The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army (Reaktion, 2024) exposes the history and the future of the Wagner Group, Russia’s notorious and secretive mercenary army, revealing details of their operations never documented before. Using extensive leaks, first-hand accounts, and the byzantine paper trail left in its wake, Jack Margolin traces the…

Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly made time back in 2023 for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and for John Plotz in his role as host for our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue. In this conversation, she reads from The Wren, The Wren and says we don’t yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority. We can be su…

For decades, media and academic analysis of African politics has emphasised instability, political violence, and male dominance. Yet a brilliant new article by Zoe Marks for the Journal of Democracy entitled “African Popular Protest and Political Change” reveals that in fact Africa stands out as the region globally with the largest number of nonvio…

Today’s book is: Immigration Realities: Challenging Common Misperceptions (Columbia UP, 2024), by Ernesto Castaneda and Carina Cione, which is a practical, evidence-based primer on immigrants and immigration. Each chapter debunks a frequently encountered claim and answers common questions. Presenting the latest findings and decades of interdiscipli…

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde's teachings on "the creative power of difference" may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today…

The achievement of Singapore’s national public housing program is impressive by any standard. Within a year of its first election victory in 1959, the People's Action Party began to deliver on its promises in dramatic fashion. By the 1980s, 85 percent of the population had been rehoused in modern flats, and today, decades later, the provision of pu…

How and Why We Make Games (CRC Press, 2024) delves into the intricate realms of games and their creation, examining them through cultural, systemic, and, most notably, human lenses. It explores diverse themes such as authorship, creative responsibility, the tension between games as a product and games as a form of cultural expression, and the myth …

An interview with Dr. Marco Demichelis in which we discuss the ideas of just war and the seal of prophethood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studiesKirjoittanut Marshall Poe

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast, host Andrea Talabér sat down with Azra Hromadžić (Syracuse University) to talk about her new book with CEU Press, Riverine Citizenship: A Bosnian City in Love with the River. In the podcast we discussed how in the Bosnian city of Bihać, people’s connection to the river Una has shaped not only the river itse…

Shadows. Smoke. Dark alleys. Rain-slicked city streets. These are iconic elements of film noir visual style. Long after its 1940s heyday, noir hallmarks continue to appear in a variety of new media forms and styles. What has made the noir aesthetic at once enduring and adaptable? Sheri Chinen Biesen's Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual …

Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influence the human psyche through form, or elicit desired behaviors with environmental incentives, implementing what Joy Knoblauch calls “psychological functio…

In Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Zrinka Stahuljak challenges scholars in both mediaeval and translation studies to rethink how ideas and texts circulated in the mediaeval world. Whereas many view translators as mere conduits of authorial intention, Dr. Stahuljak prop…

Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State (Faber & Faber, 2024) offers a lively, new and sweeping history of the rise of the state in Plantagenet England. Between 1199 and 1399, English politics was high drama. These two centuries witnessed savage political blood-letting - including civil war, deposition, the murder of kings and…

Today, we’re playing with voice assistants and thinking about the role of voices in gaming with our guest, game designer and NYU professor Frank Lantz. Over the past nightmare year of the coronavirus, many of us have been hunkered down, trying to figure out how to pass the time with our families. Board game sales on Amazon were up 4,000% percent in…

An award-winning childhood grief expert shares clinically-informed advice for supporting kids and teens through difficult times--from family deaths and lost pets to unexpected moves, and beyond. A necessary and impactful guide to understanding children's grief from the inside and to guiding children through loss, from the death of a parent and othe…

Today I talked to Philip Freeman about his new book Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor (Yale UP, 2023). Flavius Claudius Julianus, or Julian the Apostate, ruled Rome as sole emperor for just a year and a half, from 361 to 363, but during that time he turned the world upside down. Although a nephew of Constantine the Great, the first Christian empero…

'Wicked Problems' are those problems facing the planet and its inhabitants, present and future, which are hard (if not impossible) to resolve and for which bold, creative, and messy solutions are typically required. The adjective 'wicked' describes the mischievous and even evil quality of these problems, where proposed solutions often turn out to b…

Nicholas Molbert's Altars of Spine and Fraction (Curbstone Press/Northwestern UP, 2024) follows its protagonist through the joys and dangers of childhood on the rural Gulf Coast, through familial loss, and into adulthood. Refusing to romanticize what has been lost, Molbert instead interrogates how nostalgia is most often enjoyed by those with the p…

On this podcast today, I am joined by three scholars: postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt, Gil Hizi; assistant professor at Sun Yat-sen University, Xinyan Peng; and lecturer and researcher at the University of Ghent, Mieke Matthyssen. All three guests join me to talk about their chapters in the new book, Self-Development…

China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country’s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification. State environmentalism - in the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement - has transformed the lives of many ethnic minori…

The foundation of the earth, its division from the heavens and the waters, God's provision of all of nature as well as human and animal life, God's relationship to the world, and the ethics and morality of our human response; these key themes, related to both creation and covenant, emerge from the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible. In her recen…