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
Caitlin Schroering, "Global Solidarities Against Water Grabbing: Without Water, We Have Nothing" (Manchester UP, 2024)
Conflicts over water are human-caused events with socio-political and economic causes. From Brazil's Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB) to…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French
The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (Liveright, 2025), the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Leo R. Chavez, "The Latino Threat: How Alarmist Rhetoric Misrepresents Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation" (Stanford UP, 2025)
News media and pundits too frequently perpetuate the notion that Latinos, both US-born and immigrants, are an invading force bent on destroying the American…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Pierre D'Alancaisez and Amir Naaman, "Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual" (Verdurin, 2025)
With contributions by Blake Smith, Roger Lancaster, David Moulton, Stephen Adubato, Amir Naaman, Ran Heilbrunn, Pierre d'Alancaisez, Travis Jeppesen, Oliver…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Katrina Navickas, "Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England" (Reaktion, 2025)
A radical history of England, Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England (Reaktion, 2025) by Dr. Katrina Navickas is a gripping…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Mirya Holman, "The Hidden Face of Local Power: Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy" (Temple UP, 2025)
The Hidden Face of Local Power: Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy (Temple UP, 2025) by Dr. Mirya Holman explicates the purpose, role, and…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
161 One Battle After Another: A West Newton Cinema Discussion with Peter Coviello and Ethan Warren (JP)
One Battle After Another, the spirited and controversial Oscar contender from Paul Thomas Anderson, premiered in September. That opening weekend featured a…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Is a River Alive?: A Conversation with Robert Macfarlane
Hailed in the New York Times as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Nicholas Gamso, "Art After Liberalism" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Art After Liberalism (Columbia UP, 2022) is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging political and social rifts – a moment that could be…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Yoram Hazony, "Conservatism: A Rediscovery" (Regnery Publishing, 2022)
Conservatism needs to be rediscovered. That is, it needs to be differentiated from the post WWII concept of liberal democracy and return to its traditional…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Jake Monaghan, "Just Policing" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Policing is a source of perennial conflict and philosophical disagreement. Current political developments in the United States have only increased the urgency…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Lauren E. M. Everett, "Fortunate People in a Fortunate Land: At Home in Santa Monica's Rent-Controlled Housing" (Temple UP, 2025)
Rent control and other tenant protections have profound and positive impacts on individuals’ and communities’ lives. Dr. Lauren Everett’s Fortunate People in a…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
160* Hannah Arendt's Refugee Politics (JP)
John's “Arendt's Refugee Politics” came out in Public Books in early November. He made the case that his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt is an…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Can Feminism be African?: A Conversation with Minna Salami
Transcript of the interview Minna Salami is a writer, social critic, and thought leader on feminism, knowledge production, and the aesthetics and structures of…
New Books in Politics and PolemicsOn Democracy and Bullshit with Hélène Landemore
Today I’m speaking with Hélène Landemore, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, about Democracy and Bullshit, with a special focus on her 2020…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Cory Doctorow on Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
In this special livestream edition of Peoples & Things, host Lee Vinsel and very special guest host, danah boyd, formerly of Microsoft Research, presently Geri…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Caroline Jack, "Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century, (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how American capitalism has been…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Joseph Stiglitz, "The Origins of Inequality" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Joseph E. Stiglitz has had a remarkable career. He is a brilliant academic, capped by sharing the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and the Nobel Peace Prize…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr.
At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Carol Mason, "From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary" (U California Press, 2025)
Antiabortion stories, images, and policies have primed Americans to embrace attitudes and politics once deemed extreme. Abroad, US antiabortion tactics…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Liam Graham, "Physics Fixes All the Facts" (Springer Nature, 2025)
Complex systems seem to magically emerge from the interactions of their parts. A whirlpool emerges from water molecules. A living cell from organic molecules…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Joshua Castellino, "Calibrating Colonial Crime: Reparations and The Crime of Unjust Enrichment" (Policy Press, 2025)
While decolonization liberated territories, it left the root causes of historical injustice unaddressed. Governance change did not address past wrongs and…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Muhammad H. Zaman, "Infected: How Power, Politics, and Privilege Use Science Against the World’s Most Vulnerable" (The New Press, 2025)
In Infected: How Power, Politics, and Privilege Use Science Against the World’s Most Vulnerable (The New Press, 2025), Professor Muhammad H. Zaman reveals the…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
brian bean, "Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition" (Haymarket, 2025)
Where do cops come from and what do they do? How did “modern policing” as we know it today come to be? What about the capitalist state necessitates policing?…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Eram Alam, "The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare" (JHU Press, 2025)
For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Nancy Neiman, "Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures" (Routledge, 2020)
A series of market-related crises over the past two decades – financial, environmental, health, education, poverty – reinvigorated the debate about markets and…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Radio ReOrient 13.3: “Why Palestine Activism & Resistance Matter,” with Hatem Bazian and Ismail Patel, hosted by Claudia Radiven and Marchella Ward
In this episode, Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward spoke with Ismail Patel and Hatem Bazian about Pro-Palestinian resistance and the nature of protests - from…
New Books in Politics and PolemicsDemocratic Dialogues: Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries
A podcast from Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy Center on Global Democracy About the Podcast Each week, co-hosts Rachel Beatty Riedl and…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Michael Lazarus, "Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx by Michael Lazarus Karl Marx gave us not just a critique of the political economy of capital but a way of…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship" (MIT Press, 2025)
AI is changing democracy. We still get to decide how. AI’s impact on democracy will go far beyond headline-grabbing political deepfakes and automated…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Deborah Gordon, "No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World" (Oxford UP, 2021)
In No Standard Oil: Managing Abundant Petroleum in a Warming World (Oxford University Press, 2021), Deborah Gordon shows that no two oils or gases are…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Massimo Modonesi, "The Antagonistic Principle: Marxism and Political Action" (Haymarket, 2019)
What does it mean to be a political subject? This is one of the key questions asked by Massimo Modonesi in The Antagonistic Principle: Marxism and Political…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Ron Broglio, "Animal Revolution" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
Animals are staging a revolution—they’re just not telling us. From radioactive boar invading towns to jellyfish disarming battleships, Animal Revolution (U…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Elisabeth R. Anker, "Ugly Freedoms" (Duke UP, 2022)
Freedom is often considered the cornerstone of the American political project. The 1776 revolutionaries declared it an inalienable right that could neither be…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
David Stasavage, "The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today" (Princeton UP, 2020)
Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Nancy Newman, "Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York: Including Twenty-Two New Settings of Period Tunes" (SUNY Press, 2025)
Upstate New York's Anti-Rent Movement is considered the last struggle over feudalism in the United States. Tenant farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk region engaged…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Hamid Dabashi, "After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization" (Haymarket, 2025)
In this episode, we speak with Hamid Dabashi about his new book, After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization (Haymarket, 2025)…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Kevin M. Schultz, "Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
A bracing, accessible history of white American liberals—and why it’s time to change the conversation about them. If there’s one thing most Americans can agree…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Will Kitchen, "Culture, Capital and Carnival: Modern Media and the Representation of Work" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
How is the world of work depicted on page and on screen? In Culture, Capital and Carnival: Modern Media and the Representation of Work Dr Will Kitchen, an…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
What is Free Speech with Fara Dabhoiwala
The speech debates have not abated, and it’s clear that invoking the First Amendment, and the importance of free speech for democracy, does not settle these…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Richard Duncan, "The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century" (John Wiley & Sons, 2022)
In The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century, economist and bestselling author Richard Duncan lays out a farsighted strategy to maximize…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Jill Elaine Hasday, "We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for "We the People", too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen, "The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail" (Heresy Press, 2025)
The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail (Heresy Press, 2025) constitutes a bulwark against the persistent censorial efforts from…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Sasha Davis, "Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
A practical call to action against oppression. Across the globe, millions of people have participated in protests and marches, donated to political groups, or…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Kenja McCray, "Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership" (NYU Press, 2025)
Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated and overrun…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Tim Weiner, "The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century" (Mariner Books, 2025)
In 2007, Tim Weiner published the book Legacy of Ashes. It was a history of the CIA from its founding to the early 2000s. As a university student in Italy, I…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney M. Milkis, "Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism" (UP of Kansas, 2025)
Nicholas Jacobs (Colby College) and Sidney Milkis (University of Virginia) have a new book, Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Our Common Future: The Birth of Liberal Environmentalism
This is the second episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Sarah Schulman, "The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity" (Penguin, 2025)
From award-winning writer Sarah Schulman, a longtime social activist and outspoken critic of the Israeli war on Gaza, comes The Fantasy and Necessity of…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, "Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics" (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025)
Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) by Dr. Dominic Davies & Dr. Candida Rifkind is the first…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Zahi Zalloua, "Fanon, Žižek and the Violence of Resistance" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
n a novel pairing of anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon with Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Zahi Zalloua explores the ways both thinkers expose…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
When Should the Majority Rule – and is it time to resign democracy?
When do limits on majorities enhance democratic rule, and when do they undermine it? Join Nic Cheeseman as he talks to Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
“Plato and the Tyrant” with author James Romm
In 388 BCE, Plato, at the age of about forty and in the midst of writing The Republic, visited for the first time the then-Greek city state of Syracuse, on the…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? with Damon Linker
We begin the new season of International Horizons by asking a crucial question: is the U.S. helping speed up its own decline? RBI Deputy Director, Eli Karetny…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley, "Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution" (Stanford UP, 2025)
In Poland between 2015 and 2023, Jarosław Kaczyński and his Law and Justice Party (PiS) attempted a novel experiment. Could a governing party sustain a…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Sarah McLaughlin, "Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)
In an era of globalized education, where ideals of freedom and inquiry should thrive, an alarming trend has emerged: foreign authoritarian regimes infiltrating…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Santiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy of Warnings" (Columbia UP, 2025)
Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Maddalena Cerrato, "Michel Foucault's Practical Philosophy: A Critique of Subjectivation Processes" (SUNY Press, 2025)
Michel Foucault's thought, Maddalena Cerrato writes, may be understood as practical philosophy. In this perspective, political analysis, philosophy of history…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
Cordelia Fine, "Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality – and Why Men Still Win at Work" (W.W. Norton, 2025)
Inequality in the workplace impacts all areas of our lives, from health and self-development to economic security and family life. But, despite the world's…
- New Books in Politics and Polemics
David Edmonds, "Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Imagine this: You’re walking past a shallow pond and spot a toddler thrashing around in the water, in obvious danger of drowning. You look around for her…