Shows / New Books in Politics and Polemics
New Books in Politics and Polemics
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census with danah boyd (U Chicago Press, 2026)
In this episode, danah discusses proposed changes to the census that could lead to population undercounts, distort congressional apportionment, and have other…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Healthy Users: The Governance of Well-Being on Social Media with Niall Docherty (U California Press, 2025)
We are often told that social media well-being is simply the result of individual users making healthy digital choices. All it takes is a little…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Uganda During and After Museveni: Can The System Survive Its Creator?
How has Yoweri Museveni remained in power for four decades – and what happens when he is gone? In this episode of the People, Power, Politics podcast, Nic…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Rehearsing the Future: The Thought and Practice of James and Grace Lee Boggs with Michael Doan (AK Press, 2026)
In Rehearsing the Future: The Thought and Practice of James and Grace Lee Boggs (AK Press, 2026), Michael Doan explores the work and legacy of James and Grace…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
No! The Art and Activism of Complaining
To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In No! The Art and Activism of Complaining, her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Reimagining Foreign Aid in a Changing Global Order with Mary-Collier Wilks (Stanford UP, 2026)
What happens to foreign aid (and to women’s status) when the global development landscape shifts away from U.S. dominance? In this episode of International…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture with Matthew Warner Osborn (U Chicago Press, 2026)
On July 5, 1828, more than a century before Superman arrived on Earth, a superhero took flight in Philadelphia’s night sky. Buried on page three of a small…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Civil Societies, Uncivil States: Government Repression of NGOs with Suparna Chaudhry (Cornell UP, 2026)
Why would a government bother to go after groups that carry no weapons and hold no power? Suparna Chaudhry argues that the answer says a lot about where…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
The Democracy Exchange: Asia Asks, Latin America Responds
What can democracies in different parts of the Global South learn from one another - and what can democracies in the Global North learn from them? The…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America with Marie Gottschalk (Princeton UP, 2026)
The United States is an exceptionally violent country, increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. A growing corporate crime wave has…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Troubled Times: The Boston Courthouse Bombing Of 1976 with Kevin Galvin (Brandeis UP, 2026)
Kevin Galvin's Troubled Times: The Boston Courthouse Bombing Of 1976 (Brandeis UP, 2026), interweaves the stories of a revolutionary and a bombing victim to…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America with Jacob Ware (Columbia UP, 2024)
In this episode, I spoke with Jacob Ware, co-author, with Bruce Hoffman, of God, Guns and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, published in 2024 by…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts
Winston Churchill famously called Russia "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." But what if the riddle is partly of our own making—the product of…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian with Zahi Zalloua (Bloomsbury, 2026)
In the first pages of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois meditates on the question, "How does it feel to be a problem?" In this profound response to…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession with Nicolas Guilhot (Harvard UP, 2026)
Pundits, scholars, and the general public alike have argued that conspiratorial thinking is the greatest threat to liberal democracy. In Conspiracy: The…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives with Michael Hallsworth (MIT Press, 2026)
In our increasingly distrusting and polarized world, accusations of hypocrisy are everywhere. But our attempts to stamp out hypocrisy may backfire, creating…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Will AI Make Human Labor Obsolete? with Garrison Lovely
Today I’m speaking with Garrison Lovely, technology journalist and author of the new book, Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us — and…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Beyond Incremental Reform: Rethinking the United Nations with Augusto López-Claros
As the United Nations faces mounting geopolitical tensions, financial pressures, and new global challenges, what would meaningful reform actually look like? In…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Rhetorical Powers: How Rising States Shape International Order with Sasikumar Sundaram (Columbia UP, 2026)
Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Compromised Coalitions: The Paradox of Postconflict Power Sharing in Africa with Alexander Noyes (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026)
When an election turns violent and neither side will concede, why is the usual answer to put both sides in the same government? Alex Noyes has spent nearly two…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Do We Really Need To Choose Between Jobs and the Environment?
Host Licia Cianetti talks to Lorenzo Feltrin about his recent book Workers and the World: Fighting Ecological Crisis from Within (Verso, 2016). They discuss…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
The Return of the Great Powers with Brendan Simms (Basic Books, 2026)
From the dawn of the modern era to the end of the Cold War, global history was defined by rivalries between Great Powers. In the West, this meant the struggle…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st-Century Fascism with Max Haiven (MIT Press, 2026)
A provocative examination of the ways our economy has been rigged by financialization, and the importance of games to our dangerous political moment. In an age…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891-1931 with Edward Baring (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Offers a transformative reading of the Marxist tradition by uncovering its connections to the institutions and practices of worker education. For the past…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
“Ten Percent” – Will Humanity Survive AI?
Could humanity’s most powerful invention become a threat to its survival? In this episode of The Survival Curve, we examine the disturbing prospect behind the…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Democracy on the Edge: The Trump Elections and the Future of American Politics with John Kenneth White and Matthew R. Kerbel (UP of Kansas, 2026)
In Democracy on the Edge, leading political scientists John Kenneth White and Matthew R. Kerbel unravel the elections of 2020, 2022, and 2024 to show how each…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics with Roxanne L. Euben (Princeton UP, 2025)
Humiliation pervades our politics, from images of stripped Palestinian men in Gaza to mocking chants at MAGA rallies. It suffuses pictures and videos, speaks…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Aristotle Kallis, "Iconic Fascism: The Excess of Destruction and Creation in Interwar Radical Right-wing Politics" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
In Iconic Fascism: The Excess of Destruction and Creation in Interwar Radical Right-wing Politics (Bloomsbury, 2026) Aristotle Kallis uncovers the paradox at…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Damian White and Nicholas Pevzner, "Designing the Just Transition: Design-Politics, Labor, and the Battle for Post-Carbon Futures" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Environmental politics is clearly at an impasse, increasingly foreclosed by a fragmenting elite consensus on climate change, an escalating populist backlash on…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Billionaire Backlash
In this episode of International Horizons, host John Torpey sits with Pepper Culpepper, Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy at the University…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Lily Geismer on the Democratic Party in the 1990s
In this episode, hosts Lee Vinsel and Ben Waterhouse, along with producer Joe Forte, chat with historian Lily Geismer. Their conversation covers the evolution…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Why Voters Support Politicians Who Undermine Democracy
Why do so many citizens continue to support politicians who undermine democracy? And why have nationalist appeals become such a powerful tool for democratic…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Voices from North Korea: Refugees Tell Their Stories
n this podcast, North Korean refugees who visited the University of Bradford share their harrowing experiences of life in North Korea, escape, and the…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Sarah M. Rios, "Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice" (Temple UP, 2026)
Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice (Temple University Press, 2026) investigates how communities in Central Valley, California…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Richard Ned Lebow, "Why Nations Still Fight" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Drawing on an original data set of interventions and wars from 1945 to the current day, as well as numerous short case studies, Richard Ned Lebow offers a…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Srirupa Roy, "The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Defying the dire predictions that attended its birth as an independent nation-state in 1947, the Indian republic is more than seventy-five years old. And yet…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
David Helvarg, "Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp" (Princeton UP, 2026)
In a matter of decades, a spectacular cold-water paradise thirty million years in the making is succumbing to warming oceans. Kelp forests are largely out of…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
A.J.A. Woods, "The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West" (Verso, 2026)
The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (Verso Books, 2026) is the definitive history of a…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Jacob Hagstrom, "Asymmetric Warfare: Politics and Cultures of Violence in the Modern Era" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Asymmetric Warfare: Politics and Cultures of Violence in the Modern Era (Cambridge University Press, 2025). The forces that fight asymmetric wars are so…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Dalit Studies with Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana and Sanal Mohan
This episode featured a conversation with Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana, and Sanal Mohan, three scholars in the burgeoning field of Dalit Studies. We…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Edward T. G. Anderson, "Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Hindu nationalism is transforming India as an increasingly dominant ideology and political force. But it is also a global phenomenon, with sections of India’s…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Georgia Kernell, "Inside Parties: How Party Rules Shape Membership and Responsiveness" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Inside Parties: How Party Rules Shape Membership and Responsiveness (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Georgia Kernell examines how party rules determine how parties…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire with Simukai Chigudu
"In my home country, they call me a 'bornfree'." Simukai Chigudu was born in Zimbabwe, two years after the end of its bitter war of liberation - a war in which…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Matthew Pinsker, "Boss Lincoln: The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln" (Norton, 2026)
We know Abraham Lincoln as the eloquent, compassionate leader of a nation torn by civil war. But he had another, less visible side, equally central to his…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Eric O Silva, "Contested Realities and Identity Destigmatization: Identity Construction in the Culture Wars" (De Gruyter, 2026)
Much scholarship has sought to decode the polarization of American culture. Eric O Silva's analysis of the public discourse on contested realities…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Isabel Heger-Laube, "China’s Landless Peasants and the Role of State-led Rural Urbanization: Narratives, Meaning Making, and the Puzzle of Social Stability" (Würzberg UP, 2025)
As part and parcel of China’s compressed modernization, processes of state-led rural urbanization through land expropriation and rural-to-urban relocation have…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
The Resurgence of War and the Collapse of Arms Control
How the nuclear guardrails were dismantled. What arms control actually did (risk management, predictability, geography), how it unravelled from the 2000s…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Building A Freedom Infrastructure in the Age of Networked Control
Host Licia Cianetti talks to Venezuelan democracy activist and co-founder of the World Liberty Congress Leopoldo López. As part of PPP’s ongoing collaboration…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Cast Out: A Call For A Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration
In Cast Out: A Call For A Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration (Beacon Press, 2026), civil rights lawyer Joseph Margulies insists that those who…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Kurt Warner, "False Idols: How Diversion is Destroying Democracy" (Vernon Press, 2024)
False Idols: How Diversion is Destroying Democracy (Vernon Press, 2024) examines how modern forms of diversion shape civic life and weaken democratic…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
J. W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev, "Against Money" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
Money is everywhere in our daily lives. It lurks in the swipe of a card at the grocery store, in looming student-loan debts, in the prices of things we want…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, "Animals and the Right to Politics" (Oxford UP, 2026)
The assumption that only humans can engage in politics—that only humans are 'zoon politikon'—is foundational to the Western tradition of political philosophy…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Susanne Paola Antonetta, "The Devil's Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today" (Catapult, 2025)
The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today (Catapult, 2025) delves into the forgotten history of…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Christopher M. Federico et al., "The Authoritarian Divide: Partisan Identity, Voting, and the Transformation of the American Electorate" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Political Scientists Christopher Federico, Stanley Feldman, and Christopher Weber have an important and fascinating new book from Oxford University Press…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Luna Sabastian, "Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Fascism swept the world in the 1920s and 1930s, but not only because of the seductive rhetoric of Mussolini, Hitler, and their collaborators. In India as…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Democratic Backsliding and Resistance: Poland’s Civil Society, Electoral Strategies, and Institutional Levers
This week on Democracy Dialogues, Frances Cayton speaks with four experts on Polish politics about the success of Poland’s opposition coalition in 2023, and…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
The Emerging Anocracy: AI, Tech Oligarchs, and the Future of Democracy with Alexis Cruz
In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Acting Director Eli Karetny sits down with Alexis Cruz, founder of Enough Consulting and former strategic…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
What are the Limits of Political Speech? A Conversation with Erik J. Olsen
A New Approach to Political Speech: Democratic Theory, Constitutional Law, and Public Liberty After January 6 (de Gruyter, 2026) challenges conventional…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
A. G. Hopkins, "The Land Where Nothing Works: How Britain Lost the Plot" (Princeton UP, 2026)
What has happened to Britain? As drivers on its roads can attest, it is the pothole capital of Europe. Once-beautiful towns now feature peeling paint, weeds…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Are Capitalism and Democracy Fundamentally Incompatible? A Conversation with Mordecai Kurz
Today I'm speaking with Mordecai Kurz, Joan Kenney Professor of Economics Emeritus at Stanford University. We are discussing his latest book, Private Power and…