New Books Network

Rolando Pujol, author and journalist who chronicles roadside Americana, guides a coast-to-coast retro road trip celebrating vintage signs, quirky giant attractions, and classic fast-food architecture. He tours neon diners, doo-wop motels, drive-ins, and Route 66 oddities. He urges curiosity, exploring secondary roads, and preserving these fading cultural treasures.

Yossef Rapoport, a historian of the medieval Arabic-speaking Middle East, explores how rural communities transformed into Arab identities. He challenges migration-based stories. He examines peasants, land rights, tax records, revolts, and how claims of Arab lineage interacted with Islam and Turkish rule. The conversation traces social change from local villages to clan-based Arabness by the 15th century.

Stephen Bezruchka, a public health physician who studies how social and political forces shape population health. He explores why the U.S. fares poorly in life expectancy despite high spending. Topics include inequality as a toxic force, early-life and intergenerational stress, geographic and racial disparities, cultural supports like the Latino advantage, and policy lessons from Japan.

Emile Suotonye DeWeaver, formerly incarcerated organizer and author whose sentence was commuted after 21 years, draws on prison journalism and activism. He critiques how white supremacy shapes reforms and parole, exposes hidden forces that extend sentences, and explores power redistribution, collective care, and models that center incarcerated leadership.

Swapna Kona Nayudu, an academic of international history and Indian foreign policy, discusses Nehru-era non-alignment. She explores its intellectual roots in Tagore and Gandhi. She traces India’s diplomatic interventions in Korea, Suez, Hungary, and the Congo. She examines non-alignment as neutrality plus mediation and its limits in practice.

Around 500 BCE, the Indian scholar Pāṇini wrote a treatise on Sanskrit, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, describing a kind of language machine: an algebraic system of rules for producing grammatically correct word forms. The enormity and elegance of that accomplishment—and the underlying computational methodology—cemented Pāṇini’s place as a founder of linguistics. Even so, centuries of commentators have insisted that there are glitches in the machine’s ability to tackle rule conflict (that is, a situation in which two or more rules are simultaneously applicable) and have responded with complex rules and tools aimed at resolving the issues apparently besetting the ancient system. In this book we discuss Panini's Perfect Rule: A Modern Solution to an Ancient Problem in Sanskrit Grammar (Harvard UP, 2025) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Justin L. Mann, assistant professor of English at Northwestern and author of Breaking the World, studies Black speculative fiction and critical security. He discusses how SF shaped Reagan-era securitization, contrasts state futurism with Black insecurity, reads Butler and Jemisin for world-breaking practices, and connects biosecurity, militarization, and climate narratives to racialized vulnerability.

Debra Kaplan, a historian of early modern Jewish communities and social welfare, and Elisheva Carlebach, a scholar of Jewish communal life and ritual, explore newly found archival treasures. They trace women's roles in kehillot, print culture and literacy, women-led societies and burial work, mikva'ot and midwifery, marginalized lives, household inventories, and comparisons with Christian counterparts.

Robinson Kariuki Mwangi, principal and missiology Ph.D. whose 2025 study traces Keswick sanctification in the East Africa Revival. He explores revival testimony and practices, Keswick origins and Bible texts shaping separation, how revival groups relate to Anglican life, and missional tensions between zeal, exclusion, and calls for more inclusive social ethics.

LiLi Johnson, Assistant Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Dalhousie University and author of Technologies of Kinship, explores how bureaucracy, photography, digital platforms, and genetic testing shape Asian American family-making. She discusses archival discoveries like paper families, transnational matchmaking, referral photos in adoption, online dating/donor markets, and the rise of genetic intimacy.