Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

Described by Voltaire as “perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who was wholly detached from the worldly concerns of his fellow men. Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant (Princeton UP, 2026) provides a groundbreaking reassessment of Leibniz, telling the story of his trials and tribulations as an aspiring scientist and courtier navigating the learned and courtly circles of early modern Europe and the Republic of Letters. Drawing on extensive correspondence by Leibniz and many leading figures of the age, Audrey Borowski paints a nuanced portrait of Leibniz in the 1670s, during his “Paris sojourn” as a young diplomat and in Germany at the court of Duke Johann Friedrich of Hanover. She challenges the image of Leibniz as an isolated genius, revealing instead a man of multiple identities whose thought was shaped by a deep engagement with the social and intellectual milieus of his time. Borowski shows us Leibniz as he was known to his contemporaries, enabling us to rediscover him as an enigmatic young man who was complex and all too human. An exhilarating work of scholarship, Leibniz in His World demonstrates how this uncommon intellect, torn between his ideals and the necessity to work for absolutist states, struggled to make a name for himself during his formative years. Audrey Borowski is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge working on the philosophy of AI. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford and is a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and Aeon. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here

Daniel A. Bell joins the podcast to discuss his new book, Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters: Four Dialogues on China’s Past, Present, and Future (Princeton UP, 2026). This isn't your standard, dusty history — it’s a series of modernized dialogues that grew out of Bell’s own classroom at the University of Hong Kong. In this episode, Daniel tells us about the time he spent as an academic Dean at Shandong University, and where he saw firsthand how ancient Legalist ideas about strict punishment were making everyday life, and even faculty meals, feel rigid and 'joyless'. We talk about why he chose to write the book as a 'heavyweight match' between the descendants of thinkers like Confucius and Zhuangzi, and why he believes the ancient concept of 'harmony' is actually about celebrating differences rather than enforcing sameness. Whether we're talking about the 'fire exit' of modern divorce laws or the high stakes of corruption in Beijing, Daniel shows why these ancient voices are still the most relevant ones in the room. The book is an entertaining introduction to ancient Chinese thinkers, and what they can teach us about today’s most pressing political questions in China and beyond. China’s most original, diverse, and fascinating political debates took place more than two millennia ago, but they have profoundly shaped Chinese political thinking and practice ever since and, remarkably, their influence on the country’s leaders is only growing today. Yet these timeless debates which are very likely to influence the answers to such questions as whether China should use military force to take control of Taiwan seem far too little understood in the West. In this enlightening and entertaining book, Professor Bell takes the greatest thinkers from China’s past — Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Shang Yang, Han Feizi, Zhuangzi, and Mozi—and puts them in dialogue with each other in modern settings.

Doubts about the international dominance of the dollar are only growing amid worries about tariffs, political dysfunction, and fraying international alliances. Will the dollar continue to reign supreme? In Money Beyond Borders, the leading authority on international currencies, Barry Eichengreen, puts the dollar's prospects in deep historical perspective by chronicling the entire history of cross-border currencies, from the invention of coins in the seventh century BCE to the cryptocurrencies of today and the central bank digital currencies of tomorrow. Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto (Princeton University Press, 2026) recounts how Greek and Roman coins became the first true international currencies. It tells how the Florentine gold florin became the "greenback of the Renaissance," and how it was succeeded by Spanish silver and a Dutch fiat currency. The book explains why the British pound dominated the international economy in the nineteenth century, why the dollar rose to the top during World War II, and why the dollar has survived predictions of the imminent loss of its preeminence since the 1970s. The long history of international currencies shows that the same factors that encourage their widespread use eventually lead to their abandonment. Money Beyond Borders makes a powerful case that the dollar is now on the downside of this cycle, and it considers who the winners and losers will be when there is flight away from the greenback. Revealing important patterns in the life cycles of international currencies over the past 2,500 years, the book offers valuable lessons and insights about how currencies rise--and why they fall. Barry Eichengreen is the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

In Late Antiquity (ca. 200–600 CE), the world was alive with unseen forces—divine agents who influenced every aspect of daily life. For most ordinary people, religion was not found in temples, synagogues, and churches, but in lived experience as they interacted with the supernatural in a world of uncertainty and danger. In An Enchanted World, Michael Satlow uncovers a shared spiritual landscape that stretched beyond the confines of Judaism, Christianity, and the pantheon of Greek and Roman deities. From healing rituals to protective amulets, spiritual practices were a matter of necessity, transcending religious labels. To get by in the world required being on good terms with the right supernatural beings and being able to ward off the bad ones. Rejecting traditional narratives that focus on institutional religion and theological divisions, Satlow presents a compelling case for viewing the period through the lens of “lived religion.” This was not a religion of abstractions formulated by rabbis and priests, but an enchanted world populated by divine beings who had as much—if not more—agency as any person. Drawing on archaeological evidence, historical documents, and a rich trove of magical texts, Satlow vividly reconstructs how ordinary people lived in a world that crackled with the energy of the supernatural. His account reimagines the spiritual history of Late Antiquity, centering shared human fears and aspirations and challenging preconceived notions about religious boundaries. With An Enchanted World, Satlow offers a fresh perspective on a transformative period—one that has much to teach us even today about the role that spirituality can play in the secular world. New Books in Late Anqituiy is Presented by Ancient Jew Review Michael Satlow is professor of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies at Brown University Michael Motia teaches Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

The Origins of the New (Princeton University Press, 2026) presents a revolutionary approach to evolutionary success in all realms of life. In this groundbreaking book, Douglas Erwin takes readers on a dazzling excursion across science and history to explore how evolution generates new and enduring features in biology, culture, and technology. Erwin begins by tracing how thinkers from Darwin’s time to the present day have sought to discover the driving mechanisms of evolutionary novelty. He then lays out compelling empirical evidence for separating novelty from innovation, showing that novelty involves the emergence of unique characteristics, while innovation concerns the success of those characteristics over time. Erwin develops a unifying conceptual framework for these powerful dynamics, demonstrating how they have shaped everything from the evolution of avian feathers and flight to the creation of human language and the breathtaking advances in digital computing we’re witnessing today. A landmark work that redefines our understanding of the changes happening all around us, The Origins of the New reveals how the forces of novelty and innovation are the same across nature and culture, continually producing new forms and refashioning the world as we know it. Our guest is doctor Doug Erwin, who is an independent researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, after retiring as Senior Scientist and Curator of Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit--especially apples. These biodiverse orchards seemed worlds away from the cardboard apples that lined supermarket shelves in the United States. Yet on a small patch of woods near her home in Santa Fe, Kumar discovered a wild apple tree--and the seeds of an odyssey were planted. Could the taste of a feral apple offer a doorway to the wild? In The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit (Island Press, 2026), Kumar takes us on a dazzling and transformative journey to rediscover apples, unearthing a rich and complex history while illuminating how we can reimagine our relationship with nature. Apples are popular, but in our everyday lives we rarely encounter more than a handful of varieties: of the sixteen thousand apple varieties once celebrated in America, scarcely a fifth remain accessible. Kumar reveals the richness of a hidden world, bringing readers to the vibrant forests and orchards where historic trees still survive. These mature and wild orchards offer more than just fruit: they are havens for creatures from hummingbirds to bears and a living connection to generations past. She brilliantly weaves together science and childhood memories with the apple's storied history, from its roots in Kazakhstan to Spanish orchards in the Southwest and Thomas Jefferson's beloved Monticello fruitery. The Light Between Apple Trees is a lyric odyssey that will forever change how you look at an "apple a day." Kumar shows how--if we follow untamed paths--the tang and texture of an apple can lead us back to the wild. Priyanka Kumar is a nationally-acclaimed naturalist and the author. Kumar has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California, and serves on the Advisory Council of the Leopold Writing Program. Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

It’s one of the biggest questions in economic history: How did a richer, more advanced China fall behind Europe? Why was Europe the home of the Industrial Revolution, and not China? And what does that journey tell us about politics and culture? In Two Paths to Prosperity: Culture and Institutions in Europe and China, 1000–2000 (Princeton UP, 2025), Guido Tabellini, alongside his co-authors, argues that the answer comes from how European and Chinese organized cooperation—through corporations in Europe and through clans in China—and how that shaped each one’s society. Guido Tabellini is the Intesa Sanpaolo Chair in Political Economics and Vice President at Bocconi University.

The African Gold Coast writer and statesman J. E. Casely Hayford (1866–1930) was a key figure in liberal anticolonial thought as well as African and British imperial literary and intellectual history. In The Letter of the Law in J. E. Casely Hayford's West Africa (Princeton UP, 2026) Jeanne-Marie Jackson positions his career as an intriguing case study of anticolonial literature and politics. Jackson maps the contours of Casely Hayford’s thought through sustained attention to his written work within its Gold Coast and British imperial contexts, demonstrating the far-reaching conceptual and aesthetic resources of his elite legal background. Treating Casely Hayford’s 1911 novel, Ethiopia Unbound, as a constitutional document and his legal writings as literary exemplars, Jackson breaks down artificial divisions between African textual traditions. The law, for Casely Hayford and his Fante nationalist peers, was intimately bound to the virtues they attached to textuality: clear-headedness, moderation, restraint, and public discernment. Jackson argues for this liberal disposition as a crucial and neglected part of anticolonial intellectual and political history. Colonial-era legal debates framed the rise of an influential, consummately modern Gold Coast leader deemed fit to steer ambitious new pan-African institutions, and, in Jackson’s telling, Casely Hayford emerges as his era’s most emblematic figure. Jeanne-Marie Jackson is a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore.

Why did Langston Hughes's translations of Mexican and Cuban stories go unpublished for nearly a century? A landmark book—the first complete publication of Langston Hughes’s translations of thirty-three stories by eighteen Mexican and Cuban writers In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to Mexico City, where he stayed for more than five months and began translating short fiction by prominent Mexican and Cuban writers. These stories, as he wrote to a friend, explore “the revolutions and uprisings, sugar cane, Negroes, Indians, corrupt generals, [and] American imperialists,” and are “mostly all left stories, because practically all the writers down here are left these days.” But when Hughes proposed publishing the stories as a book, to be titled Troubled Lands: Stories of Mexico and Cuba as Translated by Langston Hughes (Princeton University Press, 2026), his agent discouraged him from further pursuing the project and it remained unpublished, until now, with only a handful of the translations making their way into contemporary magazines. This volume presents Hughes’s translations of these stories together for the first time as he originally envisioned. Edited by Ricardo Wilson, the book also features an introduction and brief biographies of the included writers. Troubled Lands features thirty-three stories by eighteen writers, including Rafael Felipe Muñoz, Nellie Campobello, Lino Novás Calvo, Luis Felipe Rodríguez, Germán List Arzubide, Pablo de la Torriente-Brau, and Juan de la Cabada. The collection depicts Mexico in the wake of its revolution and Cuba in the years between the brutal regimes of Machado and Batista. Hughes was a noted translator of poetry, but his commitment to translating fiction is less well known. Troubled Lands provides a window into this important dimension of his work and illuminates his deep interest in Mexico and Cuba. Ricardo A. Wilson II is a creative writer and scholar. He is associate professor of English at Williams College and founder and executive director of The Outpost Foundation. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

Most employers in the United States routinely conduct criminal background checks on job applicants, weeding out those with criminal convictions—and thus denying opportunities to those who need them most. In The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America (Princeton UP, 2025), Melissa Burch sheds light on one of the most significant forces of social and economic marginalization of our time—discrimination on the basis of criminal records. Chronicling the daily interactions of hiring managers, workforce development professionals, and job-seekers with felony convictions in Southern California, Dr. Burch shows that this discrimination is not simply a matter of employer bias. Hiring is shaped by a set of institutions, organizations, and industries that promote the erroneous idea that people with criminal records are dangerous to employ. This “criminal record complex,” as Dr. Burch names it, encourages exclusion and undermines employers’ common-sense ways of assessing candidates. In vivid and intimate detail, Dr. Burch reveals both the futility and devastating human consequences of discriminatory policies. Dr. Burch places today’s routine practice of background screening within racialized notions of risk originating in early capitalist development, tracing how, over decades, criminal background checks became a convenient catch-all, leveraged by entities with a direct interest in growing the practice. Despite this reach, however, Dr. Burch discovers that small business owners tend to put less value on background checks, trusting their own judgment. Approaching the issue from both personal and policy perspectives, The Criminal Record Complex upends what we thought we knew about the causes of criminal record discrimination. It suggests that our best hope for creating safe workplaces lies not in the false promise of background screening, but in building the kinds of economies and communities that support true safety. Our guest is: Dr. Melissa Burch, who is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and Director of the Afterlives of Conviction Project. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and editor for academics. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine Carceral Apartheid Freemans Challenge Hands Up Don't Shoot The Names of all the Flowers The Journal of Higher Education in Prison Black Boy Out of Time Secrets of the Killing State Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

In his new book, The Political Economy of Security (Princeton University Press, 2026), Stephen Brooks provides a systematic empirical and theoretical examination of how economic factors influence security affairs. Empirically, he analyzes how various economic variables affect interstate war, terrorism, and civil war; in total, sixteen pathways are examined.  Brooks shows that the relationship between economic factors and conflict is complex and multifaceted; discrete economic factors—such as international trade, economic development, and globalized manufacturing, to name a few—are sometimes helpful for promoting peace and stability, but at other times are detrimental. Brooks also develops a stronger theoretical foundation for guiding future research on the economics-security interaction. Drawing on Adam Smith, he provides a more complete range of answers to the three key conceptual questions analysts must consider: how economic goals relate to security goals; what economic factors to focus on; and how economic actors influence security policies. Combining an innovative theoretical understanding with empirical rigor, Brooks’s account will reshape our understanding of the political economy of security. Our guest is Professor Stephen Brooks, a Professor of Government at Dartmouth. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

What did slavery actually look like in the everyday lives of Jews in the medieval Middle East? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with historian Craig Perry to discuss his groundbreaking book Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History (Princeton UP, 2026). Drawing on the extraordinary archive of the Cairo Geniza, Perry reconstructs a hidden world of enslaved people, merchants, and households in medieval Egypt. These fragments—letters, contracts, and legal questions preserved for centuries in a synagogue—reveal how slavery shaped Jewish and Islamic society at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. From global slave trading networks that stretched from Europe and Africa to India, to the intimate spaces of kitchens and courtyards, Perry uncovers how enslaved people lived, labored, resisted, and sometimes entered Jewish communities after gaining their freedom. The story even reframes familiar rituals: medieval Jewish children could look around the Passover table and see slavery embodied in the people serving the meal. Together, Perry and Katz explore how this overlooked history forces us to rethink medieval Jewish life, the social realities behind religious texts, and the complex entanglements of Jews with the broader Arab-Islamic world. About the Guest Craig Perry is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. A specialist in the social and economic history of the medieval Middle East, his research focuses on slavery, law, and everyday life in Jewish and Islamic societies. He also is the editor of The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500 – AD 1420. About the Host Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud, including Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Through his writing, teaching, and podcast conversations with scholars and public thinkers, Katz brings cutting-edge scholarship into dialogue with contemporary Jewish life.

James Bryce (1838–1922) was a leading figure in Britain’s Liberal Party and a distinguished historian, a versatile scholar-politician who moved seamlessly between academia and politics. He was, among many other things, a cabinet minister and a popular ambassador, an expert on American politics and on Roman law, an advocate for the Armenian people and an architect of the League of Nations, a world traveller and a climber of Mount Ararat. In Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect (Princeton UP, 2025), Stuart Jones offers an intellectual biography of Bryce, tracing a Scots-Ulster Presbyterian’s assimilation to the increasingly multiconfessional Victorian state, and a late Victorian Liberal’s encounter with the wider world. Jones shows how a polymathic intelligence grappled with a dizzyingly wide range of concerns and issues, including the challenges of democracy and race relations, the rise of modern universities and the reconstruction of the international order after World War I. In mapping the evolution of Bryce’s thought, Liberal Worlds illuminates the international intellectual networks and the many places across the globe that shaped his thinking. Jones considers, for example, why a man who had a lifelong revulsion against slavery seemed to accept racial segregation in the American South; how a vigorous activist for girls’ and women’s education became a tenacious parliamentary critic of women’s suffrage; and why, over the objections of his Ulster Presbyterian family, he backed Irish home rule. Above all, Jones rescues Bryce—immensely influential in his time, now little remembered—from being consigned to a historical pigeonhole, restoring him to the centre of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates over the nature of democratic politics. Stuart Jones is professor of intellectual history at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The French State in Question: Public Law and Political Argument in the Third Republic, Victorian Political Thought, and Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here

How the urban-rural divide drives partisan polarization Why have Americans living in different places come to experience politics as a battle between “us” and “them”? In Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy (Princeton UP, 2025) Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown argue that political polarization is not just about red states and blue states, or coastal elites who alienate those in fly-over country. Instead, polarization permeates every region and every state—and has become organized through a pernicious rural-urban division. Mettler and Brown explain the evolution of this gulf across five decades, charting political trends in both places. Drawing on data on individuals, communities, and members of Congress, as well as interviews with local party leaders and former elected officials, they show how the divide emerged and why it poses a threat to democracy. Until about thirty years ago, both political parties attracted support from rural and urban voters. But after place-based inequality grew due to deregulation and trade liberalization, white rural dwellers began to view urban people and Democrats as affluent elites out of touch with their needs. Politically active evangelical churches, antiabortion organizations, and gun groups helped deepen the divide, encouraging many of these rural residents to become staunch supporters of the GOP. Now, regional one-party rule in rural America gives Republicans a systematic edge for gaining control of crucial political institutions, including the Senate, House of Representatives, the Presidency, and even the Supreme Court. This is helping enable an extremist political party and pushing democracy to the brink. Mettler and Brown argue that the divide can be repaired—but only if the Democrats build their own robust local organizations and offer citizens a meaningful choice. Host Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she specialises in the study of public policymaking and litigation in the US. A former British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, she is the author of the award-winning book,America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Trevor Brown is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. In Fall 2026, he will join the University of Oregon's Department of Political Science as Assistant Professor of Inequality.

Mothers and fathers use their time differently, with women spending roughly twice as many hours on family labor as men. But what about the gendered differences in the ways women and men think? What’s on Her Mind examines the cognitive labor that families depend on, and reveals why this essential aspect of family life is disproportionately handled by women—even in couples that aspire to practice equality. While most accounts of household labor center on how people use their time, Dr. Allison Daminger focuses on a less visible and less easily quantifiable aspect of family life. She introduces readers to the concept of cognitive labor—anticipating, researching, deciding, and following up—and shows how women in different-gender couples do most of this critical work. Dr. Daminger argues that cognitive labor has less to do with personality traits—for example, she’s type A while he’s laid-back—and more to do with learned skills that men and women deploy in distinct ways. Yet not all couples fall into the personality trap. Dr. Daminger looks at different-gender couples who achieve a more balanced cognitive allocation while also exploring how queer couples carve out unique relationships to the gender binary. Drawing on original, in-depth interviews with members of different- and same-gender couples, What’s on Her Mind points to new ways of understanding the interplay between who we are as individuals and the cognitive work we do on behalf of our families. Our guest is: Dr. Allison Daminger, who is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She’s the author of What’s On Her Mind; her work has also been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian, Psychology Today, and the Atlantic. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: You're Doing It Wrong Raising Them Sin Padres Ni Papeles Tomboy PhDing While Parenting Sharing lessons from his working-class parents Recipes, parenting, and grief We Take Our Cities With Us Secret Harvests The Translators Daughter Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

The story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes. Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (Princeton UP, 2025) unearths another history, one of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labor.  Focusing on the working majority, Kim Bowes tells the stories of people like the tenant farmer Epimachus, Faustilla the moneylender, and the pimp Philokles. She reveals how the economic changes of the period created a set of bitter challenges and opportunistic hustles for everyone from farmers and craftspeople to day laborers and slaves. She finds working people producing a consumer revolution, making and buying all manner of goods from fine pottery to children’s toys. Many of the poorest working people probably pieced together a living from multiple sources of income, including wages. And she suggests that Romans’ most daunting challenge was the struggle to save. Like many modern people, saving enough to buy land or start a business was a slow, precarious slog. Bowes shows how these economies of survival were shared by a wide swath of the populace, blurring the lines between genders, ages, and legal status. Drawing on new archaeological and textual evidence, Surviving Rome presents a radical new perspective on the economy of ancient Rome while speaking to the challenges of today’s laborers and gig workers surviving in an unforgiving global world. Kim Bowes is professor of archaeology and ancient history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire and Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here

Eleven days into the attack on Iran by the United States and Israel, starting on Feb. 28, 2026, I speak with Vali Nasr, a renowned analyst of Iran. He’s the author of several books dealing with Iran, including most recently Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History (Princeton University Press, 2025). Nasr was born in Tehran in 1960 and is currently a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In our talk, he discusses his surprise at the resilience the Iranian government has so far displayed in the war, as well as the high degree of advance planning the government performed in anticipation of the attack. Although many Iranians do not like the Islamic Republic, he told me, there is nevertheless a resurgent element of Iranian nationalism in Iranian society. The West, he believes, underestimates the cohesion of Iran. Vali Nasr is the Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. Paul Starobin is a former contributing editor of The Atlantic and a former Moscow bureau chief of Business Week. His companion Substack newsletter America and Beyond includes transcripts of podcasts.

A sympathetic critique that attempts to free Left politics from its own snares, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton University Press, 2025) explores how woundedness became a basis for contemporary political identity. Without condemning identity politics, Wendy Brown carefully probes the varied historical forces generating them today and the ways these formative conditions constrain emancipatory desire. Along the way, she advances a novel feminist critical theory of liberalism and the liberal democratic state. She also develops an original theoretical practice that weaves together Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Foucault, and cultural theories of gender and race to analyze contemporary political predicaments. In a new preface, Brown places States of Injury in political and intellectual context, including the rise of neoliberalism, and addresses the book’s renewed relevance in today’s political landscape. Wendy Brown is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her books include Nihilistic Times, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, and Undoing the Demos. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

Today I’m speaking with economist Bryan Caplan about education and bullshit, with a particular focus on his book, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton University Press, 2018). In our modern economy, possessing a college degree feels like a necessity for professional advancement. The age of good jobs for college dropouts is largely gone as more people spend more time in the classroom, writing papers, taking tests, and, of course, goofing off. On the one hand, policymakers celebrate the additional degrees attained by more people. Surely a more educated society means a more intelligent and productive one. It’s no secret that college grads make more money than dropouts, and high school grads make more than those who didn’t complete 12th grade. Why is this the case? Does more education truly endow students with the skills necessary to succeed in the working world, or does education merely serve to certify that an individual has the intelligence and people skills needed to succeed? If the primary value of education is to signal conformity to employers’ expectations, then education as we know it is a waste of time, energy, and money. Degrees range in practicality, but most—like economics—hardly spend time teaching the kinds of skills that translate to the jobs most graduates actually take. As Bryan puts it, “As far as I can tell, the only marketable skill I teach is how to be an economics professor.” The world certainly needs some economics professors, but the sentiment behind the point reflects an undeniable dirty little secret. Professors, by and large, teach students about their favorite subjects, not skills for career success. For years, I’ve trumpeted the line that the purpose of higher education is not to teach skills but rather to teach students how to think. The Case Against Education deflates this argument with statistics and great humor. As the type of student who loved taking Russian literature, political philosophy, and economic history, I’m thrilled to speak with Bryan Caplan about bullshit and education. Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

Populist leaders around the world increasingly reject international organizations, decrying them as constraints on state power and rallying followers against the “global elite” who run them. These institutions—painstakingly built through decades of negotiation and multilateral cooperation—are often seen as passive bystanders, unable or unwilling to push back. In Global Governance Under Fire: How International Organizations Resist the Populist Wave (Princeton UP, 2026) Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark challenge this view, arguing that international organizations are, in fact, strategic agents with the tools to resist populist pressures. Offering fresh theoretical insights and original empirical analysis, they investigate how these institutions fight back and how their defensive strategies are reshaping global governance. Using a multimethod approach that draws on novel data and qualitative evidence, Carnegie and Clark identify four key strategies that international organizations employ to both appease and sideline populists and their constituents. They find that while these strategies help fortify global governance against populist opposition, they may also produce unintended consequences, potentially eroding institutional legitimacy and fueling further resistance. A timely and compelling account, the book provides a crucial roadmap for understanding—and safeguarding—the global order. Our guests are Professor Allison Carnegie, a professor of political science at Columbia University. and Professor Richard Clark, who is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).