Professor Brian Blankenship comes back to the New Books Network to talk about what his book, The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Alliance Politics(Cornell University Press, 2023), might be able to tell us about the quickly changing nature of US military alliances across the globe. We discuss the implications of Europe's burgeoning rearmament, the prospect of a collective defense pact in the Indo-Pacific, and how changing technologies and threats might affect burden-sharing in future alliances.
Brian D. Blankenship is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami.
New novels by Sara Hamdan and Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas follow women in the entertainment industry who must balance ambition with the pressures of family, friendship and love. First, in What Will People Think?, a Palestinian-American woman named Mia works as a fact checker by day and performs standup comedy by night. She hides her comedy career in order to protect her family until she discovers her grandmother has a secret too. In today's episode, Hamdan joins NPR's Ailsa Chang for a conversation about the politicization of the Palestinian identity and using comedy to explore cultural stereotypes. Then, in Climbing in Heels, three women working as secretaries at a Hollywood agency face sexism as they aspire to careers beyond their office jobs. In today's episode, Goldsmith-Thomas talks with NPR's Leila Fadel about moving from secretary to agent in her own career.
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Jeffrey Seller says he found his home on stage from an early age. He grew up in the suburbs of Detroit as an adopted, gay, Jewish kid in a low-income family – but he was also a theater kid. In his new memoir Theater Kid, Seller reflects on how he moved on from the challenges of his childhood to find incredible success on Broadway. In today's episode, he speaks with NPR's Scott Simon about what first drew him to projects like In the Heights and Hamilton, the surprising jobs held by Seller's father, and what theater can unlock for its audiences.
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Often I will find in a chronology or a biography, you know, official materials, evidence that because I have other evidence, it’s meaningful in a way that maybe the people who edited those collections might not have expected.
That’s the idea of mosaic theory – you bring together many pieces of evidence, even small ones, to bring the full meaning out.
— Joseph Torigian, NBN interview May 2025
In his new book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (Stanford University Press, 2025), Joseph Torigian leads readers deep into the complex work of historical reconstruction – a process he metaphorically describes as mosaic theory. Studying elite politics in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Torigian explains, isn’t about uncovering one decisive document; it’s about piecing together partial, often contradictory fragments like the Li Rui diaries, edited speeches, and scattered archival traces into a fuller, richer picture.
Torigian’s approach builds on foundational insights from political scientists like Paul Pierson and China historians Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, whose empirical rigor has long shaped the field of CCP elite politics. Following this tradition, Torigian resists simple or deterministic narratives, showing that even dramatic moments like the Tiananmen protests must be understood as products of internal fractures, improvisation, and deep uncertainty – not as inevitable climaxes.
In this interview, Torigian discusses how his course “The Revisionists” invites students to wrestle with the ethical tension between judging and understanding. His own scholarship, he explains, aims to provide the tools, context, and historical reconstruction that allow readers to form their own moral judgments – without handing them a prefabricated verdict.
Ultimately, Torigian’s book and his public reflections invite us to step back from binaries of hero and villain, reformer and hardliner, or loyalist and dissenter, and to see history as a web of improvisation, contradiction, and meaning. He suggests that the historian’s role is not to dictate the final moral judgment, but to parse the evidence by piecing together and coloring a mosaic that illuminates the pressures and choices that shaped the past – leaving the moral reckoning, and the hard questions, to the rest of us.
It is indisputable that Marx began his intellectual trajectory as a philosopher, but it is often thought that he subsequently turned away from philosophy. In Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Christoph Schuringa proposes a radically different reading of Marx's intellectual project and demonstrates that from his earliest writings his aim was the 'actualization' of philosophy. Marx, he argues, should be understood not as turning away from philosophy, but as seeking to make philosophy a practical force in the world. By analysing a series of texts from across Marx's output, Schuringa shows that Marx progressively overcame what he called 'self-sufficient philosophy', not in order to leave philosophy behind but to bring it into its own. This involves a major reinterpretation of Marx's relationship to his ancestors Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, and shows that philosophy, as it actualizes itself, far from being merely a body of philosophical doctrine, figures as an instrument of the revolution.
Christoph Schuringa is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London. He has published widely on the history of philosophy and on Marx and Marxism, and is editor of the Hegel Bulletin.
The year 1963 was a landmark one for the civil rights movement – and it's the subject of Peniel Joseph's new book Freedom Season. In the book, the University of Texas at Austin professor argues the events of 1963 ushered in what would become a 50-year consensus on racial justice, including the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act and transformations to public institutions. In today's episode, Joseph joins Here & Now's Scott Tong for a conversation about the varied voices of the civil rights era – who didn't always agree – including James Baldwin, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy.
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There's a statue of Dawn Staley in Columbia, South Carolina, where she's coached the University of South Carolina women's basketball team to three national championships. But she's from Philadelphia, where she grew up in the projects surrounded by both a nurturing environment and tough love. In her new memoir Uncommon Favor, Staley writes about the life lessons she's learned from the sport that's defined her career, her upbringing in North Philly, and her mother. In today's episode, she speaks with NPR's Juana Summers about fighting for equal pay and being a sore loser.
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Kalina Silverman is a storyteller who's transforming how we connect with each other. Her "Big Talk" project turns simple conversations into profound exchanges and has reached millions. Recently, Silverman turned her attention to documenting the stories of California wildfire survivors, helping raise millions in relief. She shares her Brief But Spectacular take on big talk. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
A lively story of death, What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Dr. Robert Garland explores the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Early Christian, and Islamic. By drawing on the latest scholarship on ancient archaeology, art, literature, and funerary inscriptions, Dr. Garland invites readers to put themselves in the sandals of ancient peoples and to imagine their mental state moment by moment as they sought—in ways that turn out to be remarkably similar to ours—to assist the dead on their journey to the next world and to understand life’s greatest mystery. What to Expect When You’re Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What’s the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement—and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife—and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving? Filled with intriguing stories and frequent humor, What to Expect When You’re Dead will be a morbidly delicious treat for every reader alive.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
In Adam Roberts' debut novel, a food writer named Isabella loses her job after fumbling a chocolate souffle demonstration on Instagram Live. But soon after, she is offered the opportunity to ghostwrite a cookbook for Molly Babcock, a famous actress whose career is in need of a reboot. Food Person follows this chaotic collaboration between Isabella, who lives and breathes food, and Molly, who doesn't care much for food at all. In today's episode, Roberts joins NPR's Scott Simon for a conversation about pushing past celebrity stereotypes, the author's favorite food writers, and a recipe involving cavatappi.
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