Every two seconds a person is displaced, caught in one of the more than 40 active conflicts around the world that show no sign of ending. Since 1994, there has been ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has uprooted millions of people and resulted in the deaths of millions more. In the West, we have entered a political era where our border p ... Show More
May 12
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, "The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us" (Liveright Publishing, 2026)
MacArthur Fellow and National Humanities Medalist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex and The Mind-Body Problem, returns with a revelatory book about the primal drive that in our species alone has been transformed into one of our most persistent and uni ... Show More
43m 46s
May 8
Julia Bowes, "Every Man's Home a Castle: Parental Rights and the Makings of Modern Conservatism" (Princeton UP, 2026)
“Parental rights” is a rallying cry for today’s American conservatives, signaling opposition to mandatory vaccination and “woke” public school curricula. In Every Man's Home a Castle: Parental Rights and the Makings of Modern Conservatism (Princeton UP, 2026), Dr. Julia Bowes tra ... Show More
38m 59s
May 6
Angela Dimitrakaki, "Feminism. Art. Capitalism" (Pluto Press, 2026)
Can art change the contemporary world? In Feminism, Art, Capitalism Angela Dimitrakaki, a Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the university of Edinburgh, offers a Marxist Feminist perspective on a variety of issues in both society and the cultural sector. Engagi ... Show More
41m 14s
Nov 2023
Musab Younis, "On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought" (U California Press, 2022)
On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought (U California Press, 2022) examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across the Atlantic between the two world wars. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Black intellectuals in Europe, Africa, and ... Show More
48m 23s
Apr 2023
Decolonizing Palestine | Somdeep Sen
How can we imagine liberation under colonial rule? In this episode, we speak with Dr. Somdeep Sen, a post-colonial studies professor at Roskilde University. His book, "Decolonizing Palestine," draws on his ethnographic research in the region to study how Israeli occupation shapes ... Show More
1 h
May 2024
Donald Stoker, "Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
In this provocative challenge to United States policy and strategy, former Professor of Strategy & Policy at the US Naval War College, and author or editor of eleven books, Dr. Donald Stoker argues that America endures endless wars because its leaders no longer know how to think ... Show More
46m 15s
Aug 2021
Jonathan Haslam, "The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II" (Princeton UP, 2021)
The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II (Princeton UP, 2021), looks at a subject we thought we knew—the roots of the Second World War—and upends our assumptions with a new interpretation. Professor Jonathan Haslam, in the words of historian, Ge ... Show More
1h 3m
Jun 2023
The Reoccurring Tragedy of Geopolitics with Robert Kaplan and John Gray
The great dilemmas of geopolitics are not battles of good against evil, where the choices are clear. They are contests of good against good, where the choices are often painful, incompatible and fraught with consequence. That’s the argument that political scientist Robert Kaplan ... Show More
42m 19s
Jul 2018
Guy Laron, “The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East” (Yale UP, 2017)
The title of Guy Laron’s The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (Yale University Press, 2017) says it all. As Laron notes in this interview, the fact that the war led to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East is an accepted interpretation of the war’s meaning. However, th ... Show More
55m 43s