New Books in American Politics

The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel “viewed history as consisting of stages punctuated by times of upheaval,” the author John B. Judis wrote in a recent essay for NOTUS, and “assigned to what he called ‘world-historical individuals' a special role in spurring the transition from one era to another.” Trump, Judis posited, “is exactly such an individual,” comparable in this respect to Alexander the Great, Caesar and Napoleon. In our conversation, we discuss this proposition—including the forces that brought Trump to this role and the bleak destiny that typically greets “world-historical individuals.” Judis is the author of a number of books, including The Populist Explosion (Columbia Global Reports, 2016). John B. Judis is an author and American journalist, a contributing editor at Talking Points Memo, a former senior writer at the National Journal, and a former senior editor at The New Republic Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. His companion Substack newsletter, America and Beyond,” offers commentary and insights on the podcast. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His most recent book is Putin's Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports, 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods An engaging biography of one of the most influential Western philosophers and a thought-provoking exploration of how to live with Arthur Schopenhauer's pessimism.Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) almost wasn't one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Born in the Free City of Danzig to a family of shipping merchants, he was destined for a life of imports and exports until his father died in a suspected suicide. After much deliberation, the young Schopenhauer invested his inheritance in himself and his philosophical vocation. But the long road to recognition was a difficult one, with Schopenhauer spending all but the last decade of his life in total obscurity. Yet his ideas and style went on to influence great thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud, as well as artists such as the composer Richard Wagner and writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, and many more.A singular and remarkably influential thinker, Schopenhauer is usually described as an extreme pessimist. He questioned the purpose of existence in a world where pain and suffering are inescapable and happiness is all too brief. In this engaging philosophical biography, David Bather Woods reevaluates Schopenhauer's pessimism in the context of his life experiences, revealing the philosopher's relentless fascination with the world and making a case for his contemporary relevance. Bather Woods weaves together Schopenhauer's ideas with the story of how he came to be, including such topics as love, loneliness, morality, politics, gender, sexuality, death, suicide, fame, and madness. In doing so, this book answers some of life's most challenging questions about how to deal with pain and loss, and how to live with ourselves and each other.Despite his pessimistic outlook on human existence, Schopenhauer didn't give up on life. Rather, he recognized that the question of how to live becomes even more pressing, and he worked to provide an answer. Bather Woods shows how Schopenhauer's life informed his ideas and how they still resonate today. David Bather Woods is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is coeditor with Timothy Stoll of The Schopenhauerian Mind. He has contributed chapters to The Proustian Mind, Schopenhauer's Moral Philosophy, and The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Twenty-Two Cents an Hour: Disability Rights and the Fight to End Subminimum Wages (Cornell UP, 2022), Doug Crandell uncovers the harsh reality of people with disabilities in the United States who are forced to work in unethical conditions for subminimum wages with little or no opportunity to advocate for themselves, while wealthy CEOs grow even wealthier as a direct result. As recently as 2016, the United States Congress enacted bipartisan legislation which continued to allow workers with disabilities to legally be paid far lower than the federal minimum wage. Drawing on ongoing federal Department of Justice lawsuits, the horrifying story of Henry's Turkey Farm in Iowa, and more, Crandell shows the history of the policies that have led to these unjust outcomes, examines who benefits from this legislation, and asks important questions about the rise of a disability industrial complex. Exposing this complex—which is rooted in profit, lobbying, and playing on the emotions of workers' parents and families, as well as the public—Crandell challenges readers to reexamine how we treat some of our most vulnerable fellow citizens. Twenty-Two Cents an Hour forces the reader to face the reality of this exploitation, and builds the framework needed for reform. Doug Crandell is Public Service Faculty at the Institute on Human Development and Disability at the University of Georgia. For more than thirty years he has worked in disability advocacy, specifically the intersection of employment, economic justice, and much-needed systems change. Doug Crandell is the author of several book and novels, inlcuding most recently "They're Calling You Home." My co-producer for this episode is Shea Tripp, a graduate student in the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens when theories of racial hierarchies interact with reality? How are they contested, refuted and changed in light of that encounter? What role do experts, most notably social scientists, play here? And, what can these historical encounters tell us about how we should think of race and migration today? These are the questions which animate Sunmin Kim's The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate (U Chicago Press, 2026). Taking as his focus the Dillingham Commission, a US government investigation into migrant groups established in 1907, Kim shows how theories of racial essentialism, which increasing were moving across the, at the time blurry, boundary between biology and society were used and contested in a moment when prominent political figures were eager to separate out the valued, long-established migrants from Western and Central Europe from those coming from Eastern and Southern Europe who all, on the face of it, were ‘white'. In doing so ideas such as ethnicity and the possibility of assimilation come to be mobilised. In turn Japanese migrants on the Pacific coast were placed beyond the pale of this possibility of assimilation and continued to be excluded. As Kim shows, not only did the commission report introduce some new vocabulary for thinking of race, but also played a key role in the development of US immigration quotas and a form of racial liberalism. This perspective, while accepting the possibility of a diverse body politic, rested on an assumption of a ‘native' and ‘non-native' element, including the possibility that some of the latter simply could never be ‘American'. In our discussion we discuss the formation and activity of the Dillingham Commission. This includes discussing a number of key figures, such as Franz Boas who measures skulls for the commission and in so doing uses the same tools of the eugenicists and positivists to undercut their racist claims and Yamato Ichihashi who, while vociferously making the case that Japanese migrants such as himself are the ideal ‘Americans' ends up being an example of the ‘insurmountable difference' placed in front of such groups. We end by discussing how Zora Neale Hurston, once Boas's student, provides a different way of conceiving of race and its place in immigration debates. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) along with other texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against The Press (Columbia UP, 2026), A.J. Bauer examines the history of the idea of a “liberal media bias.” Rather than trying to show whether or not “liberal media bias” is an accurate description, Bauer shows how this idea has been an animating force for conservative political activists and media figures. Bauer shows the lineage of “liberal media bias” criticism going back to early leaders in the modern conservative movement and press, as well as the conservative and right-wing grassroots. In addition to promoting this idea of media bias, these early conservative media pioneers taught their audiences how to be media critics themselves, a tradition that is still practiced today. A.J. Bauer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama. You can find a transcript of the interview here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, has been writing about war for decades, including in his book Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Cornell University Press, 1996). In our conversation, we step back from the immediate conflict in Iran to reflect on what can be called our Age of War. We are in an era of chronic political violence, including in the United States, Pape notes—what he views as a Hobbesian period in global history. And there is not necessarily, he says, an end in sight. Robert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago specializing in international security affairs. Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His most recent book is Putin's Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports, 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Volkswagen's Chattanooga Assembly Plant opened in 2012, the United Auto Workers were excited by the golden opportunity to organize in the anti-union South, where their efforts had been routinely thwarted. However, it took ten years and several attempts before the UAW was successful in unionizing the plant. Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South (Temple UP, 2026) explains why. Dr. Abe Walker chronicles the organizing campaign from its origin in 2014 to the union's breakthrough victory in 2024, illustrating what went wrong—and what went right—along the way. Walker provides a systematic analysis of the strategic challenges and tactical shifts, showing the patterns that persisted across three election cycles while highlighting their differences, from global-level alliances to local labor issues. Reassembling the UAW also demonstrates how rebel rank-and-file workers ousted the old-guard leadership and transformed the UAW into a militant union to achieve results. Ultimately, Walker offers valuable lessons for organizational strategy, the power of collective action, and the future of the labor movement. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Examining everything from popular novels to politics, an investigation of persistent fascination with Nazis—and where it might take us. We live in an age where Hitler and the Nazis dominate our cultural imagination, shaping values once defined by religion. Historian Alec Ryrie explores why society remains captivated by this struggle, from history and fiction to modern myths such as Star Wars and Harry Potter. He examines the costs of our Nazi obsession and questions what will come as our anti-Nazi moral consensus frays and both the Left and Right begin to move on. With a fresh take on modern history and pop culture, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (Reaktion, 2025) offers a thought-provoking look at the culture wars and our shifting political crises, challenging assumptions on both sides and asking what a new moral vision might look like. Alec Ryrie is professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University and a fellow of the British Academy. His previous books include Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. He lives in rural County Durham. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2012, US President Barack Obama stated that the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons on its population would cross a red line that would require the US government to reconsider its approach to the civil war then underway in Syria. Syria subsequently used such weapons, creating a policy dilemma for the United States about how to respond to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's violation of the red line.In Coercing Syria on Chemical Weapons (Oxford UP, 2025), Matthew Moran, Wyn Q. Bowen, and Jeffrey W. Knopf examine efforts by the United States, sometimes acting with France and the United Kingdom, to respond to Syria's possession and use of chemical weapons over the course of its civil war. In particular, they focus on US strategy during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, which relied heavily on coercion, including deterrent and compellent variants. As the authors show, policies directed at the ruling Assad regime in Syria attempted to deter chemical weapons attacks and to compel Syria to give up its chemical arsenal with mixed outcomes. Drawing on the existing literature on deterrence and coercive diplomacy to identify three propositions — concerning credibility, motivations, and assurances — the book explains the mixed record of coercive success and failure and examines how effective coercive strategies were at different points and why.Drawing on the most significant attempt in the post-Cold War era to deter the use of a weapon of mass destruction, this book offers theoretical and practical lessons for both security studies scholars and policymakers. Our guest is Professor Jeff Knopf, a Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), where he serves as chair of the M.A. program in Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How the urban-rural divide drives partisan polarization Why have Americans living in different places come to experience politics as a battle between “us” and “them”? In Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy (Princeton UP, 2025) Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown argue that political polarization is not just about red states and blue states, or coastal elites who alienate those in fly-over country. Instead, polarization permeates every region and every state—and has become organized through a pernicious rural-urban division. Mettler and Brown explain the evolution of this gulf across five decades, charting political trends in both places. Drawing on data on individuals, communities, and members of Congress, as well as interviews with local party leaders and former elected officials, they show how the divide emerged and why it poses a threat to democracy. Until about thirty years ago, both political parties attracted support from rural and urban voters. But after place-based inequality grew due to deregulation and trade liberalization, white rural dwellers began to view urban people and Democrats as affluent elites out of touch with their needs. Politically active evangelical churches, antiabortion organizations, and gun groups helped deepen the divide, encouraging many of these rural residents to become staunch supporters of the GOP. Now, regional one-party rule in rural America gives Republicans a systematic edge for gaining control of crucial political institutions, including the Senate, House of Representatives, the Presidency, and even the Supreme Court. This is helping enable an extremist political party and pushing democracy to the brink. Mettler and Brown argue that the divide can be repaired—but only if the Democrats build their own robust local organizations and offer citizens a meaningful choice. Host Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she specialises in the study of public policymaking and litigation in the US. A former British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, she is the author of the award-winning book,America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Trevor Brown is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. In Fall 2026, he will join the University of Oregon's Department of Political Science as Assistant Professor of Inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Giant companies, launch rockets into space, control satellite communication and develop era-defining AI technologies. But they are also seen as promoting misinformation, undermining democracy and violating privacy. Big banks, reeling since the financial crisis of 2008, continue to be racked with major scandals. Drawing on examples such as the VW scandal in Germany, Cambridge Analytica and Samsung the authors of Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How it Could Save Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2026) show that these scandals are opportunities for real political change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Black Power, Inc.: Corporate America and the Rise of Multinational Empowerment Politics, (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026), traces the rise of Black empowerment politics in the United States and Africa. On a cold January day in 1964, civil rights minister turned entrepreneur Rev. Leon Howard Sullivan declared to a group of supporters gathered to witness the launch of Sullivan's latest venture, Opportunities Industrialization Centers, Inc., “The day has come when we must do more than protest—we must now also PREPARE and PRODUCE!” Occasionally linked with the movement for Black Power, Sullivan and others, including Coca-Cola vice president Carl Ware and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, were in fact architects of Black empowerment—an intellectual and political movement that championed private enterprise as the key to Black people's prosperity.Jessica Ann Levy traces Black empowerment's rise in American politics—from early twentieth-century influences including Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey to the cities of postwar America into corporate boardrooms and government offices—and across the Atlantic Ocean to Africa. Civil rights leaders, Black entrepreneurs, white corporate executives, and government officials all championed Black empowerment as a means to address multiple crises in US cities and to blunt some of the more radical aspects of the Black Power movement. Black empowerment politics likewise found application overseas in various Cold War efforts to promote American-style free enterprise in Africa. This was especially the case in South Africa, where US corporate executives and government officials wielded Black empowerment politics to oppose apartheid and divestment.By the early twenty-first century, the idea that private enterprise, including small-scale entrepreneurs and large multinational corporations, should play a leading role in combating racial inequality and empowering Black and other marginalized people featured prominently in various policies and programs at the local, national, and international level. By tracing Black empowerment politics' evolution, Black Power, Inc. explains its popularity, championed by leaders from Bill Clinton to Nelson Mandela, while also revealing its role in expanding US corporate power, locally and globally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A sympathetic critique that attempts to free Left politics from its own snares, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton University Press, 2025) explores how woundedness became a basis for contemporary political identity. Without condemning identity politics, Wendy Brown carefully probes the varied historical forces generating them today and the ways these formative conditions constrain emancipatory desire. Along the way, she advances a novel feminist critical theory of liberalism and the liberal democratic state. She also develops an original theoretical practice that weaves together Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Foucault, and cultural theories of gender and race to analyze contemporary political predicaments. In a new preface, Brown places States of Injury in political and intellectual context, including the rise of neoliberalism, and addresses the book's renewed relevance in today's political landscape. Wendy Brown is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her books include Nihilistic Times, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, and Undoing the Demos. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Katelyn Stauffer, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia, has an excellent new book focusing on how voters and citizens perceive the legitimacy and functionality of political institutions, especially when they think there are women elected to those institutions. The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women's Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the United States (Oxford UP, 2025) weaves together a number of different threads to reach some interesting conclusions about women in elected office and the trust that voters have in those elected offices and institutions. Stauffer starts the research trajectory with a framing around representation, and how the different kinds of representation within elected bodies connects to how voters think about those bodies themselves and whether they trust them and think they are effective. This opens the path to bring in the question of gender, and how voters' or citizens' perceptions of how many women are in legislative bodies also connects with how much trust those same citizens have in those representative bodies. The Politics of Perception explores both accurate perceptions as well as misperceptions about governmental institutions, and this is also where the research is truly fascinating. Part of what the research indicates is that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the American public does not actually know a lot about politics or about how political institutions operate. At the same time, many citizens hold strong opinions or thoughts about politics, which generally are at odds with the lack of knowledge. This is also bound up with stereotypes that voters consider in terms of male and female elected officials and how they work within institutions. The Politics of Perception interrogates all of these misperceptions, unpacking the truth or reality versus the ideas that individuals hold about office holders and the political institutions in which those office holders work. Stauffer also discussed how she was able to build on a comparative politics approach, since parliamentary systems are, by their nature, collective institutions, and this approach helped to provide another theoretical framework for the analysis. The Politics of Perception: How Beliefs About Women's Inclusion Shape Democratic Legitimacy in the U.S. is an important and useful book for many different scholars: those who study American government and politics; scholars of gender and politics, especially in the United States; comparative political scientists; and political theorists exploring issues of representation and democracy. We discussed the Ghost Bookstore in Athens, Georgia as a bookseller that can order The Politics of Perception for readers in Georgia or elsewhere. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eleven days into the attack on Iran by the United States and Israel, starting on Feb. 28, 2026, I speak with Vali Nasr, a renowned analyst of Iran. He's the author of several books dealing with Iran, including most recently Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History (Princeton University Press, 2025). Nasr was born in Tehran in 1960 and is currently a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In our talk, he discusses his surprise at the resilience the Iranian government has so far displayed in the war, as well as the high degree of advance planning the government performed in anticipation of the attack. Although many Iranians do not like the Islamic Republic, he told me, there is nevertheless a resurgent element of Iranian nationalism in Iranian society. The West, he believes, underestimates the cohesion of Iran. Vali Nasr is the Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. Paul Starobin is a former contributing editor of The Atlantic and a former Moscow bureau chief of Business Week. His companion Substack newsletter America and Beyond includes transcripts of podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fifty years of changemaking and reform haven't fixed Congress—what does that reveal about American democracy? In Stuck: How Money, Media and Violence Prevent Change in Congress, Maya Kornberg chronicles the efforts of congressional reformers over the last fifty years and documents the mounting forces that have kept their reforms from creating meaningful change. Dr. Kornberg reveals how political violence, astronomical campaign costs, relentless fundraising demands, shrinking staff, and centralized party leadership all constrain the ability of new members to legislate and represent their constituents. Social media, while offering new platforms for political expression, has also heightened harassment and fed a performative culture that rewards spectacle over substance. Bolstered by dozens of interviews, congressional records, and the voices of lawmakers past and present—including Henry Waxman, Toby Moffett, Phil English, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Lauren Underwood—Stuck offers a sobering portrait of a legislative body paralyzed by its own internal dynamics. Dr. Kornberg outlines tangible reforms that could restore Congress's capacity to function and amplify the power of its newest members. At a time when Americans are losing faith in democracy's most representative institution, Stuck makes the case for how it could be saved. A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life Our guest is: Dr. Maya Kornberg, who is a senior research fellow and manager in the Brennan Center's Elections and Government Program. She's taught political science at NYU, Georgetown and American University, worked on democratic governance issues at numerous institutions, and led research for a UNDP and IPU project examining civic engagement in the work of over 80 parliaments around the world. She is the author of Stuck. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Bears and Ballots House of Diggs The Fight To Save The Town The End of White Politics Understanding Disinformation You Are Not American The Vice-President's Black Wife You Have More Influence Than You Think We Refuse Dear Miss Perkins Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A provocative new history of modern black liberalism Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly conservative tendencies of black elected officials in the post–civil rights era within neoliberal American politics and an enduring black liberal tradition. In the 1970s and '80s, cities across the country elected black mayors for the first time. Just as these officials gained political power, however, their cities felt the full brunt of white flight and deindustrialization. Tasked with governing cities in crisis, black political leaders responded in seemingly conservative ways to the social problems that austerity worsened. Nowhere was this response more evident than in Atlanta. In the nation's preeminent black urban regime, black leaders such as mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young employed the power of policing and the private sector to discipline black Atlantans, hoping they would equip vulnerable communities with the tools to manage the volatility of the era. Danielle Wiggins shows that these punitive responses to the problems of crime, family instability, and unemployment were informed by black liberalism's disciplinary impulse: an enduring tendency to reform behaviors believed to threaten black survival in a white supremacist nation. Forged in response to the violence of Jim Crow, the disciplinary impulse relied upon notions of pathology and its inverse, black excellence. Wiggins identifies several black liberal efforts to cultivate excellent black communities, families, and workers in the post–civil rights era, including community policing, corporate-sponsored family initiatives, and black entrepreneurship. In embracing disciplinary strategies, however, black liberals often focused on behavior at the expense of addressing structural inequality. Consequently, their approaches dovetailed with those of the “New” Democrats, whose post–Great Society social policies were informed by urban black liberals. Black Excellence reveals thus how urban black liberals not only reshaped black politics but, as Democrats, also helped build the neoliberal Democratic Party. Guest: Danielle Wiggins is an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on U.S. and African American history since the 1960s. She is currently researching race and the politics of energy since the 1960s. Focusing on the 1970s energy crisis, her project will explore how black Americans thought about energy, consumption, growth, and sustainability in ways that alternately challenged, intersected with, and radically rethought mainstream energy discourses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI acting director Eli Karetny sits down with political theorist Laura Field to trace the intellectual currents shaping today's right — from Straussian thought at the Claremont Institute to Catholic integralism, the manosphere, and Trump-era populism. Using Plato's Allegory of the Cave as a touchstone, they interrogate how philosophical radicalism becomes political strategy, why some thinkers return to the “cave” with prudence while others return with authoritarian blueprints, and what these debates mean for American democracy. Tune in for a lively, theory-steeped conversation that bridges political philosophy and contemporary conservative politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights (Legacy Lit, 2026) reporter Amy Littlefield investigates the secret killers and hidden motives behind the death of abortion rights. They are going to kill people, investigative reporter for The Nation Littlefield knew, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. As a journalist covering abortion for more than a decade, she had already chronicled many near-death experiences caused by anti-abortion policy. After the anti-abortion movement's staggering defeat of Roe, she became fascinated with their victory and why they seemed so much better organized than the pro-choice movement. She set out to investigate the murderers of Roe. Killers of Roe chronicles Littlefield's journey into the unexplored corners of the most successful social movement of our time. As in every good murder mystery, the killers turn out to be the people you least suspect, like a disgraced former Congressman obsessed with offshore tax evasion and an unknown suburban bureaucrat who wrote America's most diabolical anti-abortion policy. She reports from a sweaty presidential tour bus in DC, a chaotic Michigan courtroom where a former fetus thief is on trial, and a Texas town that rejects an abortion travel ban. She encounters surprising characters who shed light on how we got to this moment of authoritarian rule: from the pro-choice superfans she meets at the Reagan library to the Senator who couldn't stop kissing every woman he met. Along the way, Amy draws upon the stories of women who have died from anti-abortion policies and on her own experience as a mother to reveal the life-and-death stakes of America's abortion wars. At once clever and poignant reportage, this abortion whodunnit uncovers the deeper story of how we lost Roe--and how we can win back so much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our guest today is Elizabeth Suhay, the author of Debating the American Dream: How Explanations for Inequality Polarize Politics. Faith in the American Dream—the idea that anyone who works hard can achieve success—has waned in the 21st century. Decreases in economic mobility, increases in the wealth gap, and other economic shifts have undoubtedly influenced this decline. Dr. Suhay investigates how politics and political identity are intertwined with beliefs about the American Dream and the causes of inequality. Drawing on public opinion surveys spanning more than four decades, Suhay finds that Americans' belief in the American Dream is strongly related to their political party affiliation. While it is true that Americans have become more skeptical of the American Dream overall, Suhay finds this skepticism is concentrated among Democratic members of the public. Despite the increasingly working-class make-up of the Republican coalition, most Republican members of the public continue to believe the American Dream is reality. Elizabeth (Liz) Suhay is an associate professor of government in the School of Public Affairs, American University, Washington, D.C. She specializes in the study of U.S. public opinion and political psychology and is a Sine Civic Life Faculty Fellow and Vice Director of the Science & Policy certificate program. She has also co-edited three volumes including The Politics of Truth in Polarized America, with David Barker, The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion, with Bernard Grofman and Alex Trechsel, and "The Politics of Science" with James Druckman. She currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Political Psychology and Editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Political Psychology series. This is episode is co-produced by Nora Kalaj, a student in the Master of Arts in Communication at Oakland University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Celebrated as a democratic space for all Americans, the major league ballpark in fact privileged the middle- and upper-class white male fan while tacitly marginalizing poor urban residents and people of color. Seth S. Tannenbaum examines how the game's economically and socially stratified system reflected changing understandings of urban space, inclusion, and the body politic. Major League Baseball owners and executives masked exclusion and division by touting the game's accessibility and instituting few overtly discriminatory policies. Affluent white males enjoyed a comfortable, safe space that reinforced their status as the prototypical American citizen. At the same time, ballparks relocated in response to how these favored fans felt about cities. Tannenbaum traces this journey from the urban locales of the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium through the suburban-oriented Dodger Stadium and Houston Astrodome to the cloistered fantasy of city life offered by Camden Yards. As he shows, owners' pursuit of greater profits incorporated existing barriers that helped shape the structure of modern parks. A revealing social history, Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites: Democracy and Division at the Twentieth-Century Ballpark (U Illinois Press, 2026) revises the persistent myth of the ballpark as an egalitarian melting pot. Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, is now available. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Populist leaders around the world increasingly reject international organizations, decrying them as constraints on state power and rallying followers against the “global elite” who run them. These institutions—painstakingly built through decades of negotiation and multilateral cooperation—are often seen as passive bystanders, unable or unwilling to push back. In Global Governance Under Fire: How International Organizations Resist the Populist Wave (Princeton UP, 2026) Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark challenge this view, arguing that international organizations are, in fact, strategic agents with the tools to resist populist pressures. Offering fresh theoretical insights and original empirical analysis, they investigate how these institutions fight back and how their defensive strategies are reshaping global governance.Using a multimethod approach that draws on novel data and qualitative evidence, Carnegie and Clark identify four key strategies that international organizations employ to both appease and sideline populists and their constituents. They find that while these strategies help fortify global governance against populist opposition, they may also produce unintended consequences, potentially eroding institutional legitimacy and fueling further resistance. A timely and compelling account, the book provides a crucial roadmap for understanding—and safeguarding—the global order. Our guests are Professor Allison Carnegie, a professor of political science at Columbia University. and Professor Richard Clark, who is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Towards the end of the Cold War, the last great struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union marked the end of détente, and escalated into the most dangerous phase of the conflict since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Aaron Donaghy examines the complex history of America's largest peacetime military buildup, which was in turn challenged by the largest peacetime peace movement. Focusing on the critical period between 1977 and 1985, Donaghy shows how domestic politics shaped dramatic foreign policy reversals by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. These reversals, the book argues, were influenced by president's willingness to take risks, by their perception of credibility, and by the timing of their decision.  Donaghy explains why the Cold War intensified so quickly and how - contrary to all expectations - US-Soviet relations were repaired. Drawing on recently declassified archival material, The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy (Cambridge UP, 2021) traces how each administration evolved in response to crises and events at home and abroad. This compelling and controversial account challenges the accepted notion of how the end of the Cold War began. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most of us would agree that American journalism has problems. Rushed reporting and thin coverage. Timidity in the face of adversity. Polarized perspectives and euphemistic language. Groupthink about complicated events.While much blame has been levelled at big tech, in How the Cold War Broke the News: The Surprising Roots of Journalism's Decline (Polity, 2025) Dr. Barbie Zelizer traces the decline of American journalism to the Cold War. She makes the bold claim that Cold War-era practices are to blame for the state of journalism today, undermining a once trusted media environment. This groundbreaking book shows how journalism's current problems can be traced back to customs developed over half a century ago and demonstrates how they've continued to upend journalism, journalists and the news ever since. We all need a news environment that works. This book tells us why it doesn't and offers a plan to make it better. If our news is better, so is our democracy. And, if our democracy is better, we may be too. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The revelatory and urgent story of how an explosion of misogyny is driving a surge of mass and far-right violence throughout the West--from an internationally recognized extremism expert and media commentator What two things do most mass shooters, terrorists, or violent extremists have in common? Most of us know the first: they are almost always men or boys. But the second? They are almost always virulent misogynists, homophobes, or transphobes--even if they are also motivated by racism, antisemitism, or xenophobia. The antigovernment militiamen charged with plotting to kidnap and execute Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer used language saturated with misogyny, with one telling an FBI informant, "Just grab the bitch." The men who killed scores at Virginia Tech, the Pulse nightclub, and a Maryland newsroom all had prior reports of stalking, domestic violence, or harassment of women. And in dozens of other incidents--from North America to Norway to New Zealand--an increasing number of misogynist incel (involuntary celibate) and male supremacist attackers have explicitly targeted and killed women, blaming feminism or sexual frustration with women as motivation for their attacks. Yet, despite all evidence, the bright red thread of misogyny running through these attacks is barely acknowledged by the media or even experts--and this failing leaves us powerless to stop the violence. In Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism (Princeton UP, 2025), Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a leading expert on extremism, addresses this crucial oversight head-on, revealing how an epidemic of misogyny--both online and off--and a patriarchal backlash are driving an exponential rise in mass and far-right violence. She also offers essential strategies that all of us--including parents, teachers, and counselors--can use to fight the rising tide of violence, beginning with recognizing the misogyny that pervades our everyday lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Each year, as many as 250 million Americans face civil legal problems like eviction, debt collection, and substandard housing. These problems are disproportionately shouldered by racially and economically marginalized people, particularly women of color. Civil courts and legal aid organizations are supposed to protect their rights, yet more than 90 percent of low-income people receive inadequate or no legal assistance. Instead, access to justice is reserved for those who can afford its high price. For those who can't, the repercussions can be devastating, from homelessness and loss of public benefits to broken families and diminished health. Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power (Princeton UP, 2026) looks at the US civil justice system through the eyes of the people whose very citizenship is indelibly shaped by it. Jamila Michener and Mallory SoRelle show how civil legal problems, and the institutions meant to address them, greatly erode trust in the legal system among marginalized communities, undermining their broader sense of democratic citizenship and political standing. While legal representation offers vital protections, increased access to justice through an ever-growing supply of lawyers does not address the structural problems that generate demand for lawyers in the first place. Looking at cases involving unfair evictions and substandard housing, Michener and SoRelle demonstrate how community groups such as tenants' unions can fill this justice gap and provide the means to build political power that transforms the conditions that create precarity. Drawing on eye-opening qualitative evidence and a wealth of historical and survey data, Uncivil Democracy explains why collective organizing holds the greatest promise for altering the systems that create civil legal problems and exercising the political power necessary for meaningful change. Host Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she specialises in the study of public policymaking and litigation in the US. A former British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, she is the author of the award-winning book,America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Jamila Michener is Professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University and inaugural director of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures. She is the author of the award-winning book,  Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Mallory SoRelle is the Tony and Teddie Brown Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She is the author of Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection (University of Chicago Press, 2020), based on her award-winning doctoral dissertation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happened to freedom singing after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination? Stephen Stacks considers this question in The Resounding Revolution: Freedom Song After 1968 (U Illinois Press, 2025). He argues that the cultural myths around the Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968, which are partially supported by the appeal of Freedom Songs, have hindered and inspired later activists as they grappled with the shadow of a simplistic and sanitized memory of what it takes to create political change. Stacks's analysis shifts the focus of attention from genre—freedom song—to process and practice—freedom singing. In a wide-ranging book, he contemplates the role of nostalgia in political advocacy, investigates the work of one of the movement's great singers, Bernice Johnson Reagon after 1968, and explains how the media and crucial musical figures shaped and sometimes complicated the collective memory of the Civil Rights movement and its music. The Resounding Revolution examines sixty years of Black music to challenge and reshape the entrenched story of the Civil Rights Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Walter Lippmann was arguably the most recognized and respected political journalist of the twentieth century. His "Today and Tomorrow" columns attracted a global readership of well over ten million. Lippmann was the author of numerous books, including the best-selling A Preface to Morals (1929) and U.S. Foreign Policy (1943). His Public Opinion (1922) remains a classic text within American political philosophy and media studies. Lippmann coined or popularized several keywords of the twentieth century, including "stereotype," the "Cold War," and the "Great Society." Sought out by U.S. Presidents and by America's allies and rivals around the world, Lippmann remained one of liberalism's most faithful proponents and harshest critics. Yet few people then or since encountered the "real" Walter Lippmann. That was because he kept crucial parts of himself hiding in plain sight. His extensive commentary on politics and diplomacy was bounded by his sense that America had to adjust to the loss of a common faith and morality in a "post-Christian" era. Over the course of his life, Lippmann traded in his fame as a happy secularist for the stardom of a grumpy Western Christian intellectual. Yet he never committed himself to any religious system, especially his own Jewish heritage. Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor (Oxford University Press, 2023) considers the role of religions in Lippmann's life and thought, prioritizing his affirmation and rejection of Christian nationalisms of the left and right. It also yields fresh insights into the philosophical origins of modern American liberalism, including liberalism's blind spots in the areas of sex, race, and class. But most importantly, this biography highlights the constructive power of doubt. For Lippmann, the good life in the good society was lived in irreconcilable tension: the struggle to be free from yet loyal to a way of life; to recognize the dangers yet also the necessity of civil religion; and to strive for a just and enduring world order that can never be. In the end, Lippmann manufactured himself as the prophet of limitation for an extravagant American Century. Mark Thomas Edwards is professor of US history and politics at Spring Arbor University in Michigan. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age The University of Chicago Press, 2024 Kenneth Lowande Political Scientist Kenneth Lowande (University of Michigan) has a new book, False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age, examining the ways in which presidents seem to be using their extraordinary powers (of the office itself) but are often holding back so as to avoid the full implementation of policies and ideas. This is an interesting thesis, since it takes apart the ways in which presidents operate, getting at not only the presentation of presidential power and the rhetoric used by presidents to illuminate their powers, but also where the full capacity of the Executive branch may not be put into action around issues, policies, or ideas. Lowande is assessing what is essentially symbolic, especially for the president, but is not substantive, even if it may seem that way. This concept, this “false front”, comes out of the polarization within the American political system, and the difficulty that presidents also have in trying to accomplish policy shifts and changes. This is also in context of a Congress that has ceded significant power to the Executive and is generally less productive in terms of passing and implementing policy than it was in the past. This is then combined with the adjustments that presidents and presidential candidates have made in the way they approach the campaign and then their work while in office, since they are compelled to construct their own “brand” as a means to getting elected. Once in office, presidents then need to perform in some way that convinces the public that they are trying to execute what they promised while on the campaign trail. But the political climate makes those outcomes extraordinarily difficult. So, presidents have constructed this path where they publicly lean into policy areas, making public statements, having ceremonies and press releases, taking executive actions, or signing Executive Orders to illustrate their commitment and their activity, but when these policy areas are examined in some depth, it turns out that not much happened after all of this attention and apparent action. Lowande notes, in our conversation, how once he had zeroed in on this presidential mode of operating it is very difficult not to see it. This becomes a kind of model of presidential behavior and strategic approaches. False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age essentially interrogates the founding basis for the American presidency, where Alexander Hamilton argued that the president is to be held accountable and responsible for the actions taken in the office itself. The media plays a role in this as well, since they report on the actions taken by the president—at least in terms of rhetoric, press releases, signing ceremonies, and executive actions—but there is no follow on analysis, for the most part, of the actual implementation of the policies and the plans. If there is no measurable outcome to distinguish how the policy solved the problem, or satisfied the demand for the policy, then the presidential action or rhetoric is disconnected from any particular policy or public good. This is also at odds with the reason for a democratic republic—where the demands of the voters are to be translated into real outcomes, not imaginary ones. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An authoritative history of the radical environmental movement in the United States, No Option But Sabotage explores how far activists are willing to go to defend the planet in the face of repression and the escalating climate crisis. After 9/11, the radical environmental movement was considered the number one domestic terror threat by the U.S. government. But by the end of the decade the movement had largely gone silent. What happened? And given the threat from climate, why haven't more radical tactics re-emerged? In No Option But Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2026), Thomas Zeitzoff traces the origins, rise, fall, and potential rise again of the movement. Using in-depth interviews with past and current activists, as well as experts, Zeitzoff covers the main factions and actors. These include: Earth First! and its early advocacy for "monkeywrenching;" the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski and his years-long anti-technology bombing campaign; the connections between animal liberation, punk, and the emergence of the Earth Liberation Front and its arson campaign; and more recent climate activists and their use of disruptive tactics. Along with providing a comprehensive overview of the movement and its various sub-movements that emerged over time, Zeitzoff also asks the bigger question-given the scope and threat from climate change why haven't activists escalated their tactics? Property destruction, sabotage, and even arson were once regular features of the movement in the 1990s and early 2000s--will activists use them again, or will they stick to non-violence? Will the threat of increasing state repression scare activists, or radicalize them? Not just a history of a major extremist movement, this book tells the story of radical environmentalism and highlights how activists are confronting the dual threats of climate change and repression, and asking themselves how far they are willing to go to protect the planet. Thomas Zeitzoff is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University. His research focuses on political violence, social media, and political psychology. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

International law scholars are often among the sharpest critics of the Trump administration—but what if the usual story misses something essential? In this episode, RBI interim director Eli Karetny speaks with NYU international law professor Robert Howse about Trump's complicated relationship with the UN Charter system, from Gaza to Venezuela and Iran. The conversation also turns to political theory: Leo Strauss's reputation as a neoconservative godfather, the shadow of Carl Schmitt, and how today's MAGA New Right recycles older anxieties about liberalism, virtue, and masculinity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Settler Colonialism is the Disaster: A Critique of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina and During the COVID-19 Pandemic (U Illinois Press, 2026) is the new book from Dr. Cassandra Shepard, Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana. Published with University of Illinois Press, this encompassing and engrossing book focuses on the crises that have engulfed New Orleans, including the disasters of colonialism, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and COVID-19, taking the reader through their causes and impacts on not only a broad level but through the everyday and often traumatic experiences of the residents of New Orleans. The analysis moves from the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, to state-level post-disaster reconstruction contracts, to international forms of colonialism, and even encompasses Beyonce. This book, which is also includes poetry and a recommended playlist, is also very relevant to the current global moment. Shepard analyses the overlapping and intersecting disasters that have affected New Orleans through ideas of disaster capitalism and settler colonialism, demonstrating how Black and Indigenous peoples have been deprived of critical resources. The reconstruction processes following, and during, these crises have often sought to exploit the authentic New Orleans culture and vibrancy to further the consolidation of power, profit, and privilege of white elites, to the detriment of Black and Indigenous peoples. Shepard's book, Settler Colonialism is the Disaster, takes a multi-scalar view of settler colonialism and investigates how it has not only operated historically in New Orleans, but clearly demonstrates that it is a continual process that still determines reconstruction, relief, and other projects today. Shepard connects the ongoing violence and dispossession inherent in settler colonialism within New Orleans, expressed through structural responses to Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19, to other settler colonial projects around the world, such as in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia. Cassandra Shepard's new book is an exceptional, theoretically and empirically rich book that offers a new critique into ‘best practice' reconstruction, which demands attention. Settler Colonialism is the Disaster offers an urgent, critical view of the political economy of reconstruction, aid, and government responses; a view which is crucial to take seriously in our world today, plagued as it is by crisis, war, and settler colonialism. Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are we living in an era of competing international orders? A new book, entitled Competing Visions for International Order: Challenges for a Shared Direction in an Age of Global Contestation (Routledge, 2025) edited by Ville Sinkkonen, Veera Laine, Matti Puranen addresses the ultimate question. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Julie Yu-Wen Chen from the University of Helsinki talks to Ville Sinkkonen (Finnish Institute of International Affairs), Matti Puranen (Finnish National Defense University and University of Helsinki), and Bart Gaens (Finnish Institute of International Affairs and the International Centre for Defense and Security) about the ambition of this new book and several key takeaways concerning particularly the US, China, and India from this book. The book's analysis also offers normative prescriptions on how to avoid a tragic race to the bottom – a fragmented world of competing orders where states are unable to address shared global crises and challenges such as pandemics, cross-border crime, climate tragedies, and armed conflict. With this, it concludes by recognising the importance of agency as well as political imagination in navigating the crisis-ridden ordering moment of the international system. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students in global order studies and governance, geopolitics, regional studies, foreign policy analysis as well as more broadly to international relations and security, political history, human geography, and policymakers. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Asian studies coordinator at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway). We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Political Theorist Laura Field has written an insightful and detailed exploration of the people and the ideas that have shaped the second Trump Administration (and some contributed, as well, to the first Trump Administration.) While Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton UP, 2025) is about quite a few scholars and academics, it is written like a propulsive page-turner of a book. And Field takes us through all the of the ins and outs of the individuals who have pursued a path to power and policy development, often from positions in the Ivory Tower. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is truly fascinating, since it is not simply about egg-headed academics writing up white papers or books, or simply about presidential advisors and the way they have worked to influence the president or put particular policies into place. Instead, Field interrogates the construction of the ideas that have come to dominate this New Right, seeking their genesis and how these ideas, which are divided into three distinct but overlapping intellectual camps, have made their way to the Trump Administration, through Trump himself, Vice President J.D. Vance, and so many of the advisors and cabinet members who surround Trump. Field's training in political theory, especially Straussian political theory, contributes to her understanding and analysis of the individuals at the heart of the story in Furious Minds—and how these particular academics think, but in particular how they think about politics and political projects. The substance of Furious Minds is focused on the past decade or so of engagement between these various schools of thought and the Trump Administration—both while in elected office as well as during the out of office interregnum. At the same time, Field traces the deep origins of some of these schools of thought through the longer conservative tradition in the United States. In our discussion, we explore the Claremonters, the Postliberals, and the National Conservatives. Each group is populated by well-educated (PhDs, published authors, etc.) individuals (mostly men) who are urging a concept of the common good, as they define it, on to the American people, through the Trump Administration's rhetoric, policies, institutional dispositions, cultural approaches, and general demeanor. Field takes all of these thinkers and ideas seriously, making the case for understanding both the ideas themselves and their origins, while also critiquing much of this by exposing the more extremist bases behind these paths of thinking as well as the people who are purveying them. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is a tour de force of the intellectual and political landscape that has brought us to the midst of the second Trump Administration and provides the reader with deep insight into the radical origins of the myths and concepts that are the backbone of the current Trump Administration and the current Republican Party. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She studied political theory at Kenyon College and Boston College. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this masterful, groundbreaking work Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2026), Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson shines surprising new light on an infamous 1984 New York subway shooting that would unveil simmering racial resentments and would lead, in unexpected ways, to a fractured future and a new era of rage and violence. On December 22, 1984, in a graffiti-covered New York City subway car, passengers looked on in horror as a white loner named Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teens, Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, at point-blank range. He then disappeared into a dark tunnel. After an intense manhunt, and his eventual surrender in New Hampshire, the man the tabloid media had dubbed the “Death Wish Vigilante” would become a celebrity and a hero to countless ordinary Americans who had been frustrated with the economic fallout of the Reagan 80s. Overnight, Goetz's young victims would become villains. Out of this dramatic moment would emerge an angry nation, in which Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and later Fox News Network stoked the fear and the fury of a stunning number of Americans. Drawing from never-before-seen archival materials, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson narrates the Bernie Goetz Subway shootings and their decades-long reverberations, while deftly recovering the lives of the boys whom too many decided didn't matter. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and a searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history. Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ask an American intelligence officer to tell you when the country started doing modern intelligence and you will probably hear something about the Office of Strategic Services in World War II or the National Security Act of 1947 and the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency. What you almost certainly will not hear is anything about World War I.  In World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence (UP of Kansas, 2023), Mark Stout establishes that, in fact, World War I led to the realization that intelligence was indispensable in both wartime and peacetime. After a lengthy gestation that started in the late nineteenth century, and included important episode like the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Punitive Expedition in Mexico, modern American intelligence emerged during World War I. The War was foundational in the establishment of a self-conscious profession of intelligence. Virtually everything that followed was maturation, reorganization, reinvigoration, or reinvention.  World War I ushered in a period of rapid changes. Never again would the War Department be without an intelligence component. Never again would a senior American commander lead a force to war without intelligence personnel on their staff. Never again would the United States government be without a signals intelligence agency or aerial reconnaissance capability. Stout examines the breadth of American intelligence in the war, not just in France, not just at home, but around the world and across the army, navy, and State Department, and demonstrates how these far-flung efforts endured after the Armistice in 1918. For the first time, there came to be a group of intelligence practitioners who viewed themselves as different from other soldiers, sailors, and diplomats. Upon entering World War II, the United States had a solid foundation from which to expand to meet the needs of another global hot war and the Cold War that followed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Untangling the Political Roots of Immigration and Inequality in the United States (Routledge, 2026) examines the causes, consequences, and politics of mass migration and growing inequality by investigating the case of the United States – the quintessential immigrant nation. While scholars, policy makers, and advocates have put forth a variety of explanations, many misdiagnose the causes and put forward remedies that treat symptoms. This book looks to the root causes of mass migration and intensifying inequality, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin resulting from rapacious forms of capitalist accumulation and imperialist interventionism. Developing a broadly left analytic framework grounded in elements of Marxist theory and political science, two periods are examined – 1870–1925 and 1970–2025 – when the proportion of immigrants in the US peaked at 15% of the total population, the US experienced steep inequality and political polarization, immigration and inequality became contentious political issues that generated sharp conflict, and immigrants and workers organized mass movements that advanced radical politics and transformative change. This book contains a wealth of information and elevates valuable lessons for scholars, policy makers, and organizers interested in understanding these trends and forging equitable and just solutions today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Sincerely held religious belief" is now a common phrase in discussions of American religious freedom, from opinions handed down by the US Supreme Court to local controversies. The "sincerity test" of religious belief has become a cornerstone of US jurisprudence, framing what counts as legitimate grounds for First Amendment claims in the eyes of the law. In Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (U Chicago Press, 2022), Charles McCrary provides an original account of how sincerely held religious belief became the primary standard for determining what legally counts as authentic religion. McCrary skillfully traces the interlocking histories of American sincerity, religion, and secularism starting in the mid-nineteenth century. He analyzes a diverse archive, including Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man, vice-suppressing police, Spiritualist women accused of being fortune-tellers, eclectic conscientious objectors, secularization theorists, Black revolutionaries, and anti-LGBTQ litigants. Across this history, McCrary reveals how sincerity and sincerely held religious belief developed as technologies of secular governance, determining what does and doesn't entitle a person to receive protections from the state. This fresh analysis of secularism in the United States invites further reflection on the role of sincerity in public life and religious studies scholarship, asking why sincerity has come to matter so much in a supposedly "post-truth" era. Dr. Charles McCrary is a scholar of American religion, focusing on secularism, religious freedom, race, and science. His work has been published in academic journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion & American Culture, and Religion. He also has written for popular outlets such as Religion & Politics, The Revealer, and The New Republic, many of which are linked in the show notes of this episode. Before coming to ASU, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Read more by Charles McCrary: "The Supreme Court and the Strange Politics of the 'Sincere Believer,'" Religion & Politics, Apr. 2022 "The Antisocial Strain of Sincere Religious Beliefs Is on the Rise," The New Republic, Apr. 2022 "The Baffling Legal Standard Fueling Religious Objections to Vaccine Mandates," The New Republic, Sept. 2021 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 formally established the promotion of religious freedom as a U.S. foreign policy and national security priority. Tracing its origins and passage, Prioritizing Faith: International Religious Freedom and U.S. Foreign Policy (NYU Press, 2025) by Dr. Ashlyn Hand shows how the legislation was made possible by the convergence of growing evangelical and Jewish advocacy, the expanding international human rights movement, and a broader search for post–Cold War purpose. Yet implementation across administrations has been uneven, shaped by shifting geopolitical dynamics and internal institutional constraints.Relying on expert interviews and rich archival analysis, Dr. Hand traces how Clinton, Bush, and Obama each wove international religious freedom into their foreign policy visions while navigating competing priorities and evolving strategic interests. Through case studies in China, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia, Dr. Hand reveals the inner workings and persistent challenges of American religious freedom policy on the global stage.Timely, insightful, and deeply researched, Prioritizing Faith offers an incisive assessment of the United States' efforts to promote religious freedom abroad, highlighting the enduring tensions between normative aspirations and the complexities of foreign policy practice. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The first biography of the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism. A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre (AK Press, 2025) is a political biography of one of the most important revolutionary figures of the twentieth century in the United States. Martin Sostre (1923–2015) was a Black Puerto Rican from East Harlem who became a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, winning cases in the early 1960s that helped secure the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He opened one of the country's first radical Black bookstores and was scapegoated and framed by police and the FBI following the Buffalo rebellion of 1967. He was sentenced by an all-white jury to thirty-one to forty-one years. Throughout his nine-year imprisonment, Sostre transformed himself and the revolutionary movements he was a part of, eventually identifying as a revolutionary anarchist and laying the foundation for contemporary Black anarchism. During that time, he engaged in principled resistance to strip frisks for which he was beaten eleven times, raising awareness about the routinized sexual assault of imprisoned people. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre movement was one of the greatest and most improbable defense campaign victories of the Black Power era, alongside those to liberate Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Although Sostre receded from public view after his release in 1976, he lived another four decades of committed struggle as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey. Throughout his long life, Martin Sostre was a jailhouse lawyer, revolutionary bookseller, yogi, mentor and teacher, anti-rape organizer, housing justice activist, and original political thinker. The variety of strategies he used and terrains on which he struggled emphasize the necessity and possibility of multi-faceted and continuous struggle against all forms of oppression in pursuit of an egalitarian society founded on the principles of “maximum human freedom, spirituality, and love.” Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throughout US history, only three Black women—Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris—have given successfully recognized bids for the office of president of the United States. In A Black Woman for President: Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris(UP of Mississippi) author Dianna N. Watkins-Dickerson uses womanist rhetorical criticism to analyze the presidential announcement speeches of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, Ambassador Carol Moseley Braun, and then-Senator Kamala Harris. In close readings of each candidate's speeches, Watkins-Dickerson defines womanist rhetorical theory and its efficacy for researching Black female voices in the field of communication in general, and the presidential announcement speeches of Black women, specifically. Beginning with Shirley Chisholm's historic 1972 campaign as the first Black woman to run a viable campaign for the US presidency, the volume analyzes how Chisholm's speech set a precedent for future generations of Black women in politics by boldly asserting her right to lead, despite the multiple barriers of race and gender. The study then moves to Carol Moseley Braun's 2004 presidential announcement, exploring how Braun's speech navigated the intersections of identity, representation, and political ambition during a time when Black women in the Senate were still a rarity. Finally, the analysis culminates with Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential bid, focusing on how her rhetoric blended elements of Black feminist resistance and national unity in an era of heightened political and racial division. The volume highlights the ways in which Chisholm, Braun, and Harris drew upon their lived experiences and cultural legacies to construct powerful, transformative narratives and argues that their speeches not only expanded the boundaries of political discourse but also reimagined the possibilities for leadership in America. Ultimately, this study provides a rich, interdisciplinary framework for understanding how Black women have reshaped the political landscape through the power of their words. You can find Dianna N. Watkins Dickerson at her website, and on social platforms @drdwd. Find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But should there be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy? Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State (punctum books, 2024) brings together essays, poems, artwork, and memes—a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. Critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume closely examines and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power, aiming to trouble the liberal imaginaries that configure the political as a left-right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people—age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving. This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and also explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as experimental practices that open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices