New Books in Politics and Polemics

Total faith in meritocracy leads to the dangerous belief that all social winners and losers are wholly deserving. Instead, we need an economy of grace.Guests Victor Tan Chen, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Understanding race in America requires understanding its relationship to class.Guests Joshua Bennett, writer and poet Julian Bourg, Professor of History at Boston College Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Efficiency has moved from a technique for measuring machines to a widely held moral value. But at what cost?Guests Jennifer Alexander, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota and author of The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control Tom Hodgkinson, founder and editor of The Idler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Vanessa A. Bee is a consumer protection lawyer with a freelancing habit. Primarily interested in inequality, corporate power, the American Left, and Washington D.C. She also loves a good meandering essay.Book Recommendations: Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus Hernan Diaz, Trust Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

The National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and place them in sanctuaries. This significant decision comes after a lengthy process of examination and debate about the ethics of animal research. For decades, proponents of such research have argued that the discoveries and benefits for humans far outweigh the costs of the traumatic effects on the animals; but today, even the researchers themselves have come to question the practice. John P. Gluck has been one of the scientists at the forefront of the movement to end research on primates, and in Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist's Ethical Journey (U Chicago Press, 2016) he tells a vivid, heart-rending, personal story of how he became a vocal activist for animal protection.Gluck begins by taking us inside the laboratory of Harry F. Harlow at the University of Wisconsin, where Gluck worked as a graduate student in the 1960s. Harlow’s primate lab became famous for his behavioral experiments in maternal deprivation and social isolation of rhesus macaques. Though trained as a behavioral scientist, Gluck finds himself unable to overlook the intense psychological and physical damage these experiments wrought on the macaques. Gluck’s sobering and moving account reveals how in this and other labs, including his own, he came to grapple with the uncomfortable justifications that many researchers were offering for their work. As his sense of conflict grows, we’re right alongside him, developing a deep empathy for the often smart and always vulnerable animals used for these experiments.At a time of unprecedented recognition of the intellectual cognition and emotional intelligence of animals, Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals is a powerful appeal for our respect and compassion for those creatures who have unwillingly dedicated their lives to science. Through the words of someone who has inflicted pain in the name of science and come to abhor it, it’s important to know what has led this far to progress and where further inroads in animal research ethics are needed.John P. Gluck is professor emeritus of psychology and a senior advisor to the president on animal research ethics and welfare at the University of New Mexico. He is also research professor of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University and coauthor of The Human Use of Animals.Callie Smith is a poet and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

What happens when politics becomes comedy and the jester becomes the king?Guests Emily Nussbaum, television critic for The New Yorker Avi Steinberg, writer Kwesi Mensah, comedian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

With the Supreme Court poised to potentially outlaw race-conscious admissions, Affirmative Action may soon be on the chopping block.What will be the legacy of this half-century-old policy? Jason Riley, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and columnist at the Wall Street Journal, discusses affirmative action's impact both on the black community and the broader American education system. Riley is the author of Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell and Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.Riley's piece "Racial Preferences Harm Their Beneficiaries, Too" is here.Riley's article "The College Board's Racial Pandering" is here.Statistical evidence of the impact of racial preferences in college admissions, mentioned in the discussion is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

The last several decades have seen a mass consolidation of wealth among a few, the rest of the world left to various degrees of dispossession. On top of this, the revolutionary movements that characterized much of the 19th and 20th centuries have generally disappeared or retreated, reform being the name of the game for most progressives. In spite of this, revolutionary movements and events have actually increased in the last few decades.This seeming contradiction is one of the animating ideas of the new essay anthology Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age: Struggling to Be Born? (Haymarket Books, 2021). A sort of spiritual sequel to the 1987 collection Revolutionary Rehearsals, this book contains several essays on revolutionary movements of the neoliberal era, bookended by more theoretical chapters on the nature of social and political movements. International in scope, the essays start with struggles in Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War and end with the Arab uprisings in Egypt. In between are essays on South and Sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, Bolivia, Argentina and Latin American Pink Tide movements. The bookending essays deal with theoretical questions; the nature of political movements, contexts in which those movements arise and how change can actually be brought about. Grounded in the reality of our dire political situation but animated by the hope that change is always nevertheless a real possibility, the essays here will provide excellent starting points for activists to think critically about their own situations and how they might rise to meet them.Gareth Dale is Associate Head of the Department of Social and Political Sciences at Brunel University in London. His recent books include Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left and Reconstructing Karl Polanyi: Excavation and Critique.Colin Barker was a lifelong activist and author. His many publications included Revolutionary Rehearsals (1987) and Marxism and Social Movements.Neil Davidson was a lecturer in sociology and political science. His many publications included How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? and Discovering the Scottish Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

By any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper moral response to this? Can prisons and the practices surrounding incarceration feasibly be reformed, or should the entire enterprise be abolished? If the latter, then what? If the former, what are the necessary reforms?In The Idea of Prison Abolition (Princeton UP, 2022), Tommie Shelby undertakes a systematic and critical examination of the arguments in favor of prison abolition. Although he ultimately rejects abolitionism as a philosophical position, he builds from the abolitionist program’s crucial insights a positive view of what it would take to create a prison and incarceration system that is consistent with justice.Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Why are women judged for their size? What if you decided that you had the right to remain fat? This episode explores: Our born desire to like ourselves as we are. How we get shamed out of that at such a young age, and so very quickly. How hard it is to re-learn how to like yourself. Why our cultural commitment to fat-phobia harms us all. A Discussion of the book You Have the Right To Remain Fat. Our guest is: Virgie Tovar, who is an author, activist, and a lecturer on weight-based discrimination and body image. She holds a Master's degree in Sexuality Studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. She edited the anthology Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press, November 2012), is the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat (Feminist Press August 2018), The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color (New Harbinger Publications 2020), and The Body Positive Journal (Chronicle Books 2022). She has received three San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commissions as well as Yale's Poynter Fellowship in Journalism.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: Fatty Fatty Boom Boom, by Rabia Chaudry What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, by Aubrey Gordon Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness, by Da’Shaun L. Harrison Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, by Sabrina Strings The Body is Not An Apology, Second Edition, by Sonya Renee Taylor Welcome to The Academic Life! On the Academic Life channel we embrace a broad definition of what it means 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. Find us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics