Yesterday
Photis Lysandrou, "Dollar Dominance: Why It Rules the Global Economy and How to Challenge It" (Policy Press, 2025)
In a world shaken by crises, why does the dollar continue to dominate? In Dollar Dominance: Why It Rules the Global Economy and How to Challenge It (Policy Press, 2025) Photis Lysandrou explores the interaction between global instability and the enduring strength of the dollar. D ... Show More
54m 13s
Yesterday
Chiara Libiseller, "Reconceptualizing War: The Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies" (Oxford UP, 2026)
The field of Strategic Studies, which studies the use and threat of force for political purposes, has seen the repeated rise of concepts to dominate discourses and research agendas, only to eventually fall to the margins again. What explains this cyclical pattern? What are the co ... Show More
51m 38s
May 12
Benjamin Robert Siegel, "Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Markets of Pain offers a sweeping history of the business of licit opium--following cultivators, merchants, scientists, and policymakers--and shows how this potent crop reshaped global trade, medicine, and geopolitics. For centuries, opium has been a source of both profit and pe ... Show More
37m 23s
Sep 2024
Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, "Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Over the past several decades, American society has experienced fundamental changes - from shifting relations between social groups and evolving language and behavior norms to the increasing value of a college degree. These transformations have polarized the nation's political cl ... Show More
32m 33s
Oct 2025
The rise of a worker friendly Republican Party
In the United States, the political right is undergoing a significant transformation. Once dominated by Reagan economics—characterised by free trade and deregulation—the movement has increasingly adopted policies focusing on the working class, opposing globalisation, pursuing pro ... Show More
33m 28s
Oct 2024
Anuradha Sajjanhar, "The New Experts: Populist Elites and Technocratic Promises in Modi's India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
How are technocratic experts supporting populist politics? In The New Experts Populist Elites and Technocratic Promises in Modi’s India (Cambridge UP, 2024), Anuradha Sajjanhar, a Lecturer in Politics & Public Policy at the University of East Anglia examines the recent history of ... Show More
37m 10s
Nov 2023
Charles S. Maier, "The Project-State and Its Rivals: A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries" (Harvard UP, 2023)
We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century. For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clear: democratic values had prevailed over dictatorship. But if the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism, as many intell ... Show More
50m 49s
Jul 2020
Katherine Stewart, "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage.
In her deeply reported investigation, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, Katherine S ... Show More
1h 1m
Jun 2025
How The Democrats Lost Labor And Found Capital, with David Sirota
<p>The Democratic Party has become too focused on appeasing its billionaire donors and has failed to communicate its commitment to the working class, argues long-time political journalist David Sirota. The question moving forward, he says, is if the party can ever refocus its bra ... Show More
49m 36s
Jul 2024
Mark L. Haas, "Frenemies: When Ideological Enemies Ally" (Cornell UP, 2022)
Alliances among ideological enemies confronting a common foe, or "frenemy" alliances, are unlike coalitions among ideologically-similar states facing comparable threats. Members of frenemy alliances are perpetually torn by two powerful opposing forces.
Frenemies: When Ideological ... Show More
45m 6s
Sep 2024
Anthony Michael Kreis, "Rot and Revival: The History of Constitutional Law in American Political Development" (U California Press, 2024)
One of the great divides in American judicial scholarship is between legal scholars who take the justices at their word and assume that those words define the law and political scientists who dismiss all judicial arguments as smokescreens for partisan bias or wider political forc ... Show More
1h 3m
Sep 2025
#433 — How Did We Get Here?
Sam Harris speaks with Dan Carlin about the decades-long buildup to our current political moment. They discuss the growing powers of the presidency, executive orders, different factions within the Republican Party, the fragmentation of our society, Libertarianism, the growing pro ... Show More
22m 6s
American democracy is in trouble. At the heart of the contemporary crisis is a mismatch between America's Constitution and today's nationalized, partisan politics. Although American political institutions remain federated and fragmented, the ground beneath them has moved, with the national subsuming and transforming the local.
In Partisan Nation: The Danger ... Show More
