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Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

New Books Network

Interviews with Columbia University Press authors.

arts books

All Episodes

60:44

Martin Moore and Thomas Colley, "Dictating Reality:...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/11/01

From the United States to China and from Brazil to India, an authoritarian approach to news is spreading across the world. Increasingly, the media is no longer a check on power or a source of objective information but a means by which governments and leaders can propagate their versions of reality, however biased or false.In Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News (Columbia UP, 2025), Dr. Martin Moore and Dr. Thomas Colley show how states are battling to control and shape the news

62:58

Diane Ravitch, "An Education: How I Changed My Mind...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/10/28

For many years, Diane Ravitch was among the country’s leading conservative thinkers on education. The cure for what ailed the school system was clear, she believed: high-stakes standardized testing, national standards, accountability, competition, charters, and vouchers. Then Ravitch saw what happened when these ideas were put into practice and recanted her long-held views. The problem was not bad teachers or failing schools, as conservatives claimed, but poverty. She denounced privatization as a

67:34

Jeffrey D. Sharon, "The Great Balancing Act: An...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/10/21

What's the secret to keeping your balance? The ear does more than hear: it helps us stay stable by perceiving movements and gravity. Elegant sensors deep within the skull detect every twist, turn, and tumble, powering swift reflexes that keep vision and balance steady. This is the vestibular system. It's primordial and ubiquitous: every animal has one, and even plants have a rudimentary version. It works so well that we take it for granted--until it fails. How does this remarkable system function

71:58

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, "Overdetermined: How...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/10/08

Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express resistance to India and Indianness? What does this reveal about how non-Western literatures are read, taught, and understood? Drawing on years of experiences in classrooms and on U.S. university campuses, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan explores how writers, critics, teachers, and students of Indian English literatures negotiate and resist the categories

102:23

Joshua Eisenman and David H. Shinn, "China's...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/10/08

Since Xi Jinping’s accession to power in 2012, nearly every aspect of China’s relations with Africa has grown dramatically. Beijing has increased the share of resources it devotes to African countries, expanding military cooperation, technological investment, and educational and cultural programs as well as extending its political influence.China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement (Columbia University Press, 2023) examines the full scope of contemporary political and

69:43

Daniel K. Sodickson, "The Future of Seeing: How...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/10/03

Over the centuries, we have learned to peer into what was once invisible. Imaging devices like cameras, telescopes, microscopes, and MRI machines map the world around, beyond, and within us in ways the naked eye could never see. In so doing, these technologies have transformed our understanding of our place in the universe and our conception of our own bodies--and we may be on the cusp of an even greater revolution.Daniel K. Sodickson--a physicist and biomedical imaging innovator--explores the

53:46

Wendell Marsh, "Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/09/22

Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2025), is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa.The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945) wrote History of the Blacks, a monumental history of West Africa, in a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both

55:11

Mark Goble, "Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/09/15

Slow motion is everywhere in contemporary film and media, but it wasn't always so ubiquitous. How did slow motion ascend to the dubious honor of becoming our culture's least "special" effect? And what does slow motion — a trick secured paradoxically through the camera's ever-racing speeds of capture — tell us about the temporalities and trajectories of modernity? Mark Goble, Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, takes up these questions in his latest book Downtime: The

51:23

Wu Jianren, "New Story of the Stone: An Early Chinese...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/09/11

What happens if you took one of the classic characters of Chinese literary fiction and dropped him into early 20th-century China?That’s the premise of Wu Jianren’s novel, New Story of the Stone (Columbia UP, 2025), written in 1905, which takes Jia Baoyu, from the classic Dream of the Red Chamber, and takes him first to Qing China and the Boxer Rebellion, and then to the fantastical “Realm of Civilization,” a world that, in Wu’s eyes, reflected what he thought would happen if people embraced

43:30

Katherine Fusco, "Hollywood's Others: Love and...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/09/06

We tend to think about movie stars as either glamorous or relatable. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Hollywood star system was taking shape, a number of unusual stars appeared on the silver screen, representing groups from which the American mainstream typically sought to avert its eyes. What did it mean for a white entertainment columnist to empathize with an ambiguously gendered Black child star? Or for boys to idolize Lon Chaney, famous for portraying characters with

53:45

Santiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/09/04

Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press, 2025). Warnings, for Zabala, are not synonymous with predictions. They are instead as much about the present as the future. They point towards already present crisis and contradictions. They also attempt to reorient us towards alternative paths. Embedded deeply in the critical hermeneutics of writers such as Heidegger, Arendt and Beauvoir but

40:25

Stephan Kieninger, "Securing Peace in Europe: Strobe...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/08/24

This deeply researched book offers new perspective on the NATO-Russia relationship through the eyes of Strobe Talbott, a deputy secretary of state for seven years under President Bill Clinton and the key US diplomatic broker for the former USSR. Stephan Kieninger traces the Clinton administration’s efforts to engage Russia and enlarge NATO at the same time, as elements of a new European security architecture. Drawing on Talbott’s diaries, as well as US and European archives and extensive interviews

41:58

Shennette Garrett-Scott, "Banking on Freedom: Black...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/08/20

Think running an insurance company or a bank is hard? Try doing it as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow South. Shennette Garrett-Scott's new book, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 2019) tells the fascinating story of just such an endeavor, first the Independent Order of St. Luke, and then the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, founded in Richmond in 1903. Along the way, she tells the tale of force-of-nature strong women,

65:20

Todd Mcgowan, "Pure Excess: Capitalism and the...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/08/18

Todd McGowan forges a new theory of capitalism as a system based on the production of more than what we need: pure excess. He argues that the promise of more—more wealth, more enjoyment, more opportunity, without requiring any sacrifice—is the essence of capitalism. Previous socioeconomic systems set up some form of the social good as their focus. Capitalism, however, represents a revolutionary turn away from the good and the useful toward excessive growth, which now threatens the habitability of

55:37

Adriana Carranca, "Soul by Soul: The Evangelical...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/08/16

US-born Protestant evangelicalism has gone global to an extent of which many of us might be unaware. Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims (Columbia Global Reports, 2024) tells the story of Americans’ colossal mobilization to proclaim Christianity “to the ends of the Earth,” a movement that triumphed in the Global South, challenged the Vatican, then turned east in full force after 9/11 to spread the Gospel among Muslims. When the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq set off a

30:29

Matthew Facciani, "Misguided: Where Misinformation...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/08/14

Why are people inclined to believe misinformation? Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How It Spreads, and What to Do about It (Columbia UP, 2025) is a wide-ranging and comprehensive book that shines a light on how false beliefs take root and spread, exploring the cognitive, emotional, and social factors that make us all susceptible to misinformation. Challenging approaches that focus solely on education and media literacy, Matthew Facciani emphasizes the important role identities and social

58:41

Vijay Selvam, "Principles of Bitcoin: Technology,...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/08/11

Principles of Bitcoin presents a holistic, first-principles-based framework for understanding one of the most misunderstood inventions of our time. By stripping away the hype, jargon, and superficial analysis that often surrounds the crypto industry, this book uncovers the true ingenuity behind Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation—and its profound implications for the future of money, governance, and individual freedom.Vijay Selvam analyzes the technology, economics, politics, and philosophy of Bitcoin,

62:13

David J. Helfand, "The Universal Timekeepers:...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/08/07

Atoms are unfathomably tiny. It takes fifteen million trillion of them to make up a single poppy seed—give or take a few billion. And there’s hardly anything to them: atoms are more than 99.9999999999 percent empty space. Yet scientists have learned to count these slivers of near nothingness with precision and to peer into their internal states. In looking so closely, we have learned that atoms, because of their inimitable signatures and imperturbable internal clocks, are little archives holding the

41:41

M’hamed Oualdi, "A Slave between Empires: A...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/07/20

In light of the profound physical and mental traumas of colonization endured by North Africans, historians of recent decades have primarily concentrated their studies of North Africa on colonial violence, domination, and shock. The choice is an understandable one. But in his new monograph, A Slave between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa (Columbia University Press, 2020), M’hamed Oualdi asks how a history of the modern Maghreb might look if we did not perceive it solely through the

58:08

Noëlle McAfee, "Fear of Breakdown: Psychoanalysis and...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/07/11

In his classic essay on the fear of breakdown, Donald Winnicott famously conveys to a patient that the disaster powerfully feared has, in fact, already happened. Taking her cue from Winnicott, Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of Breakdown: Psychoanalysis and Politics (Columbia University Press, 2019), explores the implications of breakdown fears for the practice of democracy.Democracy, as you may dimly recall, demands the capacity to bear difference, tolerate loss, and to speak into the unknown. Meanwhile we

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Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

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