Apr 2025
Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)
After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in ... Show More
1h 7m
Today
The Caste Question with Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao
TCP’s inaugural episode features Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao, two scholars whose academic work and activism have helped to set the parameters of the contemporary debate on caste. In our conversation, we addressed the challenge of defining caste, their individual pathways into re ... Show More
59m 13s
Jan 26
Terry Williams, "Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel r ... Show More
27m 9s
May 2024
Tom Mueller, "How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine" (Norton, 2023)
Dialysis is a medical miracle, a treatment that allows people with kidney failure to live when otherwise they would die. It also provides a captive customer for the dialysis industry, which values the steady revenues that come from critically required long-term care that is guara ... Show More
1h 9m
Feb 2024
Alissa Quart and David Wallis, "Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the World's Richest Country" (Haymarket, 2023)
Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate ... Show More
54m 48s
Apr 2025
TIP716: The Power of Customer Obsession: Amazon’s Secret Weapon w/ Kyle Grieve
On today’s episode, Kyle Grieve explores the DNA of Amazon by tracing Jeff Bezos’s early influences, strategic decisions, and relentless focus on customer experience, revealing how a bold vision and founder-led culture built one of the most dominant businesses in history.
IN T ... Show More
1h 4m
May 2024
Elise Andaya, "Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice" (NYU Press, 2024)
The low-wage service industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the US economy. Its workers disproportionately tend to be low-income and minority women. Service sector work entails rigid forms of temporal discipline manifested in work requirements for flexible, ... Show More
34m 21s
Jan 2025
Stacey Diane Arañez Litam, "Patterns that Remain: A Guide to Healing for Asian Children of Immigrants" (Oxford UP, 2025)
This empowering book blends history, storytelling, and culturally grounded techniques to equip readers with the tools needed to promote self-reflection, personal growth, and diasporic healing. Asian Americans represent the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, yet fe ... Show More
26m 54s
Oct 2025
Eram Alam, "The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare" (JHU Press, 2025)
For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries. The passage of the Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act ... Show More
51m 39s
This episode of the New Books in Economic and Business History is an interview with New York writer Benjamin Lorr. Benjamin Lorr is the author of Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga, a book that explores the Bikram Yoga community and movement. His second book, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark ... Show More
