New Books in Politics and Polemics

Mar 09 2025 1513 ep. 54 mins 849

New Books in Politics and Polemics Podcast artwork

Interviews with Authors of Politics and Polemics about their New Books

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Abby Innes, "Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Mar 09 2025 95 mins

Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail (Cambridge UP, 2023) demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its o

Kimberly Clausing, "Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Mar 08 2025 62 mins

Critics on the Left have long attacked open markets and free trade agreements for exploiting the poor and undermining labor, while those on the Right complain that they unjustly penalize workers back home. In Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital (Harvard University Press, 2019), Kimberly Clausing takes on old and new skeptics in her compelling

Violent Majorities 2.3: Long-Distance Ethnonationalism Roundup (LA, AS)

Mar 06 2025 46 mins

John joins Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian for the roundup episode of the second series of Violent Majorities, focusing on long-distance ethnonationalism. Looking back at their conversations with Peter Beinart on Zionism and Subir Sinha on Hindutva, Lori begins by asking whether Peter underestimates the material entanglements keeping Jewish American support for Israel in place.

Chris Higgins, "Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education" (MIT Press, 2024)

Mar 04 2025 65 mins

Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education (MIT Press, 2024) is an imaginative tour of the contemporary university as it could be: a place to discover self-knowledge, meaning, and purpose. What if college were not just a means of acquiring credentials, but a place to pursue our formation as whole persons striving to lead lives of meaning and purpose? In Undeclared, Chri

Andrew Boyd, "I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor" (New Society, 2023)

Mar 03 2025 50 mins

Andrew Boyd is a humorist and long-time veteran of creative campaigns for social change. He led the decade-long satirical media campaign “Billionaires for Bush,” and is co-founder of both Agit-Pop Communications, an award-winning creative agency and the netroots powerhouse The Other 98%, which specializes in winning the battle of the ‘story’ through meme warfare with some o

Erik Baker, "Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Mar 02 2025 58 mins

How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change—not just to do their jobs reliably but to create new opportunities for themselves and for others. Our culture of work today is more demanding than e

Sam Srauy, "Race, Culture and the Video Game Industry: A Vicious Circuit" (Routledge, 2024)

Mar 01 2025 55 mins

My guest today Sam Srauy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University, Her research examines race, video games, and the political economy of the video game industry. Srauy’s work appears in various academic journals including Social Media + Society, First Mondays, Games and Culture, and Television and New Med

Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America's Biggest Retail Stores

Feb 27 2025 62 mins

Our book is: Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (UP of Colorado, 2024) which presents a new look at how the big box retail store has dramatically reshaped the US economy and its ecosystems in the last half century. From the rural South to the frigid North, from inside stores to ecologies far beyond, this book examines the relationships that m

Giampaolo Conte, "A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms" (Routledge, 2024)

Feb 25 2025 24 mins

A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms highlights how, since the recent financial crises, the expression ‘liberal reform’ has entered common parlance as an evocative image of austerity and economic malaise, especially for the working classes and a segment of the middle class. But what exactly does ‘liberal reform’ refer to? The rese

Postscript: How to Fight Back: Charting Opposition to the Actions of the Trump Administration

Feb 24 2025 54 mins

Shortly after Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 47th American president, he issued 37 executive orders and, subsequently, the Trump administration has – through formal processes and also through extra-governmental extraordinary practices – triggered what many are calling a governmental and/or constitutional crisis. Dr. Christina Pagel has published two important Substack arti