Category: 3-BookTalkDaily

As Americans increasingly depend upon their phones, computers, and internet resources, their actions are less private than they believe. Data is routinely sold and shared with companies who want to sell something, political actors who want to analyze behavior, and law enforcement who seek to monitor and limit actions.

In The Private is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (NYU Press, 2025), law professor Ray Brescia explores the failure of existing legal systems and institutions to protect people’s online presence and identities. Examining the ways in which the digital space is under threat from both governments and private actors, Brescia reveals how the rise of private surveillance prevents individuals from organizing with others who might help to catalyze change in their lives. Brescia argues that we are not far from a world where surveillance chills not just our speech, but our very identities. Surveillance, he suggests, will ultimately stifle our ability to live full lives, realize democracy, and shape the laws that affect our privacy itself.

Brescia writes that “The search for identity and communion with others who share it has never been easier in all of human history. At the same time, our individual and collective identity is also under threat by a surveillance state like none that has ever existed before. This surveillance can be weaponized, not just for profit but also to promote political ends, and undermine efforts to achieve individual and collective self-determination”

The book identifies the harms to individuals from privacy violations, provides an expansive definition of political privacy, and identifies the ‘integrity of identity’ as a central feature of democracy. The Private is Political lays out the features of Surveillance Capitalism and provides a roadmap for “muscular disclosure”: a comprehensive privacy regime to empower consumers to collectively safeguard privacy rights.

Professor Ray Brescia is the Associate Dean for Research & Intellectual Life and the Hon. Harold R. Tyler Professor in Law & Technology at Albany Law School. He is the author of many scholarly works including Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession (from NYU Press) and The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions (from Cornell UP). He is also the author of public facing work, most recently “Elon Musk’s DOGE is executing a historically dangerous data breach” on MSNBC. He started his legal career at the Legal Aid Society of New York where he was a Skadden Fellow, and then served as the Associate Director at the Urban Justice Center, also in New York City, where he represented grassroots groups like tenant associations and low-wage worker groups. Ray’s blog is “The Future of Change” and you can find him on LinkedIn.

Mentioned:

• Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism
• Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, Amy Howe, SCOTUSBLOG
• Kevin Peter He on “data voodoo dolls”

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Since the commercial introduction of the automobile, US automakers have always sought women as customers and advertised accordingly. How, then, did car culture become so masculine? In Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way into the Driver's Seat (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), Dr. Jessica Brockmole shares the untold history of women's relationship with automobiles: a journey marked by struggle, empowerment, and the relentless pursuit of independence.

This groundbreaking work explores the evolution of women's automotive participation and the cultural shifts that have redefined their roles as drivers, mechanics, and consumers. Dr. Brockmole traces the rise of gendered marketing of automobiles over the course of the twentieth century. Auto companies created ads that conformed to commonly held ideas about women's relationships with automobiles. As the century progressed, marketing to women became less informative and even more gendered: the automotive industry portrayed women as passengers, props, or reluctant drivers, interested primarily in aesthetics. And yet, by the 1970s, female drivers were communicating directly with each other, forming clubs, and teaching each other through women-focused repair manuals.

By examining market research studies, advertising archives, trade journals, women's magazines, newspapers, driving handbooks, and repair manuals, this book shows how women bought their way into the automobile and masculine car culture. Brockmole uncovers the stories of pioneering women who defied conventions, such as trailblazer Alice Ramsey, the first woman to drive across the United States in 1909, and Barb Wyatt, whose contributions to automotive manuals broke new ground. Women have always been users of technology, and this book illustrates how the auto industry evolved—as well as how it chose not to evolve—in response.

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.

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Many people assume that the first introduction of Christianity to the Chinese was part of nineteenth-century Western imperialism. In fact, Syriac-speaking Christians brought the gospel along the Silk Road into China in the seventh century. Glen L. Thompson introduces readers to the fascinating history of this early Eastern church, referred to as Jingjiao, or the “Luminous Teaching.”

Thompson presents the history of the Persian church’s mission to China with rigor and clarity. While Christianity remained a minority and “foreign” religion in the Middle Kingdom, it nonetheless attracted adherents among indigenous Chinese and received imperial approval during the Tang Dynasty. Though it was later suppressed alongside Buddhism, it resurfaced in China and Mongolia in the twelfth century. Thompson also discusses how the modern unearthing of Chinese Christian texts has stirred controversy over the meaning of Jingjiao to recent missionary efforts in China.

In an accessible style, Thompson guides readers through primary sources as well as up-to-date scholarship. As the most recent and balanced survey on the topic available in English, Jingjiao: The Earliest Christian Church in China (Eerdmans, 2024) will be an indispensable resource for students of global Christianity and missiology.

Glen L. Thompson is professor emeritus of New Testament and historical theology at Asia Lutheran Seminary in Hong Kong. He has retired to Milwaukee, where he researches, works with students, and expands his Fourth-Century Christianity website.

New Books in Syriac Studies is presented by Kristian Heal.

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We are all stuck in a money cage. Money isn’t the most important thing, but it is a thing and you can’t get away from it. Birth costs money and death costs money. So even if you hate talking about money, you need to know the basics, the same way you need to know how to cook yourself a simple meal. The problem with most money books is that they are not written by practitioners and avoid hard truths. Paul Podolsky’s The Uncomfortable Truth About Money: How to Live with Uncertainty and Learn to Think for Yourself (Harriman House, 2024) breaks down walls around financial knowledge.

What a weathered investor knows is that stocks are not always good for the long run. They know that being stingy helps accrue wealth. They know the big thing when you buy property has nothing to do with the property. They know the big thing is less what happens to the markets in a day than if the entire system holds together. And they know what to look for if it’s time to pull out. That’s what this book will teach you: a lifetime of money learnings distilled to a thin volume, like a basic cooking recipe you can follow.

Paul Podolsky writes about macro–politics and money. For many years, he was the strategist and equity partner at the largest hedge fund in the world. Previous to that, he worked as a reporter.

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Ada Palmer joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Inventing the Renaissance (U Chicago Press, 2025) and the ways history is written and used. 

From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.

Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save them from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.

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When we think about "red tape" and the cost of regulation it's hard to overstate the impact of professional licensing. According to Professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth, it's bigger than unions and more expensive than sales taxes.

Millions of American workers are required - by law - to obtain a license in order to work. This barrier of entry depends on requirements set by licensing boards staffed mainly by members of the profession they oversee. It limits the number of people who can serve and also confers on licensees a certain degree of prestige and trust. 

In The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong (Harvard UP, 2025), Allensworth goes deep into a complex web of conflicting priorities. 

Whether it's hair stylists or doctors, plumbers or lawyers, licensing board members are asked to simultaneously represent their personal practice, fellow professionals, and the public. They have to literally "wear three hats", which leads to well-intentioned, but deeply flawed and biased, decision making.

Consumers depend on licensing boards to ensure that professionals maintain high quality and reliability standards by creating - and enforcing - licensing standards. 

In reality, their decisions can be maddeningly arbitrary, creating unnecessary barriers to hopeful practitioners while simultaneously failing to protect the public from bad actors who abuse the trust placed in them.

Despite good intent, board members lack the resources and sometimes the will to investigate even serious disciplinary cases. The consequences include, but are not limited to, the failure of medical licensing boards to remove the abusive doctors who fueled the opioid crisis and a system that allows unethical predatory lawyers to continue to practice, often targeting clients who are unable to protect themselves.

While in some areas licensing is deeply flawed, in others it is critical to a well-functioning society. Allensworth argues for abolition where appropriate and reform where it is most needed.

See Professor Allensworth's faculty profile video

Author recommended reading:

• - Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
• - Drug Dealer, MD by Anna Lembke, MD

Hosted by Meghan Cochran

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For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (Basic Books, 2025), political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.

Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, from Soviet and Maoist collectivization to initiatives turning large estates over to family farmers. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career’s worth of original research and on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis—and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate.

Michael Albertus is professor of political science at the University of Chicago. The author of four previous books, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

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A companion piece to Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology, Seven Sins and Seven Virtues (Abrams, 2024) by Dr. Ed Simon completes this moral trilogy and finally considers God’s most enigmatic of creations: None of the conundrums of metaphysics are as baroque as the motivations of the human soul. Unlike the devils condemned to perdition and the angels compelled to paradise, humans are divine creatures that house within them warring impulses.

The Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Heavenly Virtues: A Visual History (Cernunnos, 2024) examines the literary, philosophical, theological, and most of all artistic expressions of the seven deadly sins and their respective seven cardinal virtues, drawing upon millennia of history to gather a compendium of humanity at its best and its worst. As a volume, the book explores the Manichean nature of the human animal in all of its grandeur and canker, motivated by the faith that tales of damnation and salvation are the only stories that are ultimately worth telling.

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.

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Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, atrocity was not always seen as violating a moral norm or inviting indignation. Could the concept of atrocity even exist before people could accuse their own country of mass violence committed against the inhabitants of another country? 

In Atrocity: A Literary History (Stanford UP, 2025), Bruce Robbins details how, when and where the conceptual space opened to make the recognition of atrocity possible. Robbins reads Bartolomé de las Casas's account of his fellow Spaniards' atrocities, Grimmelshausen's 1668 novel Simplicissimus, Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and many other writers to examine how writers not only develop but question what representations of atrocity achieve. Critically examining the emergence of a cosmopolitan ethic, and questioning the practical wisdom offered by the indignation or its refusal in the face of atrocity, Robbins argues for the invention of atrocity as a moral achievement, however tainted its development may have been.

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Immigration is now a polarizing issue across most advanced democracies. But too much that is written about immigration fails to appreciate the complex responses to the phenomenon. Too many observers assume imaginary consensus, avoid basic questions, or disregard the larger context for human migration.

In Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2025), Hiroshi Motomura offers a complex and fair-minded account of immigration, its root causes, and the varying responses to it. Taking stock of the issue's complexity, while giving credence to the opinions of immigration critics, he tackles a series of important questions that, when answered, will move us closer to a more realistic and sustainable immigration policy. Motomura begins by affirming a basic concept—national borders—and asks when they might be ethical borders, fostering fairness but also responding realistically to migration patterns and to the political forces that migration generates. In a nation with ethical borders, who should be let in or kept out? How should people forced to migrate be treated? Should newcomers be admitted temporarily or permanently? How should those with lawful immigration status be treated? What is the best role for enforcement in immigration policy? To what extent does the arrival of newcomers hurt long-time residents? What are the "root causes" of immigration and how can we address them?

Realistic about the desire of most citizens for national borders, this book is an indispensable guide for moving toward ethical borders and better immigration policy.

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.

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