Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

World Book Café heads to Madrid to talk to writers about a new boom in feminist fiction. A few month after the resignation of President of the Spanish Football Federation over a non-consensual kiss of footballer Jenni Hermoso at the World Cup final, World Book Café investigates how Madrid’s women writers are challenging gender roles in the books world.

A gripping account of the violence and turmoil that engulfed England’s fledgling colonies and the crucial role played by Native Americans in determining the future of North America.

In 1675, eastern North America descended into chaos. Virginia exploded into civil war, as rebel colonists decried the corruption of planter oligarchs and massacred allied Indians. Maryland colonists, gripped by fears that Catholics were conspiring with enemy Indians, rose up against their rulers. Separatist movements and ethnic riots swept through New York and New Jersey. Dissidents in northern Carolina launched a revolution, proclaiming themselves independent of any authority but their own. English America teetered on the edge of anarchy.

Though seemingly distinct, these conflicts were in fact connected through the Susquehannock Indians, a once-mighty nation reduced to a small remnant. Forced to scatter by colonial militia, Susquehannock bands called upon connections with Indigenous nations from the Great Lakes to the Deep South, mobilizing sources of power that colonists could barely perceive, much less understand. Although the Susquehannock nation seemed weak and divided, it exercised influence wildly disproportionate to its size, often tipping settler societies into chaos. Colonial anarchy was intertwined with Indigenous power.

Piecing together Susquehannock strategies from a wide range of archival documents and material evidence, Matthew Kruer shows how one people’s struggle for survival and renewal changed the shape of eastern North America. Susquehannock actions rocked the foundations of the fledging English territories, forcing colonial societies and governments to respond. Time of Anarchy recasts our understanding of the late seventeenth century and places Indigenous power at the heart of the story.

Matthew Kruer is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago where he teaches early American history.

John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He is the author of Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (Univ. Press of Kansas, 2023).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Outward’s own Jules Gill-Peterson has a new book, A Short History of Transmisogyny, that gives insight into a fascinating queer history that stretches across time and around the world. In this episode, Bryan and Jules dig deep into the origins of transmisogyny and the liberatory beauty of trans femininity

Podcast production by Palace Shaw. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dry January has come and gone, but the conversation about alcohol—and rethinking our relationship with it—is still very much with us. This week’s listener, Natalie, wants to move past the abundance vs. abstinence debate and talk about a third option: thoughtful moderation. In this episode, Courtney Martin brings on journalist Rosamund Dean, author of Mindful Drinking: How Cutting Down Can Change Your Life and Well, Well, Well, a Substack about living better, for longer. She shares how she found moderation through mindfulness—and how you can too. 

If you or someone you know is struggling with excessive drinking, consider contacting SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP. You can also find a local Alcoholics Anonymous meeting by visiting aa.org.

If you liked this episode, check out: How To Stick to Your New Year’s Resolutions

Do you have a problem that needs solving? Send us a note at howto@slate.com or leave us a voicemail at 646-495-4001 and we might have you on the show. Subscribe for free on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen.

How To’s executive producer is Derek John. Joel Meyer is our senior editor/producer and our producer is Rosemary Belson. 

Slate Plus members get bonus segments and ad-free podcast feeds. Sign up now at slate.com/howtoplus.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A generation of activists –and well-meaning citizens– was pulled into intense social justice work by the murder of George Floyd in 2020. And the horrific crime, the fight for progess, and the backlash has taken a toll on their mental health. On today’s episode of A Word, Jason Johnson is joined by writer and activist Ijeoma Oluo about her new book, Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World--And How You Can, Too. It’s the collected wisdom of activists across a range of issues about how to do the hard and emotional work of confronting racism without losing hope.

Guest: Writer Ijeoma Oluo

Podcast production by Kristie Taiwo-Makanjuola

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Presenter Harriett Gilbert and readers around the world talk to acclaimed Italian physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli about his runaway bestseller Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.

A compact and engaging exploration of some of the most fundamental ideas in modern physics this book takes readers on a captivating journey through seven concise chapters, each dedicated to a different topic. From the theory of relativity to quantum mechanics and the nature of time, Rovelli presents complex concepts with remarkable clarity, making them accessible to a wide audience.

Throughout the book, Rovelli weaves together the history of scientific discovery with his own personal reflections, creating a narrative that is both poetic and thought-provoking. Delving into the mysteries of the universe and examining our own place in the cosmos Rovelli invites readers to ponder the profound questions that physics raises about the nature of space, time, and existence itself.

(Photo: Carlo Rovelli. Credit: Christopher Wahl.)

Cynthia Sylvester's The Half-White Album (University of New Mexico Press 2023) is a collection of stories, flash fiction, and poems revolving around the journey of a travelling band, The Covers. The stories are songs on the album, beginning with “Live at the House of Towers,” about a woman’s memories of her mother and home. The story of Shima (and her husband Claude) begins with all of her six daughters being taken by missionaries. The 10-year-old youngest, whom she calls The Last One, and the missionaries call Ruth, keeps running away. Shima is afraid because the missionaries will teach them to forget the songs and stories of their people. In Live at the House at the Edge of the World, Ruth is grown and eating dinner with Albert. We meet Margarita, who was born with cerebral palsy and is confined to a wheelchair and a parade of other characters who struggle to love, live, and survive in a harsh world. These are stories of hope and despair, family and banishment, based out west in what was once the wide-ranging country of native American tribes.

Cynthia Sylvester is born into the Kiyaa’áanii Clan for the Bilagáana Clan and is an enrolled member of the Diné. She is a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines. She received the Native Writer Award at the Taos Writer’s Conference. She graduated from the University of New Mexico and received her MFA in creative writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Cynthia hosts Albuquerque DimeStories—3-minute stories written and read by the author. Hosting DimeStories is a way to give back and foster a writing community. A community of writers is at the core of what she attributes to her success, endurance, and joy in writing. Writing is a solitary endeavor. “So much of what we writers write never sees the light of day.” A DimeStorie, fiction or non-fiction, is a way to have an achievable goal each month (about 500 words) and provides a venue to read the work to a receptive audience. Having a community of writers is important because Cynthia, like many writers, works a “9 to 5.” Her profession for over thirty years has been physical therapy. She comes from a line of “medicine women.” Her mother and aunts were nurses, and she and her sister have health professions. Cynthia’s career in medicine is often reflected in her work as a writer. When not working as a writer or a PT, Cynthia loves to box, take walks with her wife and their dog, Zeus, hang out with friends and family and talk about writing, TV shows, movies, books, sports, what happened last week or last year, whatever if there is a story involved, Cynthia is in her happy place.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Food is at the center of everything, writes University of Washington professor of American Indian Studies Charlotte Coté. In A Drum in One Hand, A Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast (U Washington Press, 2022), Coté shares stories from her own experience growing up and living in the Pacific Northwest. From salmon, to wild berries, to community gardens, the food abundance of this region is central to Indigenous decolonization and sovereignty. Coté connects protecting the free movement and ecological health of salmon runs to issues as global as climate change, arguing that in order to understand the big picture, you need to start with what people put on their dinner tables. A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other is a book about resilience, healing, and sustenance in the face of challenges, and about the real, material, work people are doing to decolonize their diets and in doing so, healing the land and their communities.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and is the Assistant Director of the American Society for Environmental History.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In Amazonian Cosmopolitans: Navigating a Shamanic Cosmos, Shifting Indigenous Policies, and Other Modern Projects (U Nebraska Press, 2022), Suzanne Oakdale focuses on the autobiographical accounts of two Brazilian Indigenous leaders, Prepori and Sabino, Kawaiwete men whose lives spanned the twentieth century, when Amazonia increasingly became the context of large-scale state projects. Both give accounts of how they worked in a range of interethnic enterprises from the 1920s to the 1960s in central Brazil. Prepori, a shaman, also gives an account of his relations with spirit beings that populate the Kawaiwete cosmos as he participated in these projects.

Like other Indigenous Amazonians, Kawaiwete value engagement with outsiders, particularly for leaders and shamanic healers. These social engagements encourage a careful watching and learning of others’ habits, customs, and sometimes languages, what could be called a kind of cosmopolitanism or an attitude of openness, leading to an expansion of the boundaries of community. The historical consciousness presented by these narrators centers on how transformations in social relations were experienced in bodily terms—how their bodies changed as new relationships formed. Amazonian Cosmopolitans offers Indigenous perspectives on twentieth-century Brazilian history as well as a way to reimagine lowland peoples as living within vast networks, bridging wide social and cosmological divides.

Suzanne Oakdale is Professor of Anthropology at The University of New Mexico. She specializes in Brazil, with research focused on Amazonian indigenous peoples. She explores the dynamics of ritual practice; history; and the social anthropology of the person and personal experience, particularly how these genres reflect and are used to address large scale social shifts. She is the editor of the Journal of Anthropological Research.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In this episode, Cheryl Strayed (Dear Sugar and Tiny Beautiful Things) joins Prudie (Jenée Desmond-Harris) to answer letters from readers about whether it’s a good idea to offer to be your platonic best friend’s housewife, how to handle a husband’s disturbing body odors, and what an overachieving eldest millennial daughter can do to find happiness.

If you want more Dear Prudence, join Slate Plus, Slate’s membership program. Jenée answers an extra question every week, just for members. 

Go to Slate.com/prudieplus to sign up. It’s just $15 for your first three months. 

This podcast is produced by Se’era Spragley Ricks, Daisy Rosario, and Jenée Desmond-Harris, with help from Maura Currie.

Dear Prudence is sponsored by BetterHelp.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices