Author: Marshall Poe

Anil Seth's quest to understand the biological basis of conscious experience is one of the most exciting contributions to twenty-first-century science.

An unprecedented tour of consciousness thanks to new experimental evidence, much of which comes from Anil Seth's own lab. His radical argument is that we do not perceive the world as it objectively is, but rather that we are prediction machines, constantly inventing our world and correcting our mistakes by the microsecond, and that we can now observe the biological mechanisms in the brain that accomplish this process of consciousness.

Seth's work has yielded new ways to communicate with patients previously deemed unconscious, as well as promising methods of coping with brain damage and disease. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (Dutton, 2020) sheds light on the future of AI and virtual/augmented reality, adds empirical evidence to cutting-edge ideas of how the brain works, and ushers in a new age in the study of the mystery of human consciousness. Being You is a life-changing existential insight into being you.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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From the moment that Tsars as well as hierarchs realized that having their subjects go to confession could make them better citizens as well as better Christians, the sacrament of penance in the Russian empire became a political tool, a devotional exercise, a means of education, and a literary genre. It defined who was Orthodox, and who was 'other.' First encouraging Russian subjects to participate in confession to improve them and to integrate them into a reforming Church and State, authorities then turned to confession to integrate converts of other nationalities. But the sacrament was not only something that state and religious authorities sought to impose on an unwilling populace. Confession could provide an opportunity for carefully crafted complaint. What state and church authorities initially imagined as a way of controlling an unruly population could be used by the same population as a way of telling their own story, or simply getting time off to attend to their inner lives.

Nadieszda Kizenko's book Good for the Souls: A History of Confession in the Russian Empire (Oxford UP, 2021) brings Russia into the rich scholarly and popular literature on confession, penance, discipline, and gender in the modern world, and in doing so opens a key window onto church, state, and society. It draws on state laws, Synodal decrees, archives, manuscript repositories, clerical guides, sermons, saints' lives, works of literature, and visual depictions of the sacrament in those books and on church iconostases. Russia, Ukraine, and Orthodox Christianity emerge both as part of the European, transatlantic religious continuum-and, in crucial ways, distinct from it.

Paul Werth is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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Thomas O. Haakenson's book Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada (Bloomsbury, 2021) focuses on the radical avant-garde interventions of Salomo Friedländer (aka Mynona), Til Brugman, and Hannah Höch as they challenged the questionable practices and evidentiary claims of late-19th- and early-20th-century science. Demonstrating the often excessive measures that pathologists, anthropologists, sexologists, and medical professionals went to present their research in a seemingly unambiguous way, this volume shows how Friedländer/Mynona, Brugman, Höch, and other Berlin-based artists used the artistic grotesque to criticize, satirize, and subvert a variety of forms of supposed scientific objectivity.

Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora.

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Home to over 730,000 people, with close to four million people living in the metropolitan area, Seattle has the third-highest homeless population in the United States. In 2018, an estimated 8,600 homeless people lived in the city, a figure that does not include the significant number of "hidden" homeless people doubled up with friends or living in and out of cheap hotels. In Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Josephine Ensign digs through layers of Seattle history—past its leaders and prominent citizens, respectable or not—to reveal the stories of overlooked and long-silenced people who live on the margins of society.

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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From the Taliban to Hezbollah, armed nonstate actors and civil warfare have dominated the US national security debate for much of the last 20 years. Yet, most analysis shares a critical underlying assumption: that non-state actors fight very differently than states do.

In Nonstate Warfare: The Military Methods of Guerillas, Warlords and Militias (Princeton UP, 2021), Dr. Stephen Biddle argues that those ideas are not just misleading but dangerous. Through a careful review of five nonstate actors, Dr. Biddle shows that state and nonstate military methods vary more by degree than by kind. Still, degrees do matter.

To predict how “conventionally” or “unconventionally” a nonstate actor will fight, Dr. Biddle develops a theory reliant on two key variables: the stakes leaders perceive in a conflict and the strength of a nonstate actor’s institutions. The greater either variable, the more that actor will fight like we expect states to: defending and seizing ground, concentrating forces, employing heavy weapons, and implementing a stratified theater of war.

On the episode, we talk about all that and more. I ask Dr. Biddle about the flaws in status quo theories of nonstate military methods, how the lethality of the modern battlefield creates similar tactical incentives for state and nonstate militaries, and what the implications of his theory are for international politics writ large and US defense planning in particular.

Note: At the very end, I ask Dr. Biddle, who spent time on Defense Department analytical staffs focused on Afghanistan, for his opinion on the rapid advance of the Taliban. Please note that he is a private citizen and his statements do not represent the official view of the government. The podcast was also recorded on 7/13, two days before the fall of Kabul.

Dr. Biddle is a Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, a member of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition to his academic work, Dr. Biddle has served on the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board, on General David Petraeus’s Joint Strategic Assessment Team in Baghdad in 2007, as a Senior Advisor to the Central Command Assessment Team in Washington in 2008-9, and as a member of General Stanley McChrystal’s Initial Strategic Assessment Team in Kabul in 2009, among other government advisory panels and analytic teams.

John Sakellariadis is a 2021-2022 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.

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Do you trust corporations? Do you trust politicians? Do you trust the science? Does anyone trust anyone anymore?

In Why Trust Matters: An Economist's Guide to the Ties That Bind Us (Columbia UP, 2021), Professor Ben Ho reveals the surprising importance of trust to how we understand our day-to-day economic lives. Starting with the earliest societies and proceeding through the evolution of the modern economy, he explores its role across an astonishing range of institutions and practices, surveying and synthesizing research across economics, political science, psychology, and other disciplines, and presents his own cutting-edge behavioral economics research on the role of apologies in restoring trust. He argues that we trust far more than we may realize, and that mostly this is a good thing.

Check out the New Yorker's review of the book.

Ben Ho is an associate professor at Vassar College. Ho applies economic tools like game theory and experimental design to topics like apologies, trust, identity, inequality and climate change. Before Vassar, he taught MBA students at Cornell, served as lead energy economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and worked/consulted for Morgan Stanley and several tech startups. Professor Ho also teaches at Columbia University where he is a faculty affiliate for the Center for Global Energy Policy. His work has been featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Ho holds seven degrees from Stanford and MIT in economics, education, political science, math, computer science and electrical engineering.

Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

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On this episode of the Economic and Business History channel, I spoke with Dr. Victoria Basualdo and Dr. Marcelo Bucheli about their new edited book. Big Business and Dictatorships in Latin America: A Transnational History of Profits and Repression (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) is an edited volume that studies the relationship between big business and the Latin American dictatorial regimes during the Cold War. The first section provides a general background about the contemporary history of business corporations and dictatorships in the twentieth century at the international level. The second section comprises chapters that analyze five national cases (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Peru), as well as a comparative analysis of the banking sector in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay). The third section presents six case studies of large companies in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Central America. This book is crucial reading because it provides the first comprehensive analysis of a key yet understudied topic in Cold War history in Latin America.

Victoria Basualdo is Researcher at the Argentine National Scientific Council (CONICET) and at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), and Professor in the Political Economy Master's Degree Program at FLACSO, Argentina. She specializes in contemporary economic and labor history, with special focus on structural changes and the transformations of trade-union organizations in Argentina and Latin America.

Hartmut Berghoff is Director of the Institute of Economic and Social History at the University of Göttingen, Germany. He was the Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington DC (2008-2015) and held various visiting positions at the Center of Advanced Study, Harvard Business School, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and the Henley Business School. He has worked on the history of consumption, business history, immigration history and the history of modern Germany.

Marcelo Bucheli is Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. His research focuses on the political economy of multinational corporations in Latin America, theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the relationship between firms and states in a historical perspective, and business groups.

Hosted by Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez, consultant, historian, and digital editor. New Books Network en español editor. Edita CEO.

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With technological advances and information sharing so prevalent, health care should be more transparent and easier to access than ever before. So why does it seem like everything about it―from pricing, drug development, and the emergence of new diseases to the intricacies of biologic and precision medicine therapies―is becoming more complex, not less?

Rohit Khanna's Misunderstanding Health: Making Sense of America's Broken Health Care System (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021) examines some of today's most revealing health care trends while imploring us to look at these issues with alacrity, humor, and vigilance. Over the course of eighteen short, engaging chapters, Khanna explains

• how unexamined beliefs can endanger patients, drive cost, and increase bureaucracy

• the "Dr. Google" effect on the ways that we seek (or eschew) care

• why our health care costs more than in any other country

• the unintended consequences of using rating sites like Yelp

• what we can learn about health care from hurricanes

• how social media influencers impact health care

• how artificial intelligence can improve health care

• why health screening programs are so complicated

• what the industry is doing to combat health care fraud

• what the big deal about legalizing medical cannabis is

• how to think about behavioral "nudges" designed to improve health

• why understanding how data are collected is critical to understanding what they can tell us

• and much more

Each provocative and easy-to-read chapter covers a familiar aspect of health care in a clear and succinct way. Offering inquisitive readers a warts-and-all view of American health care, Misunderstanding Health is the book that you'll want to read if you know enough to be frustrated by the system but want a deeper dive into its challenges and opportunities.

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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