Princeton UP Ideas Podcast
Episodes
Juliet Hooker, "Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss" (Princeton UP, 2023)
13 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can't always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being a...
Natasha Wheatley, "The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty" (Princeton UP, 2023)
12 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Natasha Wheatley is an Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. Her bold and riveting debut monograph, The Life and Death of States: C...
Aditya Balasubramanian, "Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India" (Princeton UP, 2023)
11 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Toward a Free Economy: Swantantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India (Princeton University Press, 2023), Aditya Balasubramanian charts t...
Caroline Levine, "The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis" (Princeton UP, 2023)
09 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
W. H. Auden once said, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Auden’s quote has been used for so many purposes, it might be worth remembering what he m...
Speak Freely: The Princeton Principles
07 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Kicking off our new monthly series on freedom of speech, Keith Whittington and Donald Downs discuss the Princeton Principles for a Campus of Free...
Timothy Brook, "The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China" (Princeton UP, 2023)
03 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1644, after close to three centuries of relative stability and prosperity, the Ming dynasty collapsed. Many historians attribute its demise to the ...
Melvin L. Rogers, "The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023)
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” is notoriously fiery. No doubt part of what’s gripping about it is ...
Ben Wildavsky, "The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials, and Connections" (Princeton UP, 2023)
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Young people coming out of high school today can expect to hold many jobs over the course of their lives, which is why they need a range of essential ...
The Unquiet Legacy of Jewish Radical Meir Kahane
19 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas in October, 2023 I spoke with Shaul Magid, author of Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Polit...
Victoria Houseman, "American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton" (Princeton UP, 2023)
15 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Edith Hamilton (1867-1963) didn't publish her first book until she was sixty-two. But over the next three decades, this former headmistress would beco...
Kevin J. Mitchell, "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" (Princeton UP, 2023)
01 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As w...
The Civic Bargain: A Conversation with Josiah Ober on Ancients and Moderns
26 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Amidst increasing acrimony and political strain, many worry that democratic governance has an expiration date. To answer these concerns, Josiah Ober l...
Katie J. Wells et al., "Disrupting D.C.: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City" (Princeton UP, 2023)
16 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The first city to fight back against Uber, Washington, D.C., was also the first city where such resistance was defeated. It was here that the company ...
Christopher Paul Harris, "To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care" (Princeton UP, 2023)
15 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When #BlackLivesMatter emerged in 2013, it animated the most consequential Black-led mobilization since the civil rights and Black power era. Today, t...
Emilee Booth Chapman, "Election Day: How We Vote and What It Means for Democracy" (Princeton UP, 2022)
14 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Emilee Booth Chapman, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, has a new book that examines the idea of the vote, and what thi...
Peter K. Andersson, "Fool: In Search of Henry VIII's Closest Man" (Princeton UP, 2023)
02 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The first biography of Henry VIII’s court fool William Somer, a legendary entertainer and one of the most intriguing figures of the Tudor age In som...
Sarah R. Coleman, "The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2023)
31 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Coleman, an historian at Texas State University, is the author of an important and topical book about immigration policy in the United States. ...
Asad L. Asad, "Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life" (Princeton UP, 2023)
27 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Because immigration is such a recurring-and divisive-topic in the United States, it is easy to assume that we understand what it means for an immigran...
Outside the Box: The History and Future of Globalization
21 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Economist, historian, and author Marc Levinson talks about his book, Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas ...
Steve Nicholls, "Alien Worlds: How Insects Conquered the Earth, and Why Their Fate Will Determine Our Future" (Princeton UP, 2023)
15 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Life on Earth depends on the busy activities of insects, but global populations of these teeming creatures are currently under threat, with grave cons...
How Uber Disrupted Washington, D.C.: A Conversation with Katie Wells and Kafui Attoh
14 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Katie Wells, a Postdoctoral Fritz Fellow with Georgetown University's Tech and Society Initiative, and Kafui Attoh, Associate Professor of Urban Studi...
Jeff Deutsch, "In Praise of Good Bookstores" (Princeton UP, 2022)
08 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Do we need bookstores in the twenty-first century? If so, what makes a good one? In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton UP, 2022), Jeff Deutsch--th...
Kathryn Cramer Brownell, "24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News" (Princeton UP, 2023)
01 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As television began to overtake the political landscape in the 1960s, network broadcast companies, bolstered by powerful lobbying interests, dominated...
Richard N. Langlois, "The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise" (Princeton UP, 2023)
27 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The twentieth century was the managerial century in the United States. An organizational transformation, from entrepreneurial to managerial capitalism...
Anne Phillips, "Unconditional Equals" (Princeton UP, 2021)
18 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For centuries, ringing declarations about all men being created equal appealed to a shared human nature as the reason to consider ourselves equals. Bu...
Janna Levin, "How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space" (Princeton UP, 2023)
15 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Is the universe infinite or just really big? With this question, cosmologist Janna Levin announces the central theme of this book, which established h...
Yi-Lin Chiang, "Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition" (Princeton UP, 2022)
11 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We understand very little about how elite individuals and families operate in everyday life to maintain their privileged statuses, as many of these st...
The Future of the Sacred Nation: A Discussion with Anna M. Grzymała-Busse
10 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to the development of Western Europe there was religion and then there was science. That is how the story is generally told but Anna Gry...
Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, "The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible" (Princeton UP, 2023)
08 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Early Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence—a movement built around the study of the Bible and steeped in a culture ...
John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle, "Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living" (Princeton UP, 2023)
01 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living (Princeton UP, 2023) invites readers to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Th...
Frank Costigliola, "Kennan: A Life Between Worlds" (Princeton UP, 2023)
19 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904-2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy--and one of its most com...
Grace Elisabeth Lavery, "Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques" (Princeton UP, 2023)
15 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques (Princeton UP, 2023), Grace Lavery investigates gender transition...
Michael B. Gill, "A Philosophy of Beauty: Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue, and Art" (Princeton UP, 2022)
14 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) was a troubled soul – negative, misanthropic, and deeply troubled by his negativity and misanthropy. In A...
Anne L. Murphy, "Virtuous Bankers: A Day in the Life of the Eighteenth-Century Bank of England" (Princeton UP, 2023)
08 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The eighteenth-century Bank of England was an institution that operated for the benefit of its shareholders--and yet came to be considered, as Adam Sm...
Mariana Alessandri, "Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods" (Princeton UP, 2023)
30 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. When viewed through the len...
Maurizio Isabella, "Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions" (Princeton UP, 2023)
23 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
After the turbulent years of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna’s attempt to guarantee peace and stability across Europe, a new revoluti...
Philip Pettit, "The State" (Princeton UP, 2023)
20 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The State (Princeton University Press, 2023), the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit embarks on a massive undertaking, offering a majo...
Virginia Jackson, "Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric" (Princeton UP, 2023)
18 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023) examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth a...
Daniel A. Bell, "The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University" (Princeton UP, 2023)
17 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
I am not now nor at any time have ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet I serve as dean of a large faculty of political science...
Carol Graham, "The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us from Despair" (Princeton UP, 2023)
15 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In a society marked by extreme inequality of income and opportunity, why should economists care about how people feel? The truth is that feelings of w...
Kate Clancy, "Period: The Real Story of Menstruation" (Princeton UP, 2023)
15 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Menstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years on end, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Scientists once...
Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, "The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism" (Princeton UP, 2023)
07 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Is libertarianism a progressive doctrine, or a reactionary one? Does libertarianism promise to liberate the poor and the marginalized from the yoke of...
Helen Sword, "Writing with Pleasure" (Princeton UP, 2023)
03 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Listen to this interview of Helen Sword, professor emerita in the School of Humanities and the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation at the Univer...
Teena U. Purohit, "Sunni Chauvinism and the Roots of Muslim Modernism" (Princeton UP, 2023)
28 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Teena Purohit’s new book Sunni Chauvinism and the Roots of Muslim Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2023) maps how various Muslim modernists ...
Tawanda Mulalu, "Please Make Me Pretty, I Don't Want to Die" (Princeton UP, 2022)
24 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Please Make Me Pretty, I Don't Want to Die (Princeton UP, 2022) explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a...
Scott Newstok, "How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education" (Princeton UP, 2020)
23 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton UP, 2020) offers a short, spirited defense of rhetoric and the libera...
David Edmonds, "Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality" (Princeton UP, 2023)
15 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of. Widely regarded as one of the greatest moral thinkers of the ...
Lachlan McNamee, "Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop" (Princeton UP, 2023)
12 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United State...
The Future of Dictatorship: A Discussion with Sergei Guriev
10 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Most dictators no longer rule by fear but by spin instead. That’s the contention of Sergei Guriev who has co-authored (with Daniel Treisman) Spin D...
Alan Blinder, "A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021" (Princeton UP, 2022)
06 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Spanning twelve presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden, and eight Federal Reserve chairs, from William McChesney Martin to Jerome Powell, this ...
Ari Joskowicz, "Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust" (Princeton UP, 2023)
02 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Ari Joskowicz, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Hol...
Eva Hagberg, "When Eero Met His Match: Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect" (Princeton UP, 2022)
01 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Aline B. Louchheim (1914-1972) was an art critic on assignment for the New York Times in 1953 when she first met the Finnish-American architect Eero...
The Good Enough Life
30 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s book is: The Good-Enough Life (Princeton UP, 2022) by Avram Alpert. We live in a world oriented toward greatness, one in which we feel co...
Taylor C. Sherman, "Nehru's India: A History in Seven Myths" (Princeton UP, 2022)
29 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Nehru's India: A History in Seven Myths (Princeton UP, 2022) brings a provocative but nuanced set of new interpretations to the history of early ind...
Margaret Chowning, "Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750–1940" (Princeton UP, 2023)
24 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Historians have long looked to networks of elite liberal and anti-clerical men as the driving forces in Mexican history over the course of the long ni...
Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil, "Migrants and Machine Politics: How India's Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness" (Princeton UP, 2023)
24 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How poor migrants shape city politics during urbanization As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside...
The Future of Genes and Equality: A Discussion with Kathryn Paige Harden
22 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
If your genes make you better suited to succeed, is that fair? And if not, can anything be done about it? Kathryn Paige Harden – professor psycholog...
Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden, "Pioneers of Capitalism: The Netherlands 1000–1800" (Princeton UP, 2022)
18 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
During the Middle Ages, the Netherlands played a significant role in the emergence of capitalism, which led to the impressive Dutch Golden Age and pav...
Sarah Iles Johnston, "Gods and Mortals: Ancient Greek Myths for Modern Readers" (Princeton UP, 2023)
15 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Gripping tales that abound with fantastic characters and astonishing twists and turns, Greek myths confront what it means to be mortal in a world of p...
Hilary Falb Kalisman, "Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2022)
15 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today, it is hard to imagine a time and place when public school teachers were considered among the elite strata of society. But in the lands controll...
Marion Turner, "The Wife of Bath: A Biography" (Princeton UP, 2023)
10 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English ...
Xin Wen, "The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road" (Princeton UP, 2023)
09 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Many of us–who maybe aren’t historians–have an image of the Silk Road: merchants who carried silk from China to as far as ancient Rome, in one o...
Rohit De, "A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic" (Princeton UP, 2018)
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rohit De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty t...
Lerone A. Martin, "The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism" (Princeton UP, 2023)
01 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On a Sunday morning in 1966, a group of white evangelicals dedicated a stained glass window to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director was not an evangelica...
Anna M. Grzymała-Busse, "Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State" (Princeton UP, 2023)
19 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sacred Foundations. The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton University Press, 2023) argues that the medieval church was a ...
Emily Hund, "The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media" (Princeton UP, 2023)
15 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that tradit...
Max Bazerman, "Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop" (Princeton UP, 2022)
09 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Max Bazerman about his book Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop (Princeton UP, 2022). Remember Saturday Night ...
Rowan Dorin, "No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe" (Princeton UP, 2023)
05 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning in the twelfth century, Jewish moneylenders increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs of European authorities, who denounced the evils...
Geneviève Zubrzycki, "Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival" (Princeton UP, 2022)
03 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish revival. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, kosher vodka, and festivals of Jew...
Meir M. Bar-Asher, "Jews and the Qur'an" (Princeton UP, 2022)
01 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this panoramic and multifaceted book, Meir Bar-Asher examines how Jews and Judaism are depicted in the Qur'an and later Islamic literature, providi...
Valerie Tiberius, "What Do You Want Out of Life?: A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters" (Princeton UP, 2023)
01 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What do you want out of life? To make a lot of money--or work for justice? To run marathons--or sing in a choir? To have children--or travel the world...
Money or Meaning? A Discussion on Choice, Restlessness, and Higher Education
30 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What kinds of tools do we need to make big decisions, and why aren't our universities training us to make them? Are universities doing students a diss...
Susannah Heschel, "The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany" (Princeton UP, 2010)
27 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton UP, 2010) documents the process, and relative ease, with which instit...
The Ideology of Innovation in India
17 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Science and Technologies scholar Lilly Irani talks her book, Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, with Peoples & Thing...
Marion Turner, "The Wife of Bath: A Biography" (Princeton UP, 2023)
17 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English ...
Holy Paradox and St. Teresa of Ávila: Mysticism in Sixteenth Century Spain
15 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Carlos Eire, author of The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila: A Biography (2019) and professor of medieval and early modern European history and religion...
Book Talk 56: Roosevelt Montás on "Great Books"
06 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and cultur...
Lorraine Daston Rules the World (EF, JP)
05 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live by (Princeton UP, 2022). Historian of science Lorraine Daston's wonderful new book, Rules:...
Zachary Schrag, "The Princeton Guide to Historical Research" (Princeton UP, 2021)
31 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The essential handbook for doing historical research in the twenty-first century The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton UP, 2021) pro...
Tommie Shelby, "The Idea of Prison Abolition" (Princeton UP, 2022)
30 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
By any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper mora...
Jed Rasula, "What the Thunder Said: How 'The Waste Land' Made Poetry Modern" (Princeton UP, 2022)
28 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. "But," as...
Sarah Zukerman Daly, "Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections" (Princeton UP, 2022)
18 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
One of the great puzzles of electoral politics is how parties that commit mass atrocities in war often win the support of victimized populations to es...
Dan Slater and Joseph Wong, "From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia" (Princeton UP, 2022)
17 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why some of Asia’s authoritarian regimes have democratized as they have grown richer—and why others haven’t Over the past century, Asia has been...
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, "Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism" (Princeton UP, 2022)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolutio...
Karen Levy, "Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance" (Princeton UP, 2022)
15 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Long-haul truckers are the backbone of the American economy, transporting goods under grueling conditions and immense economic pressure. Truckers have...
Maria Heim, "Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India" (Princeton UP, 2022)
08 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India (Princeton UP, 2022) is a captivating treasury of emotion terms drawn from some of I...
Edward S. Cooke, "Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History" (Princeton UP, 2022)
06 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A bold reorientation of art history that bridges the divide between fine art and material culture through an examination of objects and their uses art...
Joseph Silk, "Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind" (Princeton UP, 2022)
28 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Just over half a century since Neil Armstrong first stepped foot on the lunar surface, a new space race to the Moon is well underway and rapidly gaini...
Shana Kushner Gadarian et al., "Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID" (Princeton UP, 2022)
28 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
None of us really want to relive our first encounters with COVID-19 and the disruptions to our lives, to say nothing of the anxiety and concern about ...
Eric Tagliocozzo, "In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama" (Princeton UP, 2022)
17 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the nineteenth century, one group of American merchants reported an odd request from the Vietnamese emperor. An envoy asked if the traders could he...
Mary Dunn, "Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds" (Princeton UP, 2022)
17 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In our age of biomedicine, society often treats sickness and disability as problems in need of solution. Phenomena of embodied difference, however, ha...
Nile Green, "The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen's London" (Princeton UP, 2015)
14 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In July 1815, six Iranian students arrived in London under the escort of their chaperone, Captain Joseph D'Arcy. Their mission was to master the moder...
Karen Bakker, "The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants" (Princeton UP, 2022)
11 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The natural world teems with remarkable conversations, many beyond human hearing range. Scientists are using groundbreaking digital technologies to un...
Martin Puchner, "Literature for a Changing Planet" (Princeton UP, 2022)
10 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why we must learn to tell new stories about our relationship with the earth if we are to avoid climate catastrophe. Reading literature in a time of ...
The Future of Rules: A Discussion with Lorraine Daston
08 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Which rules do we obey and which ones can we find a way around? What distinctions can be drawn between rules, models to be emulated and algorithms. Lo...
Andrew S. Rosenberg, "Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration" (Princeton UP, 2022)
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 officially ended the explicit prejudice in American immigration policy that began with the 1790 restrictio...
Bruce G. Carruthers, "The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America" (Princeton UP, 2022)
02 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A comprehensive and illuminating account of the history of credit in America, The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power & Credit in America (Princeton U...
Mike Owen Benediktsson, "In the Midst of Things: The Social Lives of Objects in the Public Spaces of New York City" (Princeton UP, 2022)
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How ordinary urban objects influence our behavior, exacerbate inequality, and encourage social change Assumptions about human behavior lie hidden in p...
Yuhua Wang, "The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development" (Princeton UP, 2022)
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How social networks shaped the imperial Chinese state China was the world’s leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the ...
Max H. Bazerman, "Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop" (Princeton UP, 2022)
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It is easy to condemn obvious wrongdoers such as Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, Harvey Weinstein, and the Sackler family. But we rarely think about t...