Category: 3-BookTalkDaily

Today we are joined by Bruce Berglund, author of The Fastest Game in the World: Hockey and the Globalization of Sports (University of California Press, 2020). In this sweeping look at hockey, Bruce Berglund examines how a niche sport became a global favorite. Hockey has crossed cultures from North America to Europe and Asia, and has been a political flashpoint several times, most notably during the Summit Series of 1972 and the “Miracle on Ice” at the 1980 Winter Olympics. Berglund’s research combs the archives of Central and Eastern Europe, and he gives a thorough overview of hockey from its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The impact of players like Wayne Gretzky, the influence of youth leagues and the emergence of women in the sport are areas that Berglund explores. Berglund weaves his research with his own personal experiences with hockey to create a compelling narrative. An “anxious child of the Cold War,” Berglund examines the rise of the Soviet hockey team — the Red Machine — and how it took over the international game. Berglund also explores the beginnings of hockey, which descended from a game called bandy. He demonstrates that hockey, while a passion for fans in Canada, has spread worldwide. The Stanley Cup, long a Canadian point of pride, now resides in Tampa, Florida, showing how even in warm-weather climates, hockey has made inroads.

Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs.

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Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy placed much greater focus on stabilizing the market than on helping struggling Americans. As a result, the richest Americans got a lot richer while the middle class shrank and economic and wealth inequality skyrocketed. In Engine of Inequality, Karen Petrou offers pragmatic solutions for creating more inclusive monetary policy and equality-enhancing financial regulation as quickly and painlessly as possible. Instead of proposing legislation that would never pass Congress, the author provides an insider's look at politically plausible, high-impact financial policy fixes that will radically shift the equality balance. Offering an innovative, powerful, and highly practical solution for immediately turning around the enormous nationwide problem of economic inequality, this groundbreaking book: 

• Presents practical ways America can and should tackle economic inequality with fast-acting results; 
• Provides revealing examples of exactly how bad economic inequality in America has become no matter how hard we all work; 
• Demonstrates that increasing inequality is disastrous for long-term economic growth, political action, and even personal happiness; 
• Explains why your bank's interest rates are still only a fraction of what they were even though the rich are getting richer than ever, faster than ever; 
• Reveals the dangers of FinTech and BigTech companies taking over banking; Shows how Facebook wants to control even the dollars in your wallet; and 
• Discusses who shares the blame for our economic inequality, including the Fed, regulators, Congress, and even economists. 

Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America (Wiley, 2021) should be required reading for leaders, policymakers, regulators, media professionals, and all Americans wanting to ensure that the nation’s financial policy will be a force for promoting economic equality.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Technology is breaking politics - what can be done about it? Artificially intelligent "bot" accounts attack politicians and public figures on social media. Conspiracy theorists publish junk news sites to promote their outlandish beliefs. Campaigners create fake dating profiles to attract young voters. We live in a world of technologies that misdirect our attention, poison our political conversations, and jeopardize our democracies. With massive amounts of social media and public polling data, and in-depth interviews with political consultants, bot writers, and journalists, Philip N. Howard offers ways to take these "lie machines" apart. Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives (Yale UP, 2020) is full of riveting behind the scenes stories from the world's biggest and most damagingly successful misinformation initiatives--including those used in Brexit and U.S. elections. Howard not only shows how these campaigns evolved from older propaganda operations but also exposes their new powers, gives us insight into their effectiveness, and shows us how to shut them down. 

As dangerous as things are now, they will only get worse; the enormous flood of data coming from the so-called Internet of Things, along with the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence, will make disinformation easier to generate and disseminate and much harder to spot and remove. Howard tackles the tough task of suggesting the changes that are needed to create a radically redesigned social media ecosystem that would reinforce, rather than erode, democracy.

Medha Prasanna is an MA candidate at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Her current research focuses on International Organizations and Human Rights Law. You can learn more about her here or email her medp16@gwu.edu

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Imagine a rodeo rider atop a bucking bronco, hat in hand, straining to remain astride. Is the rider in your mind's eye white? Is the person male? Popular imaginings and high level, televised, professional rodeo circuits have created a stereotyped image of who rodeo is by and for, but it is far too limited an image, and one that does not reflect reality.

In Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Race, Gender, and Identity in the American Rodeo (University Press of Kansas, 2020), Dr. Elyssa Ford, an associate professor of history at Northwest Missouri State University, paints a very different image of rodeo than what Western myth would have one believe. Ford argues that rodeo has, from its creation, both a vehicle for rebellion and a place of refuge for groups of people told they didn't belong in the American West, let alone in Western rodeo. From Hawaiian ranching culture to Black and gay rodeo, men and women have used professional riding as a powerful expression of self in a nation that has often tried to deny their very personhood.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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The election of Barack Obama propelled the idea of a post-racial United States, or that the country had moved beyond race as a defining feature of social difference and beyond racism as an everyday reality. 

Dr. Danielle Fuentes Morgan examines the ways in which African American comedians and cultural producers took aim at such claims through the lens of satire. In her book, Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty First Century (University of Illinois Press, 2020), Morgan demonstrates and argues for satire’s capacity for social justice through its expression of Black interiority and individuality that troubles simplistic renderings of Black people. Morgan examines texts such as Insecure, Get Out, and comedy by Chris Rock and Dave Chapelle, to show how African American satire fulfills or stymies possibilities for liberation. In expressing Black interiority, satire not only provokes revolutionary laughter but aids in African American psychic and physical survival. During the interview we discussed the main concepts in the book, a range of satirical texts, and Dr. Morgan’s approach to teaching and writing about African American satire. Laughing to Keep from Dying probes satire’s potential for liberation and survival embedded within Black laughter, giving new meaning to the term seriously funny.

Danielle Fuentes Morgan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Santa Clara University.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Operation White Rabbit: LSD, the DEA, and the Fate of the Acid King (Simon and Schuster, 2020) traces the rise and fall—and rise and fall again—of the psychedelic community through the life of the man known as the “Acid King”: William Leonard Pickard. Pickard was a scientific prodigy, a follower of Timothy Leary, a con artist, a womanizer, a man who believed LSD would save lives, and one of the first voices warning about the dangers of fentanyl. He was also a foreign diplomat, a Harvard fellow, and the biggest producer of LSD on the planet—if you believe the DEA. His biography Dennis McDougal, who grew close to Pickard while he was in prison and remains his friend now that Pickard is free, shows how the story of the Acid King is the story of psychedelics in America, as the drugs have transformed from psychedelic enhancements to personal introspection, to dangerous threats to the safety of the American public, to now, when they’re once again being used as tools for personal recovery and healing.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

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This episode features three interviews with organizers and scholars concerned with Asian migrant sex work: SWAN Vancouver (Alison Clancey and Kelly Go), Dr. Lily Wong, and Dr. Yuri Doolan.

On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long targeted three Atlanta-area spas and massage parlors and killed eight people: Delania Ashley Yuan González, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Hyun Jung Grant, Soon Chung Park, Suncha Kim, and Yong Ae Yue. Six of these victims were Asian women. Within the days following the shooting, many groups representing women, Asian Americans, sex workers, and migrants, have collectively mourned and sent strength and solidarity to the eight victims and their families.

This podcast episode seeks to express solidarity with these groups by highlighting the work of scholars and organizers who have been studying the racially encoded figures and the broader histories of Asian migrant sex work. We hope to give space here to understand how the violence that occurred on March 16 was imbricated within a racial capitalist structure that views Asian and Asian American women as disposable objects, a view that has been historically continuous with the histories of Chinese exclusion (initiated by fears of Chinese sex workers and yellow peril), and with over one hundred and fifty years of US imperialism in Asia, from the colonial theft of Hawai’i and the Philippine-American War to Japanese Incarceration, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, and the growth of over eight-hundred military bases across the world.

As the organizers and scholars interviewed here stress, it is crucial now to join groups local and international that stand for the decriminalization of migration and sex work, and to reject calls for hate-crime laws or anti-sex trafficking laws, or any legislation that would bring more policing, all of which would only make migrants and sex workers more vulnerable and stigmatized.

Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia.

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Philip Boehm, who has translated over thirty books from German and Polish into English, has translated a recently discovered German manuscript Darkness at Noon (Scribner, 2019) by the late Arthur Koestler. Originally published in 1940, Koestler’s book eventually became an international bestseller. He told in fictional form the realistic story of a former Soviet Communist Party leader who became a victim of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. The story is loosely modeled on Nikolai Bukharin’s show trial in 1938. Koestler’s book was originally translated into English by his girlfriend and the original was thought to have been lost during World War II. However, in 2015, a graduate student in Switzerland discovered a copy of the original German manuscript and this was the work Boehm translated into English for this recent edition. During this interview we discuss the plot, its relevance to real Soviet purges, and the translation process.

Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University.

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In Warhol's Mother's Pantry: Art America and the Mom in Pop (Mad Creek Press, 2020), M.I. Devine introduces readers to a collection of 21st-century multi-genre essays inspired by Andy Warhol's mother, Julia, that provide a literary and cultural history of new pop humanism. "Here are Leonard Cohen’s last songs and Molly Bloom’s last words; Vampire Weekend’s Rostam and Philip Larkin too; Stevie Smith, John Donne, and Kendrick Lamar; sonnets and selfies; early cinema and post–9/11 film, pop hooks, and pop art." Devine's series of essays examines his histories and relationships with pop culture and art. 

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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The Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge University Press, 2019) shows how China's authoritarian state ensures political control by non-violent mechanisms. Daniel C. Mattingly demonstrates how coercive control is achieved through informal means to achieve goals such as land redistribution, the enforcement of family planning policies, and the suppression of protest. He draws on a broad combination of empirical evidence - from qualitative case studies, experiments and national surveys, to challenge conventional understandings of political control. Surprisingly, Mattingly shows that it is strong civil societies which strengthens the state's coercive capacities, while those that lack strong civil societies have the greatest potential to act collectively and spontaneously to resist the state. 

The Art of Political Control in China was named one of Foreign Affairs Magazine as one of the best books in 2020. It is important reading for our times to understand how governments - and especially authoritarian governments - foster political compliance through coercive mechanisms.  

Daniel Mattingly is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His work focuses on the political economy of development and authoritarian politics with a focus on China. Some of his current research focuses on the military, revolutions, elite politics, and technological innovation in China, both in the present in past.

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

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