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Episodes
Timothy Nunan, “Carl Schmitt, ‘Writings on War'” (Polity Press, 2011)
October 25, 2011 18:42 - 1 hourCarl Schmitt (1888-1985) was the author of numerous influential books and essays on political theory, law, and other subjects. In Carl Schmitt: Writings on War (Polity Press, 2011), Rhodes Scholar Timothy Nunan has provided us with an excellent translation of three of Schmitt’s essay on military affairs. These essays are relevant from a variety of perspectives. They reflect interwar debates about international law, neutrality, and the League of Nations and so are of interest to historians of ...
Laury Silvers, “A Soaring Minaret: Abu Bakr al-Wasiti and the Rise of Baghdadi Sufism” (SUNY Press, 2010)
October 25, 2011 18:16 - 51 minutesA broad portrait of early Islamic mysticism is fairly well-know. However, there are only a few key figures that have been explored in great detail and their activities shape how we understand this early history of Sufism. Laury Silvers, Professor of Religion at the University of Toronto, makes a significant contribution to the early development of Sufism by focusing on an influential but lesser-known figure, Abu Bakr al-Wasiti (d. ca. 320 AH/932 CE), the “soaring minaret.” In her new book, A ...
Elizabeth Gowing, “Travels in Blood and Honey: Becoming a Beekeeper in Kosovo” (
October 25, 2011 16:16 - 47 minutesThe hardest part of living in a foreign land is crossing that invisible divide between being an outsider and getting to know a country properly. An old foreign correspondent friend of mine said that the newspaper standard was that it always took at least two years and a lot of language learning. In reading Elizabeth Gowing‘s lovely and fascinating book it is obvious that she has found another way to cross that invisible divide and begin to really understand so much of what makes Kosovo and i...
Timothy Snyder, “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” (Basic Books, 2011)
October 25, 2011 16:05 - 1 hourNeville Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia as a far away land we know little about. He could have said it about any of the countries of east-central Europe. Yet, for the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany east-central Europe, was of prime importance in ways that would have horrible consequences for the people who made it their home, especially in the territories of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics and western Russia. Timothy Snyder calls these areas “the Bloodlands,” and with good reason. I...
Sally Ninham, “A Cohort of Pioneers: Australian Postgraduate Students and American Postgraduate Degrees, 1949-1964” (Conner Court Publishing, 2001)
October 25, 2011 15:18 - 51 minutesDespite its focus on education, Sally Ninham‘s recent book, A Cohort of Pioneers: Australian Postgraduate Students and American PostgraduateDegrees, 1949-1964 (Connor Court Publishing, 2011), covers a lot of ground: the waning of Australian-British ties, the rise of Australian identity, post-war Australian-US relations, and much more. The book is also personal: it details her own family’s experiences as young professionals studying in the United States after the Second World War. The discover...
Gregory Nagy on Homer’s “Iliad”
October 25, 2011 14:31 - 10 minutesIn this installment of Faculty Insight, produced in partnership with Harvard University Extension School, ThoughtCast speaks with the esteemed Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy about one of the earliest and greatest legends of all time: Homer’s epic story of the siege of Troy, called “The Iliad.” It’s a story of god-like heroes and blood-soaked battles; honor, pride, shame and defeat. In this interview, we dissect a key scene in “The Iliad,” where Hector and Achilles are about to meet in battle...
Chris Poullaos and Suki Sian, “Accountancy and Empire: The British Legacy of Professional Organization” (Routledge, 2010)
October 24, 2011 18:26 - 1 hourFor an empire supposedly founded on the back of trade, not much attention has been paid to how the finances of the British Empire were organized- or to the people who organized them. Chris Poullaos‘ and Suki Sian‘s pioneering compendium, Accountancy and Empire: The British Legacy of Professional Organization (Routledge, 2010), however, changes all that as it examines how Chartered Accountants fought for the right to be so called from Trinidad to India to Malaysia, and how the profession nego...
Pierre W. Orelus, “The Agony of Masculinity: Race, Gender, and Education in the Age of the ‘New’ Racism and Patriarchy” (Peter Lang, 2010)
October 17, 2011 18:42 - 53 minutesIn his new book, The Agony of Masculinity: Race, Gender, and Education in the Age of the “New” Racism and Patriarchy (Peter Lang, 2010), Pierre Orelus analyzes the “heartfelt stories of fifty men of African descent who vary in age, social class, family status, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, and ability” (1). One of the purposes of the book is to allow black men to share how they both perpetuate and are negatively impacted by heteronormativity, that is, the oppression of women and...
Peter Mauch, “Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)
October 17, 2011 17:44 - 1 hourPeter Mauch‘s Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exhaustively researched and very rich biographical account of the man who was Japan’s ambassador to the US in the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. Mauch traces the geopolitical developments of Japanese/US relations from 1877-1951, a crucial period that embraces two World Wars and many fascinating transformations in modern transnational history. The book rela...
Yasmin Saikia, “Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971” (Duke UP, 2011)
October 17, 2011 16:48 - 58 minutesIt’s almost a cliche to say that war dehumanizes those who participate in it – the organizers of violence, those who commit violent acts, and the victims of violence. In her new book, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (Duke University Press, 2011), historian Yasmin Saikia seeks to explore humanity lost, and humanity reclaimed, by women and men who experienced the war that resulted in Bangladesh’s independence. At the center of her story are women whose bodies became ...
Teddy Jamieson, “Whose Side Are You On?: Sport, the Troubles, and Me” (Yellow Jersey Press, 2011)
October 17, 2011 16:31 - 1 hourHere’s a sport quiz for you. Name a world-class athlete who hailed from the state of Nebraska: an Olympic champion, a hall of famer, someone who was among the very best at his or her game. (And no sneaking over to Google!) If you’re stumped, as I was, you’ll find some hints below. But first, think of another distant land with the same population as Nebraska (roughly 1.8 million), far removed from financial and industrial centers, like the state on the American Plains, with a hard climate and...
Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, “Mexico’s Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500-2010” (University of Colorado Press, 2010)
October 17, 2011 16:16 - 1 hourIn my work with pre-Hispanic and colonial Mexican pictorial texts, I often wish I could talk with the people who authored them. In the academic setting, sometimes we forget that these documents represent conversations about what was happening in the lives of many people at the time they were created and that some aspects of these materials that we have found in archives or ancient cities are still part of the cultural heritage and daily lives of the descendants of the creators. Ethelia Ruiz M...
Andrew Gentes, “Exile, Murder, and Madness in Siberia, 1823-1861” (Palgrave, 2010)
October 17, 2011 15:35 - 1 hourThe Russian practice of exiling criminals, dissidents, and other marginal people to the remote corners of Siberia began in the 16th century as the Russian state conquered new lands in the east. Exile to Siberia continued in the Tsarist period and the Soviets expanded it into the vast penal system known as the Gulag. Andrew Gentes wrote about the early history of this phenomenon in Exile to Siberia, 1590-1822 (Palgrave, 2008). He continues the story in Exile, Murder, and Madness in Siberia...
Troy Jollimore, “Love’s Vision” (Princeton UP, 2011)
October 15, 2011 19:50 - 1 hourLove – being loved and loving in the way two otherwise unrelated persons can be – is a kind of experience that just about everyone values intrinsically. As we say, or sing: love makes the world go ’round, and all you need is love. But what sort of experience is loving? What more can we say about it that will illuminate the kind of experience it is? In his thought-provoking new book, Love’s Vision (Princeton University Press, 2011), Troy Jollimore, Professor of Philosophy at California State ...
Edith Sheffer, “Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain” (Oxford UP, 2011)
October 14, 2011 19:13 - 1 hourIf Edith Sheffer‘s excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2011) has a single lesson, it’s that dividing a country is not as easy as you might think. You don’t just draw a line and tell people that it’s now the “border,” for in order for borders to be borders, they have to be seen as such. Sheffer shows that for quite a number of years after 1945, the Germans in Neustadt and Sonneberg–closely situated towns in, respectively, the American and Soviet...
Kevin Fellezs, “Birds of a Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion” (Duke UP, 2011)
October 11, 2011 14:04 - 1 hourTo introduce his book Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion (Duke, 2011),Kevin Fellezs quotes Jeff Beck: “For Christ’s sake, I wish somebody would make up a name for this kind of music, ’cause it ain’t jazz and it ain’t rock.” Beck’s words echo Fellezs’s argument, namely, that 1970’s fusion artists situated themselves in the “broken middle” between already established genres like rock, jazz, and funk. They liberally borrowed elements from many musical styles, often to th...
Jennifer Ring, “Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball” (University of Illinois Press, 2009)
October 10, 2011 19:55 - 1 hourIt’s October. In the American sports calendar, that means it’s time for the baseball playoffs. My team, the Minnesota Twins, wasn’t even close this year, going from first place last year to the cellar this year. But I gained some measure of consolation last week in watching A-Rod strike out to end the Yankees’ season. Jenny Ring‘s team, the Oakland Athletics, is also sitting out this October. A scholar of political theory, Jenny is a lifelong baseball fan. She was born with, as she calls it,...
Andrew Curran, “The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011)
October 10, 2011 19:28 - 10 minutesWe’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history of “Whiteness.” Today we’ll return to the history of racial ideas and listen to Andrew Curranexplain the history of “Blackness.” Doubtless Europeans have noted that different humans from different parts of the globe lookdifferent for millennia. But it was only relatively recently, as Curran explains...
Vera Tolz, “Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods” (Oxford UP, 2011)
October 05, 2011 16:51 - 1 hourEveryone knows that the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire was the largest land based empire around, and that it was growing yet- at fifty-five square miles a day, no less. But how did Moscow and St. Petersberg go about making the bewildering array of peoples and ethnicities into subjects subject of a Russian empire? Vera Tolz’s Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford University Press, 2011) examines ‘Orient...
Abdulkader Tayob, “Religion in Modern Islamic Discourse” (Columbia University Press, 2010)
October 05, 2011 16:36 - 1 hourMany people believe that the current Islamic resurgence is not necessarily a “return of religion,” but rather a continuation of tradition. According to this line of thought, therefore, Islam is essentially resistant to modernity and incompatible with contemporary secular societies. But is this really the case? Abdulkader Tayob, professor of Religion at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, examines this question in his new book Religion in Modern Islamic Discourse (Columbia University P...
Tim Goeglein, “The Man in the Middle: An Inside Account of Faith and Politics in the George W. Bush Era” (B&H Books, 2011)
October 05, 2011 15:34 - 29 minutesIn his new book, The Man in the Middle: An Inside Account of Faith and Politics in the George W. Bush Era (B&H Books, 2011), Timothy S. Goeglein, former deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison under President George W. Bush, describes his nearly eight years working for the White House. He describes President Bush’s reaction to the 2000 election recount, his response to the tragedy of September 11, and the behind-the-scene deliberations leading up to Bush’s stem cell policy...
David A. Chang, “The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929” (University of North Carolina Press, 2010)
October 05, 2011 15:12 - 1 hour“The history of Oklahoma is a history of movement, possession, and dispossession. It is American history told in fast-foward,” writes historian David A. Chang in the introduction to The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). “It captures the dynamics of global history in the middle of a continent.” As a lifelong East-Coaster, I admit this initially struck me as a little hyperbolic. Oklahoma may ind...
David J. Ulbrich, “Preparing for Victory: Thomas Holcomb and the Making of the Modern Marine Corps, 1936-1943” (Naval Institute Press, 2011).
October 05, 2011 14:49 - 1 hourThe story of the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific Theatre in the Second World War is no doubt quite familiar to our listeners. Less well known, however, is the story of how the Marine Corps readied itself for the challenges of amphibious warfare during the interwar period. No less obscure is the record of the Corps’ first commandant, Thomas Holcomb. Generally overshadowed by the combat narrative of the Marines’ first year in the South Pacific and the subsequent tenure of his successo...
Charles Prebish, “An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer” (Sumeru Press, 2011)
October 05, 2011 14:30 - 1 hourCharles Prebish is among the most prominent scholars of American Buddhism. He has been a pioneer in studying the forms that Buddhist tradition has taken in the United States. Now retired, he has written this unusual new book, An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer (Sumeru Press, 2011). The book tells the story of Prebish’s role in bringing the field of American Buddhism to prominence. The difficulties he faced in establishing American Buddhism as a legitimate field of s...
Dave Zirin, “The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment that Changed the World” (Haymarket Books, 2011)
October 04, 2011 20:25 - 1 hourThere are beautiful sports photos, and dramatic sports photos. There are sports photos that are funny, and others that are poignant. There are photos that capture athletic brilliance, and tenacity, and passion. But there are few images from the modern history of sports that have transcended the games, photos that have inspired and provoked those with little interest in athletics. Perhaps the only image to have had such a far-reaching effect is that of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the medal...
Craig Lockard, “Southeast Asia in World History” (Oxford UP, 2009)
September 30, 2011 15:21 - 1 hourA book called Southeast Asia in World History (Oxford University Press, 2009) might seem on the face of it to be out of place on a blog about South Asia. But as Craig Lockard so convincingly demonstrates, this region was shaped by, and in turn gave much to, the rest of the world. Its links with South Asia, with the ancient empires of India, go back to antiquity; and Indian traders in turn were responsible for ferrying many Southeast Asian spices to the rest of the world; curiosity eventually ...
Jason Brennan, “The Ethics of Voting” (Princeton UP, 2011)
September 30, 2011 15:06 - 1 hourIt is commonly held that citizens in a democratic society have a civic duty to participate in the processes of collective self-government. Often, this duty is held to be satisfied by voting. In fact, the sentiment is commonly expressed that voting is always a good thing for citizens to do, no matter how they vote. Similarly, it is widely held that when citizens neglect to vote they violate a civic duty, no matter how uninformed or misguided their votes would have been. These popular pieties a...
Kay Schiller and Christopher Young, “The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany” (University of California Press, 2010)
September 26, 2011 16:37 - 1 hourThis past summer Germany hosted the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The 32 matches drew more than 800,000 fans, while the total number of foreign tourists visiting Germany increased by nine per cent over the previous summer. The German government’s commissioner for tourism proudly declared that the success of the Women’s World Cup “strengthened the global image of Germany as a cosmopolitan and family-friendly travel destination with excellent infrastructure,” making the country the “world champi...
Ron Christie, “Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010)
September 26, 2011 15:08 - 40 minutesIn his new bookActing White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur (Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), former White House aide Ron Christie recounts the history of the pejorative term “acting white.” He traces its lineage from the present day through the Black Power movement back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, unraveling a fascinating history in the process. In our interview, we talked about Ron’s experiences as an African-American Republican, his ambitious vow to eradicate the term “acting white,” and his hop...
Simon Johnson, “13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown” (Pantheon, 2010)
September 23, 2011 18:23 - 9 minutes[Re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast] Simon Johnson, the Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is an outspoken critic of the US government response to the financial crisis. Now he takes on the “too big to fail” banks which continue to threaten our economy. In his latest book, called 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (Pantheon, 2010), which he c...
Tom Perrotta on Flannery O’Connor
September 23, 2011 18:09 - 32 minutes[Re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast] Tom Perrotta, the esteemed author of Little Children, Election, The Abstinence Teacher and the recently published novel The Leftovers (St. Martin’s Press, September 2011) speaks with ThoughtCast about a writer who fascinates, irritates and inspires him: Flannery O’Connor. His relationship with her borders on kinship, and he admires and admonishes her as he would a family member, with whom he shares a bond both genetic and cultural....
John Grenier, “The Far Reaches of Empire: War in Nova Scotia, 1710-1760” (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008)
September 23, 2011 17:29 - 46 minutesFor many readers, colonial history begins and ends with the original 13 American colonies. This perception overlooks the other British colonies throughout the New World, each of which created their own unique challenges for their imperial master. Historian John Grenier considers one of these “other” colonies in his book The Far Reaches of Empire: War in Nova Scotia, 1710-1760 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008). Part of the Campaigns and Commanders series from the University of Oklahoma Pres...
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, “A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order” (Cambridge UP, 2010)
September 23, 2011 17:18 - 1 hourDespite the fact that many American Muslim families have lived in the United States for generations they are often thought of as foreigners. I have witnessed on several occasions someone asking an African American Muslim when they converted to Islam or what drew them to the religion. Or asking Muslims from Middle Eastern or Asian descent where they are from or when they came to America. These questions are not always intended to be malicious but they do underscore some of the assumptions abou...
Bryan J. Cuevas, “Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet” (Oxford UP, 2008)
September 23, 2011 16:45 - 59 minutesToday on “New Books in Buddhist Studies” we’ll be going to hell and back with Bryan Cuevas in a discussion of his new book Travels in the Netherworld: Buddhist Popular Narratives of Death and the Afterlife in Tibet(Oxford University Press, 2008). Common in Tibetan Buddhism is the story of the delok, a person who has died, traveled to the afterlife, and returned to the land of living with some message or moral to share. Delok come from all walks of life–laypersons, lamas, and monks–all figure...
Steven Barnes, “Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society” (Princeton UP, 2011)
September 23, 2011 15:30 - 1 hourMost Westerners know about the Gulag (aka “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies”) thanks to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s eloquent, heart-wrenching Gulag Archipelago. Since the publication of that book in 1973 (and largely thanks to it), the Gulag has come to symbolize the horrors of Stalinism. Made up of a vast network of concentration camps, slave labor camps, and (according to some) death camps, the Gulag was a horrible thing indeed. Under Stalin some 18 million people we...
Samuel Zipp, “Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York” (Oxford UP, 2010)
September 22, 2011 18:25 - 1 hourIf you’ve ever lived in New York City, you know exactly what a “pre-war building” is. First and foremost, it’s better than a “post-war building.” Why, you might ask, is that so? Well part of the reason has to do with wartime and post-war “urban renewal,” that is, the process by which the Washington, big city governments, big city banks, and big city developers came together to clear “slums” and erect modern (really “modernist”) apartment blocks and complexes of apartment blocks. Think “the p...
Scott Brooks, “Black Men Can’t Shoot” (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
September 19, 2011 16:22 - 1 hourWith the NBA in the midst of a labor disagreement, players from the world’s premier basketball league are scattering in different directions to maintain their skills (and get paid). This past summer, a number of NBA players returned to their roots, so to speak, by playing in summer leagues in places like DC, LA, New York, and Baltimore. For many black players who grew up in big cities, summer leagues were the place where they first learned basketball, under the watchful eyes of older men who ...
Charles McKinney, Jr., “Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina” (UPA, 2010)
September 16, 2011 18:09 - 1 hourWhen I was an undergraduate, I noticed that there were certain books that seemed to be unavoidable (at least at my liberal arts college). They were assigned in many classes, and they were discussed in many others. Reading them seemed to be a secret requirement for graduation. These “liberal-arts essentials” included Plato’s Republic, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Lockes’ Two Treatises on Government (especially the second), Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Marx and Engels’ The Comm...
Helen Vendler on Emily Dickinson
September 15, 2011 15:24 - 20 minutes[Re-posted with permission from Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast] When Helen Vendler was only 13, the future poetry critic and Harvard professor memorized several of Emily Dickinson’s more famous poems. They’ve stayed with her over the years, and today, she talks with us about one poem in particular that’s haunted her all this time. It’s called “I cannot live with You.” According to Vendler, whose authoritative Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (Harvard University Press, 2011) has recent...
James Unnever and Shaun L. Gabbidon, “A Theory of African American Offending: Race, Racism, and Crime” (Routledge, 2011)
September 15, 2011 15:03 - 1 hourIs comedian and cultural critic Bill Cosby right–that black youth suffer from a cultural pathology that leads them to commit more crimes than their white counterparts? Is the remedy to the high rate of offending by African American men the “shape up or get shipped out” perspective? Is there more to African American offending than poor parenting or lousy schools? James D. Unnever is the co-author (with Shaun L. Gabbidon) of the new book A Theory of African American Offending: Race, Racism, and...
Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics” (Oxford UP, 2011)
September 14, 2011 18:42 - 1 hourToday’s podcast features a book about disgusting art – that is, art that deliberately aims to cause disgust. While aesthetic judgments regarding the value, or not, of artworks have historically been tied to the notion of beauty, there are plenty of works of art and genres of art that succeed aesthetically only when they cause non-pleasurable responses. Horror films and tragedies are typical examples. These kinds of art are philosophically puzzling. How is it that things that we know are not r...
Carool Kersten, “Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals and the Study of Islam” (Columbia University Press, 2011)
September 14, 2011 14:59 - 1 hourOften when we read about new Muslim intellectuals we are offered a presentation of their politicized Islamic teachings and radical interpretations of theology, or Western readings that nominally reflect the Islamic tradition. We are rarely introduced to critical Muslim thinkers who neither abandon their Islamic civilizational heritage nor adopt, wholesale, a Western intellectual perspective. In Carool Kersten‘s Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals and the Study of Islam (Col...
Cecilia Leong-Salobir, “Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire” (Routledge, 2011)
September 13, 2011 19:20 - 1 hourHobson-Jobson was not just about administration and geopolitics- the language of Empire extended to its culinary endeavours as well. Thus chota hazri, tiffin,and curry puffs at Peliti’s were the things that sustained an army of civil servants as they went about registering land records in the United Provinces, negotiating with Malay sultans or checking out logging operations in Sabah. Cecilia Leong-Salobir’s book, Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Routledge, 2011), looks at t...
Alan Jacobs, “The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction” (Oxford UP, 2011)
September 12, 2011 19:30 - 39 minutesIn his new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford University Press, 2011), Alan Jacobs, Clyde S. Kilby Chair Professor of English at Wheaton College, discusses the state of reading in the United States. Where some would argue that there are too few people doing the wrong kind of reading, Jacobs argues the contrary. He believes that literature is flourishing, pointing to the existence of enormous booksellers like Amazon or Barnes and Noble, as well as the influence of ...
Muriel Dimen (ed.), “With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories” (Routledge, 2011)
September 12, 2011 17:21 - 59 minutesWhat’s culture got to do with psychoanlaysis? According to Muriel Dimen and Stephen Hartman, a whole lot. Dimen, editor of With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories (Routledge, 2011), and Hartman, a contributor to the same, note that “culture is always already there.” Therefore culture and the clinic cannot be two separate places but must be, as our guests say, “interimplicated,” or folded together. With their diverse academic backgrounds, Dimen and Hartmen are the perfect pair to explai...
Allen Guttmann, “Sports and American Art from Benjamin West to Andy Warhol” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011)
September 12, 2011 15:37 - 52 minutesWhen I was a kid, I used to pore over an illustrated history of American sports that I had received as a birthday gift. The oversized, hardcover book featured some of the iconic images of 20th-century sports: Lou Gehrig standing humbly at home plate on his day of tribute, teammates present and past encircling him, the packed bleachers and Bronx cityscape in the background; an exhausted and bloodied Y.A. Tittle kneeling on the gridiron grass on an afternoon of defeat; young Wilt Chamberlain, s...
Richard Hamilton, “The Last Storytellers: Tales from the Heart of Morocco” (I. B. Taurus, 2011)
September 09, 2011 19:04 - 43 minutesFew places can match the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech for spectacle. As the shadows lengthen and dusk approaches, the square seethes with snake charmers, charlatans, showmen and chancers, all shrouded in charcoal smoke from dozens of makeshift food stalls. It feels like a glimpse into a different world in a different age. One part of that different age, however, is dying out. A handful of storytellers still make their living by captivating audiences with tales and stories of love and death, tr...
Mikaila Lemonik Arthur, “Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education” (Ashgate, 2011)
September 09, 2011 18:57 - 55 minutesColleges and universities have a reputation for being radical places where tenured radicals teach radical ideas. Don’t believe it. Consider this: the set of academic departments that one finds in most “colleges of liberal arts and sciences”–history, chemistry, sociology, physics, and so on–has remained remarkably stable for many decades. How, exactly, is that “radical?” Yet as Mikaila Lemonik Arthur shows in her enlightening book Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education (A...
Mara Hvistendahl, “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men” (PublicAffairs, 2011)
September 07, 2011 18:58 - 53 minutesThe students in my undergraduate class on gender, sexuality, and human rights are a pretty tough bunch. They know they’re in for some unpleasant topics: sex trafficking, domestic violence, mass rape in wartime. But when I have them read Amartya Sen’s classic article on the effects of son preference – that stops them in their tracks. A hundred million girls and women simply missing from the planet due to sex-selective abortion, infanticide, and neglect of daughters. You can almost see the chil...
Martha Minow, “In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark” (Oxford UP, 2011)
September 07, 2011 02:23 - 47 minutesWhat can judges do to change society? Fifty-seven years ago, the Supreme Court resolved to find out: the unanimous ruling they issued in Brown v. Board of Education threw the weight of the Constitution fully behind the aspiration of social equality among the races. The possibilities of law as an engine of social justice seem to be encapsulated in the story of the decision — and in the many decades of resistance to its enforcement. Today, there are those who argue that the Court failed in its...