In The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age (Cornell University Press, 2020), Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press tackle the central puzzle of the nuclear age: the persistence of intense geopolitical competition in the shadow of nuclear weapons. The book explains why the race to establish a nuclear deterrent can be destabilizing; how the condition of "mutual assured destruction" can unravel; and why some states threaten to wield the world’s most destructive weapon against conventional threats.
On the episode, I talked with Dr. Lieber and Dr. Press about the theoretical and policy implications of their work, the role of fear in international relations, and Thomas Schelling and his theory of a nuclear “taboo.” Dedicated listeners will also be treated to an important question. Which is better: "Dr. Strangelove" or "Failsafe?"
John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 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.
Hate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities across America and around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements.
Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2020) shows how tomorrow's far-right nationalists are being recruited in surprising places, from college campuses and mixed martial arts gyms to clothing stores, online gaming chat rooms, and YouTube cooking channels.
Instead of focusing on the how and why of far-right radicalization, Cynthia Miller-Idriss seeks answers in the physical and virtual spaces where hate is cultivated. Where does the far right do its recruiting? When do young people encounter extremist messaging in their everyday lives?
Miller-Idriss shows how far-right groups are swelling their ranks and developing their cultural, intellectual, and financial capacities in a variety of mainstream settings. She demonstrates how young people on the margins of our communities are targeted in these settings, and how the path to radicalization is a nuanced process of moving in and out of far-right scenes throughout adolescence and adulthood.
Hate in the Homeland is essential for understanding the tactics and underlying ideas of modern far-right extremism. This eye-opening book takes readers into the mainstream places and spaces where today's far right is engaging and ensnaring young people, and reveals innovative strategies we can use to combat extremist radicalization.
Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com.
Francis Buckley, who is Foundation Professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, has written a fast-moving and provocative new book about the opportunities and possibilities of a second American secession. The publication of this book couldn't be more timely, as the conclusion of an election cycle highlights both the diversity and the tribalisation of American voters. What holds the nation together? To what extent is the Constitution the source of the nation's historic and current difficulties? If small is beautiful, and smaller nations tend to be happier, why shouldn't a state like California secede and put its savings from national defence into a scheme for national health? Tune in to hear how Professor Buckley explores these and other ideas in his new book, American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Break-Up (Encounter Books, 2020)
Abt teaches, studies, and writes about the use of evidence-informed approaches to reduce urban violence. Abt is a Senior Fellow with the Council on Criminal Justice in Washington, D.C. Prior to the Council, he served as a Senior Fellow at the Hard Kennedy and Law Schools. Before that, he held leadership positions in the New York Governor’s Office and the U.S. Department of Justice. Abt’s work has been featured in major media outlets, including the Atlantic, the Economist, Foreign Affairs, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and National Public Radio. This episode covers an array of topics, from the estimated $10 million cost to society per homicide; to strategies involving people, places, and things (related to behavior-based strategies) that can most effectively combat urban violence.
The book by Victor Pickard, Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication makes it clear, however, that mainstream American news media are not really free at all, but have been pressed into service over more than a century to generate profits for a few rich owners bent on selling eyeballs and ears to advertisers.
Dr. Pickard points out that this system of "toxic commercialism” is in crisis as advertisers flee to cheaper social media outfits like Facebook. In this NBN interview, he says the old TV news adage, "If it bleeds it leads," has been supplemented by a new one, "If it's outrageous, it's contagious" as internet platforms profit from misinformation and even outright lies that engage (and enrage) their readers and keep them coming back for more.
Democracy Without Journalism? argues that the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election is symptomatic of three core failures that are baked into the structure of American news media: the excessive commercialism that made giving billions of dollars of free publicity to Trump "damn good for CBS"; the tidal waves of misinformation circulating so profitably on social media and, the sharp decline in the number of working journalists. The book points out, for example, that in the last 20 years, print newsrooms have shed more than half of their workers and that local news “deserts” have spread into more and more American communities.
Victor Pickard argues that journalism is as essential to democracy as other social goods such as education, libraries and national healthcare. He writes therefore, that journalism should receive substantial public funding just as it does in other western democracies.
Dr. Pickard contends that the current crisis in American journalism is an opportunity that "allows us to reimagine what journalism could be."
Bruce Wark is a freelance journalist and retired journalism professor based in the Sackville, New Brunswick.
Laura Landon is a librarian at Mount Allison University.
For decades if not centuries, science has backed up society’s simple dictum that men and women are hardwired differently, that the world is divided by two different kinds of brains—male and female. However, new research in neuroimaging suggests that this is little more than “neurotrash.”
In Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (Vintage, 2020), acclaimed professor of neuroimaging, Gina Rippon, finally challenges this damaging myth by showing how the science community has engendered bias and stereotype by rewarding studies that show difference rather than sameness. Drawing on cutting edge research in neuroscience and psychology, Rippon presents the latest evidence which finally proves that brains are like mosaics comprised of both male and female components, and that they remain plastic, adapting throughout the course of a person’s life. Discernable gender identities, she asserts, are shaped by society where scientific misconceptions continue to be wielded and perpetuated to the detriment of our children, our own lives, and our culture.
Gina Rippon is a British neuroscientist and feminist. She is a an honorary professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University in Birmingham, England. In 2015 she was made honorary fellow of the British Science Association. Rippon has also sat on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychophysiology, and is a member of the European Union Gender Equality Network, belongs to WISE and ScienceGrrl, and the Inspiring the Future intiative.
Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature.
When Judith G. Coffin discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir's international readers, it inspired Coffin to explore the intimate bond between the famed author and her reading public. This correspondence, at the heart of Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir (Cornell UP, 2020), immerses us in the tumultuous decades from the late 1940s to the 1970s—from the painful aftermath of World War II to the horror and shame of French colonial brutality in Algeria and through the dilemmas and exhilarations of the early gay liberation and feminist movements. The letters also provide a glimpse into the power of reading and the power of readers to seduce their favorite authors. Sex, Love, and Letters lays bare the private lives and political emotions of the letter writers and of Beauvoir herself. Her readers did not simply pen fan letters but, as Coffin shows, engaged in a dialogue that revealed intellectual and literary life to be a joint and collaborative production. "This must happen to you often, doesn't it?" wrote one. "That people write to you and tell you about their lives?"
Judith G. Coffin is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches modern European history, including courses on the French Revolution, World Wars 1 and 2, Postwar Europe as well as courses on gender and sexuality. She has written The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades (Princeton UP, 1996), the modern half of W.W. Norton’s Western Civilizations (New York, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2011) and a series of articles from her book. “Historicizing The Second Sex,” French Politics, Culture & Society 25, 3 (Winter 2007); “Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Mid-Century Sex,” French Politics, Culture, and Society 28, 2 (summer, 2010); “Opinion and Desire: Polling Women in Postwar France” in Kerstin Bruckweh, ed. The Voice of the Citizen Consumer (Oxford University Press, 2011); and "Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir," American Historical Review October, 2010. She is also writing about the histories of psychoanalysis and radio (“The Adventure of the Interior: Menie Grégoire’s Radio Broadcasts.”), and has taught graduate classes in the history of radio, publicity, and privacy.
She lived three years in Paris, got her PhD at Yale, taught at Harvard and UC Riverside; she's been a fellow at NYU and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; her husband is Professor and Dean for Research at the UT School of Law; her children are in their twenties, and she is happiest in the winter in Austin and when visiting the Hill Country.
Julia Gossard is Assistant Professor of History at Utah State University and learned quite a bit about gender, psychoanalysis, and feminist studies from Judy as a student at UT-Austin
When I put down Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (U Chicago Press, 2016) I looked up and began to wonder. I wondered about the book on gnomic poetry in Medieval Greek I had read over the weekend, I wondered about the PDF conference volume on my desktop between other PDFs downloaded at my university library. Casting an eye to the bookshelves along my wall, I looked at the spines of all those books there, upright and peaceful in their rows, and I wondered just who the people behind the books were: who printed the bindings and pages, who stocked backlisted copies in the warehouse, who encouraged booksellers to buy, who adopted the book project early stages, who chauffeured the manuscript through marketing, which editor oversaw production while which harried professor, between lectures biting into a sandwich, flipped the pages and weighed the arguments and challenged the ideas. Getting It Published opens up the other spaces which are part of every book. There's quite a lot that goes into those books on our Works Cited lists, and we don't know. Or we don't know enough, anyway.
Getting It Published, as the subtitle announces, is the guide to knowing everything a scholar needs to know about where his or her research goes. William Germano, the author, is the guide of the book. A deft hand at elegant and lucid prose style, William Germano has the industry experience, the university experience, and the teaching experience to know what writers of research will need when it's their own manuscript that's becoming the next book on a shelf or the next PDF on a desktop.
Scholarly Communication is the podcast series about how knowledge gets known. Scholarly Communication adheres to the principle that research improves when scholars better understand their role as communicators. Give scholars more opportunities to learn about publishing, and scholars will communicate their research better.
The interviewer, Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write writingprogram@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de
Have you ever felt, “Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother (or father)!” ? Robert Plomin explains why that happens in Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (MIT Press, 2019).
A century of genetic research shows that DNA differences inherited from our parents are the consistent lifelong sources of our psychological individuality―the blueprint that makes us who we are. Robert Plomin’s decades of work demonstrate that genetics explains more about the psychological differences among people than all other factors combined. Nature, not nurture, is what makes us who we are.
Plomin explores the implications of these findings, drawing some provocative conclusions―among them that parenting styles don't really affect children's outcomes once genetics is taken into account. This book offers readers a unique insider's view of the exciting synergies that came from combining genetics and psychology.
Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.
At the end of the 20th century, the liberal international order appeared unassailable after its triumph over the authoritarian challenges of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Twenty years later, however, the assumptions underlying the system appear discredited as international relations devolve into confrontation and conflict. In The New Twenty Years' Crisis: A Critique of International Relations, 1999-2019 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020), Philip Cunliffe considers the factors in this decline and the question of what lies ahead. As Cunliffe details, the explanation lies within the liberal international order itself, particularly in the utopian thinking that ignores key factors in international affairs. Cunliffe identifies similarly flawed concepts within international relations theory, which grounded itself on assumptions that led to idealistic thinking over the growing evidence of contemporary events. These dual crises, Cunliffe concludes, demand a reconsideration based on the realities of the modern international order rather than the discredited ideas that seemed unquestionable two decades ago.
