In parsha Emor (Leviticus 21:1-24:23), David and Modya continue to explore "frugality." They look at it being part of a continuum of holiness and see how frugality in action needs to match an inner authentic orientation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnet…

How to Love in Sanskrit (HarperCollins, 2024) is an invitation to Sanskrit love poetry, bringing together verses and short prose pieces by celebrated writers. How do you brew a love potion? Turn someone crimson with a compliment? How do you make love? How do you quarrel and make up? Nurse a broken heart? And how do you let go? There's something for…

Throughout the nuclear age, states have taken many different paths toward or away from nuclear weapons. These paths have been difficult to predict and cannot be explained simply by a stable or changing security environment. We can make sense of these paths by examining leaders' nuclear decisions. The political decisions state leaders make to accele…

For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. In Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard Universit…

Today’s book is: At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans (Columbia UP, 2024), by Tessa Hill and Eric Simons, which takes readers beneath the waves and along the coasts, to explore how climate change and environmental degradation have spurred the most radical transformations in human history. The world’s oceans are changing at a…

In The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Kunal M. Parker explores the massive reorientation of American legal, political, and economic thinking between 1870 and 1970. Over this period, American conceptions of law, democracy, and markets went from being oriented around tru…

Development is political but what does that mean for how we solve some of the biggest challenges facing the world today? A pathbreaking new book, The Politics of Development (Sage, 2024), sets out to answer this question and many more. Why is it so hard to reduce corruption, deliver good quality healthcare, and create more equal societies? And what…

Today I had the great pleasure of talking to Associate Professor Jennifer Dorothy Lee on her new book, Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985 (U California Press, 2024). Anxiety Aesthetics is the first book to consider a prehistory of contemporaneity in China through the emergent creative practices in the aftermath of the Mao era. …

India’s stock markets are booming. One calculation from Bloomberg puts India as the world’s fourth-largest equity market, overtaking Hong Kong, as domestic and foreign investors pile into the Indian stock exchange. But getting to the point where India’s stock markets—and its financial system more broadly—could work effectively took a long time. As …

Sari Nusseibeh's book Avicenna's Al-Shifā': Oriental Philosophy (Routledge, 2018) deals with the philosophy of Ibn Sina - Avicenna as he was known in the Latin West- a Persian Muslim who lived in the eleventh century, considered one of the most important figures in the history of philosophy. Although much has been written about Avicenna, and especi…

In 1974 the government of Jordan established a new ministry to oversee a nationwide scheme to buy and distribute subsidized flour and regulate bakeries. The scheme sets terms for the politics that are the subject of a new book: States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022). Rest assured, this …

The whole world has a stake in India's future, and that future hinges on whether India can develop its economy and deliver for its population--now the world's largest--while staying democratic. India's economy has overtaken the United Kingdom's to become the fifth-largest in the world, but it is still only one-fifth the size of China's, and India's…

Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach (Bloomsbury, 2022) uses a comparative framework to understand Russian history in a global context. The book challenges the idea of Russia as an outlier of European civilization by examining select themes in modern Russian history alongside cases drawn from the British Empire. Choi Chatterjee analyze…

The United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2023…

Sumanth Prabhaker is the editor-in-chief of Orion and the founding editor of Madra Press. He earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he was an editor for the journal Ecotone. Founded in 1982, Orion has evolved as a magazine over the years from the quieter, reverential environmental sensitivity that co…

In his latest book At Home in Nature: Technology, Labor, and Critical Ecology in Modern China (Duke UP, 2022), Ban Wang uses an ecocritical lens to examine anthropocentrism, technoscientific hubris, and ecologically destructive modes of production in modern China. Analyzing modern discourse, literature, film, and science fiction, Wang asserts that …

Educational analytics tend toward aggregation, asking what a “normative” learner does. In The Left Hand of Data: Designing Education Data for Justice (MIT Press, 2024, open access at this link), educational researchers Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia start from a different assumption—that outliers are, and must be treated as, valued individuals. …

In Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Tessa Winkelmann examines interracial social and sexual contact between Americans and Filipinos in the early twentieth century via a wide range of relationships—from the casual and economic to the formal a…

Christopher Tounsel's book Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity (Cornell UP, 2024) explores the history of Black America's intellectual and cultural engagement with the modern state of Sudan. Ancient Sudan occupies a central place in the Black American imaginary as an exemplar of Black glory, pride, and civi…

Thousands of shows have opened on Broadway. Why do we remember some and not others? The musical theatre repertory is not composed of titles popular in the theatre but by those with successful cast recordings, movie versions, or even illegal bootlegs on YouTube. The shows audiences know, and the texts and music they expect to hear when they attend a…

The Future of War Crimes Justice (Melville House, 2024), journalist and war correspondent Chris Stephen takes a colourful look at the erratic history of war crimes justice, and the pioneers who created it. He examines its shortcomings, and options for making it more effective, including the case for prosecuting the corporations and banks who fund w…

Defeating the forces of authoritarianism is the political combat task of our age, and we must take it up with the certitude and boldness that our eminent forebears did. Rebuilding the Democrats’ appeal by reestablishing reputations for superior strength and patriotism is a challenge. But the fact that democracy’s plight is due to flaws in liberals’…

In Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines (Duke UP, 2023), Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton trac…

Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England: History, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Christianity (Brill, 2023) argues that in order to understand nationalisms, we need a clearer understanding of the types of cultural myths, symbols, and traditions that legitimate them. Myths of origin and election, memories of a greater and purer past, and narrativ…

Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Dr. Liliana Doganova’s book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (Princeton University Press, 2024) sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in…

In this episode of High Theory, Rasheed Tazudeen tells us about the inhuman. The inhuman offers a way of moving beyond the legacies of humanism and across categories and scales of being. Thinking with the inhuman world, from spools of thread to microplastics, helps us try and think otherwise about the complex assemblages that shape our lives. If yo…

During an era of broad political dissatisfaction, what is the history and role of the Constitution? Does the Constitution still have the power to unite us? Dr. Yuval Levin joins Madison's Notes to discuss his forthcoming book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation ― and Could Again. Along the way, he delves into key American fig…