Author: Marshall Poe

Between May 21 and June 16, 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison went on a trip together through Upstate New York and parts of New England on horseback. This "northern journey" came at a moment of tension for the new nation, one in whose founding these Virginians and political allies had played key roles. The Constitution was ratified and President Washington was in his first term of office. Whether the country could overcome regional and political differences and remain unified, however, was still very much in question. Hence why some observers at the time wondered whether this excursion into Federalist New England by the two most prominent southern Democratic-Republicans, both future presidents, had an ulterior motive.

Madison, maintained that the journey was for "health, recreation, and curiosity." He and Jefferson needed a break from their public responsibilities, so off they set. Along the way, they took notes on the ravages of the Hessian Fly, an insect that had been devastating wheat crops. While in Vermont, they focused on the sugar maple tree, which many hoped might offer a domestic alternative to slave-grown sugar cane imports. An encounter with a free Black farmer at Fort George resulted in a journal entry that illuminates their attitudes toward slavery and race. A meeting with members of the Unkechaug tribe on Long Island led to a vocabulary project that preoccupied Jefferson for decades, and which remains relevant today.

The northern journey was also about friendship. Madison later recalled that the trip made Jefferson and him "immediate companions," solidifying a bond with almost no peer in the annals of American history, one that thrived for fifty years. Jefferson declared at the end of his life, that his friendship with Madison had been "a source of constant happiness" to him. A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship (Oxford University Press, 2025) reveals the moment when it took hold.

Louis P. Masur is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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In Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and the Black Corporeal Undercommons (Duke University Press, 2025), anthropologist and dancer Maya J. Berry examines rumba as a way of knowing the embodied and spiritual dimensions of Black political imagination in post-Fidel Cuba. Historically a Black working-class popular dance, rumba, Berry contends, is a method of Black Cuban struggle that provides the community, accountability, sustenance, and dignity that neither the state nor the expanding private market can. Berry’s feminist theorization builds on the notion of the undercommons to show how rumba creates a space in which its practitioners enact deeply felt and dedicatedly defended choreographies of reciprocity, refusal, sovereignty, devotion, and pleasure, both on stage and in their daily lives. Berry demonstrates that this Black corporeal undercommons emphasizes mutual aid and refuses neoliberal development logics, favoring instead a collective self-determination rooted in African diasporic spiritual practices through which material compensation and gendered power dynamics are negotiated. By centering rumba to analyze how poor Black Cubans navigate gendered and racialized life, Berry helps readers better understand the constraints and yearnings that move diasporic Black struggles to seek refuge beyond the bounds of the nation-state.

Maya J. Berry is Assistant Professor of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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In The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay (Grand Central Publishing, 2025) Christopher Clarey illuminates the skill and determination it took to accomplish Rafael Nadal’s most mind-blowing achievement: 14 French Open titles. Nadal has won big on tennis's many surfaces en route to becoming one of the greatest players of all time: securing two Wimbledon titles on grass and four U.S. Open titles on cushioned acrylic hardcourts. But clay, the slowest and grittiest of the game’s playgrounds, is where it all comes together best for his tactical skills, whipping topspin forehand and gladiatorial mindset. Clay is to Rafael Nadal what water is to Michael Phelps, which helps explain one of the most impressive individual sports achievements of the 21st century.

Clarey draws on interviews over many years with Nadal and his team and with rivals like Roger Federer. Not just a book about tennis, The Warrior draws much wider lessons from Nadal’s approach to competition. Check out his site Tennis and Beyond here.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, will be out in the fall of 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Today I’m thrilled to launch a brand new series for the Princeton UP Ideas Podcast. 20 years ago, Princeton University Press published a short volume with an excellent title: On Bullshit (Princeton UP, 2025). Written by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit was adapted from an essay that explored the meaning, uses, and consequences of bullshit.

At just 80 pages, On Bullshit became a favorite of readers, selling over 1 million copies and spending 27 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s not often that a work of philosophy breaks through to the mainstream, but readers of On Bullshit quickly discover why. Harry’s meditation on the meaning of bullshit can be read in one sitting, but the ideas have staying power. After you read Harry’s book, you start to see bullshit everywhere and recognize it’s uniquely pernicious effects on whatever’s left of the public square. Harry wrote his book long before modern social media and AI-generated slop. He was unbelievably prescient, making On Bullshit required reading for today. Harry sadly passed in 2023 at 94 years old, but his ideas live on. In this series, we’ll speak with scholars whose lives and work have been influenced by Harry and his seminal book.

To kick things off, I’ll be speaking with Pamela Hieronymi, one of Harry’s former students. Pamela is Professor of Philosophy at UCLA and a leading scholar in the field of moral philosophy. Like Harry, her work has resonated outside the academy. She served as an advisor on the sitcom, The Good Place, which brought philosophical concepts like the trolley problem to a mainstream audience. For the first episode in the series, Pamela will introduce readers to both the book and the man who wrote it. In subsequent episodes, I’ll speak with other scholars who explore Harry’s notion of bullshit in politics, science, and more. If you haven’t read On Bullshit, you should preorder the anniversary edition, which is set to release on August 5th. Now, let’s have ourselves a bull session.

Pamela Hieronymi is Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Watch her lecture on the blame game.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Research shows that repression can lead to both radicalization and deradicalization. When does it drive groups to pick up arms, and under what conditions does it foster disengagement from violence? To answer these questions, it is important to trace tactical changes over time, and to parse the factors that push groups toward or away from violence. Through an examination of four case studies—the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Gama'a al-Islamiya'a in Egypt, and Darul Islam and Jemaah Islamiyaa in Indonesia—Ioana Emy Matesan establishes a framework for understanding what leads groups to escalate towards violence, or to renounce it. Matesan breaks down how escalation occurs into ideological, organizational, and behavorial escalation, giving us a nuanced and systematic approach to examining the complex nature of Islamist groups and providing a structure for analyzing other social groups that engage in violent tactics.

The Violence Pendulum: Tactical Change in Islamist Groups in Egypt and Indonesia (Oxford UP, 2020).

Ioana Emy Matesan is Assistant Professor of Government and Tutor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University.

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The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.

Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

In Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays and Writings (Harper, 2025), Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.

Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.

Find author Honorée Fannone Jeffers at her website, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack.

Host Sullivan Summer can be found at her website, Instagram, and Substack.

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Chris Horton is a freelance journalist who has been based in Taiwan since 2015, before many Western publications had any dedicated presence on the island. Over the last decade, he has contributed to the New York Times, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications regarding Taiwan-related topics.

In this episode of the New Books Network, we chat with Chris about his debut book, Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival (Pan Macmillan, 2025). Ghost Nation weaves together figures and events from across Taiwan’s present and history to provide an approachable narrative about how Taiwan came to be the vibrant island nation it is today, and the challenges that it faces amidst an increasingly assertive China.

Tune in as we chat with Chris about everything from stinky tofu, Chris’ go-to rechao stir-fry restaurant in Taipei (Eight Immortals Grill), how one of Taiwan’s former Presidents tried to “Make Taiwan China Again” (and sparked a protest movement in the process), and why democratic countries ought to stand in solidarity with the “Ghost Nation” of Taiwan.

Ghost Nation will be released on July 17, 2025, and is available for pre-order today. 

Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater.

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In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus declared the earth revolved around the Sun, overturning centuries of scholastic presumption. A new age was coming into view – one guided by observation, technology and logic.

But omens and elixirs did not disappear from the sixteenth-century laboratory. Charms and potions could still be found nestled between glistening brass instruments and leather-bound tomes. The line between the natural and supernatural remained porous, yet to be defined.

From the icy Danish observatory of Tycho Brahe, to the smoky, sulphur-stained workshop of John Dee, in Inside the Stargazer’s Palace: The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Northern Europe (OneWorld, 2024) Dr. Violet Moller tours the intellectual heart of early European science. Exploring its rich, multidisciplinary culture, Inside the Stargazer’s Palace reveals a dazzling forgotten world, where all knowledge, no matter how arcane, could be pursued in good faith.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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We all know about art forgeries, but why write fake classical music? In Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon (Oxford University Press, 2025), Dr. Frederick Reece investigates the methods and motives of mysterious musicians who sign famous historical names like Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert to their own original works. Analyzing a series of genuinely fake sonatas, concertos, and symphonies in detail, Dr. Reece's study exposes the shadowy roles that forgeries have played in shaping perceptions of authenticity, creativity, and the self within classical music culture from the 1790s to the 1990s.
Holding a magnifying glass to a wide array of phony works, Forgery in Musical Composition explains how skillful fakers have succeeded in the past while also proposing active steps that scholars and musicians can take to better identify deceptive compositions in the future. Pursuing his topic from case to case, Dr. Reece observes that fake historical masterpieces have often seduced listeners not simply by imitating old works, but rather by mirroring modern cultural beliefs about innovation, identity, and meaning in music. Here forged compositions have important truths to tell us about knowing and valuing works of art precisely because they are not what they appear.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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