Power to the People: Use Your Voice, Change the World (Headline Press, 2024) is Danny Sriskandarajah‘s radical manifesto for change designed to inspire citizen action around the world. The book presents a blueprint for how we, as individuals, can make a difference through greater community engagement and how we can deliver a society that works for …

Listen to this interview of Darja Smite, Professor, and Eriks Klotins, Senior Researcher — both at Software Engineering Research Lab (SERL), Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. We talk about the paper From Collaboration to Solitude and Back: Remote Pair Programming During COVID-19 (Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programmi…

Witness the rise of Southern baking from the humble, make-do recipes of earlier generations to its place as one of the world's richest culinary traditions through Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories (Harper Celebrate, 2024), a new essential cookbook from bestselling author Anne Byrn. With 200 recipes and more than 150…

Handcrafted Careers: Working the Artisan Economy of Craft Beer (U California Press, 2024) unpacks the problems and privileges of pursuing a career of passion by exploring work inside craft breweries. As workers attempt new modes of employment in the era of the Great Resignation, they face a labor landscape that is increasingly uncertain and stubbor…

It is an intuitive truth that religious beliefs are different from ordinary factual beliefs. We understand that a belief in God or the sacredness of scripture is not the same as believing that the sun will rise again tomorrow or that flipping the switch will turn on the light. In Religion as Make Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group …

A perpetual tension exists between history and change, which is an issue long explored by historians and social scientists. Reckoning with Change in Yucatán: Histories of Care and Threat on a Former Hacienda (Routledge, 2023) engages with how best to look upon and respond to change, arguing that this debate is an important arena for negotiating loc…

Today I talked to Scott Nadelson's novel Trust Me (Forest Avenue Press, 2024). After his divorce, Lewis moves into the cabin he bought as a vacation home towards the end of his marriage. It’s in the foothills of the Cascade mountains, a forty-five-minute drive from his twelve-year-old daughter’s school and his tedious government job in Salem, Orego…

Today I talked to Will Grant about his book Populista: The Rise of Latin America's 21st Century Strongman (Bloomsbury, 2021). or more than six decades, Fidel Castro's words have echoed through the politics of Latin America. His towering political influence still looms over the region today. The swing to the Left in Latin America, known as the 'Pink…

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…

Listen to this interview of Clemens Dubslaff, Assistant Professor, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. We talk about the cultural dividing lines between researcher communities, and of course, how to cross those lines into whole new areas of research. Clemens Dubslaff : "One particular thing I would like to see eXplainable Formal Me…

Many scholars and members of the press have argued that John Roberts’ Supreme Court is exceptional. While some emphasize the approach to interpreting the Constitution or the justices conservative ideology, Dr. Kevin J. McMahon suggests that the key issue is democratic legitimacy. Historically, the Supreme Court has always had some “democracy gap” –…

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…

At the beginning of the twentieth century, for many English men and women of Welsh origin the idea of being in some part 'Welsh' reaffirmed their own understanding of what it meant to 'be British'. Wales in England, 1914-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Wendy Ugolini is the first cultural history of this English Welsh duality - an identi…

n this special Star Trek Day episode on the New Books Network, hosted by Dessy Vassileva from Vernon Press, we celebrate over 55 years of Star Trek with a deep dive into the book Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier (Vernon Press, 2023). Co-editors Emily Strand and Amy H. Sturgis join the discussion to explore how Star Trek has shaped sci…

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…

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx's lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital (Princeton UP, 2024) is a transla…

Creation Lake (Scribner, 2024) is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. "Sadie Smith" is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the read…

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…

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…

'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…

Jails are the principal people-processing machines of the criminal justice system. Mostly they hold persons awaiting trial who cannot afford or have been denied bail. Although jail sentences max out at a year, some spend years awaiting trial in jail-especially in counties where courts are jammed with cases. City and county jails, detention centers,…

Americans agree that their nation’s origins lie in the Revolution, but they have never agreed on what the Revolution meant. For nearly two hundred and fifty years, politicians, political parties, social movements, and a diverse array of ordinary Americans have constantly reimagined the Revolution to fit the times and suit their own agendas. In The …

Listen to this interview of Javier Cámara, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Málaga, Spain. We talk about the paper Cámara et al. Quantitative Verification-Aided Machine Learning: A Tandem Approach for Architecting Self-Adaptive IoT Systems. Javier Cámara : "Yes, it had been an option, at one point during revising, …

As the author of a graphic history, I loved chatting with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Paul Peart-Smith about the graphic interpretation of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2024). An Indigenous Peoples' History of The United States originally came out in 2014 with Beacon Press. In 2019 it was adapted into a Young Peopl…

Today I talked to Sivan Zakai and Matt Reingold's their book Teaching Israel: Studies of Pedagogy from the Field (Brandeis UP, 2023). In this discussion we discuss best teaching practices for Israel Incorporating Israel educators from inner-city nontraditional college classrooms, the US marine core university, Jewish day school high schools and pre…

As soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, prominent independent Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar circulated a Facebook petition signed first by hundreds of his cultural and journalistic contacts and then by thousands of others. That act led to a new law in Russia criminalizing criticism of the war, and Zygar fled Russia. In his time as a jo…