Apr 9
The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence
Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they’ve sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd’s and Sandra Bland’s, capture national attention, most victims remain nameless, their stories untold. The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Vict ... Show More
57m 50s
Apr 8
Thorsten Gromes, "Sustaining Peace After Civil War: Insights from 48 Recent Cases" (Springer, 2026)
Sustaining Peace After Civil War: Insights from 48 Recent Cases (Springer, 2026) examines one of the most important questions in peace research: What leads to enduring peace after civil wars, and what leads to the resurgence of violence? For decades, intrastate conflicts have be ... Show More
41m 8s
Apr 3
Tim Cresswell, "The Citizen and the Vagabond: A Politics of Mobility" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
An expansive treatise on the power relations that govern our movement The Citizen and the Vagabond: A Politics of Mobility (U Minnesota Press, 2026) develops a theoretical approach to the study of mobility and its relationship to the production, maintenance, and transformation of ... Show More
37m 11s
Jan 2025
Devin Fergus, “Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class” (Oxford UP, 2018)
Politicians, economists, and the media have put forth no shortage of explanations for the mounting problem of wealth inequality – a loss of working class jobs, a rise in finance-driven speculative capitalism, and a surge of tax policy decisions that benefit the ultra-rich, among ... Show More
43m 5s
Jun 2024
Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston, "The Political Development of American Debt Relief" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
A political history of the rise and fall of American debt relief. Americans have a long history with debt. They also have a long history of mobilizing for debt relief. Throughout the nineteenth century, indebted citizens demanded government protection from their financial burdens ... Show More
58m 27s
Nov 2024
What Makes A Marxist? | Dr. Paul Kengor
This week on the Sunday Special, Ben Shapiro welcomes Dr. Paul Kengor, a distinguished political scientist, author, and expert on communism and Ronald Reagan’s presidential legacy. In today’s episode, we dissect the infiltration of Marxist ideas among American progressives, the i ... Show More
1h 14m
Oct 2024
Jon Michaels and David Noll, "Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy" (Atria/One Signal, 2024)
Law professors Jon Michaels and David Noll use their expertise to expose how state-supported forms of vigilantism are being deployed by MAGA Republicans and Christian nationalists to roll back civil, political, and privacy rights and subvert American democracy. Beyond identifying ... Show More
1h 19m
Sep 2024
Amir Alexander, "Liberty's Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Seen from an airplane, much of the United States appears to be a gridded land of startling uniformity. Perpendicular streets and rectangular fields, all precisely measured and perfectly aligned, turn both urban and rural America into a checkerboard landscape that stretches from h ... Show More
58m 11s
Nov 2024
Harvey Whitehouse, "Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World" (Harvard UP, 2024)
Each of us is endowed with an inheritance--a set of evolved biases and cultural tools that shape every facet of our behavior. For countless generations, this inheritance has taken us to ever greater heights: driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organized reli ... Show More
44m 17s
Oct 2023
Mutual Aid and the Anarchist Radical Imagination
This episode of Darts and Letters examines the theory and practice of anti-statist organizing.
There’s a story you can tell about the post-Occupy left gravitating towards a more state-oriented kind of politics, exemplified by the enthusiasm around Bernie Sanders, The Squad, and o ... Show More
1h 10m
The anti-tax movement is "the most important overlooked social and political movement of the last half century", according to our guest Michael J. Graetz.
In his book The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America (Princeton UP, 2024), Graetz chronicles the movement from a fringe theory promoted by zealous outsiders using false economic cla ... Show More
