Podcasts about Public Books

On today's show, Ben sits down with Dr. Iván Chaar López, Assistant Professor with the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, to discuss his research on the history and politics of computing and information infrastructures. Iván's recently published book, The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion (Duke University Press), draws on his archival research to show how, as he writes, “the matter of ‘the border' is as much a technological question as it is a cultural one.” During our conversation, we reflect on how cybernetics—the study of circular processes or the “system of systems” in organisms, machines, and organizations—has played a significant role in shaping border and immigration enforcement. Iván discusses the development of technologies like drones, ground sensors, and surveillance networks that turn people into data and depict them as “intruders” in the landscape. This timely conversation grapples with the lineages of the border's violent history and also considers how art and activism challenge us to think about the ways these brutal systems might someday be undone. Works referenced in this episodeChaar Lopez, I. (2024). The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, Intrusion. Duke University Press. Chaar Lopez, I. (2025). “Borders are a War by Other Means.” Public Books.De Andrade, O. (2025). “Anthropophagic Manifesto (1928),” Luszo-Brazilian Review, 62 (1).Irani, L. (2013). “The Cultural Work of Microwork.” New Media & Society, 17 (5).Mbembe, A. (2003). “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, 15 (1), 11-40.Nakamura, L. (2014). “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture.” American Quarterly, 66 (4), 919-941.St. John, R. (2012). Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border. Princeton University Press. Star, S. L. (1999). “The Sociology of the Invisible: The Primacy of Work in the Writings of Anselm Strauss.” In David Maines (ed.): Social Organization and Social Process: Essays in Honor of Anselm Strauss. Aldine de Gruyter, 265–283.University of Texas at Austin Border Tech LabAn accessible transcript of this episode can be found here (via Descript): https://share.descript.com/view/EQYznoqcyau

For Episode 85 of STARK REALITY, Host James Dier aka DJ $mall ¢hange rolls out the tattered red carpet to the Great White North aka Canada, and talks to special guest SINA RAHMANI. Sina is the creator and host of The East is a Podcast, a show that focuses a critical lens on the history of the present of the modern Middle East and North Africa, featuring interviews with experts and archival mashups. his twitter: @urorientalist Sina completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at UCLA. He is a translator, scholar, and writer. His work has been published in the PMLA, Iranian Studies, boundary 2, Radical History Review, and Public Books. He does this podcast in his spare time, of which he has plenty. He has never gone fishing. Needless to say, his podcast is really dope and a great source of info on West Asia and what is going on in this terrible world in general, from an anti imperialist perspective. Well worth doing a deep dive, he has a lot of excellent guests and his rants are always on point. He also helps produce a number of other quality leftist podcasts, Red Nation with Nick Estes, Office Hours with Adam Hussian (of Rev Left Radio), and many others. In our discussion we talk about Iran, ofc, the concept of Kayfabe, how Americans are the most propagandized ppl on the planet, media, social media platforms in the West, how podcasting has changed in the 8 years he's been doing his podcast, and more. Sina is the man and was very appreciative of his time and perspective. Go check his interviews and guests at www.eastpodcast.com - you will definitely learn something. Recorded March 31st, 2026. James Dier aka $mall ¢hangewww.djsmallchange.comwww.facebook.com/djsmallchange www.soundcloud.com/smallchange666 T/IG: @djsmallchangeNickel and Dime Radio on WFMUhttp://wfmu.org/playlists/nd For all of Host James Dier aka DJ $mall ¢hange's in-depth interviews and exclusive guest playlists, Subscribe to both STARK REALITY and STARK REALITY PLAYLISTS on Apple Podcasts, Mixcloud or live & direct on uptownradio.net / jasoncharles.net Podcast Network Music Channel's STARK REALITY Series PageSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cassandra Neyenesch reads her story “Enough for Now,” from the April 6, 2026, issue of the magazine. Neyenesch is a Brooklyn-based writer and curator, who has published nonfiction in the Guardian, Public Books, and Art in America, among other places. Her début novel, “A Little Bit Bad,” will be published in May. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 1881, African American educator and political leader Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. The school's mission was to provide practical education and vocational training in fields such as agriculture and mechanics to African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South. Tuskegee ultimately became a world-renowned agricultural and industrial school for African Americans – and actually for all people. Today, we're speaking with Duke University's Jarvis McInnis about his award-winning book Afterlives of the Plantation: Plotting Agrarian Futures in the Global Black South. Interview Transcript Jarvis, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this book. And hopefully we'll make a link to the Franklin Humanities gathering (https://youtu.be/rfSy1lWWOwA?si=dVcWH3xDBuBStEEc) that we had for your book launch. As I said at that time, and I'll say it right now, this book resonated with me so deeply because of my rural upbringing. My experience as a son, a grandson of farmers and agricultural workers. And someone who grew up in the 4-H Club down South. Hopefully we will get to some of those topics as we go through. So, let's start off with a real basic idea. Could you give our readers an overview of what the book is? And also, about what you mean by the Afterlives of the Plantation. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for that question, Norbert. The book is an effort to think about the cultural and intellectual and political ties between Southern African Americans and Afro-Caribbean people in the late 19th to early 20th Century as they were responding to the legacies of slavery, right? This is the period after emancipation, and across the hemisphere. And so, I'm really interested in the way that they are sharing ideas as they are confronting the new modes of racial oppression that emerged in slavery's aftermath. In the United States, you have Jim Crow, right? Segregation, and other forms of violence and dispossession like lynching and land dispossession and so forth and so on. And then in the Caribbean, in Latin America, you have institutions like the European colonialism, and US imperialism, right? And so that is the afterlife of slavery. They're emancipated, but it's not a period of full citizenship, right? Of full access to the rights and privileges of citizenship. And so in telling that story, I center Booker T. Washington's school, the Tuskegee Institute, which was founded on the site of an abandoned and burned cotton plantation in Alabama in 1881. And this is getting at the second part of your question. I became really fascinated by what it meant to establish a school, to establish a future-oriented institution, that's committed to uplifting Black people. To establish that on the site, on the ruins of a burned plantation. And, in some ways, I became curious about that as an undergraduate student because I'm a graduate of Tougaloo College, in Tougaloo, Mississippi, which is a historically black college much like Tuskegee. And much like Tuskegee, Tougaloo was also founded on the site of a former cotton plantation. And I saw that this idea, or this practice, this logic of transforming these sites of violence into something that is more liberatory and more emancipatory was really a strategy that Black people used throughout the US South and throughout the Caribbean. Throughout much of the Americas where slavery and the plantation had existed. I placed Tuskegee, and particularly its approach to agriculture, at the center of that story to demonstrate how an institution rooted in the US South is not backward. It's not pre-modern. That's firmly rural, but that rurality... they're taking the knowledge that's cultivated there and disseminating it to other Black people in other parts of the world to aid in their struggles toward freedom and citizenship. I think this is an important point to make. And I know we've had conversations about this as you were developing the book. And I'll just say again, out of my rural Southern agricultural background, I often found a sense that people thought, oh, well you must be backward. Oh, you must come from this... and that's not a good thing. I can only imagine that people of this time must have thought, well, shouldn't people want to move away from agriculture? Why would you want to be invested in this thing that was a part of former enslavement? How do you think about this in light of this notion of agrarian futures? You would think people would want to move away from that. What is your understanding of sort of this move towards agriculture and seeing this as something for the future and even modern. That's such a great question. And I, you know, I have to say that I came to agriculture relatively late in the project. I was initially most interested in what Tuskegee was doing with Black aesthetics: with photography and with music and with literature. I'm a literary scholar after all. But as I sat with Tuskegee's aesthetic output, I realized the significance of agriculture within that. And as I began to explore the ways that Tuskegee was being disseminated to other parts of the Black world, to places like Haiti, to places like Puerto Rico. And as they were admitting students from those particular colonies at that time. Now some of them are countries; Puerto Rico is still a territory. But I realized that what other Black people, both in the US South and abroad, were interested in was its agrarian vision. Was the work, the research that someone like George Washington Carver was doing at Tuskegee and as a mode of self-help. And so I really had to wrestle with that because it was outside of how I had conceived of agriculture. And in many ways, writing this book transformed my own understanding of what the modern was. And, you know, forced me to, or perhaps invited me, to think about agriculture to understand it as intellectual. To understand it certainly as a skill, in all of these ways that I had not really given much thought to it previously. But as I sat with George Washington Carver's bulletins. As I sat with Tuskegee's extension initiatives. As I sat with the knowledge that they were producing, the various print cultural artifacts, the newspapers. And again, the agricultural bulletins and so forth and so on. I realized, wait a minute. This is a site of knowledge production, and its modern up-to-date knowledge production that actually still has a lot of sound basis that can be used in contemporary agriculture to this very day. And so, it radically transformed my understanding of Tuskegee, of a figure like Booker T. Washington. who as we know, is a much-maligned figure in Black studies and American studies because of his conservative politics. But agriculture gave me another way into that institution and to think about, again, the significance of the cultural and intellectual contributions of the US South at this particular period. Thank you for that. I want to talk about a particular section of the text that has to do with both the agricultural philosophy, but also this idea of sharing information, and you've made some reference to it. So, I grew up, as I mentioned, going and being a part of the 4-H program, which was a part of the Cooperative Extension System. And Tuskegee, in many ways, helped form and helped inform what extension would look like. Which ultimately became a thing, federally, in 1914. But I want to read this one passage from your text, and you say: "In 1897, the state of Alabama passed legislation allocating $1,500 to establish an agricultural experiment station on campus. The station also known as the Experiment Plot." And plot is something you come back to. And I would love to hear your thoughts about this garden plot and the Experiment Plot and just the metaphor of plot throughout your text. "But the station also known as the Experiment Plot, was managed by George Washington Carver. Washington insisted that the experiment station ' should not be used for scientific experiments of interest only to experts. Should deal with the fundamental problems with which the Negro Farmers of Alabama were daily confronted.' The results of Carver's experiments were thus published in bulletins that were then distributed among farmers throughout Alabama and the broader US South." And then you go on and talking about the different courses that were made available. But I wanna get this one quote from the Tuskegee student. And you said the Tuskegee student observed: 'Tuskegee Institute is primarily a school for the masses of our people. Both old and young and in all degrees of development.' I mean, Tuskegee was doing something that other land grant institutions would eventually take on, is this idea of sharing knowledge and using this. As a means of uplift and I would say even citizen building. What are your thoughts about that sort of perspective? Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to try to wrap all of those questions up into one response. We'll see how successful I am. I know I gave you a lot. Well, one of the things that I wanted to say, that I did not get a chance to say in my response to your previous question is that, you know, the majority of African Americans lived in the South in this particular period. And many of them viewed agriculture as a viable future. And that was one of the aspects of, you know, doing research on this book that was transformative for me. Was understanding that they did not hold this same necessarily, sort of, denigrating attitudes toward agriculture. In part because the United States was largely agricultural writ large, right? [00:11:00] And so it was across the country, across the color line, was regarded as a viable pathway. But it is the case that Booker T. Washington was attempting to rebrand agriculture, to re-signify it. Because there were a number of African Americans who did not want to have anything to do with it because it reminded them of the degradation of slavery. And so, what Washington said was he said, hey, you know, that there's a distinction between working and being worked, right? Being worked means degradation. Working for oneself, right? Being independent is a mode of civilization, is what he argued. And so what I argue in the book is that Washington is attempting to resignify labor, to make it something that is regarded as self-proprietorial, right? And that is a necessary tool in not just labor but agricultural labor in particular. But we can add, I would say, industrial labor also as something that is self-proprietorial and that is a part of that citizenship making project. So, I wanted to be sure to home in on that aspect of your previous question. And then I think the way into this next question is to talk a little bit about the plot. The slave garden plot. So, this idea in the book, right? The subtitle is Plotting Agrarian Futures. And there are multiple residences of the plot throughout the book. But the easiest way to, sort of, describe it is that it is an elaboration on the slave garden plot. The patches of land that enslaved people could cultivate throughout the Americas to grow foods to nourish themselves, because the rations that were provided from the plantation owners, those rations were too meager, right? A number of scholars and theorists across disciplines have theorized that the slave garden plot was a site of resistance to the plantation system. In part because it is enabling them to survive, to live, to nourish their bodies, right? But also because of what they did on the plot, right? Not only growing food, but also perhaps growing flowers. There's one scholar who regards it as the botanical gardens of the dispossessed, right? And so this idea that on these garden plots where they could cultivate food for themselves, their time was their own. They weren't growing food for sale on the global market, necessarily, or other cash crops for sale in the global market. They were growing foods that perhaps have been a part of their diets in Africa. And in addition to that, they were engaging in communal practices, singing, dancing, and sometimes perhaps even plotting revolutions, right? Another valence of the plot. And so, a scholar like Sylvia Winter establishes a kind of dichotomy between the plot and the plantation under enslavement. And when I realized that Tuskegeeans were also trying to encourage Black folks to grow food, and in doing so helping them to circumvent the predatory practices of sharecropping, of tenant farming, that would have those sharecroppers and tenant farmers to buy their foods from the local commissary and to remain in cycles of debt. And that of course, that they had an experiment station that they called an Experiment Plot. I thought, okay, this is the post emancipation iteration of the slave garden plot. It stands as a counterpoint to the plantation system, and it is imbued with these logics and ethics of care. And one of those logics and ethics of care is the dissemination of knowledge, right? Ensuring that rural Black farmers who were perhaps too old to attend Tuskegee, or could not afford to do so, that they could come to campus and learn the most up-to-date agricultural knowledge, right? And for those who couldn't come to campus, to attend the Tuskegee Farmers Conference, they would take the Jessup Agricultural Wagon into the countryside and teach them about crop rotation. Teach them about how to grow certain food crops, right? Teach them about how to grow certain plants to beautify their homes and so forth and so on. And so I think about that dissemination of knowledge, right? Whether it's those farmers coming to campus or Tuskegee taking those ideas into the countryside, as an ethic of care that is connected to the way that the plot exists as a counter to the plantation. Yeah. Wow, this is really wonderful. I love how you're able to weave in this agricultural philosophy that had deep resonance with people of the rural American South. But you also saw this as something that moved beyond the borders of the American South, and thus in your subtitle, the Global Black South. How did Tuskegee get involved in this transnational sharing of knowledge, and working in the Caribbean, and particularly, Puerto Rico, Haiti? Tell us a little bit more about that experience. Absolutely. Absolutely. Tuskegee really began to recruit students from the broader diaspora in the latter part of the 19th Century. So, around 1897. Certainly, the Caribbean, certainly Cuba and Puerto Rico, following the Spanish American War. And Booker T. Washington sent a Tuskegee student who was actually fluent in Spanish into Florida, and then later on to Havana, to recruit students to Tuskegee. He understood, he believed, that because they were experiencing conditions that were very similar to African Americans, they too were responding to the afterlife of slavery in the plantation. Given that emancipation in Cuba and Puerto Rico, in particular had just occurred in the late 1880s, he believed that their conditions were very similar to those of African Americans and that they could benefit from agricultural and industrial education as well. And there was a reformer by the name of Grace Mins. She was based in Boston. And she ensured that Booker T. Washington's autobiography, Up From Slavery, was translated into Cuban Spanish. And then that autobiography was then disseminated. A thousand copies were disseminated throughout the island of Cuba. And so as a result of that, he inspired, or the model of self-help that Washington depicted in Up From Slavery, inspired a host of Afro-Cuban readers. Students and parents and government officials and educational officials then begin to write to Tuskegee, write to Washington, wanting entry into the school. It's also translated into French, right? And so, you have French readers, particularly in a place like Haiti coming to Tuskegee. Someone by the name of the Jean Price Mars, who was the foremost Haitian intellectual of the 20th Century, actually met Washington in France when Washington was traveling there on vacation and became inspired by that model. A year later, he comes to the United States to attend the 1904 World's Fair and then spends two weeks at Tuskegee, learning those ideas and wanting to take them back to Haiti. So, through translation, right? Into different languages, those ideas then circulate throughout the Black world, but also through efforts to actively recruit students from those other places that Washington understood as experiencing a similar condition as African Americans. People whom he understood could benefit, he believed, could benefit from agricultural and industrial education. Great. And one of the things I loved in the way you talked about this in the text is you talked about not only translation but transplantation. And I thought that was an interesting turn of phrase because of what you were trying to communicate through that term. I want to, sort of, bring us up to some things that are currently happening. We just had a conference and you were a participant on a panel on humanistic issues around addressing food waste. And I've got to say, this was one of the panels that people really leaned into, that were really caught up by it. And you made some really insightful interventions based on some of the work that you've done in your book. So, you spoke about the anti-waste ethos at Tuskegee and I really found that interesting. Could you speak to that for a moment? Absolutely. Well, first I want to say thank you again for the opportunity to participate in that symposium. I really enjoyed it, and it really gave me an opportunity to think about various dimensions of a kind of anti-waste ethos at Tuskegee. And I think that there are a couple of different ways in which it manifested at the institution. So first there's a kind of metaphorical dimension to waste at Tuskegee. When Booker T. Washington writes to George Washington Carver to hire him, to recruit him to the institution. He said, I can't pay you a lot of money, but we have been tasked with helping to transform formerly enslaved people from conditions of waste to full manhood. Right? And so there is that sort of metaphorical, or what I would argue in the book is a kind of ontological understanding of waste, given the degraded status of the enslaved. And then there's a kind of philosophical dimension to waste as well. One, so Washington, Tuskegee, they are informed by the progressive era, right? It's a progressive era institution that's guided by a commitment to thrift and economy. And so, they're very much interested in a kind of practical attitude toward not being wasteful, right? To being thrifty with money, but also with resources. And what we see is, you know, complaints about food waste in the dining hall at Tuskegee, right? A very practical issue for a poor rural institution wherein the students are growing the food, right? Wherein the students are making the bricks, right? Are helping to transform this plantation into a school. We can't afford to waste food, right? But they're also teaching students and Black folks in the countryside how to preserve fruits and vegetables. There are these photographs of them teaching folks how to can and preserve fruits and veggies, right? To ensure that they have food throughout the winter months, so that they are not stricken by hunger and poverty and starvation. So that they aren't forced to borrow additional money from the plantation owners if they are indeed in sharecropping and tenant farming arrangements. And so, the last aspect I suppose of waste at Tuskegee that I want to highlight here is a kind of ecological one. Where in George Washington Carver is calling on farmers to take advantage of the quote unquote waste that is on their farms, right? The cow manure, right? To regenerate the soil. The swamp muck, right? The dead leaves, the night soil; to use that waste to regenerate the soil, to replenish it, right? In addition to practices of crop rotation and so forth and so on. And so that ecological dimension of waste is really important for understanding Tuskegee's ecological vision. I think this is so important because conversations around regenerative agriculture, and going back to, sort of, broader notions of traditional farming practices, minimizing the use of chemicals, people were talking about this. Folks like Carver were trying to find ways of using very little resources to help support the growers that he worked with. And we're hearing these echoes again and again. I'm so grateful that you illuminated that throughout your text. Thank you. I am not the only one who seems to have appreciated that because you won the 2026 Association for the study of African American Life and History Book Prize and the 2025 On the Brink book Award from the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning. Why do you think this narrative of agricultural liberation is resonating with people so strongly? You know, first of all, Norbert, I just have to say how honored I am that the book has received these recognitions. And that it's finding its audiences. Audiences that I couldn't have imagined. Imagine my seeing my face when I opened the email to see that it had been acknowledged by both of these institutions. But especially the architecture and planning. I thought, oh my goodness. I, could not have, I could not have imagined this. So, I just want to say that I'm grateful first and foremost. You know, as I've been talking to people, you know, and as I've been moving around and talking to readers at my book tour, or people have been writing to me via email, what I've found is that the historians really appreciate the archival richness, and robustness of the text, right? So, the historians, the literary scholars, they really appreciate that aspect of the book. Many people, I think, also really appreciate the fact that it is giving us a new way to think about Tuskegee and Booker T. Washington. A place and a person who we thought we knew, right? And not in a flat way; a way that holds the complexity of that institution in place. And throughout the text, I really try to wrestle with the critiques, the valid and legitimate critiques that are coming from people like Ida B. Wells Barnett, and WEB Du Bois, about the limits of Booker T. Washington's political philosophy. But at the same time, I say, but if we don't acknowledge what they were doing through agriculture and by extension through aesthetics, then we're missing a really important part of this story, right? And I think that the book is giving us a model for thinking about how to engage in criticism that is both generative and productive, I suppose, right? Like how do we hold them to a particular standard where we say, you know, here are the limits of your political vision, but at the same time, this is what you enabled, right? And that's what the text is trying to do. And I think, you know, others have shared that they appreciate that it honors the intelligence and sophistication and dignity of Black rural people, of Black Southerners, who in my opinion, are often written out of Black studies in a way that is substantive. In a way that honors their contributions, especially in this period. The South is a space that people are simply fleeing from because of Jim Crow. And I'm saying, wait, what about the people who remain rooted in the land, on the land, either in the US South or in other sort of rural places throughout the diaspora. And then finally, I think that the book seems to be connecting to people who really care about our world. Who really care about the state of environmental degradation that we have found ourselves in as a result of institutions like the plantation, of monocrop agriculture, of industrialization in the way that it abuses, and misuses the earth. And so, because the book is invested in thinking about regeneration and repair, and about more sustainable methods from the past that can be useful for our present. I think that it seems to be connecting with readers who are interested in issues like climate change and environmental catastrophe. So that's what I suspect, based on some of the feedback that I have received. But I just want to reiterate just how grateful I am that it is finding its audience. BIO Jarvis C. McInnis holds a BA in English from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, and a Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University in the City of New York.  Jarvis is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American & African Diaspora literature and culture, with teaching and research interests in the global south (primarily the US South and the Caribbean), sound studies, performance studies, and visual culture. Jarvis's research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral and Dissertation Fellowships, and Princeton University's Department of African American Studies postdoctoral fellowship. His work appears or is forthcoming in journals and venues such as Callaloo, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, Public Books, and The Global South.

In Part 2 of our discussion on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, editor Dora Zhang returns to discuss the original cover and the design of the Norton Library edition, her first encounter with Woolf's writing during college, and a few of her favorite moments in the text. Dora Zhang is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2020), which studies the works of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and, centrally, Virginia Woolf in order to reinvigorate our understanding of the ubiquitous but undertheorized category of novelistic description. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Chronicle Review, and The Point.To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of A Room of One's Own, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393893991. Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

In Part 1 of our discussion on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, we welcome editor Dora Zhang to discuss the author's early life in a literary and artistic household, the enduring nature and distinctive prose of Woolf's works, and the argument of certain necessary material conditions for creating art. Dora Zhang is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2020), which studies the works of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and, centrally, Virginia Woolf in order to reinvigorate our understanding of the ubiquitous but undertheorized category of novelistic description. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Chronicle Review, and The Point.To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of A Room of One's Own, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393893991. Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

“When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline.” This is how Isaac Butler articulates his project in The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury, February 2022). The Method tracks the origins of this transcontinental school of naturalistic acting and its many contradictions, including its emphasis on individualist achievement within communitarian organizations and the actorly tension between psychological interiority and external action when building a character. In following the life of this concept, Butler reveals the impossibly charming, ambitious, questionable cast of characters that have defined the terms of Western acting in the twentieth century. In the process, he clears up many of the public misunderstandings around Method as an approach and as a style. In this discussion, Butler details his first career in the theater as a professional actor, explores how Constantin Stanislavski's “system” of acting was the farthest thing from systematic, explains the difference between method and Method, and divulges the many rivalries and hostilities between American M/method practitioners and instructors at mid-century. Isaac Butler is the coauthor (with Dan Kois) of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, which NPR named one of the best books of 2018. Butler's writing has appeared in New York magazine, Slate, the Guardian, American Theatre, and other publications. For Slate, he created and hosted Lend Me Your Ears, a podcast about Shakespeare and politics, and currently co-hosts Working, a podcast about the creative process. His work as a director has been seen on stages throughout the United States. He is the co-creator, with Darcy James Argue and Peter Nigrini, of Real Enemies, a multimedia exploration of conspiracy theories in the American psyche, which was named one of the best live events of 2015 by the New York Times and has been adapted into a feature-length film. Butler holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota and teaches theater history and performance at the New School and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her writing has been published in the Washington Post, Public Books, Literary Hub, The Forward, and Camera Obscura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

“When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline.” This is how Isaac Butler articulates his project in The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury, February 2022). The Method tracks the origins of this transcontinental school of naturalistic acting and its many contradictions, including its emphasis on individualist achievement within communitarian organizations and the actorly tension between psychological interiority and external action when building a character. In following the life of this concept, Butler reveals the impossibly charming, ambitious, questionable cast of characters that have defined the terms of Western acting in the twentieth century. In the process, he clears up many of the public misunderstandings around Method as an approach and as a style. In this discussion, Butler details his first career in the theater as a professional actor, explores how Constantin Stanislavski's “system” of acting was the farthest thing from systematic, explains the difference between method and Method, and divulges the many rivalries and hostilities between American M/method practitioners and instructors at mid-century. Isaac Butler is the coauthor (with Dan Kois) of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, which NPR named one of the best books of 2018. Butler's writing has appeared in New York magazine, Slate, the Guardian, American Theatre, and other publications. For Slate, he created and hosted Lend Me Your Ears, a podcast about Shakespeare and politics, and currently co-hosts Working, a podcast about the creative process. His work as a director has been seen on stages throughout the United States. He is the co-creator, with Darcy James Argue and Peter Nigrini, of Real Enemies, a multimedia exploration of conspiracy theories in the American psyche, which was named one of the best live events of 2015 by the New York Times and has been adapted into a feature-length film. Butler holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota and teaches theater history and performance at the New School and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her writing has been published in the Washington Post, Public Books, Literary Hub, The Forward, and Camera Obscura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) is an interdisciplinary examination of the stubborn attachment of Asian diasporas to settler-colonial ideals and of the decolonial possibilities Asian diasporic films imagine. Author Beenash Jafri uniquely addresses the complexities of Asian–Indigenous relationality through film and visual media, urging film scholars to approach their subjects with an eye to the entanglements of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity. Beenash Jafri is an associate professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at UC Davis. Her work engages longstanding debates on relationality and coalition across feminist and queer, Indigenous and critical ethnic studies. She is the co-editor of Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (Temple University Press, 2025), and of Amerasia's forthcoming special issue on Asian Settler Colonial Critique. Her writing has been published in academic venues such as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Feminist Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association; and in public venues such as Reappropriate, Public Books, ASAP/J, Truthout, and Briarpatch Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) is an interdisciplinary examination of the stubborn attachment of Asian diasporas to settler-colonial ideals and of the decolonial possibilities Asian diasporic films imagine. Author Beenash Jafri uniquely addresses the complexities of Asian–Indigenous relationality through film and visual media, urging film scholars to approach their subjects with an eye to the entanglements of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity. Beenash Jafri is an associate professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at UC Davis. Her work engages longstanding debates on relationality and coalition across feminist and queer, Indigenous and critical ethnic studies. She is the co-editor of Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (Temple University Press, 2025), and of Amerasia's forthcoming special issue on Asian Settler Colonial Critique. Her writing has been published in academic venues such as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Feminist Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association; and in public venues such as Reappropriate, Public Books, ASAP/J, Truthout, and Briarpatch Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) is an interdisciplinary examination of the stubborn attachment of Asian diasporas to settler-colonial ideals and of the decolonial possibilities Asian diasporic films imagine. Author Beenash Jafri uniquely addresses the complexities of Asian–Indigenous relationality through film and visual media, urging film scholars to approach their subjects with an eye to the entanglements of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity. Beenash Jafri is an associate professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at UC Davis. Her work engages longstanding debates on relationality and coalition across feminist and queer, Indigenous and critical ethnic studies. She is the co-editor of Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (Temple University Press, 2025), and of Amerasia's forthcoming special issue on Asian Settler Colonial Critique. Her writing has been published in academic venues such as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Feminist Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association; and in public venues such as Reappropriate, Public Books, ASAP/J, Truthout, and Briarpatch Magazine. 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

Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) is an interdisciplinary examination of the stubborn attachment of Asian diasporas to settler-colonial ideals and of the decolonial possibilities Asian diasporic films imagine. Author Beenash Jafri uniquely addresses the complexities of Asian–Indigenous relationality through film and visual media, urging film scholars to approach their subjects with an eye to the entanglements of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity. Beenash Jafri is an associate professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at UC Davis. Her work engages longstanding debates on relationality and coalition across feminist and queer, Indigenous and critical ethnic studies. She is the co-editor of Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (Temple University Press, 2025), and of Amerasia's forthcoming special issue on Asian Settler Colonial Critique. Her writing has been published in academic venues such as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Feminist Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association; and in public venues such as Reappropriate, Public Books, ASAP/J, Truthout, and Briarpatch Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

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/new-books-network

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

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/political-science

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/critical-theory

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/american-studies

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

A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the silhouette of a rotund British gentleman…. This may sound like a catalog of images from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but it is just as much an encapsulation of the works of Joan Harrison, a studio-era producer, a prolific cinematic storyteller, and a pioneer of female-centered suspense media at mid-century. Harrison remains best known as Alfred Hitchcock's right-hand woman—that is, to the extent that she is known at all. Christina Lane has written the first-ever book dedicated to the life and art of Joan Harrison, entitled Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, The Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock (Chicago Review Press, February 2020). Born into a middle-class family in Surrey, Harrison took a secretarial job with Alfred Hitchcock as an aimless twenty-something, only to become a producer on films including Foreign Correspondent (1940), Rebecca (1940), and Suspicion (1941). In the 1940s, Harrison branched out, building a solo career producing movies for RKO and Universal Studios, only to return to the Hitchcock fold to run TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962). In this discussion, Lane shares how she uncovered this obscure history, placing this “phantom lady” at the center of her own story. She also discusses the trajectory of Harrison's career and how she adapted her research for a broader readership. Christina Lane is Professor in the Cinematic Arts Department at the University of Miami and Edgar®-Award winning author of Phantom Lady: Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock. She provides commentary for such outlets as the Daily Mail, CrimeReads and AirMail, and has been a featured guest speaker at the Film Forum, and on NPR and Turner Classic Movies. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the silhouette of a rotund British gentleman…. This may sound like a catalog of images from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but it is just as much an encapsulation of the works of Joan Harrison, a studio-era producer, a prolific cinematic storyteller, and a pioneer of female-centered suspense media at mid-century. Harrison remains best known as Alfred Hitchcock's right-hand woman—that is, to the extent that she is known at all. Christina Lane has written the first-ever book dedicated to the life and art of Joan Harrison, entitled Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, The Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock (Chicago Review Press, February 2020). Born into a middle-class family in Surrey, Harrison took a secretarial job with Alfred Hitchcock as an aimless twenty-something, only to become a producer on films including Foreign Correspondent (1940), Rebecca (1940), and Suspicion (1941). In the 1940s, Harrison branched out, building a solo career producing movies for RKO and Universal Studios, only to return to the Hitchcock fold to run TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962). In this discussion, Lane shares how she uncovered this obscure history, placing this “phantom lady” at the center of her own story. She also discusses the trajectory of Harrison's career and how she adapted her research for a broader readership. Christina Lane is Professor in the Cinematic Arts Department at the University of Miami and Edgar®-Award winning author of Phantom Lady: Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock. She provides commentary for such outlets as the Daily Mail, CrimeReads and AirMail, and has been a featured guest speaker at the Film Forum, and on NPR and Turner Classic Movies. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the silhouette of a rotund British gentleman…. This may sound like a catalog of images from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but it is just as much an encapsulation of the works of Joan Harrison, a studio-era producer, a prolific cinematic storyteller, and a pioneer of female-centered suspense media at mid-century. Harrison remains best known as Alfred Hitchcock's right-hand woman—that is, to the extent that she is known at all. Christina Lane has written the first-ever book dedicated to the life and art of Joan Harrison, entitled Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, The Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock (Chicago Review Press, February 2020). Born into a middle-class family in Surrey, Harrison took a secretarial job with Alfred Hitchcock as an aimless twenty-something, only to become a producer on films including Foreign Correspondent (1940), Rebecca (1940), and Suspicion (1941). In the 1940s, Harrison branched out, building a solo career producing movies for RKO and Universal Studios, only to return to the Hitchcock fold to run TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962). In this discussion, Lane shares how she uncovered this obscure history, placing this “phantom lady” at the center of her own story. She also discusses the trajectory of Harrison's career and how she adapted her research for a broader readership. Christina Lane is Professor in the Cinematic Arts Department at the University of Miami and Edgar®-Award winning author of Phantom Lady: Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock. She provides commentary for such outlets as the Daily Mail, CrimeReads and AirMail, and has been a featured guest speaker at the Film Forum, and on NPR and Turner Classic Movies. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the silhouette of a rotund British gentleman…. This may sound like a catalog of images from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but it is just as much an encapsulation of the works of Joan Harrison, a studio-era producer, a prolific cinematic storyteller, and a pioneer of female-centered suspense media at mid-century. Harrison remains best known as Alfred Hitchcock's right-hand woman—that is, to the extent that she is known at all. Christina Lane has written the first-ever book dedicated to the life and art of Joan Harrison, entitled Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, The Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock (Chicago Review Press, February 2020). Born into a middle-class family in Surrey, Harrison took a secretarial job with Alfred Hitchcock as an aimless twenty-something, only to become a producer on films including Foreign Correspondent (1940), Rebecca (1940), and Suspicion (1941). In the 1940s, Harrison branched out, building a solo career producing movies for RKO and Universal Studios, only to return to the Hitchcock fold to run TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962). In this discussion, Lane shares how she uncovered this obscure history, placing this “phantom lady” at the center of her own story. She also discusses the trajectory of Harrison's career and how she adapted her research for a broader readership. Christina Lane is Professor in the Cinematic Arts Department at the University of Miami and Edgar®-Award winning author of Phantom Lady: Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock. She provides commentary for such outlets as the Daily Mail, CrimeReads and AirMail, and has been a featured guest speaker at the Film Forum, and on NPR and Turner Classic Movies. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the silhouette of a rotund British gentleman…. This may sound like a catalog of images from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but it is just as much an encapsulation of the works of Joan Harrison, a studio-era producer, a prolific cinematic storyteller, and a pioneer of female-centered suspense media at mid-century. Harrison remains best known as Alfred Hitchcock's right-hand woman—that is, to the extent that she is known at all. Christina Lane has written the first-ever book dedicated to the life and art of Joan Harrison, entitled Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, The Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock (Chicago Review Press, February 2020). Born into a middle-class family in Surrey, Harrison took a secretarial job with Alfred Hitchcock as an aimless twenty-something, only to become a producer on films including Foreign Correspondent (1940), Rebecca (1940), and Suspicion (1941). In the 1940s, Harrison branched out, building a solo career producing movies for RKO and Universal Studios, only to return to the Hitchcock fold to run TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962). In this discussion, Lane shares how she uncovered this obscure history, placing this “phantom lady” at the center of her own story. She also discusses the trajectory of Harrison's career and how she adapted her research for a broader readership. Christina Lane is Professor in the Cinematic Arts Department at the University of Miami and Edgar®-Award winning author of Phantom Lady: Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock. She provides commentary for such outlets as the Daily Mail, CrimeReads and AirMail, and has been a featured guest speaker at the Film Forum, and on NPR and Turner Classic Movies. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

RtB loves the present-day shadows cast by neglected books, which can suddenly loom up out of the backlit past. So, you won't be shocked to know that John has also been editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books. In it, around 50 writers (Ursula Le Guin was one) have made the case for un-forgetting a beloved book. Now, there is a book that collects 40 of these columns. Find it as your local bookstore, or Columbia University Press, or Bookshop, (or even Amazon). Like our podcast, B-Side Books focuses on those moments when books topple off their shelves, open up, and start bellowing at you. The one that enthralled Merve Emre (Wesleyan professor and author ofsuch terrific works as The Personality Brokers) was a novella by the luminous midcentury Italian pessimist, Natalia Ginzburg. And if you think you know precisely why a mid-century Italian writer would have a dark and bitter view of the world (already thinking of the Nazi shadows in work by Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani) Ginzburg's The Dry Heart will have you thinking again. Merve Emre, Ginzburg fan and B-Side author Merve started her piece, and we started this 2023 conversation, by asking that age-old question: “When should a woman kill her husband?” Mentioned in This Episode J. W. Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading” Natalia Ginzburg. The Little Virtues (personal essays that do not stage an excessive evacuation of the self, but instead triangulate between reader, writer and object of concern…) Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline and These Possible Lives Rachel Ingals Mrs. Caliban (1982) Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

RtB loves the present-day shadows cast by neglected books, which can suddenly loom up out of the backlit past. So, you won't be shocked to know that John has also been editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books. In it, around 50 writers (Ursula Le Guin was one) have made the case for un-forgetting a beloved book. Now, there is a book that collects 40 of these columns. Find it as your local bookstore, or Columbia University Press, or Bookshop, (or even Amazon). Like our podcast, B-Side Books focuses on those moments when books topple off their shelves, open up, and start bellowing at you. The one that enthralled Merve Emre (Wesleyan professor and author ofsuch terrific works as The Personality Brokers) was a novella by the luminous midcentury Italian pessimist, Natalia Ginzburg. And if you think you know precisely why a mid-century Italian writer would have a dark and bitter view of the world (already thinking of the Nazi shadows in work by Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani) Ginzburg's The Dry Heart will have you thinking again. Merve Emre, Ginzburg fan and B-Side author Merve started her piece, and we started this 2023 conversation, by asking that age-old question: “When should a woman kill her husband?” Mentioned in This Episode J. W. Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading” Natalia Ginzburg. The Little Virtues (personal essays that do not stage an excessive evacuation of the self, but instead triangulate between reader, writer and object of concern…) Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline and These Possible Lives Rachel Ingals Mrs. Caliban (1982) Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

RtB loves the present-day shadows cast by neglected books, which can suddenly loom up out of the backlit past. So, you won't be shocked to know that John has also been editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books. In it, around 50 writers (Ursula Le Guin was one) have made the case for un-forgetting a beloved book. Now, there is a book that collects 40 of these columns. Find it as your local bookstore, or Columbia University Press, or Bookshop, (or even Amazon). Like our podcast, B-Side Books focuses on those moments when books topple off their shelves, open up, and start bellowing at you. The one that enthralled Merve Emre (Wesleyan professor and author ofsuch terrific works as The Personality Brokers) was a novella by the luminous midcentury Italian pessimist, Natalia Ginzburg. And if you think you know precisely why a mid-century Italian writer would have a dark and bitter view of the world (already thinking of the Nazi shadows in work by Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani) Ginzburg's The Dry Heart will have you thinking again. Merve Emre, Ginzburg fan and B-Side author Merve started her piece, and we started this 2023 conversation, by asking that age-old question: “When should a woman kill her husband?” Mentioned in This Episode J. W. Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading” Natalia Ginzburg. The Little Virtues (personal essays that do not stage an excessive evacuation of the self, but instead triangulate between reader, writer and object of concern…) Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline and These Possible Lives Rachel Ingals Mrs. Caliban (1982) Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

“As I was reading Hooks and Freire, a colleague recommended Adrian Rich's essay "Teaching Language in Open Admissions." It was in that essay that I first read about her experiences teaching at CUNY during open admissions, learning that she taught alongside June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade Bambara. Eventually, that essay led me to their archival teaching materials. I was really excited because I found in those materials concrete teaching methods, things they were doing in their own classrooms that I then started trying in my classrooms as well. I also really liked their educational philosophies, thinking about what it means for college to be free and the fact that they were teaching during this revolutionary era. What would that look like today? What would it mean? What could free college bring to our society? What does free college make possible? All of those things coming together led me to the project.”In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Danica Savonick about her marvelous book entitled Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College. This is a riveting and deeply inspiring story of how each of these luminaries in the fields of literature and feminism found their way into the City University of New York in the 1960s, when community activists had forced open what was called the Harvard for the proletariat to admit new classes of Black, brown, and other people of color. Savonick shows through copious archival research how Bambara, Jordan, Lorde, and Rich each came to find radical teaching methods in collaboration with these new students, and how their experiences with this new pedagogy affected their creative and other writing in profound and lasting ways. This is a critical history we can and must learn from today, when federal and state governments have added to the damage and violence done by the neoliberal university. We find exactly the tools and models we need to create spaces for education for liberation both within, but also outside, the Academy.Danica Savonick is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Cortland. Her current project focuses on the radical writers and artists who taught at the experimental Livingston College (part of Rutgers University) in the 1970s. Her research has appeared in MELUS, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Radical Teacher, Keywords for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Public Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Ed.https://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

“As I was reading Hooks and Freire, a colleague recommended Adrian Rich's essay "Teaching Language in Open Admissions." It was in that essay that I first read about her experiences teaching at CUNY during open admissions, learning that she taught alongside June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade Bambara. Eventually, that essay led me to their archival teaching materials. I was really excited because I found in those materials concrete teaching methods, things they were doing in their own classrooms that I then started trying in my classrooms as well. I also really liked their educational philosophies, thinking about what it means for college to be free and the fact that they were teaching during this revolutionary era. What would that look like today? What would it mean? What could free college bring to our society? What does free college make possible? All of those things coming together led me to the project.”In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Danica Savonick about her marvelous book entitled Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College. This is a riveting and deeply inspiring story of how each of these luminaries in the fields of literature and feminism found their way into the City University of New York in the 1960s, when community activists had forced open what was called the Harvard for the proletariat to admit new classes of Black, brown, and other people of color. Savonick shows through copious archival research how Bambara, Jordan, Lorde, and Rich each came to find radical teaching methods in collaboration with these new students, and how their experiences with this new pedagogy affected their creative and other writing in profound and lasting ways. This is a critical history we can and must learn from today, when federal and state governments have added to the damage and violence done by the neoliberal university. We find exactly the tools and models we need to create spaces for education for liberation both within, but also outside, the Academy.Danica Savonick is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Cortland. Her current project focuses on the radical writers and artists who taught at the experimental Livingston College (part of Rutgers University) in the 1970s. Her research has appeared in MELUS, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Radical Teacher, Keywords for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Public Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Ed.https://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

“As I was reading Hooks and Freire, a colleague recommended Adrian Rich's essay "Teaching Language in Open Admissions." It was in that essay that I first read about her experiences teaching at CUNY during open admissions, learning that she taught alongside June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade Bambara. Eventually, that essay led me to their archival teaching materials. I was really excited because I found in those materials concrete teaching methods, things they were doing in their own classrooms that I then started trying in my classrooms as well. I also really liked their educational philosophies, thinking about what it means for college to be free and the fact that they were teaching during this revolutionary era. What would that look like today? What would it mean? What could free college bring to our society? What does free college make possible? All of those things coming together led me to the project.”In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Danica Savonick about her marvelous book entitled Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College. This is a riveting and deeply inspiring story of how each of these luminaries in the fields of literature and feminism found their way into the City University of New York in the 1960s, when community activists had forced open what was called the Harvard for the proletariat to admit new classes of Black, brown, and other people of color. Savonick shows through copious archival research how Bambara, Jordan, Lorde, and Rich each came to find radical teaching methods in collaboration with these new students, and how their experiences with this new pedagogy affected their creative and other writing in profound and lasting ways. This is a critical history we can and must learn from today, when federal and state governments have added to the damage and violence done by the neoliberal university. We find exactly the tools and models we need to create spaces for education for liberation both within, but also outside, the Academy.Danica Savonick is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Cortland. Her current project focuses on the radical writers and artists who taught at the experimental Livingston College (part of Rutgers University) in the 1970s. Her research has appeared in MELUS, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Radical Teacher, Keywords for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Public Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Ed.https://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

Today it's my honor to speak with Danica Savonick about her marvelous book entitled Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College. This is a riveting and deeply inspiring story of how each of these luminaries in the fields of literature and feminism found their way into the City University of New York in the 1960s, when community activists had forced open what was called the Harvard for the proletariat to admit new classes of Black, brown, and other people of color.  Savonick shows through copious archival research how Bambara, Jordan, Lorde and Rich each came to find radical teaching methods in collaboration with these new students, and how their experiences with this new pedagogy affected their creative and other writing in profound and lasting manners. This is a critical history we can and must learn from today, when federal and state governments have added to the damage and violence done by the neoliberal university. We find exactly the tools and models we need to create spaces for education for liberation both within, but also outside, the Academy.Check out our blog, featuring these writers' teaching materials!Danica Savonick is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Cortland and the author of Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College (Duke University Press, 2024). Her current project focuses on the radical writers and artists who taught at the experimental Livingston College (part of Rutgers University) in the 1970s. Her research has appeared in MELUS, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Radical Teacher, Keywords for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Public Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Sixteen and living in a small Michigan town, Gertie is harboring a secret heavy enough to fracture her closest friendship. She and Cindy have been bonded since birth by the fact their fathers are addicts, and their unsteady home lives are a little easier when they're together, sprawled on a trampoline with pilfered vodka and dreams of moving to New York.After an accident involving a bonfire and an aerosol canister sends Gertie to the hospital, she finds herself with nowhere to go but to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to live with her newly sober father. She sees it as a chance to escape the hometown drama she's caused, but drama finds her all the same: parties without curfews, boys without boundaries, a compromising photo, tragedy back home . . . and her father, once again teetering on the edge of oblivion. Terrified of the consequences of being honest with Cindy, her sole refuge is the fantasy novel she's writing, a portal to another world and the story of a young girl roaming a strange land, trusting her wits to survive.Years later, when ghosts of the past surface, Gertie decides to write again about that explosive summer from the stabler shores of adulthood. Powered by the fierce imagination of her youth, Gertie finally allows herself the grace to tell a version of her narrative that she always hoped would be true.Written with the feel and power of a ticking time bomb, Atomic Hearts is an unforgettable story of the ways we can be saved by friendship, love, and imagination. Megan Cummins is the author of If the Body Allows It, awarded the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her stories and essays have appeared in A Public Space, Guernica, One Teen Story, Ninth Letter, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She edits Public Books, a magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. Recommended Books: Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows Denne Michelle Norris, When the Harvest Comes Nick Fuller Goggins, The Frequency of Living Things Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sixteen and living in a small Michigan town, Gertie is harboring a secret heavy enough to fracture her closest friendship. She and Cindy have been bonded since birth by the fact their fathers are addicts, and their unsteady home lives are a little easier when they're together, sprawled on a trampoline with pilfered vodka and dreams of moving to New York.After an accident involving a bonfire and an aerosol canister sends Gertie to the hospital, she finds herself with nowhere to go but to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to live with her newly sober father. She sees it as a chance to escape the hometown drama she's caused, but drama finds her all the same: parties without curfews, boys without boundaries, a compromising photo, tragedy back home . . . and her father, once again teetering on the edge of oblivion. Terrified of the consequences of being honest with Cindy, her sole refuge is the fantasy novel she's writing, a portal to another world and the story of a young girl roaming a strange land, trusting her wits to survive.Years later, when ghosts of the past surface, Gertie decides to write again about that explosive summer from the stabler shores of adulthood. Powered by the fierce imagination of her youth, Gertie finally allows herself the grace to tell a version of her narrative that she always hoped would be true.Written with the feel and power of a ticking time bomb, Atomic Hearts is an unforgettable story of the ways we can be saved by friendship, love, and imagination. Megan Cummins is the author of If the Body Allows It, awarded the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her stories and essays have appeared in A Public Space, Guernica, One Teen Story, Ninth Letter, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She edits Public Books, a magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. Recommended Books: Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows Denne Michelle Norris, When the Harvest Comes Nick Fuller Goggins, The Frequency of Living Things Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Sixteen and living in a small Michigan town, Gertie is harboring a secret heavy enough to fracture her closest friendship. She and Cindy have been bonded since birth by the fact their fathers are addicts, and their unsteady home lives are a little easier when they're together, sprawled on a trampoline with pilfered vodka and dreams of moving to New York.After an accident involving a bonfire and an aerosol canister sends Gertie to the hospital, she finds herself with nowhere to go but to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to live with her newly sober father. She sees it as a chance to escape the hometown drama she's caused, but drama finds her all the same: parties without curfews, boys without boundaries, a compromising photo, tragedy back home . . . and her father, once again teetering on the edge of oblivion. Terrified of the consequences of being honest with Cindy, her sole refuge is the fantasy novel she's writing, a portal to another world and the story of a young girl roaming a strange land, trusting her wits to survive.Years later, when ghosts of the past surface, Gertie decides to write again about that explosive summer from the stabler shores of adulthood. Powered by the fierce imagination of her youth, Gertie finally allows herself the grace to tell a version of her narrative that she always hoped would be true.Written with the feel and power of a ticking time bomb, Atomic Hearts is an unforgettable story of the ways we can be saved by friendship, love, and imagination. Megan Cummins is the author of If the Body Allows It, awarded the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her stories and essays have appeared in A Public Space, Guernica, One Teen Story, Ninth Letter, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She edits Public Books, a magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. Recommended Books: Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows Denne Michelle Norris, When the Harvest Comes Nick Fuller Goggins, The Frequency of Living Things Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sixteen and living in a small Michigan town, Gertie is harboring a secret heavy enough to fracture her closest friendship. She and Cindy have been bonded since birth by the fact their fathers are addicts, and their unsteady home lives are a little easier when they're together, sprawled on a trampoline with pilfered vodka and dreams of moving to New York.After an accident involving a bonfire and an aerosol canister sends Gertie to the hospital, she finds herself with nowhere to go but to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to live with her newly sober father. She sees it as a chance to escape the hometown drama she's caused, but drama finds her all the same: parties without curfews, boys without boundaries, a compromising photo, tragedy back home . . . and her father, once again teetering on the edge of oblivion. Terrified of the consequences of being honest with Cindy, her sole refuge is the fantasy novel she's writing, a portal to another world and the story of a young girl roaming a strange land, trusting her wits to survive.Years later, when ghosts of the past surface, Gertie decides to write again about that explosive summer from the stabler shores of adulthood. Powered by the fierce imagination of her youth, Gertie finally allows herself the grace to tell a version of her narrative that she always hoped would be true.Written with the feel and power of a ticking time bomb, Atomic Hearts is an unforgettable story of the ways we can be saved by friendship, love, and imagination. Megan Cummins is the author of If the Body Allows It, awarded the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her stories and essays have appeared in A Public Space, Guernica, One Teen Story, Ninth Letter, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She edits Public Books, a magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. Recommended Books: Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows Denne Michelle Norris, When the Harvest Comes Nick Fuller Goggins, The Frequency of Living Things Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

For decades, Alejandro Portes (CASBS fellow 1980-81) has been among our most distinguished scholars elucidating the causes and consequences of immigration and assimilation. René D. Flores (CASBS fellow 2023-24) engages Portes in a conversation spanning large swaths of Portes's formidable intellectual biography, including his personal journey from Cuba and its influence on his academic trajectory, as well as his approach to social science inquiry and its delivery of insights leading to some of his most celebrated and consequential works.ALEJANDRO PORTES: Princeton faculty page | CV | Univ. of Miami faculty page | Wikipedia page | on Google Scholar | Biographical sketches of Portes: American Sociological Association | National Academy of Education | Princeton | National Institutes of Health | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | Robert K. Merton's full quote about Alejandro Portes is contained in the September/October 1998 issue of Footnotes, a publication of the American Sociological Association. Access the full text.  Works referenced in this episodeAlejandro Portes, "Rationality in the Slum: An Essay on Interpretive Sociology," Comparative Studies in Society and History, v13 n3, June 1972.Alejandro Portes, "Dilemmas of a Golden Exile: Integration of Cuban Refugee Families in Milwaukee," American Sociological Review, v34 n4, August 1969.Alejandro Portes and Robert Bach, Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the United States. Univ. of California Press, 1985.Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, "The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and its Variants," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 1993.Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait, Univ. of California Press, 2024 (fifth ed.)Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation, Univ. of California Press, 2001.Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, The Asian American Achievement Paradox, Russell Sage Foundation, 2015. (Notably, Jennifer Lee was a CASBS fellow in 2002-03; Min Zhou was a CASBS fellow in 2006-06.)Bonus: 2019-20 CASBS fellow Catherine Ramírez discusses the influence of Alejandro Portes in "What Does Assimilation Mean?" Public Books, Feb. 27, 2020. The essay was written as part of CASBS's partnership with Public Books. Ramírez writes, "By showing that there are many strata in society into which people assimilate, and many outcomes of assimilation, Portes and his coauthors have enriched our understanding of the processes by which people become American, however precarious that status may be.” René D. Flores: Univ. of Chicago faculty page | CASBS page | on Google Scholar | Personal website |    Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford UniversityExplore CASBS: website|Bluesky|X|YouTube|LinkedIn|podcast|latest newsletter|signup|outreach​Human CenteredProducer: Mike Gaetani | Audio engineer & co-producer: Joe Monzel |

John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt's Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration's relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Half a century ago, in "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers" (1971) she showed how expedient occasional lies spread to become omnipresent--not just in how America's campaigns in Vietnam were reported, but throughout Nixon-era governance. 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. Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off. Mentioned in the episode: M. Gessen, Surviving Autocracy Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit" Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless" (1978) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt's Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration's relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Half a century ago, in "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers" (1971) she showed how expedient occasional lies spread to become omnipresent--not just in how America's campaigns in Vietnam were reported, but throughout Nixon-era governance. 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. Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off. Mentioned in the episode: M. Gessen, Surviving Autocracy Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit" Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless" (1978) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt's Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration's relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Half a century ago, in "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers" (1971) she showed how expedient occasional lies spread to become omnipresent--not just in how America's campaigns in Vietnam were reported, but throughout Nixon-era governance. 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. Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off. Mentioned in the episode: M. Gessen, Surviving Autocracy Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit" Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless" (1978) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt's Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration's relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Half a century ago, in "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers" (1971) she showed how expedient occasional lies spread to become omnipresent--not just in how America's campaigns in Vietnam were reported, but throughout Nixon-era governance. 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. Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off. Mentioned in the episode: M. Gessen, Surviving Autocracy Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit" Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless" (1978) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt's Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration's relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Half a century ago, in "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers" (1971) she showed how expedient occasional lies spread to become omnipresent--not just in how America's campaigns in Vietnam were reported, but throughout Nixon-era governance. 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. Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off. Mentioned in the episode: M. Gessen, Surviving Autocracy Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit" Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless" (1978) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

How has a writer known principally for his contained domestic novels come to represent the most dynamic elements of world literature? In Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), Chris Holmes expands our understanding of how world literature engages with the most pressing crises of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining Ishiguro's fascination with characters who are profoundly constrained in their ability to understand global systems to which they are subject. Rather than following the established pattern of so-called global novels, which crisscross the planet exhibiting a knowing cosmopolitanism, Ishiguro's fictional engagement with the world comes principally in the form of characters who are cut off from the global systems that abuse them. By examining the ways in which Ishiguro foregrounds the in-process thinking of those who fail to comprehend their place in the flow of politics, culture, and ideas, Holmes positions Ishiguro as the great chronicler of everyday lives, and as such, prepares a mode of reading world literature that questions the assumptions for how we live and think with others when each of us is deeply limited. Chris Holmes is Associate Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He is the host of the literary interview podcast, Burned by Books, and he is host and co-producer on Novel Dialogue, the podcast of the Society of Novel Studies, both of which are New Books Network partners. His most recent essays appear in NOVEL, MFS, Critique, and Public Books. Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author most recently of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis, and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How has a writer known principally for his contained domestic novels come to represent the most dynamic elements of world literature? In Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), Chris Holmes expands our understanding of how world literature engages with the most pressing crises of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining Ishiguro's fascination with characters who are profoundly constrained in their ability to understand global systems to which they are subject. Rather than following the established pattern of so-called global novels, which crisscross the planet exhibiting a knowing cosmopolitanism, Ishiguro's fictional engagement with the world comes principally in the form of characters who are cut off from the global systems that abuse them. By examining the ways in which Ishiguro foregrounds the in-process thinking of those who fail to comprehend their place in the flow of politics, culture, and ideas, Holmes positions Ishiguro as the great chronicler of everyday lives, and as such, prepares a mode of reading world literature that questions the assumptions for how we live and think with others when each of us is deeply limited. Chris Holmes is Associate Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He is the host of the literary interview podcast, Burned by Books, and he is host and co-producer on Novel Dialogue, the podcast of the Society of Novel Studies, both of which are New Books Network partners. His most recent essays appear in NOVEL, MFS, Critique, and Public Books. Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author most recently of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis, and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

How has a writer known principally for his contained domestic novels come to represent the most dynamic elements of world literature? In Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), Chris Holmes expands our understanding of how world literature engages with the most pressing crises of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining Ishiguro's fascination with characters who are profoundly constrained in their ability to understand global systems to which they are subject. Rather than following the established pattern of so-called global novels, which crisscross the planet exhibiting a knowing cosmopolitanism, Ishiguro's fictional engagement with the world comes principally in the form of characters who are cut off from the global systems that abuse them. By examining the ways in which Ishiguro foregrounds the in-process thinking of those who fail to comprehend their place in the flow of politics, culture, and ideas, Holmes positions Ishiguro as the great chronicler of everyday lives, and as such, prepares a mode of reading world literature that questions the assumptions for how we live and think with others when each of us is deeply limited. Chris Holmes is Associate Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He is the host of the literary interview podcast, Burned by Books, and he is host and co-producer on Novel Dialogue, the podcast of the Society of Novel Studies, both of which are New Books Network partners. His most recent essays appear in NOVEL, MFS, Critique, and Public Books. Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author most recently of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis, and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How has a writer known principally for his contained domestic novels come to represent the most dynamic elements of world literature? In Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), Chris Holmes expands our understanding of how world literature engages with the most pressing crises of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining Ishiguro's fascination with characters who are profoundly constrained in their ability to understand global systems to which they are subject. Rather than following the established pattern of so-called global novels, which crisscross the planet exhibiting a knowing cosmopolitanism, Ishiguro's fictional engagement with the world comes principally in the form of characters who are cut off from the global systems that abuse them. By examining the ways in which Ishiguro foregrounds the in-process thinking of those who fail to comprehend their place in the flow of politics, culture, and ideas, Holmes positions Ishiguro as the great chronicler of everyday lives, and as such, prepares a mode of reading world literature that questions the assumptions for how we live and think with others when each of us is deeply limited. Chris Holmes is Associate Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He is the host of the literary interview podcast, Burned by Books, and he is host and co-producer on Novel Dialogue, the podcast of the Society of Novel Studies, both of which are New Books Network partners. His most recent essays appear in NOVEL, MFS, Critique, and Public Books. Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author most recently of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis, and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

HOO BOY this week Roman historians Dr. Sarah Bond and Dr. Bret Deveraux drop in to talk about Ridley Scott's ode to his first film, uh, ancient Rome, Gladiator II. We talk about the legacy of the first film, our impressions of the new release, and the actual history behind Gladiator II. This discussion is pretty epic. Stay tuned and subscribe.About our guests:Dr. Sarah E. Bond is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa. She is interested in late Roman history, epigraphy, late antique law, Roman topography and GIS, Digital Humanities, and the socio-legal experience of ancient marginal peoples. She earned a PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2011) and obtained a BA in Classics and History with a minor in Classical Archaeology from the University of Virginia (2005). Her book, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professionals in the Roman Mediterranean, was published with the University of Michigan Press in 2016. Follow her blog: History From Below.Additionally, Bond is a regular contributor at Hyperallergic, a columnist at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and a section editor at Public Books. She has written for The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Washington Post.  Bond's latest book, Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire will be out on February 4, 2025. It is available for preorder here: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300273144/strike/Dr. Bret C. Devereaux is an ancient and military historian who currently teaches as a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. He has his PhD in ancient history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his MA in classical civilizations from Florida State University.Bret is a historian of the broader ancient Mediterranean in general and of ancient Rome in particular. His primary research interests sit at the intersections of the Roman economy and the Roman military, examining the ways that the lives of ordinary people in the ancient world were shaped by the structures of power, violence and wealth under which they lived and the ways in which they in turn shaped the military capacity of the states in which they lived (which is simply a fancy way of saying he is interested in how the big picture of wars, economic shifts and politics impacted the ‘little' folks and vice versa). More broadly he is interested in many of the nuts-and-bolts of everyday life in the ancient world, things like the production of textiles, the economics of small farming households, and the burden of military service.He is also a lifetime fan of fantasy, science fiction and speculative fiction more generally. Bret enjoys good music, bad jokes and writing about himself in the third person. He is also required, by law and ancient custom, to inform absolutely everyone that he has, in fact, beaten Dark Souls (and now also Elden Ring).

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with scholar-activists Naomi Paik and Ashley Dawson about the close connection between abolition and environmental activism from below. How are the twin projects raising profound questions about borders, carcerality, enclosures, and the separation of humans from each other and all other forms of life, including supposedly “inanimate” objects?  How can we create “sanctuary for all” in a radical rethinking of notions like “the commons”? Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. Recently published books of his focus on key topics in the Environmental Humanities, and include People's Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). Dawson is the author of a forthcoming book entitled Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket) and the co-editor of Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2023). For the past 20 years Ashley has been engaged in public higher education as our nation's largest urban university CUNY helps transform the lives of huge numbers of students from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds.  Ashley believes deeply in the mission of public institutions such as CUNY to provide a quality education to such students and his teaching and pedagogy philosophy has been shaped by this commitmentNaomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016, UNC Press; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017), as well as articles, opinion pieces, and interviews in a range of academic and public-facing venues. Her next book-length project, "Sanctuary for All," calls for the most capacious conception of sanctuary that brings together migrant and environmental justice. A member of the Radical History Review editorial collective, she has co-edited four special issues of the journal—“Militarism and Capitalism (Winter 2019), “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” (Fall 2019), “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination” (Spring 2020), and “Alternatives to the Anthropocene” with Ashley Dawson (Winter 2023). She coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books alongside Cat Ramirez, as well as “The Politics of Sanctuary” blog of the Smithsonian Institution with Sam Vong. She is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, and a member of the Migration Scholars Collaborative and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, UIC. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.

At the DNC last week, the Warriors coach and former Bulls star Steve Kerr spoke of his excitement at his return to Chicago's United Center, the home of some his greatest basketball triumphs. According to the Columbia University historian Frank Andre Guridy, there's nothing coincidental about this convergence of American politics and sports. In his intriguing new book, THE STADIUM, Guridy reimagines America through the history of sports stadiums like Candlestick Park & Madison Square Gardens. It's a story of politics, protest and play in which these sports stadiums act as mirrors and prisms to all the most troubling and hopeful aspects of American history.Frank A. Guridy is Professor of History and African American and African Diaspora Studies and the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University. He is an award-winning historian whose recent research has focused on sport history, urban history, and the history of American social movements. His latest book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (University of Texas Press, 2021) explored how Texas-based sports entrepreneurs and athletes from marginalized backgrounds transformed American sporting culture during the 1960s and 1970s, the highpoint of the Black Freedom and Second-Wave feminist movements. Guridy is also a leading scholar of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States and in other parts of the African Diaspora. His first book, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), won the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians and the Wesley-Logan Book Prize, conferred by the American Historical Association. He is also the co-editor of Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latino/a America (NYU Press, 2010), with Gina Pérez and Adrian Burgos, Jr. His articles have appeared in Kalfou, Radical History Review, Caribbean Studies, Social Text, and Cuban Studies. His writing and commentary on sport, society, and politics have been published in Public Books, Columbia News, NBC News.com and the Washington Post. He has also appeared on a wide variety of podcasts, radio, and TV programs, including the Edge of Sports podcast by The Nation, Burn it All Down, End of Sport, Texas Public Radio, the Houston Chronicle's Sports Nation, Al Jazeera's “The Listening Post,” WNYC Public Radio, among others. His fellowships and awards include the Scholar in Residence Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Ray A. Billington Professorship in American History at Occidental College and the Huntington Library. He is also an award-winning teacher, receiving the Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, and the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching at Columbia in 2019. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016, UNC Press; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017), as well as articles, opinion pieces, and interviews in a range of academic and public-facing venues. Her next book-length project, "Sanctuary for All," calls for the most capacious conception of sanctuary that brings together migrant and environmental justice. A member of the Radical History Review editorial collective, she has co-edited four special issues of the journal—“Militarism and Capitalism (Winter 2019), “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” (Fall 2019), “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination” (Spring 2020), and “Alternatives to the Anthropocene” with Ashley Dawson (Winter 2023). She coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books alongside Cat Ramirez, as well as “The Politics of Sanctuary” blog of the Smithsonian Institution with Sam Vong. She is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, and a member of the Migration Scholars Collaborative and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, UIC. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.Arianna Salgado is a queer immigrant who was born in Morelos, Mexico and arrived in the United States at the age of 6. She began organizing in high school with the West Suburban Action Project, Nuestra Voz, and the Immigrant Youth Justice League; undocumented-led organizations that sought to create safe spaces for undocumented people and resources for higher education. Arianna is a founding member of Organized Communities Against Deportations, a grassroots organization that fights against the criminalization, detention, and deportation of undocumented people. She currently lives in Chicago in the South Lawndale neighborhood with her two pups and is the executive director at Prison/ Neighborhood Arts and Education Project. 

Thank you for listening to The Cluster F Theory. If you don't already subscribe at Substact, please sign up on our page in order to receive an email when new episodes are released. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it or review it wherever you listen and share it with your friends. Thank you!Anna Kornbluh is a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she founded InterCcECT, the Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory. Her research and teaching interests center on the novel, film and cultural aesthetics in theoretical perspective, including formalist, Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches. She is the author of Immediacy or The Style of Too Late Capitalism; The Order of Forms, Realism, Formalism, and Social Space; Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club; and Realizing Capital, Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form. Her essays have appeared in various publication such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Diacritics, Public Books and Differences. Anna is also an active community organizer. She's a co-founder of Humanities Works, an initiative to debunk myths about the dire prospects of Humanities graduates, and is an active member of the UIC United Faculty bargaining team. Anna Kornbluh: http://www.annakornbluh.comAnna Kornblum's faculty page: https://engl.uic.edu/profiles/kornbluh-anna/InterCcECT: http://interccect.com/Humanities Works: http://humanitiesworks.org/UIC Faculty: https://uicunitedfaculty.org/---------The Cluster F Theory Podcast is edited by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada.You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theclusterftheory.substack.com

Bertillon developed a system of identification via body measurements that was designed to identify whether crime suspects had an existing criminal history. But his contributions to police work have been occluded by some terrible missteps.  Research:  Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Alphonse Bertillon". Encyclopedia Britannica, 19 Apr. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alphonse-Bertillon “Identifying Prisoners.” St. Louis Globe-Democrat. December 16, 1886. https://www.newspapers.com/image/571277110/?terms=Alphonse%20Bertillion&match=1 Gates, Kelly. “Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance.” NYU Press. 2011. Fornabai, Nanette L. “Criminal Factors: ‘Fantômas', Anthropometrics, and the Numerical Fictions of Modern Criminal Identity.” Yale French Studies, no. 108, 2005, pp. 60–73. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/4149298 Fosdick, Raymond B. “The Passing of the Bertillon System of Identification.” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 6, no. 3, 1915, pp. 363–69. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1132744 Hoobler, Thomas and Dorothy. “The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection.” Little, Brown, and Co. 2009. Levendowski, Amanda, “Face Surveillance Was Always Flawed.” Public Books. Nov. 30, 2021. https://www.publicbooks.org/face-surveillance-was-always-flawed/ Mouat, F. J. “Notes on M. Bertillon's Discourse on the Anthropometric Measurement of Criminals.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 20, 1891, pp. 182–98. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2842237 Wang, Hansi Lo. “Meet Alphonse Bertillon, The Man Behind The Modern Mug Shot.” NPR. March 8, 2016. https://www.npr.org/2016/03/08/469174753/meet-alphonse-bertillon-the-man-behind-the-modern-mug-shot Daniel V. The Social History of Disaster Victim Identification in the United States, 1865 to 1950. Acad Forensic Pathol. 2020 Mar;10(1):4-15. doi: 10.1177/1925362120941336 Helfand, Jessica. “Alphonse Bertillon and the Troubling Pursuit of Human Metrics.” The MIT Press Reader. May 5. 2021. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-troubling-pursuit-of-human-metrics/ “Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914).” National Library of Medicine. Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/visibleproofs/galleries/biographies/bertillon.html Farebrother, R. and Champkin, J. (2014), Alphonse Bertillon and the measure of man: More expert than Sherlock Holmes. Significance, 11: 36-39. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2014.00739.x Guthrie, Glenice J., and Sharon Jenkins. “Bertillon Files: An Untapped Source of Nineteenth-Century Human Height Data.” Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 61, no. 2, 2005, pp. 201–15. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3630855 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.