NBN Book of the Day - Abby Innes, “Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail” (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail (Cambridge UP, 2023) demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. The crisis of democracy in rich countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of neoliberal capitalism. This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality.

Abby Innes is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at the LSE.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channelTwitter.

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New Books in Native American Studies - Andrew C. Isenberg, “The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850” (UNC Press, 2025)

Most US history textbooks contain a familiar map: shaded colors stretch across North America, clearly and neatly demarcating the extent of US expansion from 1776 thru the late nineteenth century. In The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limites of Manifest Destiny (UNC Press, 2025), University of Kansas distinguished historian Andrew Isenberg asks us to rethink the clean lines and simple borders of the North American past. By examing the stories of escaped enslaved people, Christian missionaries, government vaccination campaigns, anti-slavery schemes, and even well worn historical events like Lewis and Clark and the Lousiana Purchase, Isenberg shows that American power at its borders fell far short of expectations in Washington, and often doesn't match up to historical interpretations in our present day. Rather, American hegemony in the borderlands was contingent, weak, and anything but assured, until well into the nineteenth century. Rather than Manifest Destiny, Isenberg argues that American expansion both west and south should be viewed as one of just many possible outcomes of the boistrous mess that was early North American politics. 

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Up First from NPR - Who gets to be an American?

On the first day of his second term as President, Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. whose parents are in the country illegally. The Trump Administration asserts that the children of noncitizens are not "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States" and therefore are not entitled to citizenship. But birthright citizenship is a Constitutional guarantee, explicitly laid out in the 14th Amendment. On this episode of The Sunday Story, we look at the origins of this right through a 1898 court case that would transform the life of one Chinese American and generations to follow. You can listen to the full episode from NPR's Throughline here or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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What Next | Daily News and Analysis - TBD | Zuckerberg and the Post-Factcheck Era

After the election, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was doing away with Facebook’s fact-checking apparatus in the US. With content creators getting paid based on reach, and content spreading wider and faster the more extreme it is, is Facebook the perfect environment for misinformation to flourish? 


Guest: Craig Silverman, technology reporter for ProPublica.


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It Could Happen Here - CZM Book Club: The Barrow Will Send What it May: Chapter One

Margaret reads Robert the second novella of the Danielle Cain series,

Preorder the third book in the series, including all three audiobooks, on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tangled-wilderness/the-immortal-choir-holds-every-voice

 

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PBS News Hour - Science - Scientists shed new light on the mysterious ‘lost years’ of sea turtles

Sea turtles are considered one of the oldest living species on Earth, but it’s been a mystery where their babies go after heading out to sea. Known as their “lost years,” the lack of information makes it hard for conservationists to protect these turtles. Now, a team of marine scientists is working to change that. John Yang reports. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

The Gist - The Tipping Point

Today on the Gist we got back to Wednesdays spiel on Trumps speech to congress and go to a 2019 interview with Scotland’s Daniel Sloss who churns out comedy specials at an almost alarming rate, completing his tenth at age 28. He’s here to talk about circumcision, Brexit, and why the left is doomed to eternally shoot itself in the foot


Produced by Corey Wara

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Motley Fool Money - Marc Benioff on Agentic AI and Salesforce’s Next Chapter

Marc Benioff is the founder and CEO of the cloud-based software company Salesforce. Dylan Lewis caught up with Benioff to discuss:

- Why Salesforce doesn’t plan to hire any software engineers this year.

- Lessons learned from major acquisitions, like Slack and Tableau.

- Where AI goes next.


Companies discussed: CRM, MSFT, LEN, DIS


Host: Dylan Lewis

Guest: Marc Benioff

Producer: Mary Long

Engineer: Rick Engdahl, Heather Horton

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