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New Books in Politics and Polemics

Interviews with Authors of Politics and Polemics about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

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All Episodes

28:58

Alexandra Freidus, "Unequal Lessons: School Diversity...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/08/10

Unequal Lessons: School Diversity and Educational Inequality in New York City (NYU Press, 2025) argues that diversity and racial integration efforts are not sufficient to address educational inequality. New York City schools are among the most segregated in the nation. Yet over seven decades after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, New Yorkers continue to argue about whether school segregation matters. Amid these debates, Alexandra Freidus dives deep into the roots of racial inequality in

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68:53

Irvin Weathersby Jr., "In Open Contempt: Confronting...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/08/08

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.Professor Weathersby takes us

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46:23

154 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/08/07

With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California. All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for the Future, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. Flanked by RTB’s JP, KSR’s friend and

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90:35

Heather Browning and Walter Veit, "What Are Zoos...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/08/05

Are zoos an anachronism in the 21st century when we can watch animals in their natural habitat, close-up from our couches without worrying about cruelty? Should they go the way of other bygone era ‘spectacles’ and ‘attractions’ that we now regard as barbaric? There are vocal campaigners and activists who believe so. Heather Browning and Walter Veit disagree, but they acknowledge there is a case to be answered. In What Are Zoos For? (Bristol University Press, 2024) they test the common

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60:42

Daniel José Gaztambide, "Decolonizing Psychoanalytic...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/08/03

Both new and seasoned psychotherapists wrestle with the relationship between psychological distress and inequality across race, class, gender, and sexuality. How does one address this organically in psychotherapy? What role does it play in therapeutic action? Who brings it up, the therapist or the patient? Daniel José Gaztambide addresses these questions by offering a rigorous decolonial approach that rethinks theory and technique from the ground up, providing an accessible, evidence-informed

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58:33

Linda Gordon, "Seven Social Movements That Changed...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/08/02

How do social movements arise, wield power, and bring about meaningful change? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these and other salient questions in this “visionary, cautionary, timely, and utterly necessary book” (Nicole Eustace), narrating how some of America’s most influential twentieth-century social movements transformed the nation.Beginning with the turn-of-the century settlement house movement, the book compares Chicago’s celebrated Hull-House, begun by privileged women, to a much

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58:28

Philip Cunliffe, "The National Interest: Politics...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/08/02

Globalization is over. With US president Donald Trump pursuing an 'America First' agenda in trade and foreign policy, everyone now recognises the urgency of defending their own country's national interest. But what is the national interest and why did it disappear from the political agenda? Will Trump restore American national interests, or will he betray them? How might we know the difference? The National Interest: Politics After Globalization (Polity Press, 2025) answers these questions. It

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33:42

Camilla Fitzsimons, "Rethinking Feminism in Ireland"...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/08/02

Camilla Fitzsimons teaches at Maynooth University and is the author of Community Education and Neoliberalism in 2017 as well as Repealed: Ireland's Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights in 2021 which won the American Conference for Irish Studies James S Donnelly Sr book award for History and Social Science – she talked to us in January 2022 about that book. In this interview, she discusses her new book Rethinking Feminism in Ireland Rethinking Feminism in Ireland offers a radical approach that

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33:14

How Late-Stage Neoliberal Capitalism is Breaking...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/07/31

For a long time many (although by no means all) scholars saw the relationship between capitalism and democracy as mutually reinforcing: economic competition and growth were expected to sustain democratic competition and improve governance and public good delivery for citizens, in turn creating a better environment for capitalist competition to flourish. But as capitalism has changed and has in many respects freed itself from the constraints of the state and of democratic processes, it has unleashed

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20:40

On Bullshit in AI

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/07/31

Today we’re continuing our series on Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work, On Bullshit. I have the privilege to speak with Arvind Narayanan co-author of the book AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What it Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference (Princeton University Press, 2024). Arvind is the perfect guest to explore the subject of bullshit in AI as AI Snake Oil takes on the ridiculous hype ascribed to the promise of AI. AI chatbots often hallucinate and many of the promoters of AI engage

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66:33

Foluke Taylor, "Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/07/29

In 1977, The Combahee River Collective, a group of Black American feminists issued a statement communicating the harrowing following:“The psychological toll of being a Black woman…can never be underestimated. There is a low value placed on Black women’s psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist. We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level and yet we feel the need to struggle to change the condition of all Black women.” Almost 50 years later, we have a book that

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41:03

Mark R. Rank, "Poorly Understood: What America Gets...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/07/26

Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood since the beginnings of the country, with the rhetoric only ratcheting up in recent times. Our current era of fake news, alternative facts, and media partisanship has led to a breeding ground for all types of myths and misinformation to gain traction and legitimacy.Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty (Oxford UP, 2021) is the first

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67:28

Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/07/25

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often

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33:52

The Tug of War: Why Racial Progress Often Meets...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/07/25

Dr. Karyne Messina and Dr. Felicia Powell-Williams, the host and co-host of “Psychoanalytic Perspectives of Racism in America” sponsored by The American Psychoanalytic Association explored how employing mechanisms of defense perpetuates racial injustice’s movement forward and the resistance it faces as a tug of war, i.e., progress followed by backlash. They examined the symbolic removal of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s bust from the White House and its implications for societal values, while also

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48:50

James Cairns, "In Crisis, on Crisis: Essays in...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/07/24

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews author and academic James Cairns about his collection of essays, In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025). In 2022, the Collins Dictionary announced that its word of the year was “permacrisis,” which it defined as “an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.” Have we reached a breaking point, arrived at the moment of truth? If so, what now? If not, why

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65:13

Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, "The AI Con: How to...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/07/23

Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything? Linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear that kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.” Hype twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft,

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73:57

Linda Quiquivix, "Palestine 1492: A Report Back"...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/07/23

Hello, I'm Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I speak with Linda Quiquivix, author of the new book Palestine 1492: A Report Back (Wild Ox Books, 2024). This is a book that so many of us need right now, and by "right now," I mean that I am recording this in July of 2025, when Palestinians in Gaza are on the verge of mass starvation as a result of a manufactured and illegal famine imposed by the Israeli army. Some 2.2 million people are experiencing "acute food insecurity," to use the

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64:35

Savannah Mandel on an Argument for the End of Human...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/07/14

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with space anthropologist, writer, and Virginia Tech doctoral candidate, Savannah Mandel, about her book, Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration (Chicago Review Press, 2025). The book uses history, ethnography, participant observation in policy-making, and other forms of evidence to argue for the discontinuation of human space exploration until pressing forms of human suffering are brought to an end on Earth. The pair also talk

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52:56

Elizabeth Popp Berman, "Thinking like an Economist:...

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/07/14

For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious change. What happened to bold political vision on the left, and what shrunk the very horizons of possibility? In Thinking like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman tells the story of how a distinctive way of thinking—an “economic style of reasoning”—became dominant in Washington between the 1960s and the 1980s and how it continues to dramatically narrow

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33:00

On Bullshit in Politics

New Books in Politics and Polemics ·

2025/07/12

Today we’re continuing our series on philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work, On Bullshit. Our guest is Michael Patrick Lynch, Provost Professor of the Humanities and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Michael is the author of the recently published book, On Truth in Politics: Why Democracy Demands It (Princeton University Press, 2025). The topic of our discussion today will be on bullshit in politics, and how we might think about ways to

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1,397 results

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