
Paola Tartakoff, "Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2012)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesIn 1341 in Aragon, a Jewish convert to Christianity was sentenced to death, only to be pulled from the burning stake and into a formal religious interrogation. His confession was as astonishing to his inquisitors as his brush with mortality is to us: the condemned man described a Jewish conspiracy to persuade recent converts to denounce their newfound Christian faith. His claims were corroborated by witnesses and became the catalyst for a series of trials that unfolded over the course of the ...
Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, "Merits of the Plague" (Penguin, 2023)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSix hundred years ago, the author of this landmark work of history and religious thought—an esteemed judge, poet, and scholar in Cairo—survived the bubonic plague, which took the lives of three of his children, not to mention tens of millions of others throughout the medieval world. Holding up an eerie mirror to our own time, he reflects on the origins of plagues—from those of the Prophet Muhammad’s era to the Black Death of his own—and what it means that such catastrophes could have been wil...
Guru Madhavan on Wicked Problems and Engineering a Better World
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourPeoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Guru Madhavan, Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and Senior Director of Programs at the National Academy of Engineering, about his recent book, Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024). In Wicked Problems, Madhavan draws on a rich body of literature from the humanities and social sciences to think through how engineers can do a better job working on problems that include complex social and technical realities...
Why Should We Preserve Memory of the Holocaust?
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesWojtek Soczewica has led the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation since 2019, near the site of the killing fields. The Foundation aims at the preservation of the remains of the concentration and extermination camp and of all the personal items that belonged to victims and survivors. Today they serve as material witnesses of the tragic history safeguarding “the place of Auschwitz in human memory.” In this episode of International Horizons, he speaks with John Torpey, director of the Ralph Bunche Inst...
Matthieu Grandpierron, "Nostalgic Virility as a Cause of War: How Leaders of Great Powers Cope with Status Decline" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2024)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 51 minutesWhy 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...
Claudia de Rham, "The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity" (Princeton UP, 2024)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesClaudia de Rham has been playing with gravity her entire life. As a diver, experimenting with her body's buoyancy in the Indian Ocean. As a pilot, soaring over Canadian waterfalls on dark mornings before beginning her daily scientific research. As an astronaut candidate, dreaming of the experience of flying free from Earth's pull. And as a physicist, discovering new sides to gravity's irresistible personality by exploring the limits of Einstein's general theory of relativity. In The Beauty o...
Atakohu Middleton, "Kia Hiwa Rā!: Māori Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand" (Huia Publishers, 2023)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourMāori journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand has become a vibrant industry, reporting through print, radio, television and the internet. Kia Hiwa Rā!: Māori Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand (Huia Publishers, 2023) looks at the history of Māori journalism and the elements that make it what it is today. The author examines the way that news values common in English-speaking countries are reinterpreted for a Māori worldview and analyses news stories to show how Māori perspectives are expressed. Sh...
Max Bennett, "A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains" (Mariner Books, 2023)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourA Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, Ai, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains (Mariner Books, 2023) tells two fascinating stories. One is the evolution of nervous systems. It started 600 million years ago, when the first brains evolved in tiny worms. The other one is humans' quest to create more and more intelligent systems. This story begins in 1951 with the first reinforcement learning algorithm trying to mimic neural networks. Max Bennett is an AI entrepreneur and neurosc...
Alexej Lochmatow, "Public Knowledge in Cold War Poland: Scholarly Battles and the Clash of Virtues, 1945–1956" (Routledge, 2023)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn the years after World War II, Polish scholars and scientists faced a complex and deeply personal political reality, the result of a long and violent history of war and occupation combined with pressure from Stalinist Soviet Union. In Public Knowledge in Cold War Poland: Scholarly Battles and the Clash of Virtues, 1945–1956 (Routledge, 2024), Alexej Lochmatow explores the public debates among scholars that took place during this time and challenges the traditional narrative on the ‘Sovieti...
Brothers and Sisters for Israel (“Achim Baneshek”): A Conversation with Ronen Koehler
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesHow does an organization change in an instant, shift its focus and mission in response to a new reality? One volunteer organization did just that. In this podcast, Ronen Koehler shares the ideas, skills and commitments that enabled his organization’s dramatic, consequential change. The nonprofit, Brothers and Sisters for Israel (“Achim Baneshek” in Hebrew) was started by active and former IDF reservists and high-tech leaders who opposed their government’s plan for judicial reform, which would...
Katie Barclay, "Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self" (Oxford UP, 2021)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 17 minutesCaritas, a form of grace that turned our love for our neighbour into a spiritual practice, was expected of all early modern Christians, and corresponded with a set of ethical rules for living that displayed one's love in the everyday. Caritas was not just a willingness to behave morally, to keep the peace, and to uphold social order however, but was expected to be felt as a strong passion, like that of a parent to a child. Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford UP, 2021)...
Alexandrina Vanke, "The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in Everyday Struggle" (Manchester UP, 2024)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 38 minutesDespite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses. The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in Everyday Struggle (Manchester UP, 2024) challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordin...
Diane Winston, "Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan's Evangelical Vision" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAfter two years in the White House, an aging and increasingly unpopular Ronald Reagan looked like a one-term president, but in 1983 something changed. Reagan spoke of his embattled agenda as a spiritual rather than a political project and cast his vision for limited government and market economics as the natural outworking of religious conviction. The news media broadcast this message with enthusiasm, and white evangelicals rallied to the president’s cause. With their support, Reagan won reel...
Robert Bruno, "What Work Is" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
April 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourRobert Bruno is a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also serves as Director of the Labor Education Program. He is the author of Justified by Work: Identity and the Meaning of Faith in Chicago’s Working-Class Churches; Steelworker Alley: How Class Works In Youngstown; and Reforming the Chicago Teamsters: The Story of Local 705. He is the coauthor of A Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Chicago Teachers Strike. What Wor...
Stefanos Geroulanos, "The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins" (Liveright, 2024)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBooks about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright, 2024) acclaimed...
Building the Future Buddha: A Discussion with Jundho Cohen
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesJundo 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, Buildin...
Dave Mac Marquis and Moira Marquis, "Books Through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesCo-edited by Dave Mac Marquis and Moira Marquis, two activists with deep experience in organizing prison books programs (PBPs), Books Through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement (University of Georgia Press, 2024) introduces readers to PBPs and their decentralized organization. PBPs are a grassroots-level and nationwide activist movement challenging the largest prison industry in the world by refusing to let incarcerated people remain isolated and forgotten. Operating on shoestring b...
W. B. Allen, "Montesquieu's 'The Spirit of the Laws': A Critical Edition" (Anthem Press, 2023)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesThe Spirit of the Laws not only systematizes the foundational ideas of “separation of powers” and “balances and checks,” it provides the decisive response to the question of whether power in the nation-state can be limited in the aftermath of the Westphalian settlement of 1648. It describes a civilizational change through which power becomes domesticated, with built-in resistance to attempts to absolutize (or make total) political power. As such, it is the Bible of modern politics, now made m...
"Ploughshares" Magazine: A Discussion with Ladette Randolph
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 27 minutesLadette Randolph has served as editor-in-chief of Ploughshares literary journal since 2008, where she had acquired numerous notable essays and short stories. A publishing professional for 30 years, she is co-owner of the manuscript editing firm Randolph Lundine, and the author of five award-winning books, including A Sandhills Ballad, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice book, and most recently the novel Private Way. Under Ladette Randolph’s stewardship, Ploughshares is thriving with ...
Ben Highmore, "Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late 20th-Century Britain" (Manchester UP, 2023)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn postwar Britain, journalists and politicians predicted that the class system would not survive a consumer culture where everyone had TVs and washing machines, and where more and more people owned their own homes. They were to be proved hopelessly wrong. Ben Highmore's Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late 20th-Century Britain (Manchester UP, 2023) charts how class culture, rather than being destroyed by mass consumption, was remade from flat-pack furniture, Mediterranean cu...
"Ploughshares" Magazine: A Discussion with Ladette Randolph
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 27 minutesLadette Randolph has served as editor-in-chief of Ploughshares literary journal since 2008, where she had acquired numerous notable essays and short stories. A publishing professional for 30 years, she is co-owner of the manuscript editing firm Randolph Lundine, and the author of five award-winning books, including A Sandhills Ballad, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice book, and most recently the novel Private Way. Under Ladette Randolph’s stewardship, Ploughshares is thriving with ...
Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, "Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America" (UNC Press, 2023)
March 31, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America (UNC Press, 2023), Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South. From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throughout the South; some also carried the institution to far-flung places like California, New York, ...