Episodes

  • Peter Singer, "Consider the Turkey" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    Peter Singer, "Consider the Turkey" (Princeton UP, 2024)
    Dec 26 2024
    A turkey is the centerpiece of countless Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Yet most of us know almost nothing about today’s specially bred, commercially produced birds. In this brief book, bestselling author Peter Singer tells their story—and, unfortunately, it’s not a happy one. Along the way, he also offers a brief history of the turkey and its consumption, ridicules the annual U.S. presidential “pardon” of a Thanksgiving turkey, and introduces us to “a tremendously handsome, outgoing, and intelligent turkey” named Cornelius. Above all, Singer explains how we can improve our holiday tables—for turkeys, people, and the planet—by liberating ourselves from the traditional turkey feast. In its place, he encourages us to consider trying a vegetarian alternative—or just serving the side dishes that many people already enjoy far more than turkey. Complete with some delicious recipes for turkey-free holiday feasting, Consider the Turkey (Princeton University Press, 2024) will make you reconsider what you serve for your next holiday meal—or even tomorrow’s dinner. Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics, with a background in philosophy. He works mostly in practical ethics and is best known for Animal Liberation and for his writings about global poverty.
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    52 mins
  • Leah Downey, "Our Money: Monetary Policy as If Democracy Matters" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    Leah Downey, "Our Money: Monetary Policy as If Democracy Matters" (Princeton UP, 2024)
    Dec 25 2024
    How the creation of money and monetary policy can be more democratic. The power to create money is foundational to the state. In the United States, that power has been largely delegated to private banks governed by an independent central bank. Putting monetary policy in the hands of a set of insulated, nonelected experts has fueled the popular rejection of expertise as well as a widespread dissatisfaction with democratically elected officials. In Our Money: Monetary Policy as If Democracy Matters (Princeton UP, 2024), Leah Downey makes a principled case against central bank independence (CBI) by both challenging the economic theory behind it and developing a democratic rationale for sustaining the power of the legislature to determine who can create money and on what terms. How states govern money creation has an impact on the capacity of the people and their elected officials to steer policy over time. In a healthy democracy, Downey argues, the balance of power over money creation matters. Downey applies and develops democratic theory through an exploration of monetary policy. In so doing, she develops a novel theory of independent agencies in the context of democratic government, arguing that states can employ expertise without being ruled by experts. Downey argues that it is through iterative governance, the legislature knowing and regularly showing its power over policy, that the people can retain their democratic power to guide policy in the modern state. As for contemporary macroeconomic arguments in defense of central bank independence, Downey suggests that the purported economic benefits do not outweigh the democratic costs.
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    38 mins
  • Christine M. Larson, "Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    Christine M. Larson, "Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success" (Princeton UP, 2024)
    Dec 24 2024
    As writers, musicians, online content creators, and other independent workers fight for better labor terms, romance authors offer a powerful example—and a cautionary tale—about self-organization and mutual aid in the digital economy. In Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Christine Larson traces the forty-year history of Romancelandia, a sprawling network of romance authors, readers, editors, and others, who formed a unique community based on openness and collective support. Empowered by solidarity, American romance writers—once disparaged literary outcasts—became digital publishing’s most innovative and successful authors. Meanwhile, a new surge of social media activism called attention to Romancelandia’s historic exclusion of romance authors of color and LGBTQ+ writers, forcing a long-overdue cultural reckoning. Drawing on the largest-known survey of any literary genre as well as interviews and archival research, Dr. Larson shows how romance writers became the only authors in America to make money from the rise of ebooks—increasing their median income by 73 percent while other authors’ plunged by 40 percent. The success of romance writers, Larson argues, demonstrates the power of alternative forms of organizing influenced by gendered working patterns. It also shows how networks of relationships can amplify—or mute—certain voices. Romancelandia’s experience, Dr. Larson says, offers crucial lessons about solidarity for creators and other isolated workers in an increasingly risky employment world. Romancelandia’s rise and near-meltdown shows that gaining fair treatment from platforms depends on creator solidarity—but creator solidarity, in turn, depends on fair treatment of all members. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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    50 mins
  • Paula Fredriksen, "Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    Paula Fredriksen, "Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years" (Princeton UP, 2024)
    Dec 23 2024
    The ancient Mediterranean teemed with gods. For centuries, a practical religious pluralism prevailed. How, then, did one particular god come to dominate the politics and piety of the late Roman Empire? In Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Paula Fredriksen traces the evolution of early Christianity—or rather, of early Christianities—through five centuries of Empire, mapping its pathways from the hills of Judea to the halls of Rome and Constantinople. It is a story with a sprawling cast of characters: not only theologians, bishops, and emperors, but also gods and demons, angels and magicians, astrologers and ascetics, saints and heretics, aristocratic patrons and millenarian enthusiasts. All played their part in the development of what became and remains an energetically diverse biblical religion. The New Testament, as we know it, represents only a small selection of the many gospels, letters, acts of apostles, and revelations that circulated before the establishment of the imperial church. It tells how the gospel passed from Jesus, to the apostles, thence to Paul. But by using our peripheral vision, by looking to noncanonical and paracanonical texts, by availing ourselves of information derived from papyri, inscriptions, and archaeology, we can see a different, richer, much less linear story emerging. Dr. Fredriksen brings together these many sources to reconstruct the lively interactions of pagans, Jews, and Christians, tracing the conversions of Christianity from an energetic form of Jewish messianism to an arm of the late Roman state. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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    55 mins
  • Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, "Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, "Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire" (Princeton UP, 2024)
    Dec 23 2024
    In Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton UP, 2024), Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read. Mukhopadhyay's account is populated by a cast of characters that spans the ranks of colonial society, from bored soldiers to frustrated bureaucrats. These readers formed close, even intimate relationships with everyday texts. She presents four case studies: a soldier's manual, a cache of bureaucratic documents, a collection of astrological almanacs, and a women's literary magazine. Tracking moments in which readers refused to read, were unable to read, and read in part, she uncovers the dizzying array of material, textual, and aural practices these texts elicited. Even selectively read almanacs and impenetrable account books, she finds, were springboards for personal, world-shaping readerly relationships. Untethered from the constraints of conventional literacy, Required Reading reimagines how texts work in the world and how we understand the very idea of reading.
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Renée Bergland, "Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    Renée Bergland, "Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science" (Princeton UP, 2024)
    Dec 13 2024
    Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests, and schoolgirls. The world began to change in the 1830s, while Darwin was exploring the Pacific aboard the Beagle and Dickinson was a student in Amherst, Massachusetts. Poetry and science started to grow apart, and modern thinkers challenged the old orthodoxies, offering thrilling new perspectives that suddenly felt radical—and too dangerous for women. Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science (Princeton University Press, 2024) intertwines the stories of these two luminary nineteenth-century minds whose thought and writings captured the awesome possibilities of the new sciences and at the same time strove to preserve the magic of nature. Just as Darwin’s work was informed by his roots in natural philosophy and his belief in the interconnectedness of all life, Dickinson’s poetry was shaped by her education in botany, astronomy, and chemistry, and by her fascination with the enchanting possibilities of Darwinian science. Casting their two very different careers in an entirely fresh light, Renée Bergland brings to life a time when ideas about science were rapidly evolving, reshaped by poets, scientists, philosophers, and theologians alike. She paints a colorful portrait of a remarkable century that transformed how we see the natural world. Illuminating and insightful, Natural Magic explores how Dickinson and Darwin refused to accept the separation of art and science. Today, more than ever, we need to reclaim their shared sense of ecological wonder. Renée Bergland is professor of literature and creative writing at Simmons University. She is the author of Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics and The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Caroline Winterer, "How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    Caroline Winterer, "How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America" (Princeton UP, 2024)
    Dec 10 2024
    In How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton UP, 2024), Caroline Winterer, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, takes her reader on a journey through the historical strata of the United States’ relationship with deep time. From the early days of the republic to the first half of the twentieth century, Winterer retraces how the study of the continent’s geological past provided Americans with “a vocabulary with which to frame their nation’s place in the cosmic order.” If the bones of dinosaurs found in the West play an expected part in this history, the book highlights the forgotten roles of less conspicuous, yet just as fascinating, fossils, such as the remains of Silurian trilobites and Carboniferous ferns. The book shows how fossil finds throughout history helped re-imagine, many times over, the past, present, and future of the United States. Far from simply ennobling the “New World” with an antiquity that could compete with the depth of Europe’s past, the study of American fossils influenced how Americans thought about the origins, landscapes, resources, and the many peoples of the continent. Indeed, if the author makes room for the intriguing developments of paleontological discoveries and the riveting story of how “Americans crafted a virtual deep time” made of paintings, magic lanterns, and other models, she also addresses the violence, both toward ecosystems and people, often justified by deep time imaginaries. Through its historical investigation, How the New World Became Old reminds the reader that today’s responses to intertwined ecological and social challenges will inevitably be informed by our conceptions of deep time.
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • George Steinmetz, "The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    George Steinmetz, "The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire" (Princeton UP, 2024)
    Dec 6 2024
    It is only in recent years that sociologists and historians of the social sciences have given empire the attention it deserves in histories of the discipline. In this context, George Steinmetz’s The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton University Press) is likely to be a touchstone text in these debates. Providing a new history of the French national discipline inspired by a ‘Neo-Bourdieusian Historical Sociology of Science’, Steinmetz highlights the centrality of ‘colonial sociology’, work centered on and/or created in the French overseas colonies and protectorates to the discipline’s development. The French state, eager to consolidate its empire after World War II, were eager to draw on the expertise of sociologists in pursuing this goal; as Steinmetz shows therefore, during this period, a focus on ‘the colonial’ became central to French sociology to the extent that roughly half the French sociological field could be considered ‘colonial sociologists’. Despite this entanglement with the French state these colonial sociologists became strong critics of imperialism. Alongside the many stories he uncovers Steinmetz explores in depth the case of four such colonial sociologists: Raymond Aron, Jacque Berque, Georges Balandier and Pierre Bourdieu, seeking to show not just the centrality of colonialism to each writer but how their experiences of empire formed their basis for their future work; for example, how Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field can be traced to his experiences in colonial Algeria. In our discussion, which also marks the imminent release of the text in paperback, George takes us through this hugely enlightening text, including reflections on why there may have been some ‘disciplinary amnesia’ in sociology’s unwillingness to confront empire, the relations between sociology and other imperial disciplines, how sociologists from the colonies developed their own work, the lessons from his text about how we should confront colonial sociologists and whether Durkheim had an ‘imperial gaze’. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and is the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), among other books.
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    1 hr and 57 mins