In the era of #MeToo, Brett Kavanaugh, and Donald Trump, masculinity and the harmful effects that follow certain versions of masculinity have become national conversations. Now, like many other times throughout American history, people are asking “what’s wrong with men?” Some men, however, are not widely talked about. In his new book Man Out: Men on the Sidelines of American Life (Brookings Institution Press, 2018), Dr. Andrew Yarrow investigates these “lost men”: those who have left the workfor...
Nov 09, 2018•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s been an article of faith among scholars and activists alike that poor Americans are ignored in national politics. But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong, and poor people, at least rhetorically, are in fact as commonly referred to by Presidents in their State of the Union addresses and in Party platforms as many other supposedly more favored groups? Kristina C. Miler’s Poor Representation: Congress and the Politics of Poverty in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2018) sim...
Nov 06, 2018•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast In Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear (MIT Press, 2018), journalism professor Mike Ananny provides a new framework for thinking about the media at a time of significant change within the industry. Drawing on a variety of disciplines from journalism studies, political theory and technological studies, Ananny argues press freedom is a result of an interplay of duty, autonomy, social, and institutional forces. Focusing on the public right to hear, Ananny ex...
Nov 05, 2018•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast The vast chasm between classical economics and the humanities is widely known and accepted. They are profoundly different disciplines with little to say to one another. Such is the accepted wisdom. Fortunately, Professors Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, both of Northwestern University, disagree. In their new book, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2017), they argue that the mathematically rigid world of classical economics actu...
Nov 02, 2018•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast What if guns “are not merely carriers of action, but also actors themselves?” That’s the question that animates and unites Jonathan Obert‘s and Andrew Poe‘s, and Austin Sarat‘s unique collection of essays, The Lives of Guns (Oxford University Press, 2018). In it, contributors discuss the political, social and personal “lives” of guns from a variety of perspectives. Join us to hear editors Obert and Poe help us consider new ways of thinking about American narratives of ballistic weapons. Stephen ...
Nov 01, 2018•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics (Naval Institute Press, 2018), edited by Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, is a collection of essays examining military professionalism and ethics in light of major changes to modern warfare. Contributors examine philosophical and legal questions about what constitutes a profession, the requirements of a military professional, and military education. Additionally, the authors tackle questions of ethics related to ne...
Oct 31, 2018•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast When we hear about the “future of work” today we tend to think about different forms of automation and artificial intelligence—technological innovations that will make some jobs easier and others obsolete while (hopefully) creating new ones we cannot yet foresee, and never could have. But perhaps this future isn’t so incomprehensible. Perhaps it’s here already, right in front of our faces, at the largest employer in the world. In their new book, Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Wal...
Oct 29, 2018•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pamela Woolner, senior lecturer in education at Newcastle University, joins us in this episode to discuss her edited volume, School Design Together (Routledge, 2014). Pam is an expert in understanding and developing learning environments, particularly the use of participatory research methods to engage and empower users to share their experiences and knowledge. My conversation with Pam begins with her background in psychology and how her early research studying the use of visuals in math then le...
Oct 29, 2018•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Earlier this year, we heard from Suzanne Mettler and her book on the politics of policies hidden from view. Mettler explained that most Americans are benefiting from numerous public policies, but often fail to notice it because participation is hidden in the tax code. This leads to a disconnect between many citizens and the government. This week, we return to similar terrain, with an excellent new book on homeownership policy. Chloe Thurston has written At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit...
Oct 24, 2018•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Millenial generation, those born between the early 1980s and late 1990s, are the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in US history. They also grew up during the birth of the digital revolution and two cataclysmic events: September 11th and the Great Recession. What they believe has remained largely speculation, until the publication of The Politics of Millennials: Political Beliefs and Policy Preferences of America’s Most Diverse Generation (U Michigan Press, 2018) by Stella M. R...
Oct 22, 2018•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast What role did elderly Britons have in shaping the twentieth-century welfare state? In her new book, Aging in Twentieth-Century Britain (University of California Press, 2018), Charlotte Greenhalgh offers a compelling portrait of a segment of Britain’s twentieth-century population that has, to date, received limited scholarly attention. Mobilizing a range of sources, from social science reports to women’s magazines, from photographs to autobiographies, Greenhalgh successfully foregrounds experienc...
Oct 09, 2018•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dan Ponder’s new book, Presidential Leverage: Presidents, Approval, and the American State (Stanford University Press, 2018), is an important and thoughtful exploration of the concept of presidential leverage, specifically how much capacity the president has to accomplish goals, particularly in terms of asserting power to produce outcomes from Congress. Ponder examines leverage in context, which makes this book very useful in thinking about not only the Executive, but also the Legislature, and t...
Oct 04, 2018•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Bill Ivey’s Rebuilding an Enlightened World: Folklorizing America (Indiana University Press, 2018) advances the idea that we are entering a post-enlightenment world increasingly characterized by alternative facts, fake news, and doubts over the “objective” truths of science. Faced with the failure of data-driven social sciences to explain these phenomena, and to anticipate the behaviors of the American voter in 2016 or the middle-class-teenager-turned-ISIS-fighter, Rebuilding advances folklore a...
Oct 02, 2018•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast According to a long tradition in political philosophy, there are certain conditions under which citizens may rightly disobey a law enacted by a legitimate political authority. That is, it is common for political philosophers to recognize the permissibility of civil disobedience, even under broadly just political conditions. There are, of course, longstanding debates over how to distinguish civil from uncivil disobedience, what forms civil disobedience may take, and the difference between civil d...
Oct 01, 2018•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 2018, much attention has been drawn to candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Randy Bryce: candidates for Congress who’ve made a living doing working class jobs. They are unusual because Congressional candidates are almost always drawn from white collar professions. Why do so few working class candidates run for office? Are workers unfit to govern? Do workers care about politics less? In The Cash Ceiling: Why Only the Rich Run for Office and What We Can Do About It (Princeton University...
Sep 28, 2018•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Author, journalist and sometime park ranger Ken Ilgunas has written an argument in favor a “right to roam.” This concept, unfamiliar to most Americans, is one of an ability to traverse public and private property for purposes of enjoying nature. In This Land is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back (Plume, 2018), Ilgunas compares U.S. property laws with the traditions and laws of England, Scotland and Scandinavian countries. In these nations a right to roam has been rec...
Sep 25, 2018•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast How are the vulnerabilities of older adults in need of care and their care workers intertwined? In Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care (New York University Press, 2018), Elana Buch considers this question and more. Using ethnographic methods, Buch enters the homes and lives of older adults who are receiving home care services in addition to becoming a part of two home care agencies to understand the lives of home care workers. This new book sheds light on the i...
Sep 24, 2018•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Joshua Sharfstein has learned a lot as from his years of experience as a public health leader. He has dealt with everything from a rabid raccoon, to protestors, to potentially losing refrigeration on the city of Baltimore’s stock of vaccines. And now he has turned the insight gained from all these experiences into a guidebook for public health officials. The Public Health Crisis Survival Guide: Leadership and Management in Trying Times (Oxford University Press, 2018) details not just how to ...
Sep 21, 2018•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast The North American Free Trade Agreement—or NAFTA, as we Americans call it—is very much in the news of late, primarily because President Trump has decided to make good on what he famously called “the single worst trade deal” that the United States has ever approved. Trump’s assessment, like so many of his statements, isn’t quite the fact he’d like it to be. In study after study, economists have found that NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy ranges from relatively insignificant to mildly beneficial...
Sep 19, 2018•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do schools empower but also potentially emasculate young black men? In his new book, Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Freeden Blume Oeur uses observational and interview methods to better understand the lived experiences of young black men in two all-male schools. Situating the book in “privilege, power, and politics” (p. 7), Blume Oeur encourages the reader to think beyond typical narratives around race and ...
Sep 13, 2018•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast The study of education policy is a scholarly field that sheds light on important debates and controversies revolving around education policy and its implementation. In this episode, we will be talking with three scholars who have made substantial contributions to this field by introducing an innovative perspective to the studies of educational policy—the discursive perspectives. In their new edited volume, Discursive Perspectives on Education Policy and Implementation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017),...
Sep 13, 2018•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pediatrician and integrative medicine practitioner Michelle Perro, MD, has been treating an increasing number of children with complex chronic illnesses that do not fit into our usual diagnostic boxes. She has spent years treating and disentangling why chronic (and particularly auto-inflammatory) conditions seem to be on the rise in kids. She argues that toxicants in our food supply (from pesticides to genetically modified crops) is a major culprit. In What’s Making Our Children Sick? How Indust...
Aug 23, 2018•1 hr 29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Beginning in the mid-1800s, Paris experienced an unprecedented growth in the development of parks, squares, and gardens. This greenspace was part of Napoleon III’s plan for a new, modern Paris and a France restored to glory on the international stage. Adolphe Alphand, as director of the newly established park service, brought his own democratic and egalitarian vision to urban planning. In Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris (Louisiana State University Press, 2015), Dr. Richard S...
Aug 22, 2018•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast “Appalachia was among the first places where the malaise of opioid pills hit the nation in the mid-1990s, ensnaring coal miners, loggers, furniture makers, and their kids.” This is how journalist Beth Macy premises her new book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America (Little, Brown, & Company, 2018). She then sets out to share a history of how and why this happened. Macy offers readers a familiar story of industrial exploitation and economic distress in central Ap...
Aug 21, 2018•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Optimism at All Costs: Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama’s America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018) takes as its point of departure and central preoccupation the notion of “paradoxical ebullience,” by which author Lessie B. Branch means the optimism expressed by African Americans during the presidency of Barack Obama despite a lack of socioeconomic gains (and some notable reversals) during the same period. Branch’s argument around what she considers unwarranted optimis...
Aug 17, 2018•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast You should never trust celebrities, politicians, or activists for health information. Why? Because they are not scientists! Scientists often cannot compete with celebrities when it comes to charm or evoking emotion. Science is complex and often cannot provide the easy “soundbite” worthy answers that celebrities and politicians truly comprehend. Americans are flooded with misleading or incorrect claims about health risks. In his book Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren...
Aug 17, 2018•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast How can educators ensure that young people who attain a postsecondary credential are adequately prepared for the future? Matthew T. Hora and his co-authors, Ross Benbow and Amanda Oleson, explain that the answer is not simply that students need more specialized technical training to meet narrowly defined employment opportunities. Beyond the Skills Gap: Preparing College Students for Life and Work (Harvard Education Press, 2016) challenges this conception of the “skills gap,” highlighting instead...
Aug 17, 2018•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Though usually a background concern, the aging U.S. electric grid has lately been on the minds of both legislators and consumers. Congress wants to ensure the technological security of this important infrastructure. Consumers want to find alternative ways of powering their homes and businesses. Whatever the deliberation, the grid is topic of great concern in this era of both innovation in power and technological terrorism. But to grasp the current significance of the grid, it is important to und...
Aug 15, 2018•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, I speak with Steven Alvarez about his book, Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies (SUNY Press, 2017). This book highlights a grassroots literacy mentorship program that connects emerging bilingual and trilingual K-12 students with college students from similar backgrounds. We discuss how New York immigration has changed over the past quarter century, the attributes of effective mentors and support programs, and alternatives to the defic...
Aug 14, 2018•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Thomas Mulligan’s new book, Justice and the Meritocratic State (Routledge Press, 2018), posits a theory of justice that is based on the allocation of valuable goods (jobs and appropriate income) according to merit. This is an abstract concept that Mulligan details according to economic, philosophical, and political understandings. He weaves together the political and economic dimensions of meritocratic allocations and spends the latter part of the book noting policy ideas that can bring this abs...
Aug 13, 2018•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
