In recent years, the treatment of African Americans by police departments around the country has come under increased public scrutiny. As any student of the longer historical relationship between law enforcement and people of color will know, this relationship has been the subject of tension and scrutiny at many moments in the past as well. In his new book, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Max Felker-Kantor examines this...
Apr 09, 2019•1 hr 18 min•Transcript available on Metacast Whether you are a commuter weighing options of taking the bus vs walking to get you to work on time or a military general leading troops into war, risk is something we deal with every day. Even the most cautious of us can’t opt out—the question is always which risks to take to maximize our results. But how do we know which path is correct? Enter Allison Schrager. Schrager is not a typical economist. Like others, she has spent her career assessing risk, but instead of crunching numbers or sitting...
Apr 09, 2019•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hard won transgender rights have been under attack by the Trump administration. Officials across government have sought to overturn decisions made by the Obama administration to expand rights to transgender people. Who fought those battles and continues to lobby to defend the transgender community is the topic of Anthony Nownes' new book Organizing for Transgender Rights: Collective Action, Group Development, and the Rise of a New Social Movement (SUNY Press, 2019). Nownes is professor of politi...
Apr 09, 2019•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Who funds local school board elections? Local residents or major donors living elsewhere? Jeffrey R. Henig, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Sarah Reckhow seek to answer this question in Outside Money in School Board Elections: The Nationalization of Education Politics (Harvard Education Press, 2019). Henig is a professor of political science and education at Teachers College and professor of political science at Columbia University. Jacobsen is an associate professor of education politics and policy in th...
Apr 05, 2019•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast I met with John Komlos, an American economic historian of Hungarian descent and former holder of the Chair of Economic History at the University of Munich. We spoke about his latest book, Foundations of Real-World Economics: What Every Economics Student Needs to Know (Routledge, 2019). This is a very original textbook, a good answer to the call from the Rethinking Economics movement to revise our economics textbooks and programmes. Komlos argues that the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of Trumpi...
Apr 03, 2019•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Are market cities better than people cities? Does the satisfaction that residents take in their city vary from market city to people city? In Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of Our Urban Future (NYU Press, 2018), Dr. Michael Oluf Emerson and Dr. Kevin T. Smiley identify the kinds of cities people want to live in and the façades strategically placed by city administrators to draw a specific crowd. Emerson and Smiley characterize cities as being somewhere along a spectrum with market city ...
Apr 02, 2019•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Normal turned to PTSD and a substance abuse nightmare for Jenny the instant a taxi struck her, catapulting her twenty feet across a busy New York City street. Jenny is one of the lucky ones to have survived the drug rehabilitation system, which routinely fails those at risk. Her story is multiplied across the U.S. in the shattered lives and torn-apart families of millions of Jennies. Vivian Percy's new book Saving Jenny: Rescuing Our Youth from America's Opioid and Suicide Epidemic (Radius Books...
Apr 01, 2019•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr., in his new book, Reading Politics with Machiavelli(Oxford University Press, 2018), puts himself and the reader into conversation with Machiavelli, exploring Machiavelli’s thinking and how Machiavelli explains his theories. As Schmidt notes, Machiavelli put himself into non-temporal conversations with ancient and classical thinkers, with religious texts and understandings, and with a raft of historical and contemporary political examples and experiences. These encounters p...
Mar 28, 2019•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's easy to get sidetracked while writing a book. But imagine being interrupted by the President of the United States. That happened to Tom Wheeler, who was in the midst of writing a history of communication networks when President Obama appointed him to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in 2013. Wheeler went from writing history to participating in it, making consequential decisions about net neutrality, cybersecurity, privacy, and the 5G mobile network. Wheeler is a former ...
Mar 27, 2019•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Candis Watts Smith and Christina Greer are the editors of Black Politics in Transition: Immigration, Suburbanization, and Gentrification (Routledge, 2019). Smith is assistant professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina; Greer is associate professor of political science and American Studies at Fordham University. Black Politics in Transition examines the role of three themes—immigration, suburbanization, and gentrification—in Black politics today. Immigration has resulted in de...
Mar 27, 2019•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Faith Ed: Teaching About Religion in an Age of Intolerance (Beacon Press, 2017) by Linda K. Wertheimer profiles the beauty and difficulty of teaching about religion in public schools. Teaching about religion in a public school in the United States is rewarding, but very difficult. It is not hyperbolic to say that one moment, everything is going fine and students are learning a lot and the next the class is on the news and steeped in controversy. Do an internet search using the term “Burkagate,” ...
Mar 27, 2019•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Why do people live where they do? What explains the persistence of residential segregation? Why is it complicated to address residential segregation? Please join me as I meet with Dr. Ingrid Gould Ellen and Dr. Justin Peter Steil to discuss The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates about Housing, Segregation, and Opportunity (Columbia University Press, 2019). This interview takes a heartfelt approach to discussing the ever-changing presence of urban inequality and possible solutions that would f...
Mar 25, 2019•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast How can feminist theory help address the climate crisis? In Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable (Springer Verlag, 2019), Tina Sikka, a lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Newcastle, considers the limitations of our current approach to climate change, and the means through which we can respond in more open, and thus more effective, ways. The book uses the example of geoengineering as a case study in responses to climate change, highlig...
Mar 21, 2019•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on ...
Mar 19, 2019•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Parents, teachers, feminists, conservatives, lawyers, the concerned citizen – pornography raises everyone's hackles. Author Richa Kaul Padte approaches pornography with a combination of light-hearted camaraderie and intellectual curiosity instead. Taking seriously the notion that every individual has sexual rights, Kaul Padte explores the twinned fates of gendered representations and subjectivity in our digital age. Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography (Penguin Viking, 2018) is smart and funny in ...
Mar 19, 2019•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast American’s pay double what every other developed nation in the world pays for healthcare. Does that mean that we are the healthiest? No. In fact, we are the worst of them all. American healthcare is plagued by things like preventable medical error, high taxes, and the tens of thousands of people that die each year from treatable illness due to being unable to afford the care they require. In his book The Purple World: Healing the Harm in American Health Care (Scrivener Books, 2018), Dr. Joseph J...
Mar 15, 2019•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Politicians love to woo entertainment corporations to their states and cities through subsidies and tax cities. But Pat Garofalo argues that such incentives waste taxpayer money in The Billionaire Boondoggle: How Our Politicians Let Corporations and Bigwigs Steal Our Money and Jobs (Thomas Dunne Books, 2019). Garofalo details how filmmakers, gambling companies, sports teams and other companies play governments off one another, making them bid against each other to win the privilege of luring com...
Mar 13, 2019•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you are reading this, you have probably run into the "Chicago" model at some point or another, in terms of public policy, orthodox modern finance, macro or micro economics, or any other arena where theoretical abstractions about human behavior (generally but not exclusively about or derived from economics) have been turned into specific and often highly rigid and mechanistic policy guidelines. That's the Chicago model. In Where Economics Went Wrong: Chicago's Abandonment of Classical Liberali...
Mar 11, 2019•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast As climate change politics abound, Dr. Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South (University of Georgia Press, 2019) cuts through it all to get to the core. What matters? People’s experiences with climate forces and how they are managing them now and planning to do so in the future. In his newest book, Van Noy decided not to follow the well-trodden path of trying to prove climate change science, nor did he bark about an irreversible tipping point. Instead, he...
Mar 08, 2019•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast The 1996 repeal of Aid to Families with Dependent Children -- the New Deal-era relief program for poor women with children -- was a seminal moment in the modern history of the US welfare state. That the charge was led by a Democratic president makes it even more noteworthy. Join us as we speak with Darren Barany, author of The New Welfare Consensus: Ideological, Political and Social Origins (SUNY Press, 2018), who helps us understand how we got there, and how various strains of conservative anti...
Mar 08, 2019•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast What are the characteristics of the 21st Century arts leader? In From Imposter to Impact: Arts Leadership in the 21st Century (Dahlia Publishing, 2019), Farhana Shaikh, a writer, publisher, and journalist, details lessons from key arts thinkers. The book covers issues including funding, networking, audience development, the challenge of digital, and diversity in the arts. Crucially the book confronts the struggles and failures, as well as the successes, associated with developing an arts career ...
Mar 05, 2019•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast American health care is the most expensive in the world, yet it produces some of the worst outcomes among developed nations. Many people offer unrealistic ideas or hot buzz words for how to fix it but implementing those fixes are unrealistic. In the book Health Care: Meet The American Dream (River Grove Books, 2018), Janis Powers offers a solution that is truly based on the American dream. In her solution she aims to eliminate health insurance and Medicare with her Longitudinal Health Care Plans...
Mar 04, 2019•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Back on the podcast for the second time in two years is Alex Hertel-Fernandez. You might recall his last book Politics at Work which examined the way employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy. Alex is back with his latest, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States--and the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is assistant professor in Columbia University’s School o...
Feb 15, 2019•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast The law does things, writes David Ray Papke, and it says things, and if we are talking about poor Americans, especially those living in big cities, what it does and says combine to function as powerfully oppressive forces that can much more likely be counted on to do harm than good. Join us as we discuss Papke's book Containment and Condemnation: Law and the Oppression of the Urban Poor (Michigan State University Press, 2019) and learn about how law functions in the lives of poor people in the U...
Feb 15, 2019•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Debra Thompson, in her award-winning* book The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016), explores the complexities of the politics of the census. This book, which unpacks the census itself, leads the reader to consider how this mundane tool actually translates the abstraction of the state into a concrete entity, and, at the same time, how this tool has been and is used in contradictory ways in regard to the issue of race. Thompson...
Feb 12, 2019•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast The so-called Urban Crisis of the 1970s continues to loom large in narratives of US urban politics and history, but what can we learn about the period from movies? In Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination (SUNY Press, 2018), Nathan Holmes burrows down into some key visual texts -- including Klute, Serpico, and the Taking of Pelham 123 -- and tells us about cities, suburbs, anxieties about modernism, identity, politics, and more. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in...
Feb 11, 2019•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Peter Hotez is a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases affecting the worlds poor. He is also the father of a daughter who was diagnosed with autism. The alleged link between vaccines and autism has long been disproven, but it is still a belief held onto by the anti-vaccine movement. This puts Dr. Hotez in a particularly powerful position to speak out. As the anti-vaccine movement grows and vaccine-preventable diseases continue to spread due to the misin...
Feb 07, 2019•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today we are joined by Danyel Reiche, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the American University of Beirut, and the author of Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games (Routedge, 2016) In Success and Failure, Reiche provides a playbook for National Committees that want to win more medals. Reiche’s fascinating work moves beyond the macro level analysis of international sports success to offer concrete policy initiatives for the 21st century. Previous studies have shown tha...
Feb 05, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Thanks to the efforts of activists concerned that the problem of “battered women” was being ignored -- and treated as a private, family matter rather than a broader social problem -- since the 1980s interpersonal/domestic violence has been treated as a criminal act enforced by the institutions of American criminal justice. But too seldom have we asked if this approach has actually worked. In her powerful and provocative new book, Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to I...
Feb 04, 2019•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast There’s lot of talk these days, at least in some circles on the left, of a Universal Basic Income. There’s also talk in many of the same circles of a jobs guarantee. Join us as we speak with Steven Attewell, author of People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). He tells us the history of direct job creation by government in the U.S. and the lessons to be learned from the successes and failures of such efforts throughout t...
Jan 31, 2019•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
