Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish revival. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, kosher vodka, and festivals of Jewish culture have become popular, while new museums, memorials, Jewish studies programs, and Holocaust research centers reflect soul-searching about Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. In Resurrecting the Jew: Nationalism, Philosemitism, and Poland’s Jewish Revival (Princeton University Press, 2022), sociologist Genevièv...
Feb 03, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep 184•Transcript available on Metacast What do you want out of life? To make a lot of money--or work for justice? To run marathons--or sing in a choir? To have children--or travel the world? The things we care about in life--family, friendship, leisure activities, work, our moral ideals--often conflict, preventing us from doing what matters most to us. Even worse, we don't always know what we really want, or how to define success. Blending personal stories, philosophy, and psychology, this insightful and entertaining book offers inva...
Feb 01, 2023•38 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast In this panoramic and multifaceted book, Meir Bar-Asher examines how Jews and Judaism are depicted in the Qur'an and later Islamic literature, providing needed context to those passages critical of Jews that are most often invoked to divide Muslims and Jews or to promote Islamophobia. He traces the Qur'anic origins of the protection of Jews and other minorities living under the rule of Islam, and shows how attitudes toward Jews in Shi'i Islam are substantially different from those in Sunni Islam...
Feb 01, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep 359•Transcript available on Metacast What kinds of tools do we need to make big decisions, and why aren't our universities training us to make them? Are universities doing students a disservice by occupying them with myriads of boxes to tick? Are students right to prefer money to meaning? Madison Program alumni Ben and Jenna Storey discuss the philosophy of making choices and of restlessness, and critique the way universities treat those topics. Ben and Jenna are senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute in the Social, Cu...
Jan 30, 2023•57 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton UP, 2010) documents the process, and relative ease, with which institutions of higher learning and the religious establishment, can be corrupted by political ideology and power. In Germany of the 1930’s the thin cloak of religion covered and sanitized the murderous evil of Naziism. Was Jesus a Nazi? During the Third Reich, German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-...
Jan 27, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep 88•Transcript available on Metacast Science and Technologies scholar Lilly Irani talks her book, Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Irani’s work examines the ideological role that ideas of “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” have played in India and the people who are left behind by such visions. Irani and Vinsel also discuss her other work and activism focusing on the politics of the Bay Area in California, including organization against the digital technolo...
Jan 17, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers--from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton UP, 2023), Marion Turner tells the fascinating story...
Jan 17, 2023•46 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast Carlos Eire, author of The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila: A Biography (2019) and professor of medieval and early modern European history and religion at Yale University, discusses the life of St. Teresa and mysticism in sixteenth-century Spain. He also talks a bit about his immigration to the United States as a child refugee from Cuba in the 1960s; his commentary and scholarship has earned him the title of “enemy of the state” in today’s communist Cuba. · Here is Professor Eire’s faculty webpage...
Jan 15, 2023•54 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and culture and in American citizenship, he focuses mainly on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education. This question motivates his book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021). “Great Books” dominate “the Core” at Columbia University, where undergraduates ...
Jan 06, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep 127•Transcript available on Metacast Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live by (Princeton UP, 2022). Historian of science Lorraine Daston's wonderful new book, Rules: A Short History of What We Live by (Princeton UP, 2022). is just out. Daston's earlier pathbreaking works include Against Nature, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment and many co-authored books, including Objectivity (with Peter Galison) which introduced the idea of historically changeable "epistemic virtues." In this Recall this Book conversati...
Jan 05, 2023•46 min•Ep 96•Transcript available on Metacast The essential handbook for doing historical research in the twenty-first century The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton UP, 2021) provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian's craft in the digital age, while never losing sight of the fundamental values and techniques that have defined historical scholarship for centuries. Zachary Schrag begins by explaining how to ask good questions and then guides readers step-by-step through...
Dec 31, 2022•43 min•Ep 1292•Transcript available on Metacast By any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper moral response to this? Can prisons and the practices surrounding incarceration feasibly be reformed, or should the entire enterprise be abolished? If the latter, then what? If the former, what are the necessary reforms? In The Idea of Prison Abolition (Princeton UP, 2022), Tommie Shelby undertakes a systematic and critical examination of the arguments...
Dec 30, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep 303•Transcript available on Metacast When T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. "But," as Jed Rasula writes, "The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. It was a poem that unequivocally declared that the ancient art of poetry had become modern." In What the Thunder Said: How 'The Waste Land' Made Poetry Modern (Princeton UP, 2022), Ra...
Dec 28, 2022•49 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast One of the great puzzles of electoral politics is how parties that commit mass atrocities in war often win the support of victimized populations to establish the postwar political order. Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections (Princeton University Press, 2022) by Dr. Sarah Zuckerman Daly traces how parties derived from violent, wartime belligerents successfully campaign as the best providers of future societal peace, attracting votes not just from their core supporters b...
Dec 18, 2022•1 hr•Ep 653•Transcript available on Metacast Why some of Asia’s authoritarian regimes have democratized as they have grown richer—and why others haven’t Over the past century, Asia has been transformed by rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization—a spectacular record of development that has turned one of the world’s poorest regions into one of its richest. Yet Asia’s record of democratization has been much more uneven, despite the global correlation between development and democracy. Why have some Asian countries become mo...
Dec 17, 2022•56 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (Princeton UP, 2022) explores why dictatorships born of social revolution—such as those in China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—are extraordinarily durable, even in the face of economic crisis, large-scale policy failure, mass discontent, and intense external pressure. Few other modern autocracies have survived in the face of such extreme challenges. Drawing on comparative historical analysis, Steven Levitsk...
Dec 16, 2022•58 min•Ep 634•Transcript available on Metacast Long-haul truckers are the backbone of the American economy, transporting goods under grueling conditions and immense economic pressure. Truckers have long valued the day-to-day independence of their work, sharing a strong occupational identity rooted in a tradition of autonomy. Yet these workers increasingly find themselves under many watchful eyes. Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance (Princeton UP, 2022) examines how digital surveillance is upending life and w...
Dec 15, 2022•34 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India (Princeton UP, 2022) is a captivating treasury of emotion terms drawn from some of India’s earliest classical languages. Inspired by the traditional Indian genre of a “treasury”—a wordbook or anthology of short texts or poems—this collection features 177 jewel-like entries evoking the kinds of phenomena English speakers have variously referred to as emotions, passions, sentiments, moods, affects, and dispositions. These entries ser...
Dec 08, 2022•41 min•Ep 226•Transcript available on Metacast A bold reorientation of art history that bridges the divide between fine art and material culture through an examination of objects and their uses art history is often viewed through cultural or national lenses that define some works as fine art while relegating others to the category of craft. Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History (Princeton UP, 2022) points the way to an interconnected history of art, examining a broad array of functional aesthetic objects that transcend geographic an...
Dec 06, 2022•56 min•Ep 127•Transcript available on Metacast Just over half a century since Neil Armstrong first stepped foot on the lunar surface, a new space race to the Moon is well underway and rapidly gaining momentum. Laying out a vision for the next fifty years, Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind (Princeton UP, 2022) is astrophysicist Joseph Silk's persuasive and impassioned case for putting scientific discovery at the forefront of lunar exploration. The Moon offers opportunities beyond our wildest imaginings, and plans to return a...
Nov 28, 2022•36 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast None of us really want to relive our first encounters with COVID-19 and the disruptions to our lives, to say nothing of the anxiety and concern about the life-threatening nature of this virus as it spread around the globe. At the same time, Shana Kushner Gadarian, Sara Wallace Goodman, and Thomas B. Pepinsky ask us to reflect on our experiences and the responses to COVID-19 in the United States in their new book, Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID (Princeton U...
Nov 28, 2022•46 min•Ep 631•Transcript available on Metacast In the nineteenth century, one group of American merchants reported an odd request from the Vietnamese emperor. An envoy asked if the traders could help procure a commodity brought by a previous delegation: a precious good that turned out to be a bottle of Best Durham bottled mustard. That’s one small anecdote in Eric Tagliocozzo’s latest book, In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama (Princeton University Press: 2022), which charts hundreds of years of history across Asia’s waters...
Nov 17, 2022•35 min•Ep 109•Transcript available on Metacast In our age of biomedicine, society often treats sickness and disability as problems in need of solution. Phenomena of embodied difference, however, have not always been seen in terms of lack and loss. Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds (Princeton UP, 2022) explores the case of early modern Catholic Canada under French rule and shows it to be a period rich with alternative understandings of infirmity, disease, and death. Counterna...
Nov 17, 2022•56 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast In July 1815, six Iranian students arrived in London under the escort of their chaperone, Captain Joseph D'Arcy. Their mission was to master the modern sciences behind the rapid rise of Europe. Over the next four years, they lived both the low life and high life of Regency London, from being down and out after their abandonment by D’Arcy to charming their way into society and landing on the gossip pages. The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen's London (Princeton U...
Nov 14, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep 198•Transcript available on Metacast The natural world teems with remarkable conversations, many beyond human hearing range. Scientists are using groundbreaking digital technologies to uncover these astonishing sounds, revealing vibrant communication among our fellow creatures across the Tree of Life. At once meditative and scientific, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Princeton UP, 2022)shares fascinating and surprising stories of nonhuman sound, interweaving insi...
Nov 11, 2022•56 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast Why we must learn to tell new stories about our relationship with the earth if we are to avoid climate catastrophe. Reading literature in a time of climate emergency can sometimes feel a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. Yet, at this turning point for the planet, scientists, policymakers, and activists have woken up to the power of stories in the fight against global warming. In Literature for a Changing Planet (Princeton UP, 2022), Martin Puchner ranges across four thousand years of world lit...
Nov 10, 2022•40 min•Ep 189•Transcript available on Metacast Which rules do we obey and which ones can we find a way around? What distinctions can be drawn between rules, models to be emulated and algorithms. Lorraine Daston has published widely on the history of science, probability, scientific objectivity and observation, and many other such matters, and she has now published Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton UP, 2022). Listen to her discussion with Owen Bennett Jones about rules.
Nov 08, 2022•36 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 officially ended the explicit prejudice in American immigration policy that began with the 1790 restriction on naturalization to free White persons of “good character.” By the 1980s, the rest of the Anglo-European world had followed suit, purging discriminatory language from their immigration laws and achieving what many believe to be a colorblind international system. Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration (Princeton UP...
Nov 07, 2022•49 min•Ep 628•Transcript available on Metacast A comprehensive and illuminating account of the history of credit in America, The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power & Credit in America (Princeton UP, 2022) by Northwestern University Professor Bruce Carruthers is a far-reaching study of credit in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Synthesizing and surveying economic and social history, Bruce Carruthers examines how issues of trust stitched together the modern U.S. economy. In the case of credit, that trust involves a commitment by debto...
Nov 02, 2022•42 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast How ordinary urban objects influence our behavior, exacerbate inequality, and encourage social change Assumptions about human behavior lie hidden in plain sight all around us, programmed into the design and regulation of the material objects we encounter on a daily basis. In the Midst of Things: The Social Lives of Objects in the Public Spaces of New York City (Princeton UP, 2022) takes an in-depth look at the social lives of five objects commonly found in the public spaces of New York City and ...
Nov 01, 2022•49 min•Ep 77•Transcript available on Metacast 
