New Books Network

Robert Guffey, author and cultural critic who tracks a century of taboo themes in film. He traces how cinema encodes Darwinian ideas, mind-control and UFO stigma, JFK conspiracies, and the shift from coded genre metaphors to overt treatments. Short, vivid dives into horror, westerns, sci‑fi and conspiracy films reveal how marginal art seeds cultural change.

Neelum Saran Gour, prolific novelist and award-winning scholar from Allahabad, reimagines the life of Hindustani singer Janki Bai Ilahabadi. The conversation traces Janki Bai’s rise from hardship to musical fame. It explores music lore, the social world of early 20th-century north India, language choices, and the novel’s vivid sense of place.

Dafeng Xu, an urban planning scholar who studies immigrant neighborhoods and migration history, traces Chinatown's near-erasure after the 1906 quake and its contested rebuilding. Short segments explore family separation from immigration bans, how burned records enabled paper sons, language and schooling barriers, residential segregation as protection and constraint, and the use of architecture to assert identity.

Hollay Ghadery, an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer and debut novelist, discusses a whimsical yet haunting tale about a sock puppet named Ecology Paul. Short scenes explore the puppet’s origin, mother-daughter shame, exile from Iran, inventive prose shaped by poetry, and the novel’s shifting timelines and emotional stakes.

Dianna N. Watkins-Dickerson, author and scholar of womanist rhetorical criticism, explores the presidential announcement speeches of Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris. She explains womanist rhetorical theory and its roots in Black church and HBCU spaces. Short, focused analyses trace rhetorical strategies, historical precedents, and the challenges of studying recent campaigns.

Tom Griffiths, cognitive scientist and head of Princeton’s AI Lab, explores the centuries-long quest to mathematize thought. He traces logic from Boole to modern probabilistic and neural approaches. Listens cover rule-based systems, neural networks and backpropagation, and how large language models blend frameworks while still differing from human minds.

Andrew Billing, Professor of French and Francophone Studies and author of Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing, maps how Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Rétif use animal imagery and emerging zoology. Short takes cover Buffon’s influence, political zoology, anthropomorphism, organic and molecular metaphors, and animal-based models of economy, morality, and empire.

P. C. Saidalavi, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Shiv Nadar University, explores Muslim barbers in Kerala and how Islamic values shape intra-communal hierarchy. He discusses fieldwork origins, ethical listening, competing lineage claims, patronage and labor relations, jurisprudential labels that justify humiliation, and how unionization and migration reshaped dignity and status.

Rob Kutner, comedy writer and teacher known for The Daily Show and more, offers a playful mini-history in The Jews: 5,000 Years and Counting. He reads medieval comic excerpts and explains how he makes dark history funny. He discusses timing and framing after October 7, ethical limits of satire, editorial choices on scope, and writing for Jewish audiences.

Ning Leng, Assistant Professor at Georgetown specializing in Chinese political economy, examines how officials turn private firms into political tools. She discusses visible projects like bridges, buses, and incinerators. Topics include officials’ incentives for grand projects, firms’ roles in social control, NIMBY dynamics, and challenges of fieldwork in China.