Andrea Warner's Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography(Graystone Books, 2018)tells the story, often in Buffy's own words, of the life of the remarkable artist and activist. Buffy Sainte-Marie's musical career is as varied and fascinating as those of her Canadian contemporaries Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen, but he work has not always achieved the recognition it deserves. Warner's book is in part an attempt to rectify that by presenting Buffy's complete story to a new generation of readers and listeners. We encounter Buffy as a coffee shop folkie, an electronic music pioneer, and indigenous activist, a Sesame Street cast member, and finally as an elder stateswoman of Canadian music. This is a book for longtime fans or for new initiates who have never heard songs like Power in the Blood, Now That the Buffalo's Gone, The Universal Soldier, or The War Racket.
Globalization is possibly the most important economic phenomenon of the past several decades. Opening borders, increasing trade and deepening integration has transformed our economies, our societies and our politics. Globalization changed establishment politics; the reaction against it transformed those against the establishment.
But there’s a world of difference between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders’ critiques of globalization. And those who have concerns about globalization due so for different reasons, building different alliances as they work to implement, reform or roll back globalization.
Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp, authors of Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters(Harvard University Press: 2021) looks more closely at these debates, building out distinct narratives that classify how we should think about the politics of globalization, and how different political movements understand who wins from globalization: everyone, a few, or nobody.
Those interested in learning more about the book and its arguments:
In this interview, Anthea, Nicolas and I talk about the politics of globalization: the arguments used to support it, and the stories used to criticize it. We explore some of the interesting intersections between these arguments … and where we think the politics of globalization might go from here.
Anthea Roberts is professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at Australian National University and author of the prizewinning Is International Law International? (Oxford University Press: 2017).
Nicolas Lamp is associate professor in the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University, Ontario. Before joining Queen’s University, he worked as a dispute settlement lawyer at the World Trade Organization.
Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
In their open-access publication, Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations (Oxford University Press, 2021), Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever argue that philosophers of language can contribute to a deeper understanding of artificial intelligence. AIs known as “neural nets” are becoming commonplace and we increasingly rely on their outputs for action-guidance, as when an AI like Siri hears your question and says, “There’s a pizza shop on the corner.” Our use of words like “says” suggests an important question: do AIs literally say anything? Should we understand their outputs as utterances with meaningful content? And if so, what makes that content meaningful, and how is it related to the processes which result in that output? Cappelen and Dever take up these questions and propose a framework for answering them, abstracting from existing externalist approaches to develop a “de-anthropocentrized” externalism for AI. The book introduces readers not only to issues in AI surrounding its content and interpretation, but also to concepts in philosophy of language which may be relevant to these issues, serving as an invitation for further investigation by philosophers and programmers alike.
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 Controversies and the American Community Survey, economist Matthew Holian provides a practical introduction to these techniques using publicly available data.
Whether we realize it or not, we carry in our mouths the legacy of our evolution. Our teeth are like living fossils that can be studied and compared to those of our ancestors to teach us how we became human. In Evolution's Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins(Princeton UP, 2018), noted paleoanthropologist Peter Ungar brings together for the first time cutting-edge advances in understanding human evolution and climate change with new approaches to uncovering dietary clues from fossil teeth to present a remarkable investigation into the ways that teeth—their shape, chemistry, and wear—reveal how we came to be.
Ungar describes how a tooth’s “foodprints”—distinctive patterns of microscopic wear and tear—provide telltale details about what an animal actually ate in the past. These clues, combined with groundbreaking research in paleoclimatology, demonstrate how a changing climate altered the food options available to our ancestors. When diets change, species change, and Ungar traces how diet and an unpredictable climate determined who among our ancestors was winnowed out and who survived, as well as why we transitioned from the role of forager to farmer. By sifting through the evidence—and the scars on our teeth—Ungar makes the important case for what might or might not be the most natural diet for humans.
Traveling the four corners of the globe and combining scientific breakthroughs with vivid narrative, Evolution’s Bite presents a unique dental perspective on our astonishing human development.
Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests span network and interpretable machine learning methods for the study of cancer genomics, and the history of human population genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com.
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 identity. Caitlin Ring Carlson's Hate Speech (MIT Press, 2021) examines hate speech: what it is, and is not; its history; and efforts to address it.
Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies.
Whether valorized as the heartland or derided as flyover country, the Midwest became instantly notorious when COVID-19 infections skyrocketed among workers in meatpacking plants—and Americans feared for their meat supply. But the Midwest is not simply the place where animals are fed corn and then butchered. Native midwesterner Kristy Nabhan-Warren spent years interviewing Iowans who work in the meatpacking industry, both native-born residents and recent migrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In Meatpacking America, she digs deep below the stereotype and reveals the grit and grace of a heartland that is a major global hub of migration and food production—and also, it turns out, of religion.
Across the flatlands, Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims share space every day as worshippers, employees, and employers. On the bloody floors of meatpacking plants, in bustling places of worship, and in modest family homes, longtime and newly arrived Iowans spoke to Nabhan-Warren about their passion for religious faith and desire to work hard for their families. Their stories expose how faith-based aspirations for mutual understanding blend uneasily with rampant economic exploitation and racial biases. Still, these new and old midwesterners say that a mutual language of faith and morals brings them together more than any of them would have ever expected.
Carlos Ruiz Martinez is a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa. He is also the Communications Assistant for the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA). His general interest is in American religious history, especially American Catholicism.
Allison Isidore is a graduate of the Religion in Culture Masters program at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.
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 argues that the Great Recession came down to one thing: nominal GDP, the sum of all nominal spending in the economy, which the Federal Reserve erred in allowing to plummet.
The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is an end-to-end case for this school of thought, known as market monetarism, written by its leading voice in economics. Based almost entirely on standard macroeconomic concepts, this highly accessible text lays a groundwork for a simple yet fundamentally radical understanding of how monetary policy can work best: providing a stable environment for a market economy to flourish.
Scott Sumner is the Ralph G. Hawtrey Chair of Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is also Professor Emeritus at Bentley University and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.
Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades.
In Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat (Chelsea Green, 2021), Nicolette Hahn Niman makes the expanded case for large ruminants as part of the solution to the climate crisis. In our discussion, Hahn Niman does some myth-busting and presents a system for managing beef cattle that can enhance ecosystems rather than degrade them. Hahn Niman recognizes not all beef enterprises are equal in their impact and argues components of the industry are tone-deaf. To move the industry forward Hahn Niman offers several places to improve. Some of these are to stop routinely killing primary predators, stop feeding drugs and other junk, stop using hormones, and stop long-distance transport. Join us and challenge some of your perceptions of beef cattle production.
Dr. Emily Greble, Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2021). Focusing on the Muslim inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and later Yugoslavia, as they repeatedly adjusted to shifting borders and modern state building projects between the 1870s and the 1940s, Dr. Greble shows how Ottoman political, legal, economic, and social legacies shaped post Ottoman successor states, and how ordinary Balkan Muslims understood, negotiated, and reworked the rapidly changing ideological landscapes into which the late nineteenth century had thrown them. The book forcefully argues that modern European constructs of law, national minority, and public education developed in a distinct Christian context. By recovering the Balkan Muslims’ struggle to define the role of Islam in their new, nationalizing states and societies, the book sheds new light on the historical dynamics of modern citizenship and multiculturalism, but also illuminates Muslims’ oft overlooked agency in the making of modern Europe.
Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University.
