Listen to Owen Bennett-Jones discuss the future of opinion polls with Mark Pack

New Books Network
American Studies
Media May 17, 2022

Disinformation

The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era

Donald A. Barclay

Hosted by Marci Mazzarotto
Does the idea of a world in which facts mean nothing cause anxiety? Fear? Maybe even paranoia? Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era (Rowman and …

American Studies

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Interviews with scholars of America about their new books.

Grinnell College: Authors and Artists May 17, 2022

Collecting Lives

Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century Us Literatures

Elizabeth Rodrigues

Hosted by Marshall Poe
On a near-daily basis, data is being used to narrate our lives. Categorizing algorithms drawn from amassed personal data to assign narrative destinies to individuals at crucial junctures, simultaneously predicting …
Think About It May 16, 2022

Linda Patterson Miller on Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"

Book Talk 52

Linda Patterson Miller

Hosted by Uli Baer
When first published in 1926, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises changed American literature forever. Hemingway follows a disillusioned group of expats in post-World War I Europe whose relationships unravel …
Asian American Studies May 16, 2022

Our Laundry, Our Town

My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond

Alvin Eng

Hosted by Deidre Tyler
Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond (Fordham UP, 2022) is a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle …
Geography May 16, 2022

Pipeline Populism

Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century

Kai Bosworth

Hosted by Stentor Danielson
Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also …
African American Studies May 13, 2022

Black Dragon

Afro Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination

Zachary F. Price

Hosted by Ari Barbalat
In Black Dragon: Afro Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination (Ohio State UP, 2022), Zachary F. Price illuminates martial arts as a site of knowledge exchange between Black, Asian …
Islamic Studies May 13, 2022

Innocent Until Proven Muslim

Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11

Maha Hilal

Hosted by Shehnaz Haqqani
In Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11 published in 2022 with Broadleaf Books, Maha Hilal describes how narratives of 9/11 and …
Medicine May 13, 2022

Difference and Disease

Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire

Suman Seth

Hosted by Rachel Pagones
Before the nineteenth century, travelers who left Britain for the Americas, West Africa, India and elsewhere encountered a medical conundrum: why did they fall ill when they arrived, and why …
On Religion May 13, 2022

Awkward Rituals

Sensations of Governance in Protestant America

Dana W. Logan

Hosted by Gregory Soden
In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed …
Postscript May 13, 2022

Postscript

Post-Roe Politics

Lilly J. Goren, Rebecca Kreitzer, Andrew R. Lewis, Candis Watts Smith, and Joshua C. Wilson

Hosted by Susan Liebell
Today’s Postscript uniquely engages abortion politics by addressing structural political issues (voter suppression, gerrymandering, dilutions of minority voting, obstacles to women registering their positions politically), inconsistencies in Justice Samuel Alito’s …
Animal Studies May 13, 2022

Elephant Trails

A History of Animals and Cultures

Nigel Rothfels

Hosted by Marcela Hernandez
When looking at historic records of all kinds—from prehistoric cave drawings and ancient rock art in Africa and India, from poetic narrations of travelers to hunter memoirs and press stories …
American West May 12, 2022

Beneath the Backbone of the World

Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720-1877

Ryan Hall

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
No matter what people call them today the northwestern Great Plains have been and continue to be Blackfoot country, argues Colgate University assistant professor Ryan Hall in Beneath the Backbone of …
Anthropology May 11, 2022

Prophets and Ghosts

The Story of Salvage Anthropology

Samuel J. Redman

Hosted by Lukas Rieppel
Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology (Harvard UP, 2021) is a searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of “vanishing” Indigenous peoples through …
Law May 11, 2022

The Hughes Court

From Progressivism to Pluralism, 1930 to 1941

Mark V. Tushnet

Hosted by William Domnarski
Mark V. Tushnet's book The Hughes Court: From Progressivism to Pluralism, 1930 to 1941 (Cambridge UP, 2022) describes the closing of one era in constitutional jurisprudence and the opening of another …
General History May 11, 2022

Class Struggle and the Color Line

American Socialism and the Race Question 1900-1930

Paul M. Heideman

Hosted by Zalman Newfield
In Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question, 1900-1930 (Haymarket Books, 2018), Paul Heideman collects, for the first time, source materials from a diverse array …
Critical Theory May 11, 2022

Cancel Culture

A Critical Analysis

Eve Ng

Hosted by Louisa Hann
Eve Ng’s new book Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), examines the phenomenon of "cancel culture" from a critical media studies perspective, as both cancel practices (what people …
Catholic Studies May 10, 2022

Millennial Missionaries

How a Group of Young Catholics Is Trying to Make Catholicism Cool

Katherine Dugan

Hosted by Allison Isidore
Millennials in the U.S. have been characterized as uninterested in religion, as defectors from religious institutions, and as agnostic about the role of religious identity in their culture. Amid the …
Art May 10, 2022

The Problem with Museums

A Conversation with Georgina Adam and Nizan Shaked

Georgina Adam and Nizan Shaked

Hosted by Pierre d'Alancaisez
In the past few years, museums of contemporary art have come under a fair deal of scrutiny. Pressures from groups such as Decoloinise This Space or the oxycontin scandal have …
Politics & Polemics May 10, 2022

An Inconvenient Minority

The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy

Kenny Xu

Hosted by Shu Cao Mo
Even in the midst of a nationwide surge of bias and incidents against them, Asians from coast to coast have quietly assumed mastery of the nation's technical and intellectual machinery …
The Future of . . . with Owen Bennett-Jones May 10, 2022

The Future of Opinion Polls

A Conversation with Mark Pack

Mark Pack

Hosted by Owen Bennett-Jones
As the culture wars intensify, it seems that all sources of neutral authority get challenged and that includes opinion polls. Accusations about bias and unreliability fly around and yet everyone …