From college stardom at Iowa to shattering attendance records and becoming a top financial driver for the WNBA, Caitlin Clark’s rise has also come with its fair share of controversy. Clark is in many ways just getting started and a new book takes a deeper look at how she got there. Amna Nawaz spoke with Christine Brennan about “On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports." PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Both envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. However, as Myles Lennon argues in Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism(Duke University Press, 2025), solar power is no less likely to exploit marginalized communities than dirtier forms of energy. Drawing from ethnographic research on clean energy corporations and community solar campaigns in New York City, Lennon argues that both groups overlook solar’s extractive underside because they primarily experience energy from the sun in the virtual world of the cloud. He shows how the material properties of solar technology—its shiny surfaces, decentralized spatiality, and modularity—work closely with images, digital platforms, and quantitative graphics to shape utopic visions in which renewable energy can eradicate the constitutive tensions of racial capitalism. As a corrective to this virtual world, Lennon calls for an equitable energy transition that centers the senses and sensibilities neglected by screenwork: one’s haptic care for their local environment; the full-bodied feel of infrastructural labor; and the sublime affect of the sun.
Myles Lennon is Dean's Assistant Professor of Environment and Society and Anthropology at Brown University.
Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP).
Journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf are out with a new book unpacking the twists and turns of the 2024 presidential election. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with insiders, the book offers a revealing look at the circumstances that led to Trump’s return. Amna Nawaz spoke with the writers about “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America.” PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
An artist who was once uprooted from her homeland has spent decades transforming works of nature into works of art. Michelle San Miguel of Rhode Island PBS Weekly has the story from the woods of New England for our arts and culture series, CANVAS. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
Today I’m thrilled to announce a new partnership with Genocide Studies International. GSI is one of the preeminent journals in the field of Genocide Studies. Published by the University of Toronto Press and housed in the Zoryan Institute, GSI is dedicated to “to raising knowledge and awareness among scholars, policy makers, and civil society actors by providing a forum for the critical analysis of genocide, human rights, crimes against humanity, and related mass atrocities.”
With this new partnership, I’ll be bringing you interviews with the editors and authors of cutting-edge articles and special editions on the journal. This isn’t new—we’ve done this with several other journals before. But by formalizing our partnership, we hope you’ll have more access to the best recent research and analysis on the causes, course and consequences of mass atrocity violence. It’s a partnership that enriches both organizations.
In a few weeks, you’ll hear from Alex Alvarez, the editor of a new special issue on genocide education. But first I got a chance to talk with Henry Thierault, one of the editors of the journal, and Megan Reid, Deputy Executive Director of the Zoryan Institute. We discuss the editorial vision of the journal, the Zoryan Institute’s role in genocide education and prevention, and the reasons we’re so excited about the partnership. I hope you enjoy our discussion.
Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.
The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 (UNC Press, 2024) reveals that Americans often assume that slave societies had little use for prisons and police because slaveholders only ever inflicted violence directly or through overseers. Mustering tens of thousands of previously overlooked arrest and prison records, John K. Bardes demonstrates the opposite: in parts of the South, enslaved and free people were jailed at astronomical rates. Slaveholders were deeply reliant on coercive state action. Authorities built massive slave prisons and devised specialized slave penal systems to maintain control and maximize profit. Indeed, in New Orleans—for most of the past half-century, the city with the highest incarceration rate in the United States—enslaved people were jailed at higher rates during the antebellum era than are Black residents today. Moreover, some slave prisons remained in use well after Emancipation: in these forgotten institutions lie the hidden origins of state violence under Jim Crow.
With powerful and evocative prose, Bardes boldly reinterprets relations between slavery and prison development in American history. Racialized policing and mass incarceration are among the gravest moral crises of our age, but they are not new: slavery, the prison, and race are deeply interwoven into the history of American governance.
As the crisis of democratic capitalism sweeps the globe, The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't (Oxford University Press, 2025) makes the controversial argument that what democracies require most are stronger political parties that serve as intermediaries between citizens and governments.
Once a centralizing force of the democratic process, political parties have eroded over the past fifty years. Parties now rank among the most unpopular institutions in society--less trusted than business, the police, and the media. Identification with parties has plummeted, and even those who are loyal to a party report feeling that parties care more about special interests than about regular citizens. What does a "good" political party look like? Why do we urgently need them? And how do we get them?
The Great Retreat explores the development of political parties as democracy expanded across the West in the nineteenth century. It focuses in particular on mass parties, and the ways they served as intermediaries that fostered ties between citizens and governments. While parties have become professionalized and nationalized, they have lost the robust organizational density that made them effective representatives. After the Cold War, a neoliberal economic consensus, changes to campaign finance, and shifting party priorities weakened the party systems of Western democracies. As Didi Kuo argues, this erosion of political parties has contributed to the recent crisis of democratic capitalism, as weak parties have ceded governance to the private sector.
For democracy to adapt to a new era of global capitalism, Kuo makes the case that we need strong intermediaries like mass parties--socially embedded institutions with deep connections to communities and citizens. Parties are essential to long-term democratic stability and economic growth, while the breakdown of party systems, on the other hand, has historically led to democratic collapse. As trust in political parties has plummeted, The Great Retreat provides a powerful defense of political parties--for without parties, democratic representation is impossible.
Didi Kuo is Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
Virgil Abloh was a boundary-breaking designer who made streetwear luxurious and luxury feel accessible. Abloh was the first Black artistic director at Louis Vuitton and the visionary behind Off-White. Beyond the runways, he built bridges between worlds that rarely touched. Geoff Bennett sat down with Robin Givhan, who traces the deeper meaning behind Abloh’s work in the new book, "Make It Ours." PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
For centuries, scribes across East Asia used Chinese characters to write things down–even in languages based on very different foundations than Chinese. In southern China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, people used Chinese to read and write–and never thought it was odd. It was, after all, how things were done.
Even today, Cantonese speakers use Chinese characters to reflect their dialect with no issues, while kanji remains a key part of Japanese writing. Even in South Korea, the Chosun Ilbo newspaper uses Chinese characters for its title, even as most of Korea has turned to hangul.
Zev Handel is professor of Chinese linguistics in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington. He is author of Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script and associate coeditor of Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics.
Sean “Diddy" Combs was acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering charges, but found guilty of prostitution offenses. The mixed verdict brings an end to one of the most closely watched trials in the country. Geoff Bennett discussed more with Moira Penza, a former assistant U.S. attorney who led the prosecution that resulted in the sex trafficking conviction of NXIVM leader Keith Raniere. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
