PODCAST

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

A series of interviews with authors of new books from Princeton University Press

arts books

All Episodes

44:24

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/10/25

R. Jisung Park is assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds appointments in the School of Social Policy and Practice and the Wharton School of Business.It’s hard not to feel anxious about the problem of climate change, especially if we think of it as an impending planetary catastrophe. In Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World (Princeton UP, 2025), R. Jisung Park encourages us to view climate change through a different lens: one that focuses less on the

64:41

What Do You Want Out of Life? A Philosophical Guide...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/10/23

What do you want out of life? To make a lot of money, work for justice, run marathons, sing in a choir, have children, travel the world? The things we care about in life—family, friendship, leisure activities, work, our moral ideals—often conflict, preventing us from doing what matters most to us. Even worse, we don’t always know what we really want, or how to define success. Blending personal stories, philosophy, and psychology, this insightful and entertaining book offers invaluable advice about

87:28

David Bressoud, "Calculus Reordered: A History of the...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/10/19

Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas (Princeton UP, 2019) takes readers on a remarkable journey through hundreds of years to tell the story of how calculus evolved into the subject we know today. David Bressoud explains why calculus is credited to seventeenth-century figures Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, and how its current structure is based on developments that arose in the nineteenth century. Bressoud argues that a pedagogy informed by the historical development of calculus

39:13

David Stasavage, "The Decline and Rise of Democracy:...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/10/18

Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today (Princeton University Press, 2020) draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer--democratic practices were present in many places, at many other times, from the Americas before European conquest, to ancient Mesopotamia, to precolonial Africa. Delving into the prevalence of early democracy throughout the

57:59

Hilary Holladay, "The Power of Adrienne Rich: A...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/10/17

A major American writer, thinker, and activist, Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of forceful, uncompromising prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as an architect and exemplar of the feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for women writers to take their places in the cultural

35:26

Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology,...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/10/17

In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton UP, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world’s largest, most advanced economies—the United States and China—have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and

54:04

Make Your Manuscript Work: A Guide to Developmental...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/10/09

Developmental editing holds the power to make a manuscript connect with publishers and readers, yet few scholarly writers have the training to do it well. Make Your Manuscript Work: A Guide to Developmental Editing for Scholarly Writers (Princeton UP, 2025) offers scholars a practical method for assessing and refining the features of their texts that matter most—argument, evidence, structure, and style. Dr. Laura Portwood-Stacer, a writer, editor, and consultant for academic authors, explains how

69:52

Georgios Varouxakis, "The West: The History of an...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/10/04

How did “the West” come to be used as a collective self-designation signaling political and cultural commonality? When did “Westerners” begin to refer to themselves in this way? Was the idea handed down from the ancient Greeks, or coined by nineteenth-century imperialists? Neither, writes Georgios Varouxakis in The West: The History of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2025), his ambitious and fascinating genealogy of the idea. “The West” was not used by Plato, Cicero, Locke, Mill, or other canonized figures

65:12

Mark Vellend, "Everything Evolves: Why Evolution...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/09/27

How the science of evolution explains how everything came to be, from bacteria and blue whales to cell phones, cities, and artificial intelligenceEverything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More Than We Think, from Proteins to Politics (Princeton UP, 2025) reveals how evolutionary dynamics shape the world as we know it and how we are harnessing the principles of evolution in pursuit of many goals, such as increasing the global food supply and creating artificial intelligence capable of evolving

64:56

Jack Hartnell, "Wound Man: The Many Lives of a...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/09/18

The Wound Man—a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases—was reproduced widely across the medieval and early modern globe. In Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image (Princeton University Press, 2025), Dr. Jack Hartnell charts the emergence and endurance of this striking image, used as a visual guide to the treatment of many ailments. Taking readers on a remarkable journey from medieval Europe to eighteenth-century Japan, Dr

45:20

Celene Reynolds, "Unlawful Advances: How Feminists...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/09/16

When the US Congress enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, no one expected it to become a prominent tool for confronting sexual harassment in schools. Title IX is the civil rights law that prohibits education programs from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” At the time, however, the term “sexual harassment” was not yet in use; this kind of misconduct was simply accepted as part of life for girls and women at schools and universities. In Unlawful Advances: How Feminists Transformed

42:07

Laura Garbes, "Listeners Like Who?: Exclusion and...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/09/13

Why is radio so white? In Listeners Like Who? Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry (Princeton UP, 2025) Laura Garbes, a Sociologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, explores the history of public radio, theorising it as a white institutional space. Alongside the rich history and theoretical framework, the book draws on a range of interviews with radio workers, revealing how stories are chosen and supported, expertise and perspectives are

38:05

Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe, "Growing Up...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/09/10

What do children believe in? In Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England (Princeton UP, 2025) Anna Strhan, a Reader in the Department of Sociology at the University of York and Rachael Shillitoe, a senior social scientist in the UK civil service and honorary fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of York use ethnography and interviews with young people and parents at a variety of schools in England to examine current forms of non-religiosity. The book

57:32

Andrea Louise Campbell, "Taxation and Resentment:...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/09/10

Why Americans favor progressive taxation in principle but not in practiceMost Americans support progressive taxation in principle, and want the rich to pay more. But the specific tax policies that most favor are more regressive than progressive. What is behind such a disconnect? In Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes (Princeton UP, 2025), Andrea Louise Campbell examines public opinion on taxation, exploring why what Americans favor in principle differs from

39:15

David Woodman, "The First King of England: Æthelstan...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/09/02

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Professor David Woodman is a foundational biography of Æthelstan (d. 939), the early medieval king whose territorial conquests and shrewd statesmanship united the peoples, languages, and cultures that would come to be known as the “kingdom of the English.” In this panoramic work, Dr. Woodman blends masterful storytelling with the latest scholarship to paint a multifaceted portrait of this immensely

55:30

David Edmonds, "Death in a Shallow Pond: A...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/09/01

Imagine this: You’re walking past a shallow pond and spot a toddler thrashing around in the water, in obvious danger of drowning. You look around for her parents, but nobody is there. You’re the only person who can save her and you must act immediately. But as you approach the pond you remember that you’re wearing your most expensive shoes. Wading into the water will ruin them—and might make you late for a meeting. Should you let the child drown? The philosopher Peter Singer published this thought

30:37

Joshua Specht, "Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/08/31

Why do Americans eat so much beef? In Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2019), the historian Joshua Specht provides a history that shows how our diets and consumer choices remain rooted in nineteenth century enterprises. A century and half ago, he writes, the colonialism and appropriation of indigenous lands enabled the expansion of western ranch outfits. These corporate ranchers controlled loose commodity chains, until powerful

50:55

Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/08/31

We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet.She identifies 3 types of censorship: fear (threatening punishment to deter the spread or access of information); friction (increasing the time or money necessary to access

53:22

Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta, "Private...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/08/29

What does it mean to supervise a bank? And why does it matter who holds that power? In this episode, Sean H. Vanatta joins us to explore the hidden machinery behind American finance, as told in his new book Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America (Princeton UP, 2025), co-authored with Peter Conti-Brown.Spanning nearly 150 years, the book traces the evolution of bank supervision from a patchwork of state-level oversight to a complex, layered system involving federal

42:50

Tom Arnold-Forster, "Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual...

Princeton UP Ideas Podcast ·

2025/08/27

From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers in the United States of America.His words and ideas had a powerful impact on American liberalism and his writings on the media are still taught today. Lippmann is now the subject of Tom Arnold-Forster’s Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton UP, 2025). Arnold-Forster explores Lippmann in his evolving historical context, from the

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Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

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