New Books in Politics

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 opponent both of identity politics and also of a cosmpolitan universalism that is blind to all the differences (of race, gender, belief) that make us who though not what we are. Going back to one of the first pieces she published in English, a 1943 essay from Menorah called "We Refugees", he reflected on how amazingly Arendt was able to air her unease about militant Zionism at the same time she warned fellow arrivals in America from rushing to disguise their origins. Recall this Book 153 is simply John reading the article aloud. It is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and a read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here. Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Transcript of the interview Minna Salami is a writer, social critic, and thought leader on feminism, knowledge production, and the aesthetics and structures of power. She formerly served as Programme Chair and Senior Fellow at THE NEW INSTITUTE, where she led the Black Feminism and the Polycrisis programme. Her work sits at the intersection of ideas, culture, and systems thinking, with a commitment to making complex theories accessible through books, essays, public speaking, and creative projects. She is the author of Can Feminism Be African? (Harper Collins, 2025) and Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Bloomsbury, 2020), which has been translated into multiple languages. Her writing also appears in numerous anthologies and educational publications exploring feminism, African philosophy, media, and cultural criticism. Her work has featured in The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Ideas Letter, Project Syndicate, and The Philosopher, and she has delivered talks at global institutions including TEDx, the Institute of Arts and Ideas, the European Commission, the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, Yale, and Singularity University at NASA. Salami was the creative director of the short film Black Feminism and the Polycrisis, which won the Silver Award for Public Service and Activism at the 2024 Lovie Awards. From 2019 to 2022, she co-directed Activate, an intersectional feminist movement that supported minoritised women in politics and community organising through visibility campaigns, mentoring, and fundraising. The initiative played a key role in shifting narratives and resources toward a more inclusive political landscape in the UK. She has also worked as a Research Associate and Editor at Perspectiva, advised governments on gender equality, developed national school curricula, and curated cultural events at institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Her blog, MsAfropolitan, launched in 2010, has reached over a million readers and remains a platform for exploring feminist and African-centred approaches to contemporary life. Salami is a Full Member of the Club of Rome, a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader, and serves on the advisory boards of the African Feminist Initiative at Penn State University and Public Humanities at Cambridge University Press, as well as the council of the British Royal Institute of Philosophy. Links to References:Apart Together – essay on Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire's radical vision for the world Africa's Populist Trap for The Ideas Letter The Niger River and the Dearth of History: Deconstructing the Myths of Mungo Park by Ezenwa E. Olumba Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 book, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2020). Bullshit is a feature of both democracies and dictatorships alike, but it takes different forms. In democracies, while citizens enjoy the freedom of speech and the right to vote, a range of forces often conspire to limit their real power in favor of competing elites. The political and economic elite's toolkit includes the art of bullshit—the persuasive use of language without regard for truth. Whether meritocratic or populist, elites alike have mastered this form of manipulation, amplified by modern tools of dissemination and authority. To help us understand the challenges that bullshit poses to democratic citizens, I'm pleased to welcome Hélène Landemore. Hélène Landemore is a professor of political science at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In this special livestream edition of Peoples & Things, host Lee Vinsel and very special guest host, danah boyd, formerly of Microsoft Research, presently Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University, chat with writer and activist, Cory Doctorow, about his new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. The book tracks how and why companies degrade their digital platforms and products and argues especially for the role that monopoly power plays in this phenomenon. Vinsel, boyd, and Doctorow talk about many different dimensions of these processes and go down various joyful rabbitholes, too, including our present AI bubble. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century, (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games—what Caroline Jack calls “sponsored economic education media.” These items, which were funded by corporations and trade groups who aimed to “sell America to Americans,”found their way into communities, classrooms, and workplaces, and onto the airwaves, where they promoted ideals of “free enterprise” under the cloaks of public service and civic education. They offered an idealized vision of US industrial development as a source of patriotic optimism, framed business management imperatives as economic principles, and conflated the privileges granted to corporations by the law with foundational political rights held by individuals. This rhetoric remains dominant—a harbinger of the power of disinformation that so besets us today. Jack reveals the funding, production, and distribution that together entrenched a particular vision of corporate responsibility—and, in the process, shut out other hierarchies of value and common care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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, and honorary degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and more than fifty other universities, and elected not only to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters but the Royal Society and the British Academy; a public servant, who served as Chair of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors and Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank, headed international commissions for the UN and France, and was awarded the French Legion of Honor and Australia's Sydney Peace Prize; a public intellectual whose numerous books on vital topics have been best sellers.What brought him to economics were his concerns about the inequality and discrimination he saw growing up. Wanting to understand what drives it and what can be done about it has been his lifelong passion. This book gathers together and extends to new frontiers this lifelong work, drawing upon the challenges and insights of each of these phases of his career.In a still very widely cited paper written fifty years ago, Stiglitz set forth the fundamental framework for analyzing intergenerational transfer of wealth and advantage, which plays a central role in persistent inequality. That and subsequent work, developed most fully here for the first time, described today's inequality as a result of centrifugal forces increasing inequality and centripetal forces reducing it. In recent decades, the centrifugal forces have strengthened, the centripetal forces weakened. His general theory provides a framework for understanding the marked growth in inequality in recent decades, and for devising policies to reduce it.A central message is that ever-increasing inequality is not inevitable. Inequality is, in a fundamental sense, a choice. Stiglitz explains that inequality does not largely arise from differences in savings rates between capitalists and others, though that may play a role (as Piketty, Marx, and Kaldor suggest); but rather, it originates importantly from the rules of the game, which have weakened the bargaining power of workers as they have increased the market power of corporations. He also explains how monetary authorities have contributed to increasing wealth inequality, and how, unless something is done about it, likely changes in technology such as AI and robotization will make matters worse. He describes policies that can simultaneously reduce inequality and improve economic performance. Joseph E. Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University.  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. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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, Diggs, Michigan's first Black member of Congress, was the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till's killers, worked behind the scenes with Martin Luther King Jr., and founded the Congressional Black Caucus. He was also the chief architect of legislation that restored home rule to Washington, DC, and almost single-handedly ignited the American anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s. Drawing on extensive archival research, including Diggs's rarely seen personal papers, FBI documents, and original interviews with family members and political associates, political scientist Dr. Marion Orr reveals that Diggs practiced a politics of strategic moderation. Dr. Orr argues that this quiet approach was more effective than the militant race politics practiced by Adam Clayton Powell and more appealing than the conservative Chicago-style approach of William Dawson—two of Diggs's better-known Black contemporaries. Vividly written and deeply researched, House of Diggs is the first biography of Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr., one of the most consequential Black federal legislators in US history. Congressman Diggs was a legislative lion whose unfortunate downfall punctuated his distinguished career and pushed him and his historic accomplishments out of sight. Now, for the first time, House of Diggs restores him to his much-deserved place in the history of American politics. Our guest is: Dr. Marion Orr, who is the inaugural Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies at Brown University. He specializes in urban politics, race and ethnic politics, and African-American politics. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who produces the Academic Life podcast. She is a dissertation and grad student coach, and a developmental editor for humanities scholars at all stages of their careers. She writes the Academic Life Newsletter at ChristinaGessler.Substack.Com. Playlist for listeners: The End of White Politics The Vice-President's Black Wife No Common Ground The Social Constructions of Race Smithsonian American Women The First and Last King of Haiti Of Bears and Ballots Never Caught Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And get free bonus content HERE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Complex systems seem to magically emerge from the interactions of their parts. A whirlpool emerges from water molecules. A living cell from organic molecules. You emerge from the cells of your body. Not since chaos has a concept from physics spread like wildfire to other disciplines. Emergence can be found from chemistry to economics; from psychology to ecology. At its heart is the alluring idea that there's more to the world than physics, that there is a holistic component to nature, an edge of mystery. "Physics Fixes All the Facts" starts by taking you on a tour through a fascinating world of complexity, exploring phenomena from the inside of an atomic nucleus to bacterial behaviour to the ability of your thoughts to affect the world. These examples are used along with a thorough exploration of the philosophical literature to untangle the notoriously poorly defined concept of emergence. This reveals something surprising: the term emergence is redundant. In its weak form it is so weak that it applies to everything. In its strong form it is so restrictive that it is like the belief that there are pixies in your garden, impossible to exclude but not worth spending your time on. Emergence either applies to all systems or to none. Rather than telling us something about the nature of the world, it is an illusion, an artefact of our cognitive limitations. The past decade has seen a dozen or so monographs and collections about emergence, almost all resolutely supportive of the concept. This book aims to redress the balance. But it is more than just a campaign against the idea of emergence. Graham presents a framework called Austere Physicalism and argues that it is the only coherent way to view the world. He uses this framework to reinterpret so-called emergent phenomena and investigates its wider implications for science. In this radically materialist view, we are nothing but physical systems among others. "Physics Fixes All the Facts" ends by exploring what this means for our sense of free will and consciousness. The book will appeal to academics in fields which use the concepts of complexity or emergence. Scientists and philosophers alike will find unexpected and exciting ideas in these pages. But the target audience is much broader including students who want to add context to their studies and the intellectually curious with some scientific background. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Antiabortion stories, images, and policies have primed Americans to embrace attitudes and politics once deemed extreme. Abroad, US antiabortion tactics, personnel, and funds have contributed to a global rise of the Right.From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary (University of California Press, 2025) is a scholar's story of why and how abortion foes join other militants in waging war against the federal government. Reflecting on her thirty years of analyzing the intersections of race, reproduction, and right-wing movements, Carol Mason examines primary antiabortion sources that influenced political currents of the last fifty years. From Cold War conspiracism and apocalyptic fundamentalism to anti-statist terrorism, Tea Party populism, and MAGA insurrection, opposing abortion has come to imperil democracy worldwide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 troubling history of how science and public health have been manipulated to serve the interests of power. Moving from the U.S.–Mexico border to Pakistan, from the Tuskegee syphilis trials to COVID-19 vaccine disinformation campaigns, the book traces a pattern in which infection becomes a weapon of exclusion, exploitation, and control. With clarity and urgency, Zaman demonstrates that the problem lies not in science itself, but in the ways it can be co-opted to marginalize, stigmatize, and even endanger the very people it is meant to protect. At once historical and contemporary, Infected is a searing call to recognize the ethical stakes of global health, and to build systems that resist the misuse of knowledge against those who can least afford its betrayal. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Professor Muhammad H. Zaman to discuss how power, politics, and privilege use science against the world's most vulnerable. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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? In this clear and comprehensive account of why and how the police—the linchpin of capitalism—function and exist, organizer and author brian bean presents a clear case for the abolition of policing and capitalism. Their End Is Our Beginning traces the roots and development of policing in global capitalism through colonial rule, racist enslavement, and class oppression, along the way arguing how police power can be challenged and, ultimately, abolished. bean draws from extensive interviews with activists from Mexico to Ireland to Egypt, all of whom share compelling and knowledgeable perspectives on what it takes to—even if temporarily—take down the cops and build a thriving community-organized society, free from the police. The lessons they offer bring nuance to the meaning of “solidarity” and clarity to what “abolition” and “revolution” look like in practice. Featuring illustrations by Chicago-based artist Charlie Aleck, Their End Is Our Beginning is an incendiary book that offers a socialist analysis of policing and the capitalist state, a vital discussion of the contours of abolition at large, and the revolutionary logic needed for liberation. Guest: brian bean is a Chicago-based socialist organizer, writer, and agitator originally from North Carolina. They are one of the founding editors of Rampant magazine. Their work has been published in Truthout, Jacobin, Tempest, Spectre, Red Flag, New Politics, Socialist Worker, International Viewpoint, and more. In addition to Their End Is Our Beginning, brian coedited and contributed to the book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, also published by Haymarket Books. Host: Michael Stauch (he/him) 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

While decolonization liberated territories, it left the root causes of historical injustice unaddressed. Governance change did not address past wrongs and transferred injustice through political and financial architectures. In Calibrating Colonial Crime: Reparations and The Crime of Unjust Enrichment (Bristol University Press/Policy Press, 2024) Dr. Joshua Castellino presents a five-point plan aimed at system redress through reparations that addresses the colonially induced climate crisis through equitable and sustainable means. In highlighting the structural legacy of colonial crimes, Dr. Castellino provides insights into the complexities of contemporary societies, showing how legal frameworks could foster a fairer, more just world. 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries. The passage of the Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 expedited the entry of foreign medical graduates (FMGs) from postcolonial South Asia and sent them to provide care in shortage areas throughout the United States. Although this arrangement was conceived as temporary, over the decades it has become a permanent fixture of the medical system, with FMGs comprising at least a quarter of the physician labor force since the act became law. This cohort of practitioners has not been extensively studied, rendering the impacts of immigration and foreign policy on the everyday mechanics of US health care obscure. In The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare, Dr. Alam foregrounds global dynamics embedded in the medical system to ask how and why Asian physicians—and especially practitioners from South Asia—have become integral to US medical practice and ubiquitous in the US public imaginary. Drawing on transcripts of congressional hearings; medical, scientific, and social scientific literature; ethnographies; oral histories; and popular media, Dr. Alam explores the enduring consequences of postcolonial physician migration. Combining theoretical and methodological insights from a range of disciplines, this book analyzes both the care provided by immigrant physicians as well as the care extended to them as foreigners. Our guest is: Dr. Eram Alam, who specializes in the history of medicine, with a particular emphasis on globalization, race, migration, and health during the twentieth century. She is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. She received her PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and holds a BA and BS from Northwestern University and a MA from the University of Chicago. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a developmental editor, and the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She writes the show's newsletter at ChristinaGessler.Substack.com Listeners may enjoy this playlist: Where Is Home? Immigration Realities Secret Harvests Who Gets Believed The House on Henry Street Womanist Bioethics Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by sharing episodes, or by donating here. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

A series of market-related crises over the past two decades – financial, environmental, health, education, poverty – reinvigorated the debate about markets and social justice. Since then, counter-hegemonic movements all over the globe are attempting to redefine markets and the meaning of economic enterprise in people's daily lives. Assessments of market outcomes tend toward the polemical, with capitalists and socialists, globalization advocates and anti-globalization movements, those on the political right and those on the left, all facing off to argue the benefits or harms brought about by markets. Yet not enough attention has been paid to analyzing the conditions under which markets result in just outcomes.  Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures (Routledge, 2020) explores how culture, politics, and ideology help shape market incentives in an attempt to reclaim the language of economic rationality and the policymaking legitimacy that accompanies it. Through a variety of case studies – labor relations in the U.S. meatpacking industry, the globalization process in Juaìrez, Mexico, financial reform in Cuba, and an interfaith Ugandan coffee cooperative – this book provides a framework for understanding the conditions under which markets promote just or unjust outcomes (e.g., discrimination, income inequality, environmental degradation, or racial justice, human rights, and equitable growth).  This book touches on subject matter as varied as food, religion, banking, and race and gender equality, from a multi-disciplinary perspective. It offers an analysis of markets based on community rather than pure individualism that has the potential to change the way we think about economic rationality. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars in political science, economics, sociology, geography, gender studies, critical race studies, environmental studies, and all those interested in the critique of mainstream economics and neoliberal logic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 the Iraq war demonstrations to the recent protests after the events of October 7th 2023. This conversation extended into the nature of colonial projects of occupation and the role coloniality still plays in conflicts today. Hatem Bazian is a Palestinian scholar in the Departments of Near Eastern and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at the University of California Berkley. He is also editor in chief of the Islamophobia Studies journal and president of the International Islamophobia Studies Research Association. He has been active in the struggle for Palestinian liberation at least since the 1990s when he founded the first chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Berkeley. Ismail Patel is the founder of the Friends of Al Aqsa, an UK based NGO which organises politically for the liberation of Palestine. The Friends of Al Aqsa work with MPs, grassroots organisers and educators to advocate for political change and organise events including the Palestine Expo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 Esam Boraey bring together leading scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to explore the challenges and possibilities facing democracy around the world. Produced by Cornell's Center on Global Democracy, Democratic Dialogues bridges academic research with real-world debates — from democratic backsliding and authoritarian resurgence to civic resistance, renewal, and reform. We look at new books, groundbreaking articles, and the ideas reshaping how we understand and practice democracy today. Listen on YouTube, NBN, or wherever you get your podcasts. Episode 1 Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries This week, we feature an episode with Kenneth Roberts, Jennifer McCoy, and Murat Somer, joining co-hosts Rachel Riedl and Esam Boraey to discuss their collaborative article, “Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries,” recently published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Together, they unpack how democracies don't collapse overnight, but instead erode through different pathways — from executive aggrandizement to elite collusion — and how societies can resist or even partially recover. The conversation examines how these dynamics unfold in contexts as varied as Latin America, Turkey, Hungary, and the United States, and what practical lessons citizens and policymakers can draw today. This is an essential conversation for understanding how democracies falter, and how collective action, civic mobilization, and institutional renewal can push them back from the brink. Books, Links, & Articles “Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2025) Jennifer McCoy & Murat Somer, Pernicious Polarization and Its Global Impact Kenneth Roberts, Populism, Political Mobilization, and the Latin American Left Rachel Beatty Riedl, Authoritarian Origins of Democratic Institutions in Africa Upcoming Episodes Our next episode features Susan C. Stokes (University of Chicago) discussing her book The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies. Stay tuned for an in-depth conversation on why democratic leaders sometimes turn against the institutions that empower them — and what can be done to safeguard democracy in an era of uncertainty. Subscribe and follow us on YouTube and social media for new releases every month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 confronting the impoverished ethical quality of life we face under capitalism. Interpreting Marx anew as an ethical thinker, Absolute Ethical Life provides crucial resources for understanding how freedom and rational agency are impacted by a social world formed by value under capitalism, with consequences for philosophy today. Michael Lazarus situates Marx within a shared tradition of ethical inquiry, placing him in close dialogue with Aristotle and Hegel. Lazarus traces the ethical and political dimensions of Marx's work missed by Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, two of the most profound critics of modern politics and ethics. Ultimately, the book claims that Marx's value-form theory is both a continuation of Aristotelian and Hegelian themes and at the same time his most distinctive theoretical achievement. In this normative interpretation of Marx, Lazarus integrates recent moral philosophy with a historically specific analysis of capitalism as a social form of life. He challenges contemporary political and economic theory to insist that any conception of modern life needs to account for capitalism. With a robust critique of capitalism derived from the determinations of what Marx calls the "form of value," Lazarus argues for an ethical life beyond capital. Michael Lazarus is a Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Political Economy. Before coming to King's College London, he was Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute and a visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 misinformation. Everywhere it will be used, it will create risks and opportunities to shake up long-standing power structures.In this highly readable and advisedly optimistic book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (MIT Press, 2025), security technologist Bruce Schneier and data scientist Nathan Sanders cut through the AI hype and examine the myriad ways that AI is transforming every aspect of democracy—for both good and ill.The authors describe how the sophistication of AI will fulfill demands from lawmakers for more complex legislation, reducing deference to the executive branch and altering the balance of power between lawmakers and administrators. They show how the scale and scope of AI is enhancing civil servants' ability to shape private-sector behavior, automating either the enforcement or neglect of industry regulations. They also explain how both lawyers and judges will leverage the speed of AI, upending how we think about law enforcement, litigation, and dispute resolution.Whether these outcomes enhance or degrade democracy depends on how we shape the development and use of AI technologies. Powerful players in private industry and public life are already using AI to increase their influence, and AIs built by corporations don't deliver the fairness and trust required by democratic governance. But, steered in the right direction, AI's broad capabilities can augment democratic processes and help citizens build consensus, express their voice, and shake up long-standing power structures.Democracy is facing new challenges worldwide, and AI has become a part of that. It can inform, empower, and engage citizens. It can also disinform, disempower, and disengage them. The choice is up to us. Schneier and Sanders blaze the path forward, showing us how we can use AI to make democracy stronger and more participatory. Nathan E. Sanders is a data scientist focused on making policymaking more participatory. His research spans machine learning, astrophysics, public health, environmental justice, and more. He has served in fellowships at the Massachusetts legislature and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 Action (2019)​, published as part of the Historical Materialism book series from Brill and Haymarket books. The book takes on the theories of Marx and Gramsci to develop a philosophical triad of subalternity-antagonism-autonomy as a way of studying political subjectification under oppressive conditions and the potential for resistance. The book then looks at political developments in South and Latin America, trying to understand the underlying dynamics of both where it's coming from, and what its possibilities are for anticapitalist resistance. Massimo Modonesi is professor and chair of the Political and Social Sciences Faculty at the Autonomous National University in Mexico, and is the author of numerous books on political theory and history in Latin America, his most recent in English being ​Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy: Constructing the Political Subject.​ He is a member of the coordinating committee of the International Gramsci Society. Maria Vignau served as a research assistant under Modonesi, and now teaches while working on her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 environmentally alike. Each has a distinct, quantifiable climate impact. While all oils and gases pollute, some are much worse for the climate than others. In clear, accessible language, Gordon explains the results of the Oil Climate Index Plus Gas (OCI+), an innovative, open-source model that estimates global oil and gas emissions. Gordon identifies the oils and gases from every region of the globe–– along with the specific production, processing, and refining activities–– that are the most harmful to the planet, and proposes innovative solutions to reduce their climate footprints. Global climate stabilization cannot afford to wait for oil and gas to run out. No Standard Oil shows how we can take immediate, practical steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the crucial oil and gas sector while making sustainable progress in transitioning to a carbon-free energy future. Deborah Gordon is a senior principal in the Climate Intelligence Program at RMI where she leads the Oil and Gas Solutions Initiative. Gordon also serves as a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and the principal investigator for the Oil Climate Project. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Animals are staging a revolution—they're just not telling us. From radioactive boar invading towns to jellyfish disarming battleships, Animal Revolution (U Minnesota Press, 2022) threads together news accounts and more in a powerful and timely work of creative, speculative nonfiction that imagines a revolution stirring and asks how humans can be a part of it. If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we should pay attention to how we bump up against animal worlds and how animals will push back. Animal Revolution is a passionate, provocative, cogent call for us to do so. Ron Broglio reveals how fur and claw and feather and fin are jamming the gears of our social machine. We can try to frame such disruptions as environmental intervention or through the lens of philosophy or biopolitics, but regardless the animals persist beyond our comprehension in reminding us that we too are part of an animal world. Animals see our technologies and machines as invasive beings and, in a nonlinguistic but nonetheless intensive mode of communicating with us, resist our attempts to control them and diminish their habitats. In doing so, they expose the environmental injustices and vulnerabilities in our systems. A witty, informative, and captivating work—at the juncture of posthumanism, animal studies, phenomenology, and environmental studies—Broglio reminds us of our inadequacy as humans, not our exceptionalism. Ron Broglio is professor of English, director of Desert Humanities, and associate director of the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University. He is author or editor of several books, including Beasts of Burden: Biopolitics, Labor, and Animal Life and Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art. Callie Smith is a poet and a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Freedom is often considered the cornerstone of the American political project. The 1776 revolutionaries declared it an inalienable right that could neither be taken nor granted, a sacred concept upon which the nation was established. The concept and actualization of freedom are also to be defended by the state. However, when such a concept has been arrogated, litigated, and delegitimized by a state that ignores its very definition, the concept of freedom comes under critical examination. Political theorist Elisabeth R. Anker, Associate Professor of American Studies and Political Science at George Washington University, has a new book dissecting the core of this conception of freedom. Ugly Freedoms (Duke UP, 2022) explores who defined and continues to define freedom, she also examines freedom's rhetorical capacity, and thus its potential for weaponization. Anker illuminates how the tainted gestation of freedom birthed a status quo based on the individualistic and conditional conception of ‘freedom' that has long been tangoing with white supremacy, colonialism, climate destruction, capitalism, and exploitation. Such a dance is by design and has been constant throughout U.S. history. Anker establishes that for democratic government to take hold in the United States, racial domination and violence transpired, limiting the freedoms of some individuals in order to establish a governmental system that is based, in theory, on protecting liberty and freedom. This is the kind of tension that Anker explains as “ugly freedom.” Thus, American freedom, our freedom, has embedded in it the role of colonialism, imperialism, enslavement, and land theft. The shocking stains of slavery produced freedom of prosperity and leisure for white people through direct dehumanization of Black and Brown people—this is what Anker is talking about within the concept of ugly freedom. This has also been manifested through more contemporary rhetoric regarding imperial wars like those in the Philippines, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, destroying infrastructure and lives in those countries for the capital prosperity of the imperial core. These ugly freedoms legitimize the economic exploitation of the masses in the name of individual success for the few. Thus, ugly freedom examines the acts of freedom that rely on violence and brutality—this challenges how we often imagine freedom to be. Ugly Freedom explores the connection between politics and aesthetics as well, taking up an array of historical events, political theories and concepts, different forms of art, televisual productions, poetry, music, and biology to illustrate the compounding violence of the few in the name of freedom. The cultural artifacts interrogated were controversial in their own right, and Anker explores them to help understand which kinds of freedom are worth fighting for and which kinds of freedom must be fought against. Through a critical lens, Anker shifts the perception of freedom to help restore justice to its foundational value—one that is less dependent on the individual or individual heroics, and more enveloping of the community and shared collaboration. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 Antiquity to Today (Princeton University Press, 2020) draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer--democratic practices were present in many places, at many other times, from the Americas before European conquest, to ancient Mesopotamia, to precolonial Africa. Delving into the prevalence of early democracy throughout the world, David Stasavage makes the case that understanding how and where these democracies flourished--and when and why they declined--can provide crucial information not just about the history of governance, but also about the ways modern democracies work and where they could manifest in the future. Drawing from examples spanning several millennia, Stasavage first considers why states developed either democratic or autocratic styles of governance and argues that early democracy tended to develop in small places with a weak state and, counterintuitively, simple technologies. When central state institutions (such as a tax bureaucracy) were absent--as in medieval Europe--rulers needed consent from their populace to govern. When central institutions were strong--as in China or the Middle East--consent was less necessary and autocracy more likely. He then explores the transition from early to modern democracy, which first took shape in England and then the United States, illustrating that modern democracy arose as an effort to combine popular control with a strong state over a large territory. Democracy has been an experiment that has unfolded over time and across the world--and its transformation is ongoing. Amidst rising democratic anxieties, The Decline and Rise of Democracy widens the historical lens on the growth of political institutions and offers surprising lessons for all who care about governance. David Stasavage is dean for the social sciences and Julius Silver Professor of Politics at New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 in organized protest throughout the 1840s to contest monopoly ownership of the land they worked. Arguing their cause in newspapers, on broadsides, and at rallies, their aspirations also took shape in poetry and song. More than twenty sets of lyrics (and one instrumental composition) were written at various stages of the conflict. Some of their musical sources, such as "Old Dan Tucker" and "Bruce's Address," are still well known. Each fully contextualized song offers insight into the role vernacular music played in one of the nineteenth century's major social reform movements. Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York: Including Twenty-Two New Settings of Period Tunes (SUNY Press, 2025) by Dr. Nancy Newman is the first book to gather the poetry and corresponding tunes into one publication (you can find recordings of some of the songs here). It provides detailed analysis of the repertory, followed by new musical scores of the songs, reconstructed from contemporary historical sources for study and performance. It also examines the movement's later dramatization in novels, film, and public commemorations as successive generations grapple with its meaning. 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In this episode, we speak with Hamid Dabashi about his new book, After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization (Haymarket, 2025), published by Haymarket Books. Written amid the ongoing war in Gaza, the book confronts what Dabashi describes as the moral and philosophical crisis of the modern West. After Savagery challenges long-standing traditions of Western thought, arguing that their universal claims often conceal a history of exclusion and erasure. Dabashi calls for readers to reckon with the intellectual foundations that have shaped contemporary understandings of humanity, violence, and colonialism. At the same time, he finds hope in art, literature, and film — works that, in his view, keep alive the possibility of a shared and liberated imagination. For Dabashi, Palestine becomes both a specific struggle and a universal metaphor for resistance and renewal.Joe WilliamsHistory PhD researcher at the University of Coimbra and translator website- Censorship and Sacralisation of Politics in the Portuguese Press during the Spanish Civil War- "Year X of the National Revolution" — Salazarist Palingenetic Myth in the Diário da Manhã Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 Associate Lecturer at Arts University Bournemouth explores this question using a series of literary and media case studies. Drawing on Bakhtin's theories of the carnivalesque, the book assesses the possibilities of media texts, including histories, literature, films and sitcoms, to offer alternative visions of work. More critically, the analysis highlights media's role in reinforcing exploitation and alienation within its seemingly playful and positive engagements with work. Theoretically rich, but accessible for the general reader, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding how media shapes our understanding of work today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 on, it's that everyone hates white liberals. Conservatives hate them for being culturally tolerant and threatening to usher in communism. Libertarians hate them for believing in the power of the state. Socialists hate them for serving as capitalism's beard. Even liberals hate liberals—either because they can't manage to overcome their own prejudices, or precisely because they're so self-hating.This is the starting point for Kevin M. Schultz's lively new history of white liberals in the United States. He efficiently lays out the array of objections to liberals—ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian, and more—in a historical frame that shows how protean the concept has been throughout the past hundred years. It turns out, he declares, that how you define a “white liberal” is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing your own anxieties.Sharply assessing how decades of attacks on liberals and liberalism have steadily hollowed out the center of American political life, Schultz also explains precisely what needs to be done to avoid digging ourselves even further into the hole of polarization. The ultimate goal, he argues, is to achieve political fragmentation that will fuel the rise of a true multiparty system, where ideology will matter more, not less.With a tight command of postwar American history and a spirited voice, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A Critical History (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand—and envision a way forward in—the complicated landscape of American politics. Kevin M. Schultz is professor and chair of history at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). He is the author of Buckley and Mailer and Tri-Faith America. 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 debates but provokes more questions. We have lost our way, it seems, since people on all sides invoke free speech and then try to silence those they disagree with. Historian Fara Dabhoiwala of Princeton University reminds us that free speech has always been contested, and that it became a political and social value only recently. We invited him to discuss his new book What Is Free Speech?: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Dabhoiwala examines how free speech started as a risky and radical concept, and how it evolved through centuries of political battles to become central to democracy only at a certain point in history. As Professor Dabhoiwala explains, speech rights have come and gone long before campus protests, debates over what talk show hosts can say, and whether there ought to be limits to speech that's defined as dangerous, offensive, or unpatriotic. If we hope to find a way out of our current predicament, we should study this history carefully – with Professor Dahhoiwala as the perfect guide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century, economist and bestselling author Richard Duncan lays out a farsighted strategy to maximize the United States' unmatched financial and technological potential. In compelling fashion, the author shows that the United States can and should invest in the industries and technologies of the future on an unprecedented scale in order to ignite a new technological revolution that would cement the country's geopolitical preeminence, greatly enhance human wellbeing, and create unimaginable wealth. This book also features a history of the Federal Reserve. Richard Duncan has served as Global Head of Investment Strategy at ABN AMRO Asset Management in London, worked as a financial sector specialist for the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and headed equity research departments for James Capel Securities and Salomon Brothers in Bangkok, Thailand. He is now the publisher of Macro Watch, a video-newsletter that analyzes the forces driving the global economy in the 21st Century. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 We the Men. A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential voices have ignored women's struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decision making, and everyday life, prominent Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.Professor Jill Elaine Hasday's We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2025) is the first book to explore how forgetting women's struggles for equality—and forgetting the work America still has to do—perpetuates injustice, promotes complacency, and denies how generations of women have had to come together to fight for reform and against regression. Professor Hasday argues that remembering women's stories more often and more accurately can help the nation advance toward sex equality. These stories highlight the persistence of women's inequality and make clear that real progress has always required women to disrupt the status quo, demand change, and duel with determined opponents.America needs more conflict over women's status rather than less. Conflict has the power to generate forward momentum. Patiently awaiting men's spontaneous enlightenment does not. Transforming America's dominant stories about itself can reorient our understanding of how women's progress takes place, focus our attention on the battles that are still unwon, and fortify our determination to push for a more equal future. 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 both the political left and right. At a time when conformist pressures threaten viewpoint diversity, and when political attacks on free expression are mounting, this book is a valuable resource for all who seek to understand and defend the right that is central to both individual liberty and our democratic self-government. This concise volume is organized around 10 claims that proponents of speech restrictions regularly assert, such as: “words are violence,” “free speech is right-wing,” and “hate speech isn't free speech.” In lively, clear, and persuasive prose, the authors examine the flaws in these pro-censorship assertions. The book also includes an insightful introduction by Jacob Mchangama, shedding additional light on the topic from historical and international perspectives. Greg Lukianoff is an attorney, New York Times best-selling author, and the President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Nadine Strossen is the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and was the national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. She is a Senior Fellow at FIRE and serves on the advisory boards of the ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, and National Coalition Against Censorship. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

A practical call to action against oppression. Across the globe, millions of people have participated in protests and marches, donated to political groups, or lobbied their representatives with the aim of creating lasting social change, overturning repressive laws, or limiting environmental destruction. Yet very little seems to improve for those affected by rapacious governments. Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail (U Minnesota Press, 2025) brings new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have found success by unconventional, and more direct, means. Sasha Davis, an activist and scholar of radical environmental advocacy, focuses on the strategies of movements, many of them Indigenous, that have occupied contested sites and demonstrated their effectiveness at managing or governing them. Including case studies of resistance to development on Indigenous lands in Hawai'i, nuclear testing in the Nevada desert, and the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa, he offers insight and direction for activists, students, academics, and others dedicated to protecting and improving the well-being of their communities and beyond. It would be easy to succumb to pessimism and political apathy in the face of governing institutions that are increasingly unresponsive to calls for change and repressive in response to protest, even as they violate human rights, ignore existential climate catastrophes, and concentrate power into fewer and fewer hands. Instead, Davis finds inspiration for genuine political change through social movements that are successfully "replacing the state" and taking over the day-to-day governance of threatened places. From contesting environmental abuse to reasserting Indigenous sovereignty, these social movements demonstrate how people can collectively wrest control over their communities from oppressive governments and manage them with a more egalitarian ethics of care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 bought the book as soon as it came out. The second non-fiction book I ever bought in English. The book was riveting. It kickstarted my interest in the CIA and covert operations. Now, Tim Weiner has published a sequel to Legacy of Ashes. His new book is called The Mission: the CIA in the 21st Century (Mariner Books, 2025). It is a gripping and revelatory history of the from the late 1990s to the present. It ranges from 9/11 through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to today's battles with Russia and China--and with the President of the United States.  At the turn of the century, the Central Intelligence Agency was in crisis. The end of the Cold War had robbed the agency of its mission. More than thirty overseas stations and bases had been shuttered, and scores that remained had been severely cut back. Many countries where surveillance was once deemed crucial went uncovered. Essential intelligence wasn't being collected. At the dawn of the information age, the CIA's officers and analysts worked with outmoded technology, struggling to distinguish the clear signals of significant facts from the cacophony of background noise.  Then came September 11th, 2001. After the attacks, the CIA transformed itself into a lethal paramilitary force, running secret prisons and brutal interrogations, mounting deadly drone attacks, and all but abandoning its core missions of espionage and counterespionage. The consequences were grave: the deaths of scores of its recruited foreign agents, the theft of its personnel files by Chinese spies, the penetration of its computer networks by Russian intelligence and American hackers, and the tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq. A new generation of spies now must fight the hardest targets--Moscow, Beijing, Tehran--while confronting a president who has attacked the CIA as a subversive force.  The book reveals how the agency fought to rebuild the espionage powers it lost during the war on terror--and finally succeeded in penetrating the Kremlin. The key message of the book is that the CIA must reclaim its original mission: know thy enemies. This is made even more difficult by the attacks on the intelligence community deployed by the second Trump presidency, from unqualified senior officials to loyalty tests. The fate of the free world hangs in the balance. The Mission includes exclusive on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors, the top spymaster, thirteen station chiefs, and scores of top operations officers who served undercover for decades and have never spoken to a journalist before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 with autocratic leaders. Yet women's strategizing, management, and sustained work were integral to movement organizations' functioning, and female advocates of cultural nationalism often exhibited a unique service-oriented, collaborative leadership style.Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership (New York University Press, 2025) documents a variety of women Pan-African nationalists' experiences, considering the ways they produced a distinctive kind of leadership through their devotion and service to the struggle for freedom and equality. Relying on oral histories, textual archival material, and scholarly literature, this book delves into women's organizing and resistance efforts, investigating how they challenged the one-dimensional notions of gender roles within cultural nationalist organizations. Revealing a form of Black Power leadership that has never been highlighted, author Kenja McCray explores how women articulated and used their power to transform themselves and their environments. Through her examination, McCray argues that women's Pan-Africanist cultural nationalist activism embodied a work-centered, people-centered, and African-centered form of service leadership. A dynamic and fascinating narrative of African American women activists, Essential Soldiers provides a new vantage point for considering Black Power leadership legacies. This episode includes a reference to the book Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores by Katie Mitchell (Random House, 2025). Listen to Mitchell discuss her book at New Books in African American Studies, hosted by N'Kosi Oates. Dr. Kenja McCray is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Clayton State University and coauthor of Atlanta Metropolitan State College: A Campus History (Arcadia Publishing, 2023). You can find Dr. McCray at her website, on Facebook, and on Instagram. Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Dr. McCray continued their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Nicholas Jacobs (Colby College) and Sidney Milkis (University of Virginia) have a new book, Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism (UP of Kansas, 2025), focusing on the idea of presidentialism, which is a way to think of political systems that include a dominant president or executive. In the United States, with the original constitutional system of separate co-equal branches of government, presidentialism disrupts the structure that was initially constructed under the U.S. Constitution. Over the course of more than two centuries, the United States has contended with the waxing and waning of presidential power within the multi-branch system. But Jacobs and Milkis maintain that since the 1990s we have seen an expansion of presidentialism, with a collective tendency to invest greater responsibilities and power in the presidential office itself as well as in the person who is serving in that capacity. Part of this thesis is also about how different, competing forces and ideologies have pushed for the use of presidential power to solve cultural struggles, which are not necessarily the institutional or structural role of the presidency. While the growth of American presidentialism may be more contemporary, it has origins in the struggles and ruptures of the 1960s and the 1970s—which were never fully resolved, especially in regard to who belongs within the American community. Subverting The Republic spends time examining this historical framework to help us think about the current structural, political, and cultural contexts, and especially the place of President Donald J. Trump within our understanding of presidentialism. This book is a careful and deeply researched historical and political analysis of the shifts and changes in how the American presidency has operated over the past 75 years, and grounds many of the actions we have seen within both Trump Administrations, as well as much of the pushback against some of these actions and assertions of power. In weaving together the historical background with the structural form of the presidency and the various tools that a president has at his command, Jacobs and Milkis lay out both the precedents relied upon by presidents of the 21st century, especially Donald Trump, but also the anomalies of the Trump Administration and actions. While Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism went to press before President Trump was re-elected in 2024 (and there is a brief postscript that is included, noting the results and considering what the second Trump Administration might look like), the authors noted in our conversation that much of what they discuss about the first Trump Administration in the book has only grown and expanded in the second Trump Administration. This is an important analysis of the office of the American presidency and how that office, as conceived of by the Founders and situated within a constitutional system that includes other centers of power and responsibility, has evolved rather dramatically from that initial form and structure. 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 (University Press of Kansas, 2022), 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS). An Albertan oil man and a socialist policy wonk from Saskatchewan banded together to think up “eco-development,” a precursor to today's sustainable development. This unlikely duo forged a global consensus at the United Nations, effectively codifying the reigning orthodoxy of liberal environmental governance. They told us that capitalism and sustainability are indeed compatible. Might that be the most utopian of all green dreams? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 Solidarity (Penguin, 2025). This book is a brilliant examination of the inherent psychological and social challenges to solidarity movements, and what that means for the future For those who seek to combat injustice, solidarity with the oppressed is one of the highest ideals, yet it does not come without complication. In this searing yet uplifting book, award-winning writer and cultural critic Sarah Schulman delves into the intricate and often misunderstood concept of solidarity to provide a new vision for what it means to engage in this work—and why it matters. To grapple with solidarity, Schulman writes, we must recognize its inherent fantasies. Those being oppressed dream of relief, that a bystander will intervene though it may not seem to be in their immediate interest to do so, and that the oppressor will be called out and punished. Those standing in solidarity with the oppressed are occluded by a different fantasy: that their intervention is effective, that it will not cost them, and that they will be rewarded with friendship and thanks. Neither is always the case, and yet in order to realize our full potential as human beings in relation with others, we must continue to pursue action towards these shared goals. Within this framework, Schulman examines a range of case studies, from the fight for abortion rights in post-Franco Spain, to NYC's AIDS activism in the 1990s, to the current wave of campus protest movements against Israel's war on Gaza, and her own experience growing up as a queer female artist in male dominated culture industries. Drawing parallels between queer, Palestinian, feminist, and artistic struggles for justice, Schulman challenges the traditional notion of solidarity as a simple union of equals, arguing that in today's world of globalized power structures, true solidarity requires the collaboration of bystanders and conflicted perpetrators with the excluded and oppressed. That action comes at a cost, and is not always effective. And yet without it we sentence ourselves to a world without progressive change towards visions of liberation. By turns challenging, inspiring, pragmatic, and poetic, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity provides a much-needed path for how we can work together to create a more just, more equitable present and future. Sarah Schulman is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian. Her books include The Gentrification of the Mind, Conflict Is Not Abuse, and Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, and the novels The Cosmopolitans and Maggie Terry. Schulman's honors include a Fulbright in Judaic Studies, a Guggenheim in Playwriting, and honors from Lambda Literary, the Publishing Triangle, NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists, the American Library Association, and others. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Guardian. Schulman holds an endowed chair in creative writing at Northwestern University and is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

n a novel pairing of anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon with Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Zahi Zalloua explores the ways both thinkers expose the violence of political structures.This inventive exploration advances an anti-racist critique, describing how ontology operates in a racial matrix to produce some human bodies that count and others (deemed not-quite- or non-human) that do not. For Fanon and Žižek, the violence of ontology must be met with another form of violence, a revolutionary violence that delegitimizes the logic of the symbolic order and troubles its collective fantasies. Whereas Fanon begins his challenge to ontology by exposing its historical linkages to Europe's destructive imperialist procedures before proceeding to “stretch” Marxism, along with psychoanalysis, to account for the crushing (neo)colonial situation, Žižek premises his work on the refusal to accept the totality of ontology. Because of these different points of intervention, Fanon and Žižek together offer a powerful and multifaceted assessment of the liberal anti-racist paradigm whose propensity for identity politics and aversion to class struggle silence the cry of the dispossessed and foreclose radical change. Avoiding contemporary separatist temptations (decoloniality and Afropessimism), and breaking with a non-violent, sentimentalist futurology that announces more of the same, Fanon and Žižek point in a different direction, one that eschews identitarian thought in favor of a collective struggle for freedom and equality. Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a Professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) by Dr. Dominic Davies & Dr. Candida Rifkind is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas. Through close readings of work by diverse artists including Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Don Brown, Olivier Kugler, Jasper Rietman, Hamid Sulaiman, Leila Abdelrazzaq, Thi Bui, and Matt Huynh, Graphic Refuge shows how comics challenge dominant representations of the displaced to bring a radical politics of refugee agency and refusal into view. Beyond simply affirming the “humanity” of the refugee, these comics demand that we apprehend the historical construction of categories such as “citizen” and “refugee” through systems of empire, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. The comics medium allows readers not only to visualize the lives of refugees but also refocuses the lens on citizen non-refugees—“we who can sleep under warm cover at night”, as Vinh Nguyen writes in his foreword—and interrogates their perceptions, aspirations, and beliefs. 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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, well-known as authors of the best-selling book How Democracies Die, about their new framework for understanding when the best way to protect democracy is to constrain the wishes of the majority, and when we need to empower them. Lumping all majoritarian measures into the same category, they argue, can lead us to preserve and prescribe outdated and undemocratic institutions that distort political competition and may undermine democratic legitimacy. So does saving democracy actually depend on the recognition that while special protections for powerful minorities may have helped to secure the historical passage to democracy, today the healthiest democracies empower majorities? This episode is based on Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's article “When Should the Majority Rule?” that was published in the January 2025 issue of the Journal of Democracy, and is part of an ongoing partnership between the Journal of Democracy and the People, Power, Politics podcast. A transcript is available for download here. Steven Levitsky is Professor of Government at Harvard University and the co-author of How Democracies Die (2018), which won the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Arthur Ross Book Award. A leading scholar of authoritarianism and democratic backsliding, his earlier works include Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War (2010). Levitsky directs Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and served as Vice Provost for International Affairs. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Karl Deutsch Award for his contributions to comparative politics. His research spans Latin American politics, party systems, and informal institutions, influencing both academic debate and public discourse on democracy's challenges. Daniel Ziblatt is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die (2018), which won the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Arthur Ross Book Award. His book Conservative Advantage (2017) received the Luebbert Prize for the Best Book on Comparative Politics. Ziblatt's research explores democratic durability and party systems, especially in Europe. He serves as Co-Director of Harvard's Center for European Studies and holds a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has significantly influenced understandings of conservative parties' roles in sustaining democracy and the threats posed by their erosion. Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR. The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 eastern shores of Sicily. Syracuse was ruled by a tyrant, Dionysius, who on death was followed by his son, also a tyrant. Over the course of his three separate visits to Syracuse over the years, encountering both father and son, Plato arrived at the model for tyranny laid out in The Republic. That's the argument of James Romm's splendid book, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece (W.W. Norton, 2025). In our conversation, Romm renders, not the familiar “marble Plato” of his God-like dialogues, but an altogether human figure grappling with his own personal vulnerabilities. We discuss, too, the parallels to today's times, in which tyrants and would-be tyrants continue to plague the world. The tyrant, as Romm ably shows, is an archetype for all time. James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College and editor of the Ancient Lives biography series from Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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 talks with political writer and scholar Damon Linker about how Trump's movement sees presidential power, why it challenges long-standing rules and institutions, and what it means for America's role in the world. They explore whether U.S. influence has shifted from leading a global order after World War II to carving out its own “sphere of influence” alongside other major powers. The discussion looks at attacks on government expertise, the idea of “restraint” in foreign policy, and how fringe thinkers on the right are shaping real political choices. What happens when leaders value absolute freedom of action over laws, expertise, or alliances? Tune in for a clear look at the ideas driving today's high-stakes political battles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics