Americans are deeply polarized on many issues, including science and medicine. Where once was widespread agreement, today the differences are sharp: on one hand, posters announce, “I believe in science!” and on the other hand, dramatic videos show ICU patients affirming their anti-vax beliefs with their final breaths. What is going on? Science is supposed to be based on reason, not faith. We get into a pile of metal – our cars – every day without fear because we trust the engineers, who built ca...
Feb 15, 2022•47 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast I spoke with Eric Protzer (Harvard University) and Paul Summerville (University of Victoria) about their great new book: Reclaiming Populism: How Economic Fairness Can Win Back Disenchanted Voters, published by Polity in 2022. The book provides an original and counterintuitive analysis of what triggered populism around the world. It has received excellent reviews by journalists, policy makers, economists, and academic colleagues. Those who read with interest 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'...
Feb 14, 2022•53 min•Ep 90•Transcript available on Metacast There is a logical flaw in the statistical methods used across experimental science. This fault is not a minor academic quibble: it underlies a reproducibility crisis now threatening entire disciplines. In an increasingly statistics-reliant society, this same deeply rooted error shapes decisions in medicine, law, and public policy with profound consequences. The foundation of the problem is a misunderstanding of probability and its role in making inferences from observations. Aubrey Clayton trac...
Feb 10, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast Rebecca S. Natow's book Reexamining the Federal Role in Higher Education: Politics and Policymaking in the Postsecondary Sector (Teachers College Press, 2022) provides a comprehensive description of the federal government's relationship with higher education and how that relationship became so expansive and indispensable over time. Drawing from constitutional law, social science research, federal policy documents, and original interviews with key policy insiders, the author explores the U.S. gov...
Feb 09, 2022•32 min•Ep 129•Transcript available on Metacast In Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be (Princeton UP, 2021), Diane Coyle explores the enormous problems—but also opportunities—facing economics today if it is to respond effectively to these dizzying changes and help policymakers solve the world’s crises, from pandemic recovery and inequality to slow growth and the climate emergency. Mainstream economics, Coyle says, still assumes people are “cogs”—self-interested, calculating, independent agents interacting in defined co...
Feb 08, 2022•35 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative journalist whose best-selling 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Press, 2019), was one of the first to take fentanyl seriously as both a social phenomenon and a national threat. Since its release, Westhoff has become a policy expert, advising top government officials on the fentanyl crisis, and continuing to follow the story on his Substack account. The author of two previous no...
Feb 07, 2022•47 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast In Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns (U California Press, 2022), Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs a...
Feb 07, 2022•33 min•Ep 128•Transcript available on Metacast Food insecurity poses one of the most pressing development and human security challenges in the world. Feeding the Hungry: Advocacy and Blame in the Global Fight Against Hunger (Oxford UP, 2020) examines the social and normative environments in which international anti-hunger organizations are working and argues that despite international law ascribing responsibility to national governments to ensure the right to food of their citizens, there is no shared social consensus on who ought to do what...
Feb 07, 2022•45 min•Ep 580•Transcript available on Metacast "Quarantine, as an invention of man, is the most primitive and universal instrument of defense against contagious disease epidemics. Almost universally maligned or ignored by historians, quarantine is like an iceberg with 90 percent of its secrets hidden from view in inaccessible archives of the government." In Germs at Bay: Politics, Public Health, and American Quarantine (Praeger/ABC-Clio, 2021), Charles Vidich explores the surprisingly rich history of quarantine in America. It's gone through ...
Feb 03, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep 144•Transcript available on Metacast The average person produces about four hundred pounds of excrement a year. More than seven billion people live on this planet. Holy crap! Because of the diseases it spreads, we have learned to distance ourselves from our waste, but the long line of engineering marvels we've created to do so--from Roman sewage systems and medieval latrines to the immense, computerized treatment plants we use today--has also done considerable damage to the earth's ecology. Now scientists tell us: we've been wastin...
Feb 03, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep 112•Transcript available on Metacast Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. From broken toilets and everyday things, to art and forms of writing, fragments are signatures of urban worlds and provocations for change. In Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds (U California Press, 2021), Colin McFarlane examines such fragments, what they are and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of cities. How does the city appear when we look at it through it...
Feb 02, 2022•49 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast America’s community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree―or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community College (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), Robin Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The Costs of Compl...
Feb 02, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep 155•Transcript available on Metacast Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. The disproportionate Black deaths and cries of “I can’t breathe” that ring out in our era — because of police violence, COVID-19, or menthol smoking — are intimately connected...
Jan 31, 2022•56 min•Ep 276•Transcript available on Metacast Today I talked to Helga Nowotny about her new book In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms (Polity, 2021). One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI - and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to unders...
Jan 20, 2022•48 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast Societies all over the world are getting older, the result of the fact that we are living longer and having fewer children. At some point in the near future, much of the developed world will have at least twenty percent of their national populations over the age of sixty-five. Bradley Schurman calls this the Super Age. Today, Italy, Japan, and Germany have already reached the Super Age, and another ten countries will have gone over the tipping point in 2021. Thirty-five countries will be part of...
Jan 18, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep 87•Transcript available on Metacast Today I talked to Suzanne Cope about her new book Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement (Lawrence Hill Books, 2021) In early 1969 Cleo Silvers and a few Black Panther Party members met at a community center laden with boxes of donated food to cook for the neighborhood children. By the end of the year, the Black Panthers would be feeding more children daily in all of their breakfast programs than the state of California was at that ti...
Jan 17, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep 95•Transcript available on Metacast Tracing the dramatic conflicts both inside organized medicine and between the medical profession and the larger society over quality, equality, and economy in health care, Peter A. Swenson illuminates the history of American medical politics from the late nineteenth century to the present. Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in American Medicine (Yale UP, 2021) chronicles the role of medical reformers in the progressive movement around the beginning of the twentieth century and th...
Jan 12, 2022•36 min•Ep 127•Transcript available on Metacast How can we make creative industries fair and inclusive? In Reimagining the Creative Industries: Youth Creative Work, Communities of Care (Routledge, 2021), Miranda Campbell, an associate professor in the School of Creative Industries at Ryerson University, explores this question theoretically and empirically to present a new vision for both young creative workers and creative production itself. Drawing on ideas of ordinariness and the everyday, along with the need for care and inclusivity, the b...
Jan 11, 2022•45 min•Ep 256•Transcript available on Metacast Amy C. Sullivan explores the complexity of America’s opioid epidemic through firsthand accounts of people grappling with the reverberating effects of stigma, treatment, and recovery. Taking a clear-eyed, nonjudgmental perspective of every aspect of these issues—drug use, parenting, harm reduction, medication, abstinence, and stigma—Opioid Reckoning: Love, Loss, and Redemption in the Rehab State (U Minnesota Press, 2021) questions current treatment models, healthcare inequities, and the criminal ...
Jan 07, 2022•51 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast Why are Americans so angry? American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation (Greenleaf, 2021) explores history to find the answer to a divided America Two disparate Americas have always coexisted. In this thoroughly researched, engaging and story of our nation’s divergent roots, Seth David Radwell clearly links the fascinating history of the two American Enlightenments to our raging political division. He also demonstrates that reasoned analysis and historical p...
Dec 29, 2021•1 hr•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast For many Americans, the birth certificate is a mundane piece of paper, unearthed from deep storage when applying for a driver’s license, verifying information for new employers, or claiming state and federal benefits. Yet as Donald Trump and his fellow “birthers” reminded us when they claimed that Barack Obama wasn’t an American citizen, it plays a central role in determining identity and citizenship. In The Birth Certificate: An American History (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), award...
Dec 27, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep 1126•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Paul Steinberg, Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, returns to New Books Network to discuss his latest book, Applying Psychoanalytic Thought to Contemporary Mental Health Practice (Routledge, 2021). In this latest work, a “sister” publication his prior Psychoanalysis in Medicine (Routledge, 2020), Dr. Steinberg describes the potential for psychoanalytic ideas and practice to be applied to a variety of mental health care contexts, includin...
Dec 27, 2021•41 min•Ep 182•Transcript available on Metacast Much has been reported and discussed about the hotly debated issue of immigration enforcement, yet a question is still to be explored: What is the impact of the immigration enforcement on schools and our educational system? In Schools Under Siege: The Impact of Immigration Enforcement on Educational Equity (Harvard Education Press, 2021), Patricia Gándara and Jongyeon Ee addressed this question using rich and comprehensive data from their survey and interview studies. More than 6 million school ...
Dec 27, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep 152•Transcript available on Metacast The Deportation Express: A History of America Through Forced Removal (University of California Press, 2021) details the history of the United States' systematic expulsion of "undesirables" and immigrants, told through the lives of the passengers who travelled from around the world, only to be locked up and forced out aboard America's first deportation trains. The United States, celebrated as a nation of immigrants and the land of the free, has developed the most extensive system of imprisonment ...
Dec 23, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep 1124•Transcript available on Metacast When Rebecca Lester was eleven years old--and again when she was eighteen--she almost died from anorexia nervosa. Now both a tenured professor in anthropology and a licensed social worker, she turns her ethnographic and clinical gaze to the world of eating disorders--their history, diagnosis, lived realities, treatment, and place in the American cultural imagination. Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America (U California Press, 2019), the culmination of over two decades of anthropol...
Dec 21, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep 133•Transcript available on Metacast The idea that a woman may leave a biological trace on her gestating offspring has long been a commonplace folk intuition and a matter of scientific intrigue, but the form of that idea has changed dramatically over time. Beginning with the advent of modern genetics at the turn of the twentieth century, biomedical scientists dismissed any notion that a mother--except in cases of extreme deprivation or injury--could alter her offspring's traits. Consensus asserted that a child's fate was set by a c...
Dec 21, 2021•43 min•Ep 190•Transcript available on Metacast Ethnographer and sociologist Joanne Golann spent 18 months observing the day-to-day life of students and teachers in a “no-excuses” charter school. In her book Scripting the Moves, she explores the school’s use of behavioural scripts, including SLANT. Golann investigates the reasoning behind the use of these scripts, their implementation and their impacts on the school community, and questions whether the micro-management shaping every school day serves its stated purpose, namely, to prepare stu...
Dec 17, 2021•58 min•Ep 151•Transcript available on Metacast Michael S. Dodson's Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City in North India: 1870-1930 (Routledge, 2020) is a re-evaluation of modern urbanism and architecture and a history of urbanism, architecture, and local identity in colonial north India at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on Banaras and Jaunpur, two of northern India's most traditional cities, the book examines the workings of colonial bureaucracy in the cities and argues that interactions with the colonial state were an integral a...
Dec 16, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep 135•Transcript available on Metacast Historically, how have marginalized and minority groups pushed the boundaries of representative government to pass legislation that benefits them? Political Scientist Shamira Gelbman, the Daniel F. Evans Associate Professor in Social Sciences at Wabash College, answers this question in her new book, The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction (Temple UP, 2021). Gelbman examines the history of The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) thr...
Dec 16, 2021•51 min•Ep 565•Transcript available on Metacast Today I talked to Thom Hartmann about his new book The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich (Berrett-Koehler, 2021). To hear Thom Hartmann tell it, the battle over whether healthcare should be seen as a right or a privilege has two phases in American history. From the 1880’s to the 1980’s the idea of universal American healthcare was opposed due to racist bias, i.e., to provide it would favor aiding African-Americans, too. Then from the...
Dec 16, 2021•24 min•Ep 84•Transcript available on Metacast 
