Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force (Princeton, 2021) explores the scope and power of one of America’s most influential interest groups. Despite widespread public support for stricter gun control laws, the National Rifle Association has consistently managed to defeat or weaken proposed regulations. Firepower provides an unprecedented look at how this controversial organization built its political power and how it has deployed it on behalf of its pro-gun agenda. Taking...
Nov 03, 2021•51 min•Ep 120•Transcript available on Metacast Nada Moumtaz’s God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State (University of California Press, 2021) is an ethnography anchored in deep study of the Muslim scholarly tradition, the urban landscape, and Lebanon across the Ottoman, Mandate, and post-independence periods. At the center of the book is the waqf, often translated as “pious endowment.” An act and a practice exhibiting or embodying both change and stability since the nineteenth century, the waqf allows Moumtaz to reinterpret major...
Nov 02, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep 149•Transcript available on Metacast How much do new building codes reduce energy usage? How much and it what ways does it matter for an immigrant to be able to work legally? How has the Affordable Care Act affected people’s work decisions? How did the Great Recession affect women’s childbearing decisions? New statistical and econometric techniques give us better ways of distinguishing correlation from causation even when an experiment would be impossible or unethical. In Data and the American Dream: Contemporary Social Controversi...
Nov 02, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep 81•Transcript available on Metacast In Re-Union: How Bold Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States (Cornell UP, 2021), David Madland explores how labor unions are essential to all workers. Yet, union systems are badly flawed and in need of rapid changes for reform. Madland's multilayered analysis presents a solution--a model to replace the existing firm-based collective bargaining with a larger, industry-scale bargaining method coupled with powerful incentives for union membership. These changes would re...
Nov 01, 2021•50 min•Ep 147•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Robert J. Spitzer’s classic text, The Politics of Gun Control: 8th Edition (Routledge, 2020), has been revised based on new data on gun ownership and use. Dr. Spitzer insightfully interrogates the impact of gun politics on the 2018 elections, new research on the history of American gun laws, and controversies over the geography of guns -- where and when they can be carried and whether they can be concealed. The podcast conversation digs into new findings on elections, public opinion, single-...
Nov 01, 2021•55 min•Ep 557•Transcript available on Metacast Hate speech can happen anywhere - in Charlottesville, Virginia, where young men in khakis shouted, "Jews will not replace us"; in Myanmar, where the military used Facebook to target the Muslim Rohingya; in Cape Town, South Africa, where a pastor called on ISIS to rid South Africa of the "homosexual curse." In person or online, people wield language to attack others for their race, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or other aspects of identit...
Oct 29, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep 76•Transcript available on Metacast Today I talked to Adam Kahane about his new book Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together (Berrett-Koehler, 2021). You’re helping South Africa make the transition from apartheid to democracy under Nelson Mandela. You’re helping end a half-century civil war in Columbia. You’re working with the First Nations in Canada. That’s a small part of the scope that Adam Kahane has been involved in over the recent decades. It’s meaningful, enlightened...
Oct 28, 2021•33 min•Ep 77•Transcript available on Metacast Mental Health: Policies, Laws and Attitudes is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Elyn Saks, Orrin B. Evans Distinguished Professor of Law, and Professor of Law, Psychology and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at USC. During this wide-ranging conversation Elyn Saks candidly shares her personal experiences with schizophrenia and discusses the intersection of law, mental health and ethics: the legal and ethical implications surrounding mental health. Further t...
Oct 28, 2021•2 hr 31 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It's happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz led the economics community in the 1960s to reevaluate its view of what caused the Great Depression, the same may be happening now to our understanding of the first economic crisis of this century. Foregoing the usual relitigating of the problems of housing markets and banking crises, renowned monetary economist Scott Sumner argue...
Oct 27, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Ep 131•Transcript available on Metacast The Immigrant-Food Nexus: Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America (MIT Press, 2020) considers the intersection of food and immigration at both the macroscale of national policy and the microscale of immigrant foodways—the intimate, daily performances of identity, culture, and community through food. Taken together, the chapters—which range from an account of the militarization of the agricultural borderlands of Yuma, Arizona, to a case study of Food Policy Council in Vancouver, Canada—demo...
Oct 26, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep 81•Transcript available on Metacast History is told, it is said, by the victors. And so it is in regard to Richard Nixon. We all know how his presidency ended. What too few of us recall or bother to learn is how it started. In his new The Last Liberal Republican: An Insider's Perspective on Nixon's Surprising Social Policy (UP of Kansas, 2021), John Roy Price details how in Nixon's first few years in office, the President ardently tried to lead from the middle to eradicate the widespread poverty that had so characterized his own u...
Oct 22, 2021•38 min•Ep 1090•Transcript available on Metacast Today I spoke to Nick R. Smith to talk about how China's expansive new era of urbanization threatens to undermine the foundations of rural life, which he writes about in his recently published book The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China (U Minnesota Press, 2021). Centered on the mountainous region of Chongqing, which serves as an experimental site for the country's new urban development policies, The End of the Village analyzes the radical expansion of urbanization and ...
Oct 22, 2021•1 hr 29 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast Criminal Justice: An Examination is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Julian Roberts, Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford. Julian Roberts is an international expert on sentencing throughout the common-law world and is strongly involved in connecting scholars with practitioners as well as promoting greater public understanding of sentencing. This thought-provoking conversation covers a wide range of topics related to criminal justice, including pl...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 27 min•Ep 74•Transcript available on Metacast James Russell’s The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans: For Union Organizers and Employees (NYU Press, 2021) is a helpful how-to for workers navigating their retirement and pension options, from the labor organizer's perspective. Researching retirement plans should not take the rest of your life, even if deciphering the relevant paperwork seems to have become a full-time job. Deliberately elaborate legalese is obscuring the efforts of financial elites to seize control of workers' collective retirem...
Oct 21, 2021•39 min•Ep 119•Transcript available on Metacast What is the future of care? In The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? (Verso, 2021), Emma Dowling, an associate professor at the Institute for Sociology University of Vienna, introduces the extent of the global crisis of care. Drawing on a feminist perspective, the book thinks through the multiple ways that care is rendered invisible in contemporary society, subject to a public storm of privatisation and austerity. The crisis is exacerbated by broader social trends, from the moni...
Oct 21, 2021•40 min•Ep 248•Transcript available on Metacast The current opioid epidemic in the United States began in the mid-1990s with the introduction of a new drug, OxyContin, viewed as a safer and more effective opiate for chronic pain management. By 2017, the opioid epidemic had become a full-blown crisis as over two million Americans had become dependent on and abused prescription pain pills and street drugs. The Opioid Epidemics in the United States: Missed Opportunities and Policy Failures (Routledge, 2021) examines the origins, development, and...
Oct 20, 2021•1 hr•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast There’s nothing more vital to survival than water. “Water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink!”, said the Ancient Mariner, in the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Besides widespread water shortage, too much of America’s water is undrinkable. From big cities and suburbs to the rural heartland, chemicals linked to cancer, heart disease, obesity, birth defects, and lowered IQ routinely spill from our taps. The tragedy is that existing technologies could launch a new age of clean, healthy, and...
Oct 18, 2021•42 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast It's time to rethink how we create and allocate money In Outgrowing Capitalism: Rethinking Money to Reshape Society and Pursue Purpose (Fast Company Press, 2021), Marco Dondi sheds light on the fact that most people do not have the economic security to focus on purpose and life fulfillment. He proposes that this is not the way things have to be; there is an alternative. In a quest to change our economic system to cater for everyone, he identifies deep issues in how money is created and allocated...
Oct 18, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep 128•Transcript available on Metacast Called the “quarterback of the new anti-drug movement,” Kevin Sabet received his Ph.D. in social policy from the University of Oxford and has worked in drug policy for over two decades. He’s served as an advisor for three presidential administrations, Pope Francis and the United Nations, and in 2013 he founded the group he still leads, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, better known as SAM, which opposes cannabis legalization and commercialization. His new book, Smokescreen: What the Marijuana Indus...
Oct 13, 2021•1 hr•Ep 35•Transcript available on Metacast J.C. Salyer’s Court of Injustice: Law Without Recognition in U.S. Immigration (Stanford UP, 2020) is an important look at the histories and processes of immigration law in the US. The book engages with US immigration policy by both tracing the history of US immigration law in the US and considering contemporary practices. Not just a history of law or assessment of policy, Court of Injustice is ethnographically grounded in New York City immigration courts, as well as the New York Immigrant Family...
Oct 08, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast Neoclassical economic theory shows that under the right conditions, prices alone can guide markets to efficient outcomes. But what if it it’s hard to find the right price? In many important markets, a buyer’s willingness to pay for one good (say, the right to use a certain part of the radio spectrum range in San Francisco) will depend on the price of another complementary good (the right to use that same spectrum in Los Angeles). The number of possible combinations can rapidly become incalculabl...
Oct 06, 2021•47 min•Ep 80•Transcript available on Metacast To many observers, Congress has become a deeply partisan institution where ideologically-distinct political parties do little more than engage in legislative trench warfare. A zero-sum, winner-take-all approach to congressional politics has replaced the bipartisan comity ofpast eras. If the parties cannot get everything they want in national policymaking, then they prefer gridlock and stalemate to compromise. Or, at least, that is the conventional wisdom. In The Limits of Party: Congress and Law...
Oct 06, 2021•50 min•Ep 118•Transcript available on Metacast Vigilante action. Renegades. Human intrigue and the future at stake in New York City. In Urbanism without Guarantees, Christian M. Anderson offers a new perspective on urban dynamics and urban structural inequality based on an intimate ethnography of on-the-ground gentrification. The book is centered on ethnographic work undertaken on a single street in Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen in New York City—once a site of disinvestment, but now rapidly gentrifying. Anderson examines the everyday strategies of ...
Oct 05, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast In Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design (Mariner Books, 2015), Nobel Memorial Prize Winner Alvin Roth explains his pioneering work in the study of matching markets such as kidney exchange, marriage, job placements for new doctors and new professors, and enrollments in schools or colleges. In these markets, “buyers” and “sellers” must each chose the other, and getting the prices right is only a small part of what makes for a successful transaction, if cash i...
Oct 05, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast Mary (Molly) Scudder, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Purdue University, has a new book that focuses on an incredibly timely issue: how do citizens with deep and conflicting differences come together to foster democratic life? Part of the answer, according to Scudder, is by pursuing the political power of listening. In her book, Beyond Empathy and Inclusion: The Challenge of Listening in Democratic Deliberation (Oxford UP, 2020), Scudder examines a listening-based approach that moves...
Sep 30, 2021•50 min•Ep 547•Transcript available on Metacast How can we create a healthier world and prevent the crisis next time? In a few short months, COVID-19 devastated the world and, in particular, the United States. It infected millions, killed hundreds of thousands, and effectively made the earth stand still. Yet America was already in poor health before COVID-19 appeared. Racism, marginalization, socioeconomic inequality--our failure to address these forces left us vulnerable to COVID-19 and the ensuing global health crisis it became. Had we tack...
Sep 30, 2021•24 min•Ep 136•Transcript available on Metacast This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, Joshua Preiss' book Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century (Taylor & ...
Sep 29, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep 144•Transcript available on Metacast With a focus on the court diversion of disabled people, Disability, Criminal Justice and Law: Reconsidering Court Diversion (Routledge 2020) undertakes a theoretical and empirical examination of how law is complicit in debilitating disabled people. In our post-institutionalisation era, diversion of disabled people from the court process is often assumed to be humane, therapeutic and socially just. However, in this work, Dr. Linda Steele draws on Foucauldian theory of biopolitics, critical legal ...
Sep 28, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep 139•Transcript available on Metacast What is the purpose of education? Folks outside the field are likely to think of a relatively clear or concrete answer—learning, citizenship, preparation for life, which for the vast majority encompasses work and skills. Upon probing, however, most are likely to realize that these explanations are deceptively simple. Learning what, how, and according to which or whose values? Citizenship within what communities, through which policies and enacted with how much equity, not to mention care? Why ar...
Sep 27, 2021•44 min•Ep 143•Transcript available on Metacast In her phenomenal new book God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State (U California Press, 2021), Nada Moumtaz charts the historical continuities and disjunctures as well contemporary paradoxes shadowing the intellectual and sociological career of waqf or Islamic charity/endowment in modern Lebanon. Nimbly moving between layered textual analysis, riveting ethnography, and formidable historical inquiry, Moumtaz demonstrates the secularization and sectarianization of waqf in Lebanon prem...
Sep 27, 2021•1 hr•Ep 243•Transcript available on Metacast 
