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Episodes
Nietzsche Now! With Glenn Wallis
June 18, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourNietzsche Now! Now? Really, you might ask. Isn’t he dead already? The Great Immoralist on the vital issues of our time. Hmm, how is that you might ask. Find out in this conversation with Glenn Wallis, returning guest and author of Nietzsche Now! We discuss the role Nietzsche might play today in helping all of us exit the culture war bubble and start to think again. For regular listeners, don’t worry, we do touch on Buddhism too! The Press Release does much of the work in explaining the appeal...
Dasha Kiper, "Travelers to Unimaginable Lands: Stories of Dementia, the Caregiver, and the Human Brain" (Random House, 2023)
June 18, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIf you’ve ever worked with dementia patients before, you know how unique and bizarre the experience can be, and how little the stereotypes actually hold up to the experience. Even knowing about the diagnosis often does little to help us in caring for people, and many caregivers find themselves getting sucked into behavioral loops of their own. This is because your brain is not wired to deal with the altered form of reality that dementia patients inhabit. Evolution has not equipped us to deal ...
Test Subjects
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesSeason Two erupts in our ears with a film-noir soundscape—an eerie voice utters strange and disjointed phrases and echoing footsteps lead to sirens and gunshots. What on Earth are we listening to? We unravel the mystery with NYU media professor Mara Mills who studies the historical relationship between disability and media technologies. In Episode 8, “Test Subjects,” we examine the strange and obscure history of sound’s use as a psychological diagnostic tool. In the late 20th century, while ...
Postscript: Previewing the 2024 Presidential Race
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesStates are holding primaries. The Democrats and Republicans will convene in July and August but it has already been decided that the presidential race will be a rematch. Former President Donald Trump will challenge President Joe Biden. To take stock of where the race stands five months out, we have two experts on the presidency. Dr. Meena Bose is the Executive Dean for Public Policy and Public Service Programs at the Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affai...
Rachel Khong, "Real Americans" (Knopf, 2024)
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 46 minutesReal Americans (Knopf, 2024) begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao's Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in l...
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, "Sound in Indian Film and Audiovisual Media: History, Practices and Production" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBudhaditya Chattopadhyay’s book Sound in Indian Film and Audiovisual Media: History, Practices and Production (Amsterdam UP, 2023) is an exhaustive attempt to study film sound in the Indian subcontinent through artistic research. It aims to fill a significant scholarly void by addressing issues of sound and listening within the cultural contexts of the Global South. By developing a comprehensive understanding of the unique soundscapes of Indian film and audiovisual media, his study examines t...
Kira Huju, "Cosmopolitan Elites: Indian Diplomats and the Social Hierarchies of Global Order" (Oxford UP, 2023)
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourCosmopolitan Elites: Indian Diplomats and the Social Hierarchies of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Kira Huju narrates the birth, everyday life, and fracturing of a Western-dominated global order from its margins. It offers a critical sociological examination of the elite Indian Foreign Service and its members, many of whom were present at the founding of this order. Dr. Huju explores how these diplomats set out to remake the service in the name of a radically anti-colonia...
John Keane and Baogang He, "China's Galaxy Empire: Wealth, Power, War, and Peace in the New Chinese Century" (Oxford UP, 2023)
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn China's Galaxy Empire: Wealth, Power, War, and Peace in the New Chinese Century (Oxford University Press, 2024), authors Dr. John Keane and Dr. Baogang He, target a development of enormous significance: China's return, after two centuries of decline and subjugation, to a position of prominence in world affairs. The daring thesis is that China is a newly rising empire of a kind never before witnessed: a galaxy empire. The first to be born of the digital communications era, this young empire...
Harry R. McCarthy, "Boy Actors in Early Modern England" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesBoy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Harry McCarthy provides a new approach to the study of early modern boy actors, offering a historical re-appraisal of these performers' physical skills in order to reassess their wide-reaching contribution to early modern theatrical culture. Ranging across drama performed from the 1580s to the 1630s by all-boy and adult companies alike, the book argues that the exuberant physicali...
Bringing Out the Dead
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 23 minutesWhat is the proper—or most effective—response to a barrage of horror and pain? The closest that screenwriter Paul Schrader ever came to a comedy (albeit a very dark one), Bringing Out the Dead (1999) is low on special effects depicting medical emergencies but high on drama. Join us for a conversation about one of Scorsese’s sleepers, a movie about a man who wants to find something like religious faith in a world with no spiritual oasis. It also dramatizes the incredible cost paid a moment of ...
Tahera Qutbuddin, trans., "Nahj al-Balāghah: The Wisdom and Eloquence of ʿAlī" (Brill, 2024)
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourNahj al-Balagha is among the most powerful, consequential, and linguistically brilliant masterpieces of Arabic and of Islamic thought and literature. Based on the orations, letters, and sayings of wisdom of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 661), the first Imam or successor to Prophet Muhammad in Shi‘i Islam and the fourth caliph in Sunni Islam, this oral treasure was compiled and brought together as a text by the late tenth/early eleventh scholar and poet Al-Sharif al-Radi (d. 1015). In this episode I...
danah boyd on Digital Technology and Everyday Life
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourPeoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with danah boyd, Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, founder of the Data & Society Research Institute, and a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University, about her career and work. The pair discuss boyd's the genesis and intellectual background of boyd's now classic text, It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Teens (Yale UP, 2014) as well as her more recent work on digital infrastructure and the US Census Bureau. Learn more about your...
Key Tips to Identifying Your Target Publisher
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 8 minutesIn the first episode of Publish My Book, Avi Staiman offers strategic tips for identifying your target publisher, including: understanding where other titles in your research field have been published and how your research angle fits into existing series, using platforms such as the Association of University Presses and New Books Network to your advantage and introducing yourself to relevant editors to inquire about potential publishing fits. Related resources: Association of University Press...
Timothy G. Anderson and Brian Schoen, "Settling Ohio: First Peoples and Beyond" (Ohio UP, 2023)
June 17, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesScholars working in archaeology, education, history, geography, and politics tell a nuanced story about the people and dynamics that reshaped this region and determined who would control it. The Ohio Valley possesses some of the most resource-rich terrain in the world. Its settlement by humans was thus consequential not only for shaping the geographic and cultural landscape of the region but also for forming the United States and the future of world history. Settling Ohio begins with an overv...
David Criekemans, "Geopolitics and International Relations: Grounding World Politics Anew" (Brill, 2021)
June 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAlthough we live in a globalised world, territorially embedded factors are highly relevant in such domains as security, economy, energy, environment, politics & diplomacy. Today's analysts of world affairs are often loosely referring to 'geopolitics', but do not always clearly define it. Geopolitics and International Relations: Grounding World Politics Anew (Brill | Nijhoff, 2021) therefore offers a necessary framework: an introduction into the main components of geopolitical analysis, an ove...
John Soluri, "Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States" (U Texas Press, 2021)
June 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this second edition of Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and t...
Todd H. Weir, "Red Secularism: Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany 1890 to 1933" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
June 16, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesRed Secularism: Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany 1890 to 1933 (Cambridge UP, 2023) is the first substantive investigation into one of the key sources of radicalism in modern German, the subculture that arose at the intersection of secularism and socialism in the late nineteenth-century. It explores the organizations that promoted their humanistic-monistic worldview through popular science and asks how this worldview shaped the biographies of ambitious self-educated workers and earl...
Lisa M. P. Munoz, "Women in Science Now: Stories and Strategies for Achieving Equity" (Columbia UP, 2023)
June 16, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesWomen working in the sciences face obstacles at virtually every step along their career paths. From subtle slights to blatant biases, deep systemic problems block women from advancing or push them out of science and technology entirely. Women in Science Now: Stories and Strategies for Achieving Equity (Columbia UP, 2023) examines solutions to this persistent gender gap, offering new perspectives on how to make science more equitable and inclusive for all. This book shares stories and insights...
Carlos M. N. Eire, "They Flew: A History of the Impossible" (Yale UP, 2023)
June 16, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesIn the early modern era, seemingly impossible stories of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft were common and believable. The important question of the time was not if these things happened, but why. This was particularly true as the rise of Protestantism began to challenge Catholic beliefs in miracles and continued to be the case even after scientific research began to supplant religious belief in these phenomena. In They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale UP, 2023), Carlos Eire show...
Daniel Scott Souleles et al., "People before Markets: An Alternative Casebook" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
June 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourPeople before Markets:: An Alternative Casebook (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents twenty comparative case studies of important global questions, such as 'Where should our food come from?' 'What should we do about climate change?' and 'Where should innovation come from?' A variety of solutions are proposed and compared, including market-based, economic, and neoliberal approaches, as well as those determined by humane values and ethical and socially responsible perspectives. Drawing on original res...
Michael V. Singh, "Good Boys, Bad Hombres: The Racial Politics of Mentoring Latino Boys in Schools" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
June 16, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesThe unintended consequences of youth empowerment programs for Latino boys Educational research has long documented the politics of punishment for boys and young men of color in schools—but what about the politics of empowerment and inclusion? In Good Boys, Bad Hombres: The Racial Politics of Mentoring Latino Boys in Schools (U Minnesota Press, 2024), Michael V. Singh focuses on this aspect of youth control in schools, asking on whose terms a positive Latino manhood gets to be envisioned. Base...
Madman in the White House?
June 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourDid Woodrow Wilson's daddy issues cause World War II? And what might this teach us about our contemporary political plight? Jordan Osserman talks with psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster and historian Patrick Weil about The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard UP, 2023). While conducting research at Yale, Patrick Weil chanced upon the unpublished and unredacted original manuscript of Sigmund Freud and Ambassador Willi...
Robert D. Heaton, "The Shepherd of Hermas As Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
June 16, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourComposed within the first Christian century by a Roman named Hermas, the Shepherd remains a mysterious and underestimated book to scholars and laypeople alike. In The Shepherd of Hermas As Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), Robert D. Heaton argues that early Christians mainly received the Shepherd positively and accepted it unproblematically alongside texts that would ultimately be canonized, requ...
Hannah Forsyth, "Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870–2008" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
June 16, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesVirtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870–2008 (Cambridge UP, 2023) explores the rise of the professional middle class across the Anglophone world from c. 1870 to 2008. With a focus on British settler colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States - Hannah Forsyth argues that the British middle class structured old forms of virtue into rapidly expanding white-collar professional work, needed to drive both economic and civili...
Andrew M. Gardner, "The Fragmentary City: Migration, Modernity, and Difference in the Urban Landscape of Doha, Qatar" (Cornell UP, 2024)
June 15, 2024 08:00 - 46 minutesAs Andrew M. Gardner explains in The Fragmentary City: Migration, Modernity, and Difference in the Urban Landscape of Doha, Qatar (Cornell UP, 2024) in Qatar and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, nearly nine out of every ten residents are foreign noncitizens. Many of these foreigners reside in the cities that have arisen in Qatar and neighboring states. The book provides an overview of the gulf migration system with its diverse migrant experiences. Gardner focuses on the ways that demograph...
Sommer Browning and Isabel Soto-Luna, "Serving Hispanic, Latine, and Latinx Students in Academic Libraries" (Library Juice Press, 2022)
June 15, 2024 08:00 - 46 minutesServing Hispanic, Latine, and Latinx Students in Academic Libraries (Library Juice Press, 2024) is a collection of essays written by library workers that highlights academic library practices, programs, and services that support Hispanic, Latine, and Latinx students. As of 2020, there were over 500 federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) in the United States and Puerto Rico with another 300 designated as “emerging”. But this is only part of the picture; there are many more i...
Jessica Calarco, "Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net" (Portfolio, 2024)
June 15, 2024 08:00 - 46 minutesHow do unequal societies function? In Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net (Portfolio, 2024), Jesscia Calarco, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, examines how America’s DIY society depends on the labour of mothers and excludes the sorts of social supports present in other countries. This dependence has hugely negative social and individual consequences, as demonstrated by the rich qualitiative and quantitative data examined in the...
Meredith Weiss et al., "Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
June 15, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesPoliticians in Southeast Asia, as in many other regions, win elections by distributing cash, goods, jobs, projects, and other benefits to supporters, but the ways in which they do this vary tremendously, both across and within countries. Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents a new framework for analyzing variation in patronage democracies, focusing on distinct forms of patronage and different networks through which it is di...
Klas-Göran Karlsson, "Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)
June 15, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourLessons of history are often referred to in public discourse, but seldom in scholarly discussions. Klas-Göran Karlsson's book Lessons of History: The Holocaust and Soviet Terror as Borderline Events (Academic Studies Press, 2024) seeks to change this by introducing an innovative scholarly, analytical model of historical lessons, starting from the basic three-fold perspective that you simultaneously are history, share history, and make history. Not any history is useful for extracting or using...
Laurence M. Geary, "The Land War in Ireland: Famine, Philanthropy and Moonlighting" (Cork UP, 2023)
June 15, 2024 08:00 - 27 minutesIn this interview, he discusses his new book The Land War in Ireland: Famine, Philanthropy and Moonlighting (Cork UP, 2023), a collection of interconnected essays on different aspects of agrarian agitation in 1870s and 1880s Ireland. The Land War in Ireland addresses perceived lacunae in the historiography of the Land War in late nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly deficiencies or omissions relating to the themes of the title: famine, humanitarianism, and the activities of agrarian secre...
"America: Now and Here": A Lecture by Artist Eric FIschl
June 15, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesArtist Eric Fischl was born in 1948 in New York City and grew up in the Long Island suburbs. His paintings first received critical attention for depicting the dark, disturbing undercurrents of mainstream American life. In 1972 he received a B.F.A. from the California Institute for the Arts. In February 2012, Fischl spoke to the Institute about his work, and about his project “America: Now and Here,” a traveling multi-disciplinary exhibition designed to encourage a national dialogue about Amer...
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, "Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America" (UNC Press, 2023)
June 15, 2024 08:00 - 51 minutesPivoting from studies that emphasize the dominance of progressivism on American college campuses during the late sixties and early seventies, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd positions conservative critiques of, and agendas in, American colleges and universities as an essential dimension of a broader conversation of conservative backlash against liberal education. This book explores the story of how stakeholders in American higher education organized and reacted to challenges to their power from the N...
C. J. Spataro, "More Strange Than True" (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2024)
June 15, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesAward winning author and short fiction writer, C. J. Spataro's debut novel, More Strange Than True (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2024) takes us in to a world of faeries and what happens when wishes do come true. After an epically shitty day, Jewell Jamieson unknowingly eats a magic-spiked meal and happens also to make a certain wish-and that's why she awakes the next morning to discover her beloved dog Oberon has been transformed into a beautiful naked man in her bed. Conflict ensues when Titania,...
Allison J. Pugh, "The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World" (Princeton UP, 2024)
June 15, 2024 08:00 - 31 minutesWith the rapid development of artificial intelligence and labor-saving technologies like self-checkouts and automated factories, the future of work has never been more uncertain, and even jobs requiring high levels of human interaction are no longer safe. The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton UP, 2024) explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other in these settings is valuable and worth preserving. Dra...
Gordon C. Chang, "Revolution and Witchcraft: The Code of Ideology in Unsettled Times" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
June 14, 2024 08:00 - 51 minutesIdeas influence people. In particular, extremely well-developed sets of ideas shape individuals, groups, and societies in far-reaching ways. In Revolution and Witchcraft: The Code of Ideology in Unsettled Times (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Gordon Chang establishes these “idea systems” as an academic concept. Through three intense episodes of manipulation and mayhem connected to idea systems—Europe’s witch hunts, the Mao Zedong-era “revolutions,” and the early campaign of the U.S. War on Terror...
On Richard Linklater and “Hit Man”
June 14, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesIt’s the UConn Popcast, and “Hit Man” is writer and director Richard Linklater’s latest film, available on Netflix after a brief theatrical run. We analyze the movie through Linklater’s classic themes: identity and its malleability, American sub-cultures, and American mythologies. “Hit Man” is a less challenging watch than much of Linklater’s canon, but it works best, we argue, when seen as part of his wider project of examining the permeable boundary between fantasy and reality. Learn more a...
Stephen Marr and Patience Mususa, "DIY Urbanism in Africa: Politics and Practice" (Zed Books, 2023)
June 14, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesProtracted economic crises, accelerating inequalities, and increased resource scarcity present significant challenges for the majority of Africa's urban population. Limited state capacity and widespread infrastructure deficiencies common in cities across the continent often require residents to draw on their own resources, knowledge, and expertise to resolve these life and livelihood dilemmas. In DIY Urbanism in Africa: Politics and Practice (Zed Books, 2023), editors Stephen Marr and Patienc...
Jared Stearns, "Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers" (Headpress, 2024)
June 14, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Pure: The Sexual Revolutions of Marilyn Chambers (Headpress, 2024), Jared Stearns tells the untold story of the world's most famous X-rated star, who rose to fame as the face of Ivory Snow and the star of Behind the Green Door but struggled to find her true self in a world of sex, scandal, and shattered dreams. Marilyn Chambers was the embodiment of the free-spirited Seventies, the world's most famous X-rated star, and an unappreciated talent whose work in adult films hindered her dreams o...
Christopher William England, "Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
June 14, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesHenry George’s Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, and his ideas were taken up by by powerful figures as diverse as Sun Yat-sen, Leo Tolstoy, and Theodor Herzl. Yet, in the 21st century, George is often reduced to a footnote in the history of the Gilded Age. In Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Christopher William England uncovers the influence of Georgism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and t...
Cory C. Brock and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, "Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction" (Lexham Press, 2023)
June 14, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesDiscover the rich theology of Neo-Calvinism. Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck sparked a theological tradition in the Netherlands that came to be known as Neo-Calvinism. While studies in Neo-Calvinism have focused primarily on its political and philosophical insights, its theology has received less attention. In Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction (Lexham Press, 2023), Cory C. Brock and N. Gray Sutanto present the unique dogmatic contributions of the tradition. Each chapter focuses on a...
Tessa Hill and Eric Simons, "At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans" (Columbia UP, 2024)
June 14, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesAt Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans (Columbia UP, 2024) takes readers on a journey from California tidepools to Antarctic poles, showcasing myriad efforts to research and protect marine environments. Through insightful interviews, oceanographer Tessa Hill and science journalist Eric Simons offer a compelling exploration of humanity's relationship with the ocean. They shed light on research methodologies, the ocean's importance, and the vital role of indigenous peoples...
Sidney Xu Lu, "The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
June 14, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSidney Lu’s The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868-1961 (Cambridge 2019) places the concept of “Malthusian expansionism” at the center of Japanese settler colonialism around the Pacific. For Japan’s imperial apologists and the discursive architecture they disseminated, alleged overpopulation―or more precisely, a critical imbalance between surplus population and insufficient land and resources―justified expansionism. Simultaneously, both pop...
Lydia Walker, "States-in-Waiting: A Counter Narrative of Global Decolonization" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
June 14, 2024 08:00 - 45 minutesDr. Lydia Walker's deeply researched and carefully narrated debut monograph, States-in-Waiting: A Counter Narrative of Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2024) traces “the un-endings of decolonization” – the messy and improvised ways in which the 20th-century state-centric international order replaced empire as the default mode of political organization. States-in-Waiting zooms in on the postwar Naga national liberation movement which failed to achieve independence from India ...
Benjamin Breen, "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science" (Grand Central, 2024)
June 14, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesToday I talked to Benjamin Breen about his book Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central, 2024). The generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with ...
"Conjunctions" Magazine: A Discussion with Bradford Morrow
June 13, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesBradford Morrow is an American novelist, editor, essayist, poet, and children’s book author. A professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College, he is the founding editor of Conjunctions literary magazine. In 2020, he published The Forger’s Daughter, which the New York Times named a “Ten Best Crime Novels of 2020 selection.” His tenth novel, The Forger’s Requiem, will be released early next year. Three essays from the Ways of Water issue are discussed today: Kristin Posehn’s “Th...
The Complexities of the EU Parliament Elections
June 13, 2024 08:00 - 46 minutesIn this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey spoke with Francesco Ronchi and Udo Zolleis, two European Parliament officials and analysts. With the European Parliament elections taking place shortly after we spoke, they share their insights on the direction that politics in Europe may take in the coming months and years, especially with regard to right-wing nationalist groups. With its unique position as a supranational institution with diverse political parties and the ...
Sudev Sheth, "Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
June 13, 2024 08:00 - 52 minutesRunning and securing an empire can get expensive–especially one known for its opulence, like the Mughal Empire, which conquered much of northern India before rapidly declining in the eighteenth century. But how did the Mughals get their money? Often, it was through wealthy merchants, like the Jhaveri family, who willingly—and then not-so-willingly–funded the empire’s activities. Dr. Sudev Sheth writes about this relationship in Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation ...
Cambio agrario y gran propiedad en el franquismo: los duques de Alba (1940-1970)
June 13, 2024 08:00 - 31 minutesTras la Guerra Civil, el campo experimentó en España transformaciones de gran calado. Su declive y decadencia fueron las principales conclusiones del análisis, aunque los historiadores debatieron durante tiempo cómo ocurrió el proceso. El impacto de los cambios en las grandes propiedades pareció un tema cerrado, subrayando el fin del rentismo como parte de aquel declive. El caso de los duques de Alba ofrece algunas especificidades que modifican la visión asumida. Por un lado, ellos tuvieron ...
Gale L. Kenny, "Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire" (NYU Press, 2024)
June 13, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAmidst the global instability of the early twentieth century, white Christian American women embraced the idea of an “empire of Christ” that was racially diverse, but which they believed they were uniquely qualified to manage. America’s burgeoning power, combined with women’s rising roles within the church, led to white Protestant women adopting a feminism rooted in religion and imperialism. In Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU Press, 2024...
More Than A Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech
June 13, 2024 08:00 - 47 minutesToday’s book is: More Than A Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (MIT Press, 2024), by Meredith Broussard. When technology reinforces inequality, it's not just a glitch—it's a signal that we need to redesign our systems to create a more equitable world. The word “glitch” implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery? What if they're coded into the system itse...