The United States takes pride in its democratic model and the idea that citizens deliberate in a process to form political opinions. However, in recent years, division and partisanship have increased while deliberation and the actual discussion of competing ideas have decreased. More and more, citizens are siloed, interacting only with those with whom they a ... Show More
Yesterday
Elaine M. Fisher, "The Meeting of Rivers: Translating Religion in Early Modern India" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In The Meeting of Rivers: Translating Religion in Early Modern India (Oxford UP, 2025), Elaine Fisher reconstructs Vīraśaiva origins from unstudied multilingual archives, overturning the conventional narrative of a monolingual Kannada bhakti movement protesting Sanskrit Brahmani ... Show More
38m 38s
Feb 11
Manchán Magan, "Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape" (Chelsea Green, 2026)
Most people associate Britain and Ireland with the English language, a vast, sprawling linguistic tree with roots in Latin, French, and German, and branches spanning the world, from Australia and India to North America. But the inhabitants of these islands originally spoke anothe ... Show More
39m 40s
Jan 29
Rishi Rajpopat, "Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Around 500 BCE, the Indian scholar Pāṇini wrote a treatise on Sanskrit, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, describing a kind of language machine: an algebraic system of rules for producing grammatically correct word forms. The enormity and elegance of that accomplishment—and the underlying computat ... Show More
1h 24m
Jan 2024
Stephen M. Engel and Timothy S. Lyle, "Disrupting Dignity: Rethinking Power and Progress in LGBTQ Lives" (NYU Press, 2021)
Scholars Stephen Engel and Timothy Lyle have a new book that dives into the thinking around power, political and cultural progress, and the LGBTQ+ communities in the United States. This book is fascinating and important in examining not only policy developments around rights and ... Show More
58m 56s
Mar 2023
Raina Lipsitz, "The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics" (Verso, 2022)
The mushrooming rolls of the Democratic Socialists of America, Marxist explainers in Teen Vogue, and the outsized impact of the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all herald a new, youth-inflected radical politics.
The Rise of a New Left: How Youn ... Show More
37m 7s
Feb 2024
James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson, "Judging Inequality: State Supreme Courts and the Inequality Crisis" (Russell Sage, 2021)
Soaring levels of political, legal, economic, and social inequality have been documented by social scientists – but the public conversation and scholarship on inequality has not examined the role of state law and state courts in establishing policies that significantly affect ine ... Show More
58m 58s
Jun 2020
Leticia Bode et al., "Words That Matter: How the News and Social Media Shaped the 2016 Presidential Campaign" (Brookings, 2020)
Words That Matter: How the News and Social Media Shaped the 2016 Presidential Campaign (Brookings Institution Press, 2020) comes out of a broader collaboration between social scientists at the University of Michigan, Georgetown University, Gallup, Inc.
This collaboration, which i ... Show More
1h 1m
May 2023
Jo Littler, "Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and Political" (Lawrence Wishart, 2023)
What is the history and future of feminism? In Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and Political (Lawrence Wishart, 2023), Jo Littler, Professor of Social Analysis and Cultural Politics at City, University of London, collects almost a decade of interviews with key think ... Show More
34m 58s