American society is rapidly secularizing – a radical departure from its historically high level of religiosity–and politics is a big part of the reason. Just as, forty years ago, the Religious Right arose as a new political movement, today secularism is gaining traction as a distinct and politically energized identity. Secular Surge: A New Faultline in American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2020) examines the political causes and political consequences of this secular surge, drawing on a wealth of original data. The authors show that secular identity is in part a reaction to the Religious Right. However, while the political impact of secularism is profound, there may not yet be a Secular Left to counterbalance the Religious Right. Secularism has introduced new tensions within the Democratic Party while adding oxygen to political polarization between Democrats and Republicans. Still there may be opportunities to reach common ground if politicians seek to forge coalitions that encompass both secular and religious Americans. David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the former chairperson of the political science department. His research focuses on civic and political engagement, with a particular focus on religion (and secularism) and young people. Geoff Layman serves as the chair of the Department of Political Science and is the co-editor of the journal Political Behavior. His research focuses on political behavior, political parties, and religion and politics, with a particular emphasis on long-term changes in the parties and their electoral coalitions. Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on American Political Development (APD), federalism, education, and religion and politics. Her award-winning book America's Voucher Politics is out now with Cambridge University Press, and her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Climate change is a hoax--and so is coronavirus. Vaccines are bad for you. These days, many of our fellow citizens reject scientific expertise and prefer ideology to facts. They are not merely uninformed--they are misinformed. They cite cherry-picked evidence, rely on fake experts, and believe conspiracy theories. How can we convince such people otherwise? How can we get them to change their minds and accept the facts when they don't believe in facts? In How to Talk to a Science Denier (MIT Press, 2021), Lee McIntyre shows that anyone can fight back against science deniers, and argues that it's important to do so. Science denial can kill. Drawing on his own experience--including a visit to a Flat Earth convention--as well as academic research, McIntyre outlines the common themes of science denialism, present in misinformation campaigns ranging from tobacco companies' denial in the 1950s that smoking causes lung cancer to today's anti-vaxxers. He describes attempts to use his persuasive powers as a philosopher to convert Flat Earthers; surprising discussions with coal miners; and conversations with a scientist friend about genetically modified organisms in food. McIntyre offers tools and techniques for communicating the truth and values of science, emphasizing that the most important way to reach science deniers is to talk to them calmly and respectfully--to put ourselves out there, and meet them face to face. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In 1804, King Charles IV of Spain enacted a royal order mandating the postmortem cesarean procedure in all of Spain's dominions. The Audiencia de Guatemala, way back in 1785, had already enacted a law mandating postmortem cesareans for all deceased pregnant women and even those suspected of being pregnant when they had passed away. Audiencias of other viceroyalties also enacted similar laws before 1804. What explains the emergence of the postmortem cesarean operation in colonial Latin America? What was the purpose of this procedure? Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire (Penn State Press, 2020), edited by Drs. Martha Few, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren tell us the story of the postmortem cesarean operation in the Spanish Empire during the eighteenth century, though the book builds a genealogy that situates this procedure in a longer history that begins in the medieval period (and even earlier!) and extends way up the twentieth century. Part of the Latin American Original series (LAO) of the Pennsylvania University Press, this book centers on the translation (made by Nina M. Scott) of a fascinating medicoreligious text: Pedro José de Arrese’s Physical, Canonical, Moral Principles . . . on the Baptism of Miscarried Fetuses and the Cesarean Operation on Women Who Die Pregnant. Additionally, the editors present us with shorter excerpts of a wide range of texts (other medical treatises, scientific and political journals, medical instructions) that also deal with the postmortem cesarean operation in the Spanish American world. Here we talk about transatlantic enlightenment cultures; different conceptions of life and death; the co-existence and co-production of religion and medical procedures; the changes that the cesarean operation went through in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and lastly, as usual, why this history matters to the present. A must for those listeners that want to learn more about the history of the body, medicine, and gender! Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Hannah Wohl speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged (U Chicago Press, 2021), her ethnographic study of the New York contemporary art scene that reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions and how aesthetic judgment evolves between artist studios, galleries, art fairs, and collectors’ houses. We mention Paula Cooper Gallery and the work of artists Lucky DeBellevue and Gina Beavers. The Armory Show takes place in NY in early September 2021. Hannah Wohl is an assistant professor in sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Richard Alba, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has written an intriguing new book on our understanding of American demographic data, and how we, as citizens, see each other as part of the fabric of the United States. The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream (Princeton UP, 2020) examines the long historical narrative of the experience of immigrants to the United States while also mapping out various forms of data to help us understand the actual experience of immigrants, over time, in the U.S. Part of Alba’s research in this project is highlighting the issue of what kind of assimilation actually happened in the U.S., especially in the post-World War II period. He explains that there was mass assimilation, after World War II, of the children of immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. in the earlier waves of immigration, prior to WWII. But Alba is not only interested in the immigrant experience, what he is really digging into is the experience of those who are not white, or who were not considered white initially but subsequently were seen as white citizens of the U.S. Alba is examining the reality and interrogating the narrative that has come to be associated with particular waves of immigrants to the U.S. In order to unpack the reality of these immigration narratives, Alba is also digging into the demographic data about where people live, who they marry, and the way that children are categorized according to the United States’ census. The census generates a lot of data, which is used in a host of different ways, including in a traditional political fashion, in the allocation of goods and services. This is not the story that Alba is telling in The Great Demographic Illusion, which is mining the census data to determine what assimilation actually looks like in the U.S., and how citizens perceive themselves, and how they go on to raise their children, where they choose to live, and the kinds of communities to which they are connected. The Great Demographic Illusion also highlights the problems with the census data, in the aggregation of the data that is compiled in the survey, especially in regard to the questions of racial identification. While the census has innovated by expanding the capacity for individuals to indicate more than one race, thus adapting to the individuals who have parents of different races. In order to tease out the problems in the ways that the census data is reported, Alba compared the information from the census in terms of racial identification with what birth certificates indicate about the racial identity of parents of the child; he also compared the census data to the Pew Research data on intermarriage. This really gets at the heart of what Alba is calling the “great demographic illusion” – since the reporting of the census data is indicative of a greater and faster racial change in the country, which Alba has noted is not exactly accurate. Another dimension of the research that Alba finds particularly engaging is the sociological position of these individuals who come from mixed backgrounds, since they are socially flexible in ways that their parents and grandparents were unable to be. This is a sophisticated and multi-dimensional study of what we know, assume, and possibly are misguided about, in regard to the tapestry of the American citizenry and all those who live in the U.S. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Why has secularism faced such challenges in the Middle East and in Lebanon in particular? In light of dominating headlines about the spread of sectarianism and the so-called death of Arab secularism, Mark Farha addresses the need for a thorough examination of the history of secular thought and practice in the region. In Lebanon: The Rise and Fall of a Secular State under Siege (Cambridge UP, 2019), Farha provides a new understanding of the historical roots of secularism as well as the potential causes for the continued resistance a fully deconfessionalized state faces both in Lebanon and in the region at large. Drawing on a vast corpus of primary and secondary sources to examine the varying political parties and ideologies involved, this book provides a fresh approach to the study of religion and politics in the Arab world and beyond. Mark Farha is currently in the Department of Sociology at the University of Zurich; he also teaches a masterclass for Macat.com. Christopher S. Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

German Ambassador Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau believed that Germany and the Soviet Union were locked together in a Schicksalgemienshaft, or “community of fate.” The interaction of these two nations, Brockdorff-Rantzau thought, would decide the course of history, in Europe and beyond. Anyone familiar with the history of German-Soviet relations in the twentieth century might be inclined to agree with the ambassador’s assessment; though they might find his use of the word “community,” with all its positive connotations, somewhat out of place. For if the Germans and Soviets built any community at all, the evidence suggests it was not built on mutual respect and cooperation. Rather it was built on hate—vicious, unbridled, unrelenting hate. Hate, however, can unite as powerfully as it divides. Ideologically, politically, culturally, economically, and socially, the Germans and the Soviets were diametrically opposed. But for a brief period during the interwar years, their mutual hatred of the post-First World War order overcame their mutual distrust to bring these two powers together in an uncharacteristic, but highly consequential, economic, technologic, and military partnership. Formalized with the signing of the Treaty of Ropallo in April 1922, this uneasy alliance saw the Soviet Union provide a safe haven for German rearmament in return for German investment, trade, and military assistance. German officers, businessmen, industrialists, and engineers relocated to secret sites throughout the Soviet Union to work on the design of tanks and aircraft, develop new chemical weapons capabilities, and train a new generation of German military leaders away from the prying eyes of the Allied powers. Simultaneously, Soviet officers learned the art of war from their German counterparts, while their country acquired the industrial base, manufacturing expertise, and military hardware it believed necessary to advancing the Communist cause. Understanding the grave significance of that exchange is the object of military historian Ian Ona Johnson’s recent work, Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2021). The Ropallo relationship, Johnson convincingly argues, can explain not only the outbreak of the Second World War, but also its conduct, especially on the Eastern Front. Germany’s rapid rearmament, the Nazification of the Reichswar, the Soviet military purges of the 1930s, and even British and French appeasement, Johnson maintains, can all trace their roots to the Ropallo era. Without the Soviet Union’s assistance, Germany would not have been able to so easily violate the Versailles treaty; nor would the German military have been able to so rapidly rearm. Close contact between German officers and the Soviet regime, Johnson observes, radicalized many in the Reichswar’s upper echelons, driving them into the open embrace of the National Socialists. Contact between these two groups also troubled Stalin, who feared Red Army officers were becoming contaminated by German ideology and culture. That fear, Johnson contends, resulted in the disastrous Red Army purges of 1936. And, Johnson argues, had the Germany Army not stolen a technological night march on the British and the French, appeasement may not have been as attractive a posture. Without Ropallo, Hitler’s early advances may have been more forcefully checked. Faustian Bargain is an insightful, incisive, exhaustively researched, and incredibly accessible look at a critical period in the lead up to the Second World War. Johnson provides a fresh lens through which to examine the most important questions surrounding the war, its origins, and its conduct. In doing so, Johnson reminds us that the story of the Second World War is in fact, as Brockdorff-Rantzau might have stated, the story of the the complex relationships built by an international “community of fate.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Cian T. McMahon is an associate professor of history at University of Nevada-Las Vegas. His research focuses on the history and identity of the Irish Diaspora. In this interview, he discusses his new book The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine (NYU Press, 2021), a social history of migration during the Great Irish Famine (1845-55). Drawing primarily on migrants’ diaries and letters, The Coffin Ship reconstructs the experience of leaving Ireland by sea during the cataclysm of the Famine of the late 1840s and early 1850s, when approximately 2.2 million people left Ireland. With chapters examining “Preparation”, “Embarkation”, “Life”, “Death”, and “Arrival”, McMahon not only provides an intimate account of migrant experiences but also places this migration into its British imperial and Atlantic contexts, tracing maritime routes from Ireland to Liverpool and from there to Quebec, the United States and Australia. McMahon’s book also investigates popular memories of the Famine, not least the assumption that the “coffin ships” that passed back and forth between Ireland and Eastern Canada were sites of mass death. The Coffin Ship is published by NYU Press as part of their new Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Crisis? What Crisis? At a time where there are repeated claims of the impending demise of art criticism, The Ends of Art Criticism (Lund Humphries Publishers, 2021) dispel these myths by arguing that the lack of a single dominant voice in criticism is not, as some believe, a weakness, but a strength, allowing previously marginalised voices and new global and political perspectives to come to the fore. Patricia Bickers speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about her time as the editor of Art Monthly, the changing role of art criticism, the politics of speaking and writing about art, the art school, the relationship between artists and critics, the academicisation of critical discourse, the relationship between art history and criticism, and.. the art of the interview. Some of the works mentioned in the conversation: The Freeze exhibitions That Jerry Saltz tweet Richard Serra, Weight and Measure Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Black Trans Archive Pilvi Takala, The Trainee Cameron Rowland, 3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73 The Art Monthly Talking Art anthology of artist interviews: Volume 1, Volume 2 A bonus episode with an extra 20 minutes from the conversation is available on Pierre’s website. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Today we have John Christopoulos, Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, to talk about his new book, Abortion in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2021) In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. His poignant portraits of women who terminated or were forced to terminate pregnancies offer a corrective to longstanding views: he finds that Italians maintained a fundamental ambivalence about abortion. Italians from all levels of society sought, had, and participated in abortions. Early modern Italy was not an absolute anti-abortion culture, an exemplary Catholic society centered on the “traditional family.” Rather, Christopoulos shows, Italians held many views on abortion, and their responses to its practice varied. Bringing together medical, religious, and legal perspectives alongside a social and cultural history of sexuality, reproduction, and the family, Christopoulos offers a nuanced and convincing account of the meanings Italians ascribed to abortion and shows how prevailing ideas about the practice were spread, modified, and challenged. Christopoulos begins by introducing readers to prevailing ideas about abortion and women’s bodies, describing the widely available purgative medicines and surgeries that various healers and women themselves employed to terminate pregnancies. He then explores how these ideas and practices ran up against and shaped theology, medicine, and law. Catholic understanding of abortion was changing amid religious, legal, and scientific debates concerning the nature of human life, women’s bodies, and sexual politics. Christopoulos examines how ecclesiastical, secular, and medical authorities sought to regulate abortion, and how tribunals investigated and punished its procurers—or did not, even when they could have. Abortion in Early Modern Italy offers a compelling and sensitive study of abortion in a time of dramatic religious, scientific, and social change. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep (W. W. Norton, 2021), psychologist Dr. Antonio Zadra and neuroscientist Dr. Robert Stickgold offer a fascinating survey of the biological and psychological bases of dreams and dreaming. The authors address head-on fundamental questions such as why do we dream? Do dreams hold psychological meaning or are they merely the reflection of random brain activity? What purpose do dreams serve? As part of their synthesis, Zadra and Stickgold introduce a new conceptual model of dream function, NEXTUP (Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities). This model can help readers and scientists to understand key features of several types of dreams, from prophetic dreams to nightmares and lucid dreams. When Brains Dream also explores the history of psychological, neuroscientific, and psychoanalytic dream research, examines a host of dream-related disorders, and explains how dreams can facilitate creativity and be a source of personal insight. Dr. Robert Stickold is a full professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. A sleep researcher, his work focuses on the relationship between sleep and learning. His articles in the popular press are intended to illustrate the dangers of sleep deprivation. Dr. Antonio Zadra is full Professor in the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal, and is a researcher at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine, as well as a member of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Intimate Relationship Problems and Sexual Abuse. His research covers a wide range of topics on the psychology of dreaming, including parasomnias, somnambulism, interactions with personality and well-being, and consciousness. Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Spies deep behind enemy lines; double agents; a Chinese American James Bond; black propaganda radio broadcasters; guerrilla fighters; pirates; smugglers; prostitutes and dancers as spies; and Asian Americans collaborating with Axis Powers. All these colorful individuals form the story of Asian Americans in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of today's CIA. Brian Masaru Hayashi brings to light for the first time the role played by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans in America's first centralized intelligence agency in its fight against the Imperial Japanese forces in east Asia during World War II. They served deep behind enemy lines gathering intelligence for American and Chinese troops locked in a desperate struggle against Imperial Japanese forces on the Asian continent. Other Asian Americans produced and disseminated statements by bogus peace groups inside the Japanese empire to weaken the fighting resolve of the Japanese. Still others served with guerrilla forces attacking enemy supply and communication lines behind enemy lines. Engaged in this deadly conflict, these Asian Americans agents encountered pirates, smugglers, prostitutes, and dancers serving as the enemy's spies, all the while being subverted from within the OSS by a double agent and without by co-ethnic collaborators in wartime Shanghai. Drawing on recently declassified documents, Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory (Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the romanticized and stereotyped image of these Chinese, Japanese, and Korean American agents--the Model Minority-while offering a fresh perspective on the Allied victory in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Jessica Moloughney is a public librarian in New York and a recent graduate of Queens College with a Master’s Degree in History and Library Science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself.  An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason about Human Nature (Oxford UP, 2020) grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity. You can find Dr. Berent on Twitter at @berent_iris.  Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

While i find it pretty easy to recognize when i'm reading articles in complexity science, i've never been satisfied by definitions of complexity and related concepts. I'm not alone! Researchers' own attempts to define complex systems incorporate a mix of folk wisdom and fraught assumptions anchored to a menagerie of contested examples. The field was ripe for a 2013 article proposing a unified account of complexity, and it's no less ripe today for this book-length expansion. In What Is a Complex System? (Yale UP, 2020), philosopher of science James Ladyman and physicist and mathematician Karoline Wiesner systematically interrogate popular definitions. They break the most commonly cited features into three bins: truisms on which there is universal agreement, the conditions necessary for complexity to arise, and various emergent products of complexity. A key insight of their account, for me, was to understand emergence as a relation between features rather than one feature among many. The book is compact, accessible, and at times profound. Indeed, James and Karoline bring the lessons of their account to some of the most consequential complex systems of our time, including Earth's climate and biosphere as well as our global social media ecosystem. I was honored to host them in conversation on this episode, and i encourage listeners to pick up the book itself for deeper dives into the topics we discussed. James Ladyman is professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol and works mainly in the philosophy of science. Karoline Wiesner is professor of physics at the University of Potsdam and uses information theory to understand complex systems. Cory Brunson is a Research Assistant Professor at the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida. His research focuses on geometric and topological approaches to the analysis of medical and healthcare data. He welcomes book suggestions, listener feedback, and transparent supply chains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

As we taste, chew, swallow, digest, and excrete, our foods transform us, while our eating, in its turn, affects the wider earthly environment. In Eating in Theory (Duke UP, 2021), Annemarie Mol takes inspiration from these transformative entanglements to rethink what it is to be human. Drawing on fieldwork at food conferences, research labs, health care facilities, restaurants, and her own kitchen table, Mol reassesses the work of authors such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas. They celebrated the allegedly unique capability of humans to rise above their immediate bodily needs. Mol, by contrast, appreciates that as humans we share our fleshy substance with other living beings, whom we cultivate, cut into pieces, transport, prepare, and incorporate--and to whom we leave our excesses. This has far-reaching philosophical consequences. Taking human eating seriously suggests a reappraisal of being as transformative, knowing as entangling, doing as dispersed, and relating as a matter of inescapable dependence. Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

This is an important, revisionist account of the origins of the British Empire in Asia in the early modern period. In The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), David Veevers uncovers a hidden world of transcultural interactions between servants of the English East India Company and the Asian communities and states they came into contact with, revealing how it was this integration of Europeans into non-European economies, states and societies which was central to British imperial and commercial success rather than national or mercantilist enterprise. As their servants skillfully adapted to this rich and complex environment, the East India Company became enfranchised by the eighteenth century with a breadth of privileges and rights – from governing sprawling metropolises to trading customs-free. In emphasizing the Asian genesis of the British Empire, this book sheds new light on the foreign frameworks of power which fueled the expansion of Global Britain in the early modern world. David Veevers is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He has published articles in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Journal of Global History, and won the Royal Historical Society's Alexander Prize in 2014. He is co-editor of The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c.1550 to 1750 (2018). Samee Siddiqui is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

When people think of Russian food, they generally think either of the opulent luxury of the tsarist aristocracy or of post-Soviet elites, signified above all by caviar, or on the other hand of poverty and hunger--of cabbage and potatoes and porridge. Both of these visions have a basis in reality, but both are incomplete. The history of food and drink in Russia includes fasts and feasts, scarcity and, for some, at least, abundance. It includes dishes that came out of the northern, forested regions and ones that incorporate foods from the wider Russian Empire and later from the Soviet Union. Cabbage and Caviar: A History of Food in Russia (Reaktion Books, 2021) places Russian food and drink in the context of Russian history and shows off the incredible (and largely unknown) variety of Russian food. Alison Smith is Professor and Chair of History at the University of Toronto.  Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Two experts of extremist radicalization take us down the QAnon rabbit hole, exposing how the conspiracy theory ensnared countless Americans, and show us a way back to sanity. In January 2021, thousands descended on the U.S. Capitol to aid President Donald Trump in combating a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Two women were among those who died that day. They, like millions of Americans, believed that a mysterious insider known as "Q" is exposing a vast deep-state conspiracy. The QAnon conspiracy theory has ensnared many women, who identify as members of "pastel QAnon," answering the call to "save the children." With Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon (Redwood Press, 2021), Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko explain why the rise of QAnon should not surprise us: believers have been manipulated to follow the baseless conspiracy. The authors track QAnon's unexpected leap from the darkest corners of the Internet to the filtered glow of yogi-mama Instagram, a frenzy fed by the COVID-19 pandemic that supercharged conspiracy theories and spurred a fresh wave of Q-inspired violence. Pastels and Pedophiles connects the dots for readers, showing how a conspiracy theory with its roots in centuries-old anti-Semitic hate has adapted to encompass local grievances and has metastasized around the globe—appealing to a wide range of alienated people who feel that something is not quite right in the world around them. While QAnon claims to hate Hollywood, the book demonstrates how much of Q's mythology is ripped from movie and television plot lines. Finally, Pastels and Pedophiles lays out what can be done about QAnon's corrosive effect on society, to bring Q followers out of the rabbit hole and back into the light. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In The Devil's Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant examine the many ways in which the medieval past has been manipulated to promote discrimination, oppression, and murder. Tracing the fetish for “medieval times” behind toxic ideologies like nationalism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and white supremacy, Kaufman and Sturtevant show us how the Middle Ages have been twisted for political purposes in every century that followed. The Devil’s Historians casts aside the myth of an oppressive, patriarchal medieval monoculture and reveals a medieval world not often shown in popular culture: one that is diverse, thriving, courageous, compelling, and complex. Amy S. Kaufman is a scholar of medieval studies and popular culture. Paul B. Sturtevant is Editor in Chief of The Public Medievalist and a Visitor Research Specialist at The Smithsonian Institution. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health (MIT Press, 2020), physician-anthropologist Eugene T. Richardson explores how public health practices—from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment—help perpetuate global inequities. This book questions the Global North's "monopoly on truth" in global public health science, making a provocative claim: that public health science manages and maintains global health inequity. Richardson, a physician and anthropologist, examines the conventional public health approach to epidemiology through the lens of a participant-observer, identifying a dogmatic commitment to the quantitative paradigm. This paradigm, he argues, plays a role in causing and perpetrating public health crises. The mechanisms of public health science--and epidemiology in particular--that set public health agendas and claim a monopoly on truth stem from a colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492. Deploying a range of rhetorical tools, including ironism, “redescriptions” of public health crises, Platonic dialogue, flash fiction, allegory, and koan, Richardson describes how epidemiology uses models of disease causation that serve protected affluence (the possessing classes) by setting epistemic limits to the understanding of why some groups live sicker lives than others—limits that sustain predatory accumulation rather than challenge it. Drawing on his clinical work in a variety of epidemics, including Ebola in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leishmania in the Sudan, HIV/TB in southern Africa, diphtheria in Bangladesh, and SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, he concludes that the biggest epidemic we currently face is an epidemic of illusions—one that is propagated by the coloniality of knowledge production. Eugene T. Richardson, MD, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Visiting Faculty at the University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, Rwanda, and Chair of the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. Her current work concerns the politics of travel in Cold War US; she has previously published on US intervention in the 2013-16 Ebola epidemic. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Photography emerged in the 1840s in the United States, and it became a visual medium that documents the harsh realities of enslavement. Similarly, the photography culture grew during the Civil War, and it became an important material that archived this unprecedented war. Deborah Willis's The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York University Press, 2021) contains rarely seen letters and diary notes from Black men and women and photographs of Black soldiers who fought and died in this war. These ninety-nine images reshape African American narratives. The Black Civil War Soldier offers an opportunity to experience the war through their perspectives. N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State (Cambridge University Press 2020) advances a new understanding of how democratic social movements work with welfare institutions to challenge structures of domination. Steven Klein develops a novel theory that depicts welfare institutions as “worldly mediators,” or sites of democratic world-making fostering political empowerment and participation within the context of capitalist economic forces. Drawing on the writings of Weber, Arendt, and Habermas, and historical episodes that range from the workers' movement in Bismarck's Germany to post-war Swedish feminism, the book challenges us to rethink the distribution of power in society, as well as the fundamental concerns of democratic theory. Ranging across political theory and intellectual history, The Work of Politics provides a vital contribution to contemporary thinking about the future of the welfare state. Tejas Parasher is Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King’s College, University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Americans rely on credit to provide for their food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and other daily necessities and the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated how they relied on private financial institutions that encouraged risky lending practices. Yet federal policy makers did little to change their approach to curbing risky lending practices and there was little political response from consumers or consumer groups. How can political scientists explain the behavior of government actors, interest groups, or borrowers?  In Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection (U Chicago Press, 2020), Dr. SoRelle insists that the expansion of consumer financing -- in terms of access and economic significance -- is fundamentally a political issue with serious political and economic consequences. She offers a policy-centered explanation sensitive to what she calls regulatory feedback effects that shape the behavior of bureaucrats, consumer advocates, and ordinary Americans. Individuals did not fail – they responded to systemic incentives and goals. SoRelle explains how angry borrowers' experiences with nearly invisible government policies teach them to focus their attention primarily on banks and lenders instead of demanding that lawmakers address predatory behavior. As a result, advocacy groups have been mostly unsuccessful in mobilizing borrowers in support of stronger consumer financial protections. The absence of safeguards on consumer financing is particularly dangerous because the consequences extend well beyond harm to individuals--they threaten the stability of entire economies. In addition to explaining the political dynamics of failure, SoRelle identifies possible remedies. This multi-method scholarship contributes to our understanding of policy feedback in an important and timely case study. Dr. Mallory E. SoRelle is an assistant professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Her research interrogates how public policies are produced by, and how they reproduce, socioeconomic and political inequality in the United States. She has worked in both electoral politics and consumer advocacy. The podcast drops the week of the 10th anniversary of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Sensitive Places: Originalism, Gender, and the Myth Self-Defense in District of Columbia v. Heller” can be found in July 2021’s Polity. Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

From the ancient world to the present women have been critical to the progress of science, yet their importance is overlooked, their stories lost, distorted, or actively suppressed. Forces of Nature sets the record straight and charts the fascinating history of women's discoveries in science. In the ancient and medieval world, women served as royal physicians and nurses, taught mathematics, studied the stars, and practiced midwifery. As natural philosophers, physicists, anatomists, and botanists, they were central to the great intellectual flourishing of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. More recently women have been crucially involved in the Manhattan Project, pioneering space missions and much more. Despite their record of illustrious achievements, even today very few women win Nobel Prizes in science. In Anna Reser and Leila McNeill's book Forces of Nature: The Women who Changed Science (Frances Lincoln, 2021), you will discover how women have navigated a male-dominated scientific culture - showing themselves to be pioneers and trailblazers, often without any recognition at all. Listeners might be interested in Lady Science Magazine and the Lady Science Podcast.  Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The dominant impression of Russia in the news media and politics, even today, is that it is and always has been an autocratic power controlled by a single despotic ruler. But historians of the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries have long realized that this vision was to some extent a myth projected by the central authorities to support a system that was in fact oligarchic but competitive in nature. A fundamental step in recognizing the gap between that myth and reality was the identification of marriages between aristocratic clans as a determinant in political alliances, followed by a new understanding of patron-client relations and other interpersonal connections within the elite. In The Tsar’s Happy Occasion: Ritual and Dynasty in the Weddings of Russian Rulers, 1495–1745 (Northern Illinois UP, 2021), Russell E. Martin explores the ways in which the weddings of tsars and lesser members of the royal family worked to integrate brides and their families into the elite while moderating tensions among the nobility. The whole occasion was elaborately choreographed and developed over time as the needs of the original dynasty, the Daniilovichi, to extend and sustain the lineage by managing the number of heirs gave way to the new Romanov dynasty’s attempts to establish its legitimacy, followed by a squabble for power between two branches of the later Romanovs (Peter the Great and his descendants). And the stakes were high—the book is full of examples of poisoned brides, recalcitrant exiles, bridegrooms executed for failing to judge the balance correctly, and more. Through this in-depth but beautifully written study, we gain a new appreciation of the importance of ceremony and ritual in creating and promoting visions of how the world does and should work at specific points in time. C. P. Lesley is the pen name of Carolyn Johnston Pouncy, a historian of Muscovite Russia who hosts New Books in Historical Fiction. Under her real name, she translated and edited The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest novel, Song of the Sisters, appeared in 2021. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Sushi and sashimi are by now a global sensation and have become perhaps the best known of Japanese foods—but they are also the most widely misunderstood. Oishii: The History of Sushi (Reaktion Books, 2020) reveals that sushi began as a fermented food with a sour taste, used as a means to preserve fish. This book, the first history of sushi in English, traces sushi’s development from China to Japan and then internationally, and from street food to high-class cuisine. Included are two dozen historical and original recipes that show the diversity of sushi and how to prepare it. Written by an expert on Japanese food history, Oishii is a must read for understanding sushi’s past, its variety and sustainability, and how it became one of the world’s greatest anonymous cuisines. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The Power of Principles: Physics Revealed is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Nima Arkani-Hamed, faculty member at the renowned Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Prof. Arkani-Hamed is one of today’s leading particle physicists. This extensive Ideas Roadshow conversation explores how we discover the laws of nature, the “scientific method”, the relation between theory and experiment and how we can push our understanding well beyond where experiments can currently reach. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix—and control—society. The essays in Your Computer Is on Fire (MIT Press, 2021) interrogate how our human and computational infrastructures overlap, showing why technologies that centralize power tend to weaken democracy. These practices are often kept out of sight until it is too late to question the costs of how they shape society. From energy-hungry server farms to racist and sexist algorithms, the digital is always IRL, with everything that happens algorithmically or online influencing our offline lives as well. Each essay proposes paths for action to understand and solve technological problems that are often ignored or misunderstood. Mathew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Political Theorist Sara Rushing’s new book, The Virtues of Vulnerability: Humility, Autonomy, and Citizen-Subjectivity (Oxford UP, 2020), examines the very real experiences that individuals have in the context of healthcare, especially healthcare and medical approaches to the most human of all experiences, birth, illness, and death. Rushing’s analysis posits that the corporal bodies that we all inhabit are also sites of politics—not the problem for politics, as others have theorized, but rather a place and space where politics transpires. Instead of beginning an exploration from an abstract position, Rushing starts from her own experiences, since her encounters with birth, death, mourning, and grief engaged her thinking about how we as citizens, as individuals, engage and face medical experiences and all of the settings where these experiences take place. Rushing focuses the theoretical framework around these issues of humility and vulnerability, which is often how we find ourselves in context of these human experiences that engage the “medical-industrial complex.” We often consider humility as a quality associated with a religious bearing but Rushing urges a reconsideration of the concept of humility, as a means to embrace one’s vulnerability and thus move towards a redefined understanding of autonomy. This is the context into whichThe Virtues of Vulnerability then examines three distinct human experiences, birth, illness—in this case, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as suffered by American military veterans—and death, exploring how we encounter these life experiences and how politics essentially happens in these medicalized spaces. A substantial component of the theoretical analysis in The Virtues of Vulnerability is wrestling with the way that choice and freedom are presented within the medical environment but are delimited in what we can actually choose and what we understand and know about these choices as well. This concept of freedom and choice are also connected to the way that neoliberalism frames our experiences, thus we perceive of our autonomy in these medicalized environments through the appearance of choices we get to make, or options provided to us, but often these are actually quite narrow in scope, constrained by the demands of health insurance and healthcare/medical marketplace. Rushing’s analysis gets at these many competing dimensions of healthcare and how it is operationalized, leading the reader to consider how we experience our interactions and how we might reconsider our autonomy within these environments by understanding how our vulnerability and humility can help us work more collaboratively with those who are engaging in this ethics of care with us. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

There are few movements more firmly associated with civil disobedience than the Civil Rights Movement. In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority's principles, and submitted willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reforms and facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic principles. Their fidelity to the spirit of the law, commitment to civility, and allegiance to American democracy set the normative standard for liberal philosophies of civil disobedience. This narrative offers the civil disobedience of the Civil Rights Movement as a moral exemplar: a blueprint for activists who seek transformative change and racial justice within the bounds of democracy. Yet in this book, Erin R. Pineda shows how it more often functions as a disciplining example—a means of scolding activists and quieting dissent. As Pineda argues, the familiar account of Civil Rights disobedience not only misremembers history; it also distorts our political judgments about how civil disobedience might fit into democratic politics. Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford UP, 2021) charts the emergence of this influential account of civil disobedience in the Civil Rights Movement, and demonstrates its reliance on a narrative about black protest that is itself entangled with white supremacy. Liberal political theorists whose work informed decades of scholarship saw civil disobedience "like a white state": taking for granted the legitimacy of the constitutional order, assuming as primary the ends of constitutional integrity and stability, centering the white citizen as the normative ideal, and figuring the problem of racial injustice as limited, exceptional, and all-but-already solved. Instead, this book "sees" civil disobedience from the perspective of an activist, showing the consequences for ideas about how civil disobedience ought to unfold in the present. Building on historical and archival evidence, Pineda shows how civil rights activists, in concert with anticolonial movements across the globe, turned to civil disobedience as a practice of decolonization in order to emancipate themselves and others, and in the process transform the racial order. Pineda recovers this powerful alternative account by adopting a different theoretical approach—one which sees activists as themselves engaged in the creative work of political theorizing. Tejas Parasher is Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King’s College, University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In this wide-ranging and authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline. A History of Art History (Princeton UP, 2019) shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance—Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari—measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval art, anticipating the relativism of the later nineteenth century, when art history learned to admire the art of all societies and to value every work as an index of its times. The major art historians of the modern era, however—Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Ernst Gombrich—struggled to adapt their work to the rupture of artistic modernism, leading to the current predicaments of the discipline. Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The vision for America’s cross-cultural future lies beyond the multicultural myth of the "great melting pot." That idea of diversity often imagined ethnically distinct urban districts—the Little Italys, Koreatowns, and Jewish quarters of American cities—built up over generations and occupying spaces that excluded one another. But the neighborhood of Boyle Heights shows us something altogether different: a dynamic, multiracial community that has forged solidarity through a history of social and political upheaval. Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy (University of California Press, 2021) is an in-depth history of the Los Angeles neighborhood, showcasing the potent experiences of its residents, from early contact between Spanish colonizers and native Californians to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the hunt for hidden Communists among the Jewish population, negotiating citizenship and belonging among Latino migrants and Mexican American residents, and beyond. Through each period and every struggle, the residents of Boyle Heights have maintained remarkable solidarity across racial and ethnic lines, acting as a unified polyglot community even as their tribulations have become more explicitly racial in nature. Boyle Heights is immigrant America embodied, and it can serve as the true beacon on a hill toward which the country can strive in a time when racial solidarity and civic resistance have never been in greater need. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Sergio Lopez-Pineiro about his new book, A Glossary of Urban Voids (2020). It's one of the more fascinating books I've encountered in some time. And I say "encountered" because it's not only a book, in the traditional sense of something you read, but also a keen intellectual and aesthetic experience: the very design of the book and its use of the glossary as a form open up exciting ways of thinking and seeing. And this is very much to the point for Lopez-Pineiro, because the urban void about which he writes is a phenomenon that resists definition. It is, in his words, "unspecified and underspecified." And that's exactly what makes it so intriguing. Join me in hearing Lopez-Pineiro show us how some of the most seemingly overlooked and neglected areas of our urban environments may end up being the most crucial for our freedoms and our possibilities. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Popular discussions of China’s growth prospects often focus on the success or failure specific industries. They might address the challenges rising wages pose to the export manufacturing sector, or the emergence of the new data-fueled tech sector. But one of the most important determinants of a country’s long-run economic growth is human capital—the education and health of its people.  In Toxic Politics: China's Environmental Health Crisis and its Challenge to the Chinese State (Cambridge UP, 2020), Yanzhong Huang shows how China’s environmental problems have created a health crisis with long-run consequences. It then digs into the reasons why despite all the centralized power China’s leaders showed in dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak, these same leaders have found it difficult to address the country’s rampant air, water, and soil pollution. The institutional problems in the Chinese system highlighted by this book go far beyond the environmental sphere. This makes the book an excellent way to learn about the challenges China’s leaders face in any domain of policy implementation, whether it be pushing forward domestic economic reforms on their own initiative or implementing international agreements around trade and climate change. Yanzhong Huang is a professor at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, where he directs the school’s Center for Global Health Studies. He is also a Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations and the founding editor of Global Health Governance: The Scholarly Journal for the New Health Security Paradigm. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Recommendation from Professor Huang: The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID, by Lawrence Wright. Recommendation from Peter Lorentzen: Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell’s Invisible China on the failure of China’s educational system to serve the majority of its population. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. His research examines the political economy of governance and development in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Every year, millions of women turn to law to help them escape intimate partner violence. The legal processes are complex and varied, often enmeshing women for many years. In Intimate Partner Violence and the Law, published by Oxford University Press in 2021, Professor Heather Douglas examines intimate partner violence, including nonphysical coercive control, and shows how women's interactions with the law and legal processes can support or exacerbate their experiences and their abilities to leave an abusive partner. Over a period of three years, Douglas conducted a series of interviews to understand how women engage with criminal, family, and civil courts. The women's stories show how abusers can use the law to further perpetuate abuse. Despite the heightened danger that leaving an abusive partner can represent, the book showcases the level of endurance, resilience and patience that it takes women when they seek protection through law for themselves and their children. Reading the first-hand experiences of women and the impact on them from their interactions with police, lawyers, judges, and child protective services is extremely moving and illuminating. The book is profoundly important in understanding the need for reform to protect women and their children from intimate partner violence. Douglas shows how the legal system operates in practice, and the gap in protection for women and their children as to how it should work.  Professor Heather Douglas is a Professor of Law at the Melbourne Law School at The University of Melbourne and Honorary Professor at the School of Law at The University of Queensland. She has worked on the legal response to intimate partner violence for over twenty years, both as a practitioner and an academic.  Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (UNC Press, 2021), Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the Constitution's ratification through Abraham Lincoln's election, chronicling the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states. Full of untold stories and thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black political activism following emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford, Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define citizenship. Jessica Georges is a third year history PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest. Through the ages, word "horde" has entered the English lexicon with a negative connotation, conjuring up images of warriors on horseback, sweeping across the plain--a virtual human flood destroying everything in its path and then receding, leaving a wave of devastation and grief. Such is often the popular perception of the Mongol empire under Chingghis Khan and his successors, who came to control much of Eurasia in the mid-thirteenth century. In the past few decades, scholarship has started emphasizing other aspects of the three hundred year Mongol project--after all, waves of destruction don't tend to also be referred to by names like "Pax Mongolica," or "the Mongolian Peace." In this majestic new study, Marie Favereau (Paris Nanterre University) takes us inside one of the most powerful sources of cross-border integration in world history. For three centuries, the Mongol Empire was no less a force for global development than the Roman Empire. The Horde--ulus Jochi, one of the four divisions of Chingghis Khan's Empire--was the central node in the Eurasian commercial boom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Its unique political regime--a complex power-sharing arrangement among the khan and the nobility--reswarded skillful administrators and diplomats and fostered an economic order that was mobile, organized, and innovative. The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Harvard UP, 2021) is an ambitious, accessible, beautifully written portrait of an empire little understood tand too readily dismissed. Challenging conceptions of nomads as peripheral to history, Marie Favereau makes clear that we live in a world inherited from the Mongol moment. Christopher S Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

“…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” -Isaiah 2:4 The instinct to fight may be innate in human nature, but war—organized violence—comes with organized society. War has shaped humanity’s history, its social and political institutions, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, and some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject, not least because it brings out both the vilest and the noblest aspects of humanity. Margaret MacMillan looks at the ways in which war has influenced human society and how, in turn, changes in political organization, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight. War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Random House, 2020) explores such much-debated and controversial questions as: When did war first start? Does human nature doom us to fight one another? Why has war been described as the most organized of all human activities? Why are warriors almost always men? Is war ever within our control? Drawing on lessons from wars throughout the past, from classical history to the present day, MacMillan reveals the many faces of war—the way it has determined our past, our future, our views of the world, and our very conception of ourselves. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In her new book Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips (Ohio State Press, 2021) Susan Kirtley examines female-created comics that were nationally syndicated starting in the late 1970s-2010. Kirtley uncovers the understudied and developing history of these strips, defining and exploring the ramifications of this expression of women’s roles at a time of great change in history and in comic art. This impressive, engaging, and timely study illustrates how these comics express the complexities of women’s experiences, especially as such experiences were shaped by shifting and often competing notions of womanhood and feminism. Including the comics of Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy), Nicole Hollander (Sylvia), Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek), Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From), Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), and Jan Eliot (Stone Soup), Typical Girls is an important history of the representation of womanhood and women’s rights in popular comic strips. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

What can debt reveal to us about coloniality and its undoing? In Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2021), Rocío Zambrana theorizes the way debt has been used as a technique of neoliberal coloniality in Puerto Rico, producing profit from death on the island. With close attention to the material practices of protestors who have fought that destruction of life for the purposes of profit, Zambrana argues that decolonization entails political-economic subversion and transformative interruption of the hierarchies of race, gender, and class that fuel and are sustained by colonization. She shows us how organizing pessimism nourishes hope. Sarah Tyson is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin's War: A New History of World War II (Basic Books, 2021) by award winning historian, Sean McMeekin, Professor of History at Bard College, revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary. McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army. This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism. A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is revisionist history at its very best: breaking down old paradigms and narratives and bringing to the fore new understandings of the historical process. All from a historian who has the best claim to be the closest, modern-day American equivalent of A. J. P. Taylor. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Heterosexuality is in crisis. Reports of sexual harassment, misconduct, and rape saturate the news in the era of #MeToo. Straight men and women spend thousands of dollars every day on relationship coaches, seduction boot camps, and couple’s therapy in a search for happiness. In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (NYU Press, 2020), Jane Ward smartly explores what, exactly, is wrong with heterosexuality in the twenty-first century, and what straight people can do to fix it for good. She shows how straight women, and to a lesser extent straight men, have tried to mend a fraught patriarchal system in which intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and mutual respect are expected to coexist alongside enduring forms of inequality, alienation, and violence in straight relationships. Ward also takes an intriguing look at the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry, which markets goods and services to help heterosexual couples without addressing the root of their problems. Ultimately, she encourages straight men and women to take a page out of queer culture, reminding them “about the human capacity to desire, fuck, and show respect at the same time.” Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Listen to this interview of William Tierney, University Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. We talk about his book Get Real: 49 Challenges Confronting Higher Education (SUNY, 2020), about what people really believe when it comes to higher education, and also about what people need to do when it comes to higher education. William Tierney : "Oftentimes the board and the administration and the faculty are in cahoots with one another, in the sense that the marker is only how to improve in the rankings. And you can see this when a teaching college becomes a state university, and then it will try to move away from teaching and move towards research. And a board member will feel good about that: 'Boy, I came in, and my institution was ranked 250th, and now it's a 100. We the board are doing a great job.' And what the administration will say is: 'I transformed the institution. We were 250, and now we're 100.' And the faculty will say, 'Yup, the students are better.' And all this impacts on writing centers like this: Writing centers are often seen as problems–––you know, that kids go to the writing center because they have a problem. Well, then, if we don't have writing centers, then we don't have students who have problems–––which is, of course, the exact wrong way to think about an essential skill that we need for the twenty-first century." Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The People's Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America (Reaktion Books, 2020) is a beautifully written and groundbreaking historical study of homemade, handmade and amateur pornographic artifacts. Covering everything from erotic scrimshaw to amateur videos on the web, Lisa Sigel offers a fascinating account of what ordinary people thought about sexuality and desire. This hidden chapter of American sexual history is not only a much-needed counterbalance to ahistorical arguments which dominate pornography today, it’s also a reminder of humanity’s prodigious tendency to create and communicate sexual desires. At times, the images and objects presented in this book might appear shocking, crude, grotesque, problematic, confrontational, unrestrained, unruly; but in the end they are deeply human. Zachary Lowell holds an MA in global studies from Humboldts Universtität zu Berlin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In Rebirthing a Nation: White Women, Identity Politics, and the Internet (U Mississippi Press, 2021), author Wendy K. Z. Anderson details how white nationalist and alt-right women refine racist rhetoric and web design as a means of protection and simultaneous instantiation of white supremacy, which conservative political actors including Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Ivanka Trump have amplified through transnational politics. By validating racial fears and political divisiveness through coded white identity politics, postfeminist and motherhood discourse functions as a colorblind, gilded cage. Rebirthing a Nation reveals how white nationalist women utilize colorblind racism within digital space, exposing how a postfeminist framework becomes fodder for conservative white women’s political speech to preserve institutional white supremacy. Wendy K. Z. Anderson (she/her) is an independent researcher and instructor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities. Lee M. Pierce (they & she) is Asst Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the State University of New York College at Geneseo. Connect on Twitter, Gmail, etc. @rhetoriclee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Gospel music evolved in often surprising directions during the post-Civil Rights era. Claudrena N. Harold's in-depth look at late-century gospel, When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras (U Illinois Press, 2020), focuses on musicians like Yolanda Adams, Andraé Crouch, the Clark Sisters, Al Green, Take 6, and the Winans, and on the network of black record shops, churches, and businesses that nurtured the music. Harold details the creative shifts, sonic innovations, theological tensions, and political assertions that transformed the music, and revisits the debates within the community over groundbreaking recordings and gospel's incorporation of rhythm and blues, funk, hip-hop, and other popular forms. At the same time, she details how sociopolitical and cultural developments like the Black Power Movement and the emergence of the Christian Right shaped both the art and attitudes of African American performers. Weaving insightful analysis into a collective biography of gospel icons, When Sunday Comes explores the music's essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves. Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Many believe the solution to ongoing crises in the news industry — including profound financial instability and public distrust — is for journalists to improve connections to their audiences. Conversations about the proper relationship between the media and the public go back to Walter Lippmann and John Dewey and through the public journalism movement of the 1990s to today and what's come to be known as engaged journalism.  In Imagined Audiences: How Journalists Perceive and Pursue the Public (Oxford UP, 2021), Jacob L. Nelson examines the role that audiences have traditionally played in journalism, how that role has changed, and what those changes mean for both the profession and the public. The result is a comprehensive study of both news production and reception at a moment when the relationship between the two has grown more important than ever before. Beyond the arguments in Imagined Audiences, Nelson talks with New Books in Journalism host Jenna Spinelle about how journalism researchers and practitioners can work more closely together, as well as how Nelson's students perceive engaged journalism in relationship to their own media habits. This conversation is also in many ways a companion to the recent episode with Andrea Wenzel on her book "Community-Centered Journalism." Nelson and Wenzel work together on the Engaged Journalism Exchange, a series of gatherings aiming to bridge the divide between journalism scholars and innovators. Nelson is an assistant professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast. Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In an “other world” composed of language—it could be a fathomless Martian well, a labyrinthine hotel, or forest—a narrative unfolds, and with it the experiences, memories, and dreams that constitute reality for Haruki Murakami’s characters and readers. Memories and dreams in turn conjure their magical counterparts—people without names or pasts, fantastic animals, half-animals, and talking machines that traverse the dark psychic underworld of this writer’s extraordinary fiction. Fervently acclaimed worldwide, Haruki Murakami’s wildly imaginative work in many ways remains a mystery, its worlds within worlds uncharted territory. Finally in The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Matthew Carl Strecher provides readers with a map to the strange realm that grounds virtually every aspect of Murakami’s writing. A journey through the enigmatic and baffling innermost mind, a metaphysical dimension where Murakami’s most bizarre scenes and characters lurk, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami exposes the psychological and mythological underpinnings of this other world. The author shows how these considerations color Murakami’s depictions of the individual and collective soul, which constantly shift between the tangible and intangible but in this literary landscape are undeniably real. Through these otherworldly depths The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami also charts the writer’s vivid “inner world,” whether unconscious or underworld (what some Japanese critics call achiragawa あちら側, or “over there”), and its connectivity to language. Strecher covers all of Murakami’s work—including his efforts as a literary journalist—and concludes with the first full-length close reading of the writer’s recent novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. He is the editor of the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day