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Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas

New Books Network

Interviews with thought-leaders about their new books. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/van-leer-institute

arts books

All Episodes

42:44

Michael J. Sandel, "The Tyranny of Merit: What's...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2021/01/08

These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the American credo that you can make it if you try. The consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fueled populist protest and extreme polarization, and led to deep distrust of both government and our fellow citizens--leaving us morally unprepared to face the profound challenges

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54:21

Adina Hoffman, "Till We Have Built Jerusalem:...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2021/01/04

A remarkable view of one of the world's most beloved and troubled cities, Adina Hoffman's Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City (FSG, 2017) is a gripping and intimate journey into the very different lives of three architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem. The book unfolds as an excavation. It opens with the 1934 arrival in Jerusalem of the celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn, a refugee from Hitler's Germany who must reckon with a complex new Middle Eastern reality. Next

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45:31

S. L. Lewis and M. A. Maslin, "The Human Planet: How...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/12/18

Meteorites, mega-volcanoes, and plate tectonics--the old forces of nature--have transformed Earth for millions of years. They are now joined by a new geological force--humans. Our actions have driven Earth into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. For the first time in our home planet's 4.5-billion-year history a single species is increasingly dictating Earth's future. To some the Anthropocene symbolizes a future of superlative control of our environment. To others it is the height of hubris,

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34:27

Mike Shanahan, "Ladders to Heaven: How Figs Shaped...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/12/04

They are trees of life and trees of knowledge. They are wish-fulfillers … rainforest royalty … more precious than gold. They are the fig trees, and they have affected humanity in profound but little-known ways. Mike Shanahan's book Ladders to Heaven: How Figs Shaped our History, Fed our Imaginations, and can Enrich our Future (Unbound, 2016) tells their amazing story. Fig trees fed our pre-human ancestors, influenced diverse cultures and played key roles in the dawn of civilisation. They feature in

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60:26

Sumit Guha, "History and Collective Memory in South...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/11/23

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system

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42:40

Betty Rojtman, "The Fascination with Death in...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/11/09

The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought: A Longing for the Abyss (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) analyses a cultural phenomenon that goes to the very roots of Western civilization: the centrality of death in our sense of human existence. It does so through a close reading of seminal works by the most creative authors of modern French thought, such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. These works encode an entire ethics of postmodernism. Betty Rojtman offers the

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70:59

Robert Plomin, "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/10/22

Have you ever felt, “Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother (or father)!” ? Robert Plomin explains why that happens in Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (MIT Press, 2019). A century of genetic research shows that DNA differences inherited from our parents are the consistent lifelong sources of our psychological individuality―the blueprint that makes us who we are. Robert Plomin’s decades of work demonstrate that genetics explains more about the psychological differences among people than all

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49:59

Joseph E. David, "Kinship, Law and Politics: An...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/10/14

Why are we so concerned with belonging? In what ways does our belonging constitute our identity? Is belonging a universal concept or a culturally dependent value? How does belonging situate and motivate us? In these days of identity politics, these issues are more significant and more complex than ever. Joseph E. David grapples with these questions through a genealogical analysis of ideas and concepts of belonging. In his book Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging (Cambridge UP,

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40:20

Eric Weiner, "The Geography of Genius: Lessons from...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/10/07

Living, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for NPR who writes with humility and humor, as he brings us along with him on his travels to times and places that produced genius. Beginning with Athens in the Golden age, and ending with Palo Alto in the Silicon age, Weiner steps lightly through a most serious and fascinating topic, aided and supplemented with the latest

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34:21

Armstrong Williams, "What Black and White America...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/10/02

What Black and White America Must Do Now: A Prescription to Move Beyond Race (Hot Books, 2020) explores the complexity of race and culture in the United States. In his third book, renowned conservative entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist Armstrong Williams discusses his prescription for healing and atonement amidst today’s current social upheaval. Race and racism are America's original sin, and four hundred years later, they still plague the nation, pitting groups against each other. Despite

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46:22

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/09/21

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of An American Family (Doubleday, 2020) is the story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In

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52:10

Alexander Kaye, "The Invention of Jewish Theocracy:...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/09/09

The tension between secular politics and religious fundamentalism is a problem shared by many modern states. This is certainly true of the State of Israel, where the religious-secular schism provokes conflict at every level of society. Driving this schism is the idea of the halakhic state, the demand by many religious Jews that Israel should be governed by the law of the Torah as interpreted by Orthodox rabbis. The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern

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60:49

Rafael Medoff, "The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/08/31

Like so many Americans, American Jews supported President Roosevelt. They adored him. They believed in him. They idolized him. Perhaps they shouldn’t have. Based on recently discovered documents, The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust (Jewish Publication Society) reassesses the hows and whys behind the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s fateful policies during the Holocaust. Rafael Medoff delves into difficult truths: With FDR’s consent, the

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64:37

Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, "The War of Return: How...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/08/06

Two prominent Israeli liberals argue that for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to end with peace, Palestinians must come to terms with the fact that there will be no "right of return." In 1948, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were forced out of their homes by the first Arab-Israeli War. More than seventy years later, most of their houses are long gone, but millions of their descendants are still registered as refugees, with many living in refugee camps. This group―unlike

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68:24

Paula Fredriksen, "When Christians Were Jews: The...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/07/31

How did a group of charismatic, apocalyptic Jewish missionaries, working to prepare their world for the impending realization of God's promises to Israel, end up inaugurating a movement that would grow into the gentile church? Committed to Jesus’s prophecy—“The Kingdom of God is at hand!”—they were, in their own eyes, history's last generation. But in history's eyes, they became the first Christians. In When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (Yale University Press, 2018), Paula

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53:06

Fay Bound Alberti, "A Biography of Loneliness: The...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/07/14

Before the global pandemic of Covid-19 arrived, public health experts in the U.S. and U.K. were warning of the epidemic of loneliness. Loneliness steals more years of life than obesity. Loneliness is as much of a risk as smoking. Loneliness shortens a lifespan as much as poverty. It is associated with addiction, depression, anxiety, paranoia, and even suicide. And more and more of us report feeling lonely. Nevertheless, despite our 21st-century fears of an epidemic of loneliness, we know very little

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41:08

Stephan Talty, "The Good Assassin" (HMH, 2020)

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/07/06

History that reads like a thriller; The Good Assassin: How A Mossad Agent and a Band of Survivors Hunted Down The Butcher of Latvia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020) by Stephan Talty is the untold story of an Israeli spy’s epic journey to bring the notorious Butcher of Latvia to justice—a case that altered the fates of all ex-Nazis. Before World War II, Herbert Cukurs was a famous figure in his small Latvian city, the “Charles Lindbergh of his country.” But by 1945, he was the Butcher of Latvia, a

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51:31

Pehr Granqvist, "Attachment in Religion and...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/06/25

Attachment theory is a popular lens through which psychologists have examined human development and interpersonal dynamics. In Attachment in Religion and Spirituality: A Wider View (Guilford Press, 2020), Pehr Granqvist uses that lens to examine the psychology of religion and spirituality. He focuses on the connections between early caregiving experiences, attachment patterns, and individual differences in religious cognition, experience, and behavior. The function of a deity as an attachment figure

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42:45

Cailin O’Connor, "The Misinformation Age: How False...

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/05/20

The social dynamics of “alternative facts”: why what you believe depends on who you know Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them? In The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread (Yale University Press, 2018), Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and

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37:03

Yael Tamir, "Why Nationalism?" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Van Leer Institute Series on Ideas ·

2020/05/04

Around the world today, nationalism is back—and it’s often deeply troubling. Populist politicians exploit nationalism for authoritarian, chauvinistic, racist, and xenophobic purposes, reinforcing the view that it is fundamentally reactionary and antidemocratic. But Yael (Yuli) Tamir makes a passionate argument for a very different kind of nationalism—one that revives its participatory, creative, and egalitarian virtues, answers many of the problems caused by neoliberalism and hyperglobalism, and is

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158 results

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