Without a doubt, the paramount duty of a municipality, of any size, is the delivery services to its constituents. These services range from the seasonal-think snow removal, to the daily-ensuring traffic lights work, to the critical-think trash removal. Cities, particularly those in large urban areas, are tasked with finding ways to respond to issues important to the people for whom they work. New technology and data collection platforms are assisting municipalities to respond to the needs of cit...
Jan 01, 2015•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jeff Smith is the author of Ferguson in Black and White (Kindle Single, 2014). Smith is assistant professor of political science at The New School’s Milano Graduate School. Smith writes this book from a position of academic and personal expertise. He grew up in the area and served as a state representative for several years. Ferguson in Black and White provides useful background about the socio-political history of the St. Louis region that set the stage for Michael Brown’s killing and the painf...
Dec 22, 2014•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast How did a golden age of cultural funding in UK turn to lead? This is the subject of a new cultural history by Robert Hewison. Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (Verso, 2014) charts the New Labour era of cultural policy, detailing the shift from the optimism of the late 1990s to the eventual crisis of funding and policy currently confronting culture in the UK. The book identifies the faustian pact between government and cultural sector, as increased funding came at the price...
Dec 19, 2014•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Conventional thinking tells us that private school education is better than public schooling in the US. Why else would parents pay the hefty price tag often associate with private education, especially at very elite schools? But, Dr. Christopher Lubienski and Dr. Sarah Lubienski question this assumption in their new book, entitled The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013). In this publication, the authors use two large-scale da...
Dec 15, 2014•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Janet K. Shim‘s new book juxtaposes the accounts of epidemiologists and lay people to consider the roles of race, class, and gender (among other things) in health and illness. Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease (New York University Press, 2014) integrates several kinds of sources into a theoretically-informed sociological investigation of inequality and cardiovascular disease, including interviews with epidemiologists and people of color who are dealing in different ...
Nov 27, 2014•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Is there any such thing as a generic drug? Jeremy A, Greene‘s new book Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) treats its subject matter with a learned skepticism that lets the reader see through the eyes of the historical actors who helped define the modern drug industry. By inverting preconceived notions about what we take to be mundane, mass-produced chemical identities, the book offers a broad yet pointed glance at an industry and its attendant regul...
Nov 26, 2014•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Paul Loeb is well known in sociology as the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in Challenging Times, and for the previous edition of the book reviewed here. His books are used in college classes all across the country. Paul also has a presence as a public intellectual who takes his ideas to the radio waves, college speakers’ forums, and the Internet. He is the founder of the Campus Election Engagement Project. This new edition of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Persever...
Nov 18, 2014•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-11 attacks in New York City, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, to the ill-equipped and ill-fated responses to disasters like the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, and Hurricane Katrina, a common denominator in all of these events, and those similar, was a lack of inter- and intra-government information sharing. In his new book Traversing Digital Babel...
Nov 07, 2014•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast So how many billionaires are there in the world? And what do they have to do with politics? Darrell M. West has answered those questions in Billionaires: Reflection on the Upper Crust (Brookings 2014). West is vice president of Governance Studies and director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. As an election approaches, the role of money and politics is fresh on everyone’s mind. Darrell West takes this issue on at its zenith. He examines the relationship of the...
Oct 20, 2014•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast How did we come to think of spaces for the storage and circulation of body parts as “banks,” and what are the consequences of that history for the way we think about human bodies as property today? Kara W. Swanson‘s wonderful new book traces the history of body banks in America from the nineteenth century to today, focusing especially on milk, blood, and sperm. Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2014) takes readers into early tw...
Oct 20, 2014•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth century. Author Matthew Huber shows the crucial role oil and housing policy played in the New Deal and how, in subsequent decades, government policies drove many Americans to the suburbs and increased their dependence on petroleum. Although such policies were central to suburbanization, Americans in t...
Oct 17, 2014•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast The death penalty is a subject that can easily inflame emotions. However, in his book, Exile & Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourses on the Death Penalty (Northeastern University Press, 2013), Dr. Anthony Santoro does an amazing job of objectively presenting opposition to and support of the death penalty and explaining his own opposition to it. At the same time, Dr. Santoro explores, primarily through a focus on Virginia, a broad range of perspectives on the death penalty, such as official ...
Oct 14, 2014•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Andrea Louise Campbell is the author of Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Campbell is professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trapped in America’s Safety Net sheds light on the reality of means-tested programs in the United States. Following an accident that left her sister-in-law paralyzed, Campbell sees the vast array of federal and California state assistance programs up close. The book highlights t...
Oct 13, 2014•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Prior to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, the United States did not have a national system of taxation–it had a regional system, a system linked to political parties, and a system that, in many instances, preserved and protected trade. In his superbly written and thoughtful book Making the Modern American Fiscal State (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Ajay K. Mehrotra argues that “the rise of direct and graduated taxation in the early twentieth century signaled the start of a more compl...
Oct 07, 2014•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Canadian author and scholar, Heather Menzies, has written a book about the journey she took to the highlands of Scotland in search of her ancestral roots. In Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A Memoir and Manifesto (New Society Publishers, 2014), Menzies outlines her discovery of a vanished way of life and argues that restoring it would help North Americans recover a deeper sense of self as well as more satisfying social relations with the people around them. It could also help the...
Oct 06, 2014•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Robert J. Pekkanen, Steven Rathgeb Smith, and Yutaka Tsujinaka are the authors of Nonprofits and Advocacy: Engaging Community and Government in an Era of Retrenchment (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Pekkanen is professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. Smith is executive director of the APSA and affiliate professor in the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University o...
Oct 06, 2014•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Philip Kretsedemas is the author of Migrants and Race in the US: Territorial Racism and the Alien/Outside (Routledge, 2014). Kretsedemas is associate professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts-Boston. This is the second time he has been featured on New Books in Political Science podcast. In Migrants and Race in the US, Kretsedemas explains how migrants can be viewed as racial others, not just because they are viewed as nonwhite, but because they are racially “alien.” This way of seein...
Sep 29, 2014•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast “All classes are sorta boring” (p. 19). This statement is one that college students might believe, along with many of their professors, but not Dr. Mark Carnes, author of Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College (Harvard University Press, 2014). In Carnes’ book, he describes a new type of learning and classroom pedagogy called “Reacting”, where students take control of the class by being immersed into various roles in a certain event in history and given a competitive goal to co...
Sep 24, 2014•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast The new book, Constructing Neoliberalism: Economic Transformation in Anglo-American Democracies (University of Toronto Press, 2013) shows how political elites in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada successfully introduced radically new economic policies in the 1980s. While opinion polls have consistently showed that neoliberal policies are not popular, governments in all four countries have continued implementing an agenda that includes government spending cuts, the privatization of state...
Sep 22, 2014•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Shaazka Beyerle is the author of the new book, Curtailing Corruption: People Power for Accountability and Justice (Lynne Rienner 2014). Beyerle is senior adviser at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and a visiting scholar at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University. Beyerle brings a scholar’s approach and a practitioner’s eye for detail to the book. She argues that corruption undermines development, but is more than just the conventional government corruptio...
Sep 15, 2014•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Teachers have recently become a target in the educational reform debate. Most would agree that great teachers are crucial for education. However, there is no singular formula for a great teacher. So then, what makes a great teacher? Do those characteristics transcend culture? These questions and more are explored in a new book titled West Meets East: Best Practices from Expert Teachers in the United States and China (ASCD, 2014). The book is a collaboration from several American and Chinese acad...
Sep 14, 2014•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast “We are not half a dozen provinces. We are one great Dominion,” Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald proudly declared. More than a century later, Canada has 10 provinces and three northern territories making it one of the biggest and richest countries on Earth. In the spirit of optimism that prevailed in the year after the country celebrated its 100th anniversary, then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau called for the founding of a just society in which every Canadian would enjoy fundamen...
Sep 11, 2014•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast With a new focus on vocational and work ready education, the notion of a liberal education is becoming less valued in American society. Though, there are still defenders of this well-rounded and classic form of education. One staunch defender is Dr. Michael S. Roth, current President of Wesleyan University and author of Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press, 2014). As the title suggests, Dr. Roth contends that liberal education is still important in higher e...
Sep 07, 2014•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Staci Zavattaro is the author of the new book Cities for Sale: Municipalities as Public Relations and Marketing Firms (SUNY Press, 2013). Zavattaro is assistant professor of public administration at Mississippi State University. Cities have received renewed interest from political scientists recently. Previously, Ravi K. Perry was on the podcast to discuss his book Black Mayors, White Majorities: The Balancing Act of Racial Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). Zavattaro approaches the ...
Sep 01, 2014•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Matt Grossmann is back on the podcast with his newest book, Artists of the Possible: Governing Networks and American Policy Change Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2014). Grossmann is associate professor of political science at Michigan State University. He is also author of The Not-So-Special Interests, for which he appeared on the podcast in 2012. In Artists of the Possible, Grossman ponders who moves policy? Is it an enraged public or talking heads on TV? Grossmann suggests that neither p...
Aug 25, 2014•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.” This was the headline of a recent New Republic article that reverberated across the internet recently, going viral as it was shared over 160 thousands times on Facebook. The author of this piece, Dr. William Deresiewicz, joins the New Books in Education podcast to discuss his new book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (Free Press 2014), which further elaborates upon his recent viral article and anothe...
Aug 19, 2014•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford UP, 2014), by UC Berkeley Professor of Rhetoric Marianne Constable, impels its readers to reassess the dominant methods of considering what is law. Constable’s study of law is informed by both philosophy and sociology; however, she avoids common approaches employed by both disciplines and instead conducts her legal analysis by searching for directives in the form of J.L. Austin’s “speech acts.” Her methods suggest that there is more of a conn...
Aug 16, 2014•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen are the authors of The National Origins of Policy Ideas: Knowledge Regimes in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark (Princeton University Press, 2014). Campbell is the Class of 1925 Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College and professor of political economy and the Copenhagen Business School. Pederson is professor of comparative political economy at the Copenhagen Business School. Do policy ideas come from different places in different countries?...
Aug 04, 2014•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Josh Lerner is the author of Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics (MIT Press, 2014). Lerner earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from The New School for Social Research, and is now the Executive Director of The Participatory Budgeting Project, a nonprofit organization that empowers communities to decide how to spend public money. Lerner asks the question at the start of the book: Can games make democratic participation more fun? He does not mean game...
Jul 28, 2014•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Judith Kelley is the author of Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works, and Why It Often Fails (Princeton University Press, 2012). Kelley is associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. Monitoring Democracy, which won the Co-Winner of the 2013 Chadwick F. Alger Prize from the International Studies Association, has numerous theoretical insights and empirical findings to deepen our knowledge of democratic elections. Kelley weaves togeth...
Jul 21, 2014•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
