New Books in Public Policy

Along with football and religion, housing is a fundamental cornerstone of Egyptian life: it can make or break marriage proposals, invigorate or slow down the economy, and popularize or embarrass a ruler. Housing is political. Almost every Egyptian ruler over the last eighty years has directly associated himself with at least one large-scale housing project. It is also big business, with Egypt currently the world leader in per capita housing production, building at almost double China’s rate, and creating a housing surplus that counts in the millions of units. Despite this, Egypt has been in the grip of a housing crisis for almost eight decades. From the 1940s onward, officials deployed a number of policies to create adequate housing for the country’s growing population. By the 1970s, housing production had outstripped population growth, but today half of Egypt’s one hundred million people cannot afford a decent home. Egypt's Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space (American U in Cairo Press, 2020) takes presidential speeches, parliamentary reports, legislation, and official statistics as the basis with which to investigate the tools that officials have used to ‘solve’ the housing crisis—rent control, social housing, and amnesties for informal self-building—as well as the inescapable reality of these policies’ outcomes. Yahia Shawkat argues that wars, mass displacement, and rural–urban migration played a part in creating the problem early on, but that neoliberal deregulation, crony capitalism and corruption, and neglectful planning have made things steadily worse ever since. In the final analysis he asks, is affordable housing for all really that hard to achieve? Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How can billionaires justify the endless accumulation of wealth? Effective altruism. An almost religious philosophical belief. Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO and founder of collapsed crypto exchange FTX is a major proponent, as is Elon Musk. Now, SBF and many in Effective Altruism have also embraced longtermism, a strand of extreme utilitarian thinking that tells us we should worry about the interests of future people -- trillions of future people, 1000s of years into the future, and in planets far away. We examine the complicated moral math of longtermism with Émile P. Torres, a former longtermist who is now one of the movement's sharpest apostates. SUPPORT THE SHOW You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ABOUT THE SHOW For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Digital platforms controlled by Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Tencent and Uber have transformed not only the ways we do business, but also the very nature of people's everyday lives. It is of vital importance that we understand the economic principles governing how these platforms operate. Paul Belleflamme and Martin Peitz's book The Economics of Platforms: Concepts and Strategy (Cambridge UP, 2021) explains the driving forces behind any platform business with a focus on network effects. The authors use short case studies and real-world applications to explain key concepts such as how platforms manage network effects and which price and non-price strategies they choose. This self-contained text is the first to offer a systematic and formalized account of what platforms are and how they operate, concisely incorporating path-breaking insights in economics over the last twenty years. Martin Peitz is professor of economics at the University of Mannheim (since 2007), a director of the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation – MaCCI (since 2009). He has been member of the economic advisory group on competition policy (EAGCP) at the European Commission (2013–2016), an academic director of the Centre on Regulation in Europe, CERRE (2012–2016) and head of the Department of Economics (2010–2013). Martin has widely published in leading economics journals. He also frequently trains and advises government agencies in Europe and abroad on competition and regulation issues. Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

It is widely accepted that London is in the midst of a serious housing crisis, manifested most obviously in city's soaring rents. While the causes of this crisis are manifold, many people have come to argue that the diminished role of public housing, which includes council estates, is a major contributing factor. Yet the bitter irony is that, at a time of such massive housing shortages, London's council estates are disappearing from the city's skyline in the name of renewal and regeneration. In Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London (Policy Press, 2021), Watt provides a systematic policy and sociological account of the transformation of council housing in London over the last three decades, drawing on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and statistical and documentary analysis undertaken in several London boroughs. The book explores what this dramatic shift in housing implies for ever-widening inequality in London's distribution of wealth. Anna Zhelnina holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. To learn more, visit her website or follow Anna on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Haiti is the target of an overwhelming number of internationally funded health projects. While religious institutions sponsor a number of these initiatives, many are implemented within the secular framework of global health. In Where They Need Me: Local Clinicians and the Workings of Global Health in Haiti (Cornell UP, 2022), Pierre Minn illustrates the divergent criteria that actors involved in global health use to evaluate interventions' efficacy through examining the work of Haitian health professionals in humanitarian aid encounters. Haitian physicians, nurses, and administrative staff are hired to carry out these global health programs, distribute or withhold resources, and produce accounts of interventions' outcomes. In their roles as intermediaries, Haitian clinicians are expected not only to embody the humanitarian projects of foreign funders and care for their impoverished patients but also to act as sources of support for their own kin networks, while negotiating their future prospects in a climate of pronounced scarcity and insecurity. Minn argues that a serious consideration of these local health care providers in the context of global health is essential to counter simplistic depictions of clinicians and patients as heroes, villains, or victims as well as to move beyond the donor-recipient dyad that has dominated theoretical work on humanitarianism and the gift. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author. She was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego before moving to the UK in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

None of us really want to relive our first encounters with COVID-19 and the disruptions to our lives, to say nothing of the anxiety and concern about the life-threatening nature of this virus as it spread around the globe. At the same time, Shana Kushner Gadarian, Sara Wallace Goodman, and Thomas B. Pepinsky ask us to reflect on our experiences and the responses to COVID-19 in the United States in their new book, Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID (Princeton UP, 2022). Kushner Gadarian, Wallace Goodman, and Pepinsky were able to put sizeable surveys into the field starting as early as March 2020, as the pandemic was taking hold in the United States and as our daily lives started to “shut down.” The three authors continued to send out the same survey to the same individuals over the course of the next two years, eventually pulling together data from six waves of surveys of some 3000 Americans. The center of the research design was to try to examine individual attitudes towards COVID-19 itself, and how people responded to the pandemic threat and the mitigation efforts. Because of the capacity to survey the same individuals over time, the authors were able to see the way that people changed their thinking as COVID itself mutated and re-situated itself in different parts of the country. The conclusion from all of this data and information is that, in the United States, partisanship swamped everything else in terms of how individuals thought about, reacted to, and responded to COVID-19. Pandemic Politics explores the way that citizens were picking up on different signals from partisan leadership because there were differing approaches to how to handle and respond to COVID-19. This was unique in the United States in comparison to other countries. Because of competing messages coming from different authoritative individuals (like the president of the United States, governors, state and local level health authorities, CDC and NIH experts, etc.) and, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a significant knowledge gap as to what to do and how to keep ourselves safe, many Americans found themselves confused and concerned. As a result, the data indicates that Republicans and Democrats were hearing and seeing different information, different advice, and this continued and became more entrenched as the pandemic continued. The authors also note that the structural foundation for these partisan differences were already present before the pandemic—there were pre-existing conditions within the body politic that subsequently led to the sclerotic partisan reactions to the pandemic itself and to the efforts to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of the new book, The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

What is the best way to achieve societal harmony in a place in which groups of people with different identities are living together. Should minority groups be given exemptions from general policies and laws or is it better to say majority privilege should be removed by finding solutions in which the law applies equally to the minority and the majority. Owen Bennett Jones was joined by co-authors Peter Balint and Patti Lenard who have discussed these issues in Debating Multiculturalism: Should There be Minority Rights? (Oxford UP, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)—or both. In Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back (Beacon, 2022), scholar Dr. Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of “chokepoint capitalism,” with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well-illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon’s use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook’s siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels’ use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere. By analyzing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct “anti-competitive flywheels” designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices. In the book’s second half, Giblin and Doctorow then explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work. Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that’s being heisted away—before it’s too late. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The liberalism that is defended here is therefore itself an object of political contestation, and not just the background against which such contestation takes place. If we can look to the past achievements of liberal polities – the widespread (but still imperfect) acceptance of religious toleration and free inquiry, the relative (but still woefully incomplete) deconstruction of class, gender, and racial hierarchies, the (possibly temporary) defeat of totalitarianisms, left and right – to remind ourselves of the promise of a liberal politics, we can look to our many remaining failings, and to the fact that even our achievements are preserved only through our own vigilance, to remind ourselves how fallible our ideals, and the institutions that we have built upon them, actually are. Liberal freedom is, in short, both a richer and a more fragile ideal than many of its supporters – and critics – realize. – Eric MacGilvray, Liberal Freedom (2022) Professor MacGilvray has been studying the concept of freedom for over 15 years culminating in his latest Cambridge University Press publication: Liberal Freedom: Pluralism, Polarization, and Politics. For anyone interested in the importance of freedom and liberalism and the key concepts and thinkers written as intellectual history from the discerning eye of a political theorist and analytic philosopher you will find this book most engaging. His explanation of its relevant issues are well worth your time in this interview. Here is the publisher’s description which provides a nice synopsis of the book’s main focus: "We seem to be losing the ability to talk to each other about – and despite – our political differences. The liberal tradition, with its emphasis on open-mindedness, toleration, and inclusion, is ideally suited to respond to this challenge. Yet liberalism is often seen today as a barrier to constructive dialogue: narrowly focused on individual rights, indifferent to the communal sources of human well-being, and deeply implicated in structures of economic and social domination. This book provides a novel defense of liberalism that weaves together a commitment to republican self-government, an emphasis on the value of unregulated choice, and an appreciation of how hard it is to strike a balance between them. By treating freedom rather than justice as the central liberal value this important book, critical to the times, provides an indispensable resource for constructive dialogue in a time of political polarization." Eric’s thoughtful book recommendation pairings from this interview for interested listeners: Political philosophy – 1) Philip Pettit’s Just Freedom; 2) Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government Political thought – 1) Mill’s Considerations of Representative Government; 2) L.T. Hobhouse’s Liberalism Popular political – 1) Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities; 2) Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism Also, as discussed, The Atlantic article based on Packer’s book: Last Best Hope - America in Crisis and Renewal Eric MacGilvray is a political theorist at Ohio State University whose research and teaching interests focus on liberal, republican, and democratic theory as well as the pragmatic philosophical tradition. He is a pragmatist whose scholarly journal articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Theory, and Social Philosophy and Policy, among others. Liberal Freedom is his third book and builds on his second, The Invention of Market Freedom. Keith Krueger lectures part-time in the Sydney Business School at Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

There's a strong chance that chair you are sitting on was made from stolen lumber. In Tree Thieves: Crime And Survival In North America's Woods (Little, Brown Spark, 2022), Lyndsie Bourgon takes us deep into the underbelly of the illegal timber market. As she traces three timber poaching cases, she introduces us to tree poachers, law enforcement, forensic wood specialists, the enigmatic residents of former logging communities, environmental activists, international timber cartels, and indigenous communities along the way. Old-growth trees are invaluable and irreplaceable for both humans and wildlife, and are the oldest living things on earth. But the morality of tree poaching is not as simple as we might think: stealing trees is a form of deeply rooted protest, and a side effect of environmental preservation and protection that doesn't include communities that have been uprooted or marginalized when park boundaries are drawn. As Bourgon discovers, failing to include working class and rural communities in the preservation of these awe-inducing ecosystems can lead to catastrophic results. Featuring excellent investigative reporting, fascinating characters, logging history, political analysis, and cutting-edge tree science, Tree Thieves takes readers on a thrilling journey into the intrigue, crime, and incredible complexity sheltered under the forest canopy. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America (UNC Press, 2022), Psyche A. Williams-Forson offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated. What is at stake is nothing less than whether Americans can learn to embrace nonracist understandings and practices in relation to food. Starkly exposing the rampant shaming and policing around how Black people eat, Williams-Forson contemplates food's role in cultural transmission, belonging, homemaking, and survival. Black people's relationships to food have historically been connected to extreme forms of control and scarcity--as well as to stunning creativity and ingenuity. In advancing dialogue about eating and race, this book urges us to think and talk about food in new ways in order to improve American society on both personal and structural levels. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Disability in Contemporary China: Citizenship, Identity and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2022), Sarah Dauncey offers the first comprehensive exploration of disability and citizenship in Chinese society and culture from 1949 to the present. Through the analysis of a wide variety of Chinese sources, from film and documentary to literature and life writing, media and state documents, she sheds important new light on the ways in which disability and disabled identities have been represented and negotiated over this time. She exposes the standards against which disabled people have been held as the Chinese state has grappled with expectations of what makes the 'ideal' Chinese citizen. From this, she proposes an exciting new theoretical framework for understanding disabled citizenship in different societies - 'para-citizenship'. A far more dynamic relationship of identity and belonging than previously imagined, her new reading synthesises the often troubling contradictions of citizenship for disabled people - the perils of bodily and mental difference and the potential for personal and group empowerment. Professor Sarah Dauncey is a China specialist with 30 years' experience in visiting and studying China. She joined the School of Sociology and Social Policy in 2016 at the University of Nottingham, having previously served as Deputy Head and Director of Teaching at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was--and is--a world-class, Nobel Prize-winning lab, and its reactor was the cornerstone of US materials science and one of the world's finest research facilities. The leak, harmless to health, came from a storage pool rather than the reactor. But its discovery triggered a media and political firestorm that resulted in the reactor's shutdown, and even attempts to close the entire laboratory. A quarter century later, the episode reveals the dynamics of today's controversies in which fears and the dismissal of science disrupt serious discussion and research of vital issues such as vaccines, climate change, and toxic chemicals. This story has all the elements of a thriller, with vivid characters and dramatic twists and turns. Key players include congressmen and scientists; journalists and university presidents; actors, supermodels, and anti-nuclear activists, all interacting and teaming up in surprising ways. The authors, each with insider knowledge of and access to confidential documents and the key players, reveal how a fact of no health significance could be portrayed as a Chernobyl-like disaster. The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory (MIT Press, 2022) reveals the gaps between scientists, politicians, media, and the public that have only gotten more dangerous since 1997. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Seattle has a reputation as a city of Progressive values, but as Megan Asaka argues in Seattle From the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City (U Washington Press, 2022), that image had to be built on bulldozed neighborhoods of migrant workers. Asaka argues it was these individuals, from Japan, Europe, and Indigenous to the Puget Sound, who worked in the extractive industries that built Seattle, and whose presence was threatening to elites who wished for Seattle to reflect their own genteel visions of America's future. In the twenty first century, evidence of these workers lives and neighborhoods is hard to find in the city's urban geography, and Asaka's work excavates what has been a purposefully hidden history of Seattle's complex founding. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. Mass Incarceration Nation offers a novel, in-the-trenches perspective to explain the factors - historical, political, and institutional - that led to the current system of mass imprisonment. Jeffrey Bellin's book Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How it Can Recover (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the causes and impacts of mass incarceration on both the political and criminal justice systems. With accessible language and straightforward statistical analysis, former prosecutor turned law professor Jeffery Bellin provides a formula for reform to return to the low incarceration rates that characterized the United States prior to the 1970s. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A few big companies are selling information about us to governments and companies. But beyond a general sense of unease, what do we need to know about this and what do we need to do about it? Professor Sarah Lamdan gives answers to those questions in her book Data Cartels: The Companies that Control and Monopolise our Information (Stanford UP, 2022). Listen to her conversations with Owen Bennett Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Is Marx relevant today, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe? Is Marx’s political theory compatible with individual rights? You will be surprised to learn that the answers are yes and yes. Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality and Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) offers a theoretical reconstruction of Karl Marx’s new materialist understanding of justice, legality, and rights through the vantage point of his widely invoked but generally misunderstood critique of liberalism. Igor Shoikhedbrod begins his book by reconstructing Marx’s conception of justice and rights through close textual interpretation and extrapolation. The central thesis of the book is, firstly, that Marx regards justice as an essential feature of any society, including the emancipated society of the future; and secondly, that standards of justice and right undergo transformation throughout history. In our discussion, the author tracks the enduring legacy of Marx’s critique of liberal justice by examining how Marx still speaks to our time. The Marx that emerges from this book is therefore a thoroughly modern thinker whose insights shed valuable light on some of the most pressing challenges confronting liberal democracies today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Adam Crowley's book Representations of Poverty in Videogames (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) argues that digital games address contemporary, middle-class anxieties about poverty in the United States. The early chapters consider gaming as a modern form of slumming and explore the ways in which titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and World of Warcraft thematize poverty. The argument turns to the field of literary studies to identify analytical frameworks for addressing and understanding these themes. Throughout, the book considers how the academic area of inquiry known as game studies has developed over time, and makes use of such scholarship to present, frame, and value its major claims and findings. In its conclusion, the book models how poverty themes might be identified and associated for the purpose of gaining greater insights into how games can shape, and also be shaped by, the player’s economic expectations. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

During the early twentieth century New York State, with its settlement houses, muckraking journalists, labor unions and national political leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, was central to the political ferment of the Progressive Era. And in that time, the New York State Court of Appeals—the state’ highest court--made vitally important decisions on the constitutional legitimacy of laws relating to public health, personal liberty, privacy, the regulation of businesses, working hours for women, and compensation for workers injured on the job. The Court of Appeals, Bruce Dearstyne argues in his new book, was in these years a crucible where new and complex public issues were debated and decided. New York State was large in population (and thus spoke loudly in Congress and the Electoral College) and was at the center of fierce debates over topics such as corporate power, labor rights, public health. In The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era (SUNY Press, 2022), Dearstyne argues that the court’s pathbreaking decisions in the Progressive Era echo into our own times. Indeed, he concludes, it was second in importance only to the United States Supreme Court. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Email: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Richard Petts' Father Involvement and Gender Equality in the United States: Contemporary Norms and Barriers (Routledge, 2022) focuses on issues of family, work, and gender, with a focus on gender inequality. Women are disadvantaged in both paid and domestic work, due in large part to being primarily responsible for duties within the domestic sphere. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these inequalities, making the issue of reducing gender inequality even more pressing. Fathers play an important role in contributing to, and perhaps reducing, gender inequality, but barriers to their involvement in family life have received less attention than detailing challenges that mothers face. If men were equally involved in all aspects of domestic life (i.e., were fully engaged dads), women's burdens would be reduced and perceptions of who is responsible for parenting may change, resulting in greater gender equality. The book focuses on the key issue of father involvement, seeking to understand why fathers are less involved at home than mothers despite an increased desire for fathers to be more engaged parents. This book utilizes recent national survey data, interviews with fathers, and insights from the author's personal experience as a father to identify current norms of fatherhood within the United States, barriers to father involvement, and strategies to overcome these barriers. Overall, this book argues that by establishing the expectation that fathers will be fully engaged dads as a cultural norm, and by providing structural opportunities for fathers to meet this cultural standard, greater gender equality can be achieved within the United States. The arguments presented in this book are valuable for scholars in the areas of family, work, and gender, policymakers and business leaders who seek to promote gender equality and work-family balance, and parents who are interested in achieving a more egalitarian division of labor within their own families. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her (Duke UP, 2022) Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the present. He meditates on the possibilities of writing about someone who is gone—what should be represented, what experiences resist rendering, what ethical challenges exist when studying the lives of others. Meyers considers how chronic illness is bound up in the racialized and socioeconomic conditions of Beverly’s life and explores the stakes of the anthropologist’s engagement with one subject. Even as Meyers struggles to give Beverly the final word, he finds himself unmade alongside her. All That Was Not Her captures the complexity of personal relationships in the field and the difficulty of their ending. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The census isn't just a data-collection process; it's a ritual, and a tool, of American democracy. Behind every neat grid of numbers is a collage of messy, human stories--you just have to know how to read them. In Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them (MCD, 2022), the data historian Dan Bouk examines the 1940 U.S. census, uncovering what those numbers both condense and cleverly abstract: a universe of meaning and uncertainty, of cultural negotiation and political struggle. He introduces us to the men and women employed as census takers, bringing us with them as they go door to door, recording the lives of their neighbors. He takes us into the makeshift halls of the Census Bureau, where hundreds of civil servants, not to mention machines, labored with pencil and paper to divide and conquer the nation's data. And he uses these little points to paint bigger pictures, such as of the ruling hand of white supremacy, the place of queer people in straight systems, and the struggle of ordinary people to be seen by the state as they see themselves. The 1940 census is a crucial entry in American history, a controversial dataset that enabled the creation of New Deal era social programs, but that also, with the advent of World War Two, would be weaponized against many of the citizens whom it was supposed to serve. In our age of quantification, Democracy's Data not only teaches us how to read between the lines but gives us a new perspective on the relationship between representation, identity, and governance today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Societies are often judged by how they treat their most vulnerable members: the poor and near poor. In the United States, this responsibility belongs not only to governments, but also to charities, businesses, individuals, and family members. Their combined efforts generate a social safety net. In Who Cares: The Social Safety Net in America (Oxford UP, 2022), Christopher Howard offers the first comprehensive map of the US social safety net. He chronicles how different parts of American society talk about poverty-related needs. And he shows what Americans do to provide basic levels of income, food, housing, medical care, and daily care. Although the US social safety net is extensive, major gaps remain, particularly impacting Blacks, Hispanics, and individuals who are not employed full-time. Drawing heavily upon evidence from the years right before the COVID-19 pandemic, Howard demonstrates that these problems persist even when the economy seems healthy. Who Cares concludes with an initial assessment of how the social safety net performed during the pandemic. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity (Routledge, 2021), June Carolyn Erlick explores the relationship between natural disasters and civil society, immigration and diaspora communities and the long-term impact on emotional health. Natural disasters shape history and society and, in turn, their long-range impact is determined by history and society. This is especially true in Latin America and the Caribbean, where climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of these extreme events. Ranging from pre-Columbian flooding in the Andes to the devastation of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, this book focuses on long-range recovery and recuperation, rather than short-term disaster relief. Written in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, the author shows how lessons learned about civil society, governance, climate change, inequality and trauma from natural disasters have their echoes in the challenges of today’s uncertain world. June Carolyn Erlick is the Editor-in-Chief of ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America and Publications Director at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. She is the author of five books, including Telenovelas in Pan-Latino Context (Routledge, 2018), Disappeared: A Journalist Silenced, the Irma Flaquer Story (Seal Press, 2004) and A Gringa in Bogotá: Living Colombia's Invisible War (University of Texas Press, 2010). She teaches journalism at Harvard Extension and Summer Schools and coordinates the journalism capstone and internship programs there. Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 officially ended the explicit prejudice in American immigration policy that began with the 1790 restriction on naturalization to free White persons of “good character.” By the 1980s, the rest of the Anglo-European world had followed suit, purging discriminatory language from their immigration laws and achieving what many believe to be a colorblind international system. Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration (Princeton UP, 2022) challenges this notion, revealing how racial inequality persists in global migration despite the end of formally racist laws. In this eye-opening book, Andrew Rosenberg argues that while today’s leaders claim that their policies are objective and seek only to restrict obviously dangerous migrants, these policies are still correlated with race. He traces how colonialism and White supremacy catalyzed violence and sabotaged institutions around the world, and how this historical legacy has produced migrants that the former imperial powers and their allies now deem unfit to enter. Rosenberg shows how postcolonial states remain embedded in a Western culture that requires them to continuously perform their statehood, and how the closing and policing of international borders has become an important symbol of sovereignty, one that imposes harsher restrictions on non-White migrants. Drawing on a wealth of original quantitative evidence, Undesirable Immigrants demonstrates that we cannot address the challenges of international migration without coming to terms with the brutal history of colonialism. Andrew Rosenberg is an assistant of political science at the University of Florida. His research examines racial inequality in the international system, the politics of migration, and global inequality. His current projects empirically break down the ideologies that maintain racial inequality in international migration. His research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Political Analysis, and Security Dialogue. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Ohio State University and is originally from Des Moines, Iowa. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Canadians are proud of their multicultural image both at home and abroad. But that image isn t grounded in historical facts. As recently as the 1960s, the Canadian government enforced discriminatory, anti-Black immigration policies, designed to restrict and prohibit the entry of Black Barbadians and Black West Indians. The Canadian state capitalized on the public s fear of the Black unknown and racist stereotypes to justify their exclusion. In Flying Fish in the Great White North: The Autonomous Migration of Black Barbadians (Fernwood, 2016), Christopher Stuart Taylor utilizes the intersectionality of race, gender and class to challenge the perception that Blacks were simply victims of racist and discriminatory Canadian and international, immigration policies by emphasizing the agency and educational capital of Black Barbadian emigrants during this period. In fact, many Barbadians were middle to upper class and were well educated, and many, particularly women, found autonomous agency and challenged the very Canadian immigration policies designed to exclude them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How the FDA was shaped by public health crises and patient advocacy, told against a background of the contentious hearings on the breast cancer drug Avastin. Food and Drug Administration approval for COVID-19 vaccines and the controversial Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm made headlines, but few of us know much about how the agency does its work. Why is the FDA the ultimate US authority on a drug's safety and efficacy? In Drugs and the FDA: Safety, Efficacy, and the Public's Trust (MIT Press, 2022), Mikkael Sekeres--a leading oncologist and former chair of the FDA's cancer drug advisory committee--tells the story of how the FDA became the most trusted regulatory agency in the world. It took a series of tragedies and health crises, as well as patient advocacy, for the government to take responsibility for ensuring the efficacy and safety of drugs and medical devices. Before the FDA existed, drug makers could hawk any potion, claim treatment of any ailment, and make any promise on a label. But then, throughout the twentieth century, the government was forced to take action when children were poisoned by contaminated diphtheria and smallpox vaccines, an early antibiotic contained antifreeze, a drug prescribed for morning sickness in pregnancy caused babies to be born disfigured, and access to AIDS drugs was limited to a few clinical trials while thousands died. Sekeres describes all these events against the backdrop of the contentious 2011 hearings on the breast cancer drug Avastin, in which he participated as a panel member. The Avastin hearings, he says, put to the test a century of the FDA's evolution, demonstrating how its system of checks and balances works--or doesn't work. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Today I talked to Richard Reeves about his important new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (Brookings Institution, 2022). The statistics are stunning. Men have a 9% lower graduation rate from college. One in three men without a completed high school education are now out of the workforce. About 40% of births take place outside of marriage (up from 11% in 1970). And men are 50% more likely to die from Covid-19 than women after contracting the virus. The long and short of it, while also advocating for full, real opportunities for women, short shrift is often being given to the problems men face. Neither ignoring the problem (the liberal choice, often) or suggesting we turn-back-the-clock to the 1950s (the conservative choice, often) will suffice. In this episode, Richard Reeves dares to propose some real solutions regarding education reforms, workplace opportunities, and pro-childrearing roles for all dads, married or otherwise. Richard Reeves is a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. He’s the author of the 2017 book Dream Hoarders and is also a regular contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The Resistance, Persistence and Resilience of Black Families Raising Children with Autism (Peter Lang, 2020) presents nuanced perspectives in the form of counternarratives of what Black families who have children with autism experience at the intersection of race, class, disability and gender. It intentionally centers the expertise of Black parents, challenging what is considered knowledge, whose knowledge counts, and how knowledge can be co-generated for learning, sharing and advocacy. The book speaks directly to Black parents on the autism journey. To right systemic racial inequities and to cultivate culturally responsive practices, it is critical for practitioners and professionals to understand what is known about Black families' experiences with autism in general and how these experiences differ because of our intersecting identities. University faculty and students in programs involving medicine, speech and language pathology, occupational therapy, nursing, political science, school psychology, teaching, special education and leadership can benefit from the wisdom offered by these parents. This text is perfect for several courses, including those in departments of anthropology, women and gender studies, health sciences, psychology, special education, teacher education and administrative leadership. In addition, given the uniquely Black perspective presented in the text, this text is relevant to other fields, including ethnic studies, cultural studies, urban studies and African American studies. It is relevant to individuals who wish to better understand how issues of race and intra-racial differences shape lived experiences with disability in American society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

How can you hide and spend billions of dollars? Many people hoping to do that go to London which is today considered the money laundering capital of the world. It’s the place where the world’s most corrupt individuals can park their money safely. How does that work? Where else does it happen and can anything be done about it? Owen Bennett Jones discusses the business of cleaning up dirty money with a journalist and author who has covered kleptocrats and their ill gotten gains for years, Oliver Bullough. He is the author of Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the World's Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything (St. Martin's Press, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

This agenda-setting book presents a framework for creating a more just and equitable care-centered world. Climate change, pandemic events, systemic racism, and deep inequalities have all underscored the centrality of care in our lives. Yet care work is, for the most part, undervalued and exploited. In Care-Centered Politics: From the Home to the Planet (MIT Press, 2022), Robert Gottlieb examines how a care economy and care politics can influence and remake health, climate, and environmental policy, as well as the institutions and practices of daily life. He shows how, through this care-centered politics, we can build an ethics of care and a society of cooperation, sharing, and solidarity. Arguing that care is a form of labor, Gottlieb expands the ways we think about home care, child care, elder care, and other care relationships. He links them to the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, immigration, and the militarization of daily life. He also provides perspective on the events of 2020 and 2021 (including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and movements calling attention to racism and inequality) as they relate to a care politics. Care, says Gottlieb, must be universal--whether healthcare for all, care for the earth, care at work, or care for the household, shared equally by men and women. Care-centered politics is about strategic and structural reforms that imply radical and revolutionary change. Gottlieb offers a practical, mindful, yet also utopian, politics of daily life. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

It is easy to condemn obvious wrongdoers such as Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, Harvey Weinstein, and the Sackler family. But we rarely think about the many people who supported their unethical or criminal behavior. In each case there was a supporting cast of complicitors: business partners, employees, investors, news organizations, and others. And, whether we're aware of it or not, almost all of us have been complicit in the unethical behavior of others. In Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop (Princeton UP, 2022), Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman confronts our complicity head-on and offers strategies for recognizing and avoiding the psychological and other traps that lead us to ignore, condone, or actively support wrongdoing in our businesses, organizations, communities, politics, and more. Complicit tells compelling stories of those who enabled the Theranos and WeWork scandals, the opioid crisis, the sexual abuse that led to the #MeToo movement, and the January 6th U.S. Capitol attack. The book describes seven different behavioral profiles that can lead to complicity in wrongdoing, ranging from true partners to those who unknowingly benefit from systemic privilege, including white privilege, and it tells the story of Bazerman's own brushes with complicity. Complicit also offers concrete and detailed solutions, describing how individuals, leaders, and organizations can more effectively prevent complicity. By challenging the notion that a few bad apples are responsible for society's ills, Complicit implicates us all--and offers a path to creating a more ethical world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Why don't trains run on time? Why are fares so expensive? Why are there so many strikes? Few would disagree that Britain's railways are broken, and have been for a long time. In Derailed: How to Fix Britain's Broken Railways (Manchester University Press, 2022), Dr. Tom Haines-Doran provides an insightful new book that calls for a radical rethink of how we view the railways, and explains the problems we face and how to fix them. Dr. Haines-Doran argues that the railways should be seen as a social good and an indispensable feature of the national economy. With passengers and railway workers holding governments to account, we could then move past the incessant debates on whether our railways are an unavoidably loss-making business failure. An alternative vision is both possible and affordable, enabling the railways to play an instrumental role in decreasing social inequalities, strengthening the economy and supporting a transition to a sustainable future. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The world's population has just passed the 8 billion mark and an increasing proportion of those people are old, including increasingly the so-called "old old" in their 90s and beyond. Indeed, never before have so many older people inhabited the planet. Are we prepared for them? Given the inevitable medical and health challenges that accompany old age, are we ready to take care of all those people? We also need to know how people experience old age. Are you really just as old as you feel? In this episode of International Horizons David Troyansky from the History departments of Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY refers to the demographics of aging and the causes of the unprecedented disproportion of the amount old with respect to younger generations. Troyansky also discusses how older individuals’ perspectives can inform research on aging, and whether the intergenerational gap between old and youngsters may (or may not) yield to conflict. Finally, the author addresses sexuality issues in aging people and why it is seen as taboo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Paris Marx is one of the sharpest modern writers on Silicon Valley and transit. We have been talking a lot lately about the idea of techno-utopian thinking, but we’re coming to a somewhat surprising conclusion: there isn’t as much of it as there used to be. Our Silicon Valley tech bros have quite a curtailed vision. If they do have a utopia, it is a utopia of sustaining the unsustainable, of paving over the continent to keep everyone in their cars. With Paris we’ll traverse the intellectual history of hippies-turned-arch-capitalists, and focus especially on their ideas for transportation policy. Do they have a radical vision for a different transportation future, or is it a vision of maintaining the status quo? Marx is author of the book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, out now from Verso Books. SUPPORT THE SHOW You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ABOUT THE SHOW For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union (U Michigan Press, 2022) explores the politics of migration in the European Union and explains how the EU responded to the 2015–17 refugee crisis. Based on 86 interviews and fieldwork in Greece and Italy, Nicholas R. Micinski proposes a new theory of international cooperation on international migration. States approach migration policies in many ways—such as coordination, collaboration, subcontracting, and unilateralism—but which policy they choose is based on capacity and on credible partners on the ground. Micinski traces the fifty-year evolution of EU migration management, like border security and asylum policies, and shows how EU officials used “crises” as political leverage to further Europeanize migration governance. In two in-depth case studies, he explains how Italy and Greece responded to the most recent refugee crisis. He concludes with a discussion of policy recommendations regarding contemporary as well as long-term aspirations for migration management in the EU. Nicholas R. Micinski is Libra Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Maine. His research focuses on global governance, particularly how states and international organizations respond to refugees, migration, climate change, and peacebuilding. Micinski is the author of two books: Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union (University of Michigan Press, 2022) and UN Global Compacts: Governing Migrants and Refugees (Routledge, 2021). Previously, Micinski was postdoctoral fellow at Université Laval, ISA James N. Rosenau Postdoctoral Fellow, and visiting researcher at the Center for the Study of Europe, Boston University. Before academia, he worked in the NGO sector in London for five years on refugee policy and service delivery. Micinski received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The Commodification Gap: Gentrification and Public Policy in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg (Wiley, 2022) provides an insightful institutionalist perspective on the field of gentrification studies. The book explores the relationship between the operation of gentrification and the institutions underpinning - but also influencing and restricting - it in three neighborhoods in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg. Matthias Bernt demonstrates how different institutional arrangements have resulted in the facilitation, deceleration or alteration of gentrification across time and place. The book is based on empirical studies conducted in Great Britain, Germany and Russia and contains one of the first-ever English language discussions of gentrification in Germany and Russia. It begins with an examination of the limits of the widely established “rent-gap” theory and proposes the novel concept of the “commodification gap.” It then moves on to explore how different institutional contexts in the UK, Germany and Russia have framed the conditions for these gaps to enable gentrification. The Commodification Gap is an indispensable resource for researchers and academics studying human geography, housing studies, urban sociology and spatial planning. Anna Zhelnina holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. To learn more, visit her website or follow Anna on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

California was born "under the shadow of slavery," writes Lynn Hudson, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California's Color Line (U of Illinois Press, 2020), Hudson argues that despite its reputation as a land of opportunity and freedom, California's deeply racist past extended well into the twentieth century. As one Black Californian put it, the only difference between California and Mississippi was the way they were spelled. Yet, African Americans in the state nonetheless resisted Jim Crow in the West at every turn, from founding all Black communities to struggling to integrate public facilities such as swimming pools. West of Jim Crow is a fascinating look at how the myths about where Jim Crow segregation began and ended hide important truth's about segregation and discrimination's extent. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Micha Odenheimer is the founder and director of Tevel B’Zedek, an Israeli NGO that aims to create Israeli and Jewish leadership passionately engaged in Tikkun Olam – fixing the world – locally and globally. Tevel B’Zedek provides community development support for sustainable agriculture in remote rural areas. Odenheimer is an activist and former journalist who reported from worldwide locations including Somalia, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Bangladesh and India. Born in California and educated at Yale, Odenheimer is an ordained Orthodox rabbi for whom reducing global poverty is a religious imperative. Around the world, more than enough food is produced to feed the global population—but hundreds of millions of people still go hungry. After steadily declining for a decade, world hunger is on the rise today, reportedly affecting nearly 10% percent of people globally. The growing food crisis is driven largely by wars, the COVID-19 pandemic, and climate change. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at [email protected]. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Atlanta, the capital of the American South, is at the red-hot core of expansion, inequality, and political relevance. In recent decades, central Atlanta has experienced heavily racialized gentrification while the suburbs have become more diverse, with many affluent suburbs trying to push back against this diversity. Exploring the city’s past and future, Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta (U California Press, 2022) tracks these racial and economic shifts and the politics and policies that produced them. Dan Immergluck documents the trends that are inverting Atlanta’s late-twentieth-century “poor-in-the-core” urban model. New emphasis on capital-driven growth has excluded low-income people and families of color from the city’s center, pushing them to distant suburbs far from mass transit, large public hospitals, and other essential services. Revealing critical lessons for leaders, activists, and residents in cities around the world, Immergluck considers how planners and policymakers can reverse recent trends to create more socially equitable cities. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Dr Lucy Series Deprivations of Liberty in The Shadows of the Institution (Bristol University Press, 2022) is one that I have long been looking forward to reading, and it did not disappoint. Series provides a rich historical and socio-legal context to bring new understanding of the post-carceral era, and the legacies of the institutions which continue to shape the contemporary era of social care detention. She provides an in-depth analysis of the very odd legal landscape that has been imported into the British care system, to draw out the specific logics, locus and temporality of a complex social problem, for which the legal solution has produced anomalous results. Her key concern goes beyond bringing new understanding of the ways that individuals are regulated and controlled. Crucially, Series delves into what we should be aiming for. Dr Lucy Series is a lecturer in the school for policy studies at the University of Bristol. She also writes a fabulous blog, The Small Places. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

As a deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness--much to the confusion of the world around her. While she cannot see well enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her blindness and can hear when they're whispering behind her back. And she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be. As a media studies professor, she's also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the Deafblind experience, Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism (Simon Element, 2021) explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was--and is--a world-class, Nobel Prize-winning lab, and its reactor was the cornerstone of US materials science and one of the world's finest research facilities. The leak, harmless to health, came from a storage pool rather than the reactor. But its discovery triggered a media and political firestorm that resulted in the reactor's shutdown, and even attempts to close the entire laboratory. A quarter century later, the episode reveals the dynamics of today's controversies in which fears and the dismissal of science disrupt serious discussion and research of vital issues such as vaccines, climate change, and toxic chemicals. This story has all the elements of a thriller, with vivid characters and dramatic twists and turns. Key players include congressmen and scientists; journalists and university presidents; actors, supermodels, and anti-nuclear activists, all interacting and teaming up in surprising ways. The authors, each with insider knowledge of and access to confidential documents and the key players, reveal how a fact of no health significance could be portrayed as a Chernobyl-like disaster. The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory (MIT Press, 2022) reveals the gaps between scientists, politicians, media, and the public that have only gotten more dangerous since 1997. Peter Bond is a retired physicist who worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory for 43 years in a wide variety of roles, including interim laboratory director during much of the period covered by this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A sweeping history of the federal legislation that prohibits sex discrimination in education, published on the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX. “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” —Title IX’s first thirty-seven words By prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education, the 1972 legislation popularly known as Title IX profoundly changed the lives of women and girls in the United States, accelerating a movement for equal education in classrooms, on sports fields, and in all of campus life. Sherry Boschert's book 37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination (New Press, 2022) is the story of Title IX. Filled with rich characters—from Bernice Resnick Sandler, an early organizer for the law, to her trans grandchild—the story of Title IX is a legislative and legal drama with conflicts over regulations and challenges to the law. It’s also a human story about women denied opportunities, students struggling for an education free from sexual harassment, and activists defying sexist discrimination. These intersecting narratives of women seeking an education, playing sports, and wanting protection from sexual harassment and assault map gains and setbacks for feminism in the last fifty years and show how some women benefit more than others. Award-winning journalist Sherry Boschert beautifully explores the gripping history of Title IX through the gutsy people behind it. In the tradition of the acclaimed documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, 37 Words offers a crucial playbook for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and who is horrified by current attacks on women’s rights. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Why we need to write about difficult topics. Four American towns trying to save themselves. The structural processes behind poverty. A discussion of the book The Fight to Save the Town. Today’s book is: The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America (Avid Reader, 2022), by Michele Wilde Anderson, which examines how decades of cuts to local government amidst rising concentrations of poverty have wreaked havoc on communities left behind by the modern economy. These discarded places include big cities, small cities, rural areas, and historic suburbs. Some are diverse communities, while others are nearly all white, all Latino, or all Black. All are routinely trashed by the media for their poverty and their politics, ignoring how our smallest governments shape people’s safety, comfort, and life chances. For decades, these governments haven’t just reflected inequality—they have helped drive it. But Anderson argues that a new generation of local leaders are figuring out how to turn poverty traps back into gateway cities. Our guest is: Michelle Wilde Anderson, a professor of property, local government, and environmental justice at Stanford Law School. Her writing has appeared in the Stanford Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, among other publications. Prior to joining Stanford, she worked as a visiting professor, assistant professor, a research fellow, and an environmental law fellow. She is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Housing Law Project and a board member at the East Bay Community Law Center in Oakland. She holds a joint appointment with Stanford’s new Doerr School of Sustainability, and lives with her family in San Francisco. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the co-producer of the Academic Life. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union, by Daisy Pitkin Pedagogy of the Poor: Building the Movement to End Poverty, by Willie Baptist and Jan Rehmann How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass, by Aaron Foley Dog Whistle Politics, by Ian Henry Lopez The Miseducation of the Barrio: The School to Prison Pipeline, by Julia Mendoza You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available—but exclusively so, as the city deems much of the population ineligible for civic benefits. The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi (Stanford UP, 2022) examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and life in the city. Contributing to debates about the contradictions of state governmentality and the citizenship projects of the poor in Delhi, this book explores social suffering, logistics, and the logic of political mobilizations that emanate from processes of displacement and resettlement. Sanjeev Routray draws upon fieldwork conducted in various low-income neighborhoods throughout the 2010s to describe the process of claims-making as an attempt by the political community of the poor to assert its existence and numerical strength, and demonstrates how this struggle to be counted constitutes the systematic, protracted, and incremental political process by which the poor claim their substantive entitlements and become entrenched in the city. Analyzing various social, political, and economic relationships, as well as kinship networks and solidarity linkages across the political and social spectrum, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi and establish agency for themselves. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In Black Disability Politics (Duke UP, 2022) Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present. Dr. Schalk shows how Black people have long engaged with disability as a political issue deeply tied to race and racism. She points out that this work has not been recognized as part of the legacy of disability justice and liberation because Black disability politics differ in language and approach from the mainstream white-dominant disability rights movement. Drawing on the archives of the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project alongside interviews with contemporary Black disabled cultural workers, Dr. Schalk identifies common qualities of Black disability politics, including the need to ground public health initiatives in the experience and expertise of marginalized disabled people so that they can work in antiracist, feminist, and anti-ableist ways. Prioritizing an understanding of disability within the context of white supremacy, Dr. Schalk demonstrates that the work of Black disability politics not only exists but is essential to the future of Black liberation movements. Dr. Sami Schalk is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the author of Bodymind Reimagined: Disability, Race, Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2018). Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The global war on drugs began some 150 years before US President Richard Nixon launched the current chapter of America’s drug war in 1971. In Opium’s Orphans: The 200-Year History of the War on Drugs (Reaktion Books, 2022), P. E. Caquet tells the story of “how an ever-larger group of mind-altering products came to be prohibited throughout the world, for what reasons, and with what effects.” The story opens with Britain’s two Opium Wars against the Chinese. Caquet shows how policies based on the properties of opium have been applied to disparate substances. The book describes how a worldwide effort, long led by the United States, to eliminate drugs at their sources has had unplanned consequences – economic, social, and political – while falling far short of the drug war’s stated goals. Finally, Caquet describes how “the last decade has seen an increasingly direct challenge to the international drug-control system.” Opium’s Orphans is a wide-ranging account of a profoundly consequential history whose origins, rationale, and effects raise difficult questions of the limits of governmental action and the scope of human freedom. Steve Beitler’s work in the history of medicine focuses on how pain has been understood, treated, experienced, and represented. His recently published articles examined the history of opiates in American football and surveyed the history of therapeutic drugs. He can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was a giant in the legal world, even if he is often remembered for his four wives, as a potential vice-presidential nominee, as a target of impeachment proceedings, and for his tenure as the longest-serving justice from 1939 to 1975. His most enduring legacy, however, is perhaps his advocacy for the environment. Douglas was the spiritual heir to early twentieth-century conservation pioneers such as Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. His personal spiritual mantra embraced nature as a place of solitude, sanctuary, and refuge. Caught in the giant expansion of America's urban and transportation infrastructure after World War II, Douglas became a powerful leader in forging the ambitious goals of today's environmental movement. And, in doing so, Douglas became a true citizen justice. In a way unthinkable today, Douglas ran a one-man lobby shop from his chambers at the U.S. Supreme Court, bringing him admiration from allies in conservation groups but raising ethical issues with his colleagues. He became a national figure through his books, articles, and speeches warning against environmental dangers. Douglas organized protest hikes to leverage his position as a national icon, he lobbied politicians and policymakers privately about everything from logging to highway construction and pollution, and he protested at the Supreme Court through his voluminous and passionate dissents. Douglas made a lasting contribution to both the physical environment and environmental law--with trees still standing, dams unbuilt, and beaches protected as a result of his work. His merged roles as citizen advocate and justice also put him squarely in the center of ethical dilemmas that he never fully resolved. M. Margaret McKeown's Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas (Potomac Books, 2022) elucidates the why and how of these tensions and their contemporary lessons against the backdrop of Douglas's unparalleled commitment to the environment. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (Verso, 2021) offers a critical look at policing and the power of the state, examining the relationship between our ideas of order and wider social and political issues. First published in 2000, this new edition of Mark Neocleous' influential book features a new introduction which helpfully situates this ever-relevant text in the context of contemporary struggles over police and policing. Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By situating the police power in relation to both capital and the state and at the heart of the politics of security, the book opens up into an understanding of the ways in which the state administers civil society and fabricates order through law and the ideology of crime. The discretionary violence of the police on the street is thereby connected to the wider administrative powers of the state, and the thud of the truncheon to the dull compulsion of economic relations. Content warning: the last 2 minutes of the interview include a brief discussion of Mark's current work on suicide. Listeners who enjoyed this interview may enjoy my recent interviews with Mark on his most recent book The Politics of Immunity, with undercover police ("Spycop") victims Helen Steel and Alison about Deep Deception, and with counterterrorism scholar Rizwaan Sabir about The Suspect. Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University in London, and is well-known for his work on police power and security. His recent books include The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and 'The Enemies of All Mankind' (2016); War Power, Police Power (2014); and the newly-reissued A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (2021). Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy