NBN Book of the Day

From the workings of financial markets to our response to the ecological crisis, economic theory shapes the world. But where do these ideas come from? Ricardo’s Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray (Bristol University Press, 2024) tells the fascinating story of David Ricardo, Adam Smith’s only real rival as the ‘founder of economics’. The wealthiest stock trader of his day, Ricardo introduced the study of abstract models to economics. He also developed the theory of trade that underpinned globalization and hides, behind its mathematical facade, a history of power, empire, and slavery. Brimming with fresh ideas and stories, Ricardo’s Dream shows how too many economists, from Ricardo’s day to our own, have turned away from observing the real world and led us astray. Nat Dyer is a writer and researcher specialising in global political economy. He is a Fellow of the Schumacher Institute and the Royal Society of Arts. He has worked for Global Witness and for Promoting Economic Pluralism and his stories have been reported on by the BBC, the New York Times and Bloomberg 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. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Star. Stjarna. Setareh. Thousands of miles apart, humans look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see. Listen to these English, Icelandic, and Iranian words, and you can hear echoes of one of history's most unlikely, miraculous journeys. For all of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient source. In a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue exploded outwards, forming new worlds as it spread east and west. Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. How did this happen? In Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (HarperCollins, 2025), acclaimed journalist Laura Spinney sets off to find out. Travelling over the steppe and the silk roads, she follows in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings – the ancient peoples who spread their words far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists, archaeologists and linguists racing to reanimate this lost world. What they have learned has vital lessons for our modern age, as people and their languages are on the move again. Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word. Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

An enthralling tour of the world’s rarest and most endangered languages Languages and cultures are becoming increasingly homogenous, with the resulting loss of a rich linguistic tapestry reflecting unique perspectives and ways of life. Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages (Princeton University Press, 2025) tells the stories of the world’s rare and vanishing languages, revealing how each is a living testament to human resilience, adaptability, and the perennial quest for identity. Taking readers on a captivating journey of discovery, Lorna Gibb explores the histories of languages under threat or already extinct as well as those in resurgence, shedding light on their origins, development, and distinctive voices. She travels the globe—from Australia and Finland to India, the Canary Islands, Namibia, Scotland, and Paraguay—showing how these languages are not mere words and syntax but keepers of diverse worldviews, sites of ethnic conflict, and a means for finding surprising commonalities. Readers learn the basics of how various language systems work—with vowels and consonants, whistles and clicks, tonal inflections, or hand signs—and how this kaleidoscope of self-expression carries vital information about our planet, indigenous cultures and tradition, and the history and evolution of humankind. Rare Tongues is essential reading for anyone concerned about the preservation of endangered languages and an eloquent and disarmingly personal meditation on why the world’s linguistic heritage is so fundamental to our shared experience—and why its loss should worry us all.Lorna Gibb is associate professor of creative writing and linguistics at the University of Stirling.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In Cormac McCarthy's 1985 Western, Blood Meridian, the story follows infamous scalp hunter John Joel Glanton through the Mexican borderlands in the mid-19th century. How much of this story is myth, and how much history, asks Texas A&M-San Antonio history professor William Kiser. In his new book, The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America (Yale UP, 2025), Kiser argues that scalp hunting, or scalp warfare as it may more accurately be called, was in many ways more brutal, and more nuanced and complex, than popular imaginings often describe. By following the practice from 17th century New France to colonial and early republic New England, through to the southwestern borderlands and finally the California gold rush in the mid-19th century, Kiser uncovers important differences, as well as throughlines, from time to time and place to place. In doing so, The Business of Killing Indians shows that there is no one story of Native-settler relations, and that while structural forces like markets and colonialism matter a great deal, when it comes to violence, the devil truly lies in the details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

If your reaction to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol was to think, 'That’s not us,' think again. In Illiberal America: A History (Norton, 2024), a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian uncovers a powerful illiberalism as deep-seated in the American past as the founding ideals.A storm of illiberalism, building in the United States for years, unleashed its destructive force in the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021. The attack on American democracy and images of mob violence led many to recoil, thinking “That’s not us.” But now we must think again, for Steven Hahn shows in his startling new history that illiberalism has deep roots in our past. To those who believe that the ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence set us apart as a nation, Hahn shows that Americans have long been animated by competing values, equally deep-seated, in which the illiberal will of the community overrides individual rights, and often protects itself by excluding perceived threats, whether on grounds of race, religion, gender, economic status, or ideology.Driven by popular movements and implemented through courts and legislation, illiberalism is part of the American bedrock. The United States was born a republic of loosely connected states and localities that demanded control of their domestic institutions, including slavery. As white settlement expanded west and immigration exploded in eastern cities, the democracy of the 1830s fueled expulsions of Blacks, Native Americans, Catholics, Mormons, and abolitionists. After the Civil War, southern states denied new constitutional guarantees of civil rights and enforced racial exclusions in everyday life. Illiberalism was modernized during the Progressive movement through advocates of eugenics who aimed to reduce the numbers of racial and ethnic minorities as well as the poor. The turmoil of the 1960s enabled George Wallace to tap local fears of unrest and build support outside the South, a politics adopted by Richard Nixon in 1968. Today, with illiberalism shaping elections and policy debates over guns, education, and abortion, it is urgent to understand its long history, and how that history bears on the present crisis.Steven Hahn is an acclaimed historian whose works include A Nation Under Our Feet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize, and A Nation Without Borders. He is professor of history at New York University.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. Twitter.Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word.Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter.150 million lifetime downloads. Advertise on the New Books Network. Watch our promotional video.Learn how to make the most of our library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

What does a general education from an Ivy League mean? What structures produce the course catalogues that students can choose to customize their education from? Is a world-class degree a world-class education?In this episode, we sit down with the three authors of Slacking: A Guide A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation (Encounter Books, 2025). Adam Kissel, Madison Marino Doan, and Rachel Alexander Cambre guide us through their process of collaboration and their argument that Ivy League institutions are not providing students with a quality education. Through the saturation of DEI-coded or hyper-specialized courses, they argue, students lack access to classical education and Western civilization–based instruction that would better serve their intellectual development. The authors discuss their approach to building the argument, the origins of their idea, and what students should keep in mind when selecting their schools and course lists.Adam Kissel is a visiting fellow for higher education reform in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. He is a board member of the University of West Florida, Southern Wesleyan University, and the National Association of Scholars. Rachel Alexander Cambre teaches for Belmont Abbey College’s new Master of Arts in Classical and Liberal Education program. A visiting fellow in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Politics and Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation from 2022 to 2024, she researches and writes on liberal arts education and American political thought. She held a research postdoctoral fellowship at the James Madison Program from 2019-2020. Madison Marina Doan is a senior research associate in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Her work focuses on affordability and accountability reform in higher education and K-12 education choice initiatives. Her work may be found in Fox News, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, The Daily Signal, and the Educational Freedom Institute.Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Video (television, film, the moving image generally) is today’s most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information more often from screens and speakers than through any other means. The Moving Image: A User's Manual (MIT Press, 2025) is the first authoritative account of how we have arrived here, together with the first definitive manual to help writers, educators, and publishers use video more effectively. Drawing on decades as an educator, publisher, and producer, MIT’s Peter Kaufman presents new tools, best practices, and community resources for integrating film and sound into media that matters. Kaufman describes video’s vital role in politics, law, education, and entertainment today, only 130 years since the birth of film. He explains how best to produce video, distribute it, clear rights to it, cite it, and, ultimately, archive and preserve it. With detailed guidance on producing and deploying video and sound for publication, finding and using archival video and sound, securing rights and permissions, developing distribution strategies, and addressing questions about citation, preservation, and storage—across the broadest spectrum of platforms, publications, disciplines, and formats—The Moving Image equips readers for the medium’s continued ascendance in education, publishing, and knowledge dissemination in the decades to come. And, modeled in part on Strunk and White’s classic, The Elements of Style, it’s also a highly enjoyable read.Peter B. Kaufman is Senior Program Officer at MIT Open Learning. He is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge and founder of Intelligent Television, a video production company that works with cultural and educational institutions around the world.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The growing concern about global environmental change and human impacts on the planet has led to the emergence of a broad field of study on the 'sustainability' of human societies. The term's common usage can be traced back to the advent of the Earth Summit in 1992 when 'sustainable development' was broadly embraced by the international community as an ostensibly win-win proposition for economic development, social inclusion, and ecological conservation. Yet both the natural science underpinnings and the social implications of a quest for sustainability have been diffuse. There is a need for a coherentSustainability: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2024) begins by introducing the concept of sustainability and how it has developed. The central chapters consider four key concepts crucial to sustainability: a) material and energy flows in consumption and production; b) technological interventions for a sustainable society; c) tipping points, and resilience in natural and social systems; and d) renewability and circularity in the economy. In the concluding chapter, Saleem H. Ali explores political means of managing anthropogenic change for a more sustainable society. Earthly Order by Saleem H. Ali Pursuing Sustainability: A Guide to the Science and Practice  National Sustainability Society Saleem's column in Forbes Saleem H. Ali is Chair and Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of Delaware.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so. The result is the explosive growth of an industry dominated by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings. One out of every five American adults gambled on sports in 2023, amounting to $121 billion, more than they spent on movies and video games combined.The rise of online sports gambling—the immediacy of betting with your phone, the ability of the companies to target users, the dynamic pricing and offers based on how good or bad of a gambler you are—has produced a public health crisis marked by addiction and far too many people, particularly young men, gambling more than they can afford to lose. Under intense lobbying from the gaming industry, states have created a system built around profit for sportsbooks, not the well-being of players.In Losing Big: America's Dangerous Sports Gambling Boom (Columbia Global Reports, 2025), historian Jonathan D. Cohen lays out the astonishing emergence of online sports gambling, from sportsbook executives drafting legislation to an addicted gambler confessing their $300,000 losses. Sports gambling is here to stay, and the stakes could not be higher. Losing Big explains how this brewing crisis came to be, and how it can be addressed before new generations get hooked.Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, will be out in the fall of 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although agricultural inputs are a huge sector of the global economy, the lion's share of that market is controlled by a relatively small number of very large transnational corporations. The high degree of concentration among these agribusiness titans is striking, considering that just a few hundred years ago agricultural inputs were not even marketed goods. In Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters (MIT Press, 2025), Dr. Jennifer Clapp explains how we got from there to here, outlining the forces that enabled this extreme concentration of power and the entrenchment of industrial agriculture.Clapp reveals that the firms that rose to the top of these sectors benefited from distinct market, technology, and policy advantages dating back a century or more that enabled them to expand their businesses through mergers and acquisitions that made them even bigger and more powerful. These dynamics matter because the firms at the top have long shaped industrial farming practices that, in turn, have generated enormous social, ecological, and health impacts on the planet and the future of food systems. Beyond analyzing how these problems have arisen and manifested, the book examines recent efforts to address corporate power and dominance in food systems and assesses the prospects for change.Among the first works to examine deep roots of corporate power in agriculture, Titans of Industrial Agriculture helps illuminate just how corporate actors have encouraged the “lock-in” of industrial agriculture, despite all its known social and ecological costs.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day