New Books in Public Policy

Imagine reading or watching The Minority Report and thinking of that as a model for the criminal justice system. Well, plenty of forensic types are doing just that. Can you figure out if you are a criminal by scanning your brain? On this episode of Darts and Letters, guest-host Jay Cockburn and our guests explore the study of the criminal mind, from the history of madness, to spotty personality tests, to the emerging neuroscientific frontier.—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————-You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.——————-ABOUT THE SHOW——————For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Using data from the writers' groundbreaking research on mass shooters, including first-person accounts from the perpetrators themselves, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic (Harry N. Abrams, 2021) charts new pathways to prevention and innovative ways to stop the social contagion of violence. Frustrated by reactionary policy conversations that never seemed to convert into meaningful action, special investigator and psychologist Jill Peterson and sociologist James Densley built The Violence Project, the first comprehensive database of mass shooters. Their goal was to establish the root causes of mass shootings and figure out how to stop them by examining hundreds of data points in the life histories of more than 170 mass shooters--from their childhood and adolescence to their mental health and motives. They've also interviewed the living perpetrators of mass shootings and people who knew them, shooting survivors, victims' families, first responders, and leading experts to gain a comprehensive firsthand understanding of the real stories behind them, rather than the sensationalized media narratives that too often prevail. For the first time, instead of offering thoughts and prayers for the victims of these crimes, Peterson and Densley share their data-driven solutions for exactly what we must do, at the individual level, in our communities, and as a country, to put an end to these tragedies that have defined our modern era.Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Incomes are stagnating, middle-class jobs are disappearing, economic growth is slowing, and the meager gains are mostly going to those who are already wealthy. More Americans than ever are frustrated by the direction in which we are headed. Understandable Economics: Because Understanding Our Economy Is Easier Than You Think and More Important Than You Know (Prometheus, 2022) aims to replace this frustration with a practical understanding of our economy and empower readers to identify and advocate for a better approach to the problems we face.In this entertaining and informative guide, author Howard Yaruss breaks down our economic system in a straightforward way, avoiding jargon, formulas, graphs, and other technical material so common in books on this subject. Instead, he creates a compelling and comprehensive picture of our economy using accessible analogies, real-world observations, and entertaining anecdotes. Understandable Economics will enable readers to answer questions such as: Why is inequality soaring and what can we do about it? Do tax cuts for the wealthy create jobs or just create more inequality? Where does money come from, why does it have value, and who controls it? What does the Fed do and how does it affect our lives? Could alternative currencies like Bitcoin replace the dollar? Is our national debt a threat? Why do so many people believe free trade is good if it causes some people to lose jobs? Why does the economy regularly turn down and how can we get it back on track? ... and many more.Understandable Economics provides the context, tools and foundational knowledge readers need to thoroughly understand our economy, determine which policies would work best, and champion those policies effectively.Howard Yaruss is an economist, professor, attorney, businessman, and activist who greatly enjoys explaining complex issues in a clear, interesting, and easily accessible way. He has taught a variety of economics and business courses, and currently teaches at New York University. Previously, he was executive vice president and general counsel of Radian Group, one of the largest guarantors of debt in the world. He has also served on the boards of organizations that advocate for safer streets, help the homeless, and support the arts. Yaruss graduated from Brown University, studied at the London School of Economics, and earned a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Manhattan and is a member of his local community board.Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics (Twitter @15MinFilm). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Wartime military service is held up as a marker of civic duty and patriotism, yet the rewards of veteran status have never been equally distributed. Certain groups of military veterans--women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and former service members with stigmatizing conditions, "bad paper" discharges, or criminal records--have been left out of official histories, excised from national consciousness, and denied state recognition and military benefits. Chronicling the untold stories of marginalized veterans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) uncovers the generational divides, cultural stigmas, and discriminatory policies that affected veterans during and after their military service. Together, the chapters in this collection recast veterans beyond the archetype, inspiring an innovative model for veterans studies that encourages an intersectional and interdisciplinary analysis of veterans history. In addition to contributions from the volume editors, this collection features scholarship by Barbara Gannon, Robert Jefferson, Evan P. Sullivan, Steven Rosales, Heather Marie Stur, Juan Coronado, Kara Dixon Vuic, John Worsencroft, and David Kieran. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Health care is political. It entails fierce battles over the allocation of resources, arguments over the imposition of regulations, and the mediation of dueling public sentiments—all conflicts that are often narrated from a national, top-down view. In All Health Politics Is Local: Community Battles for Medical Care and Environmental Health (UNC Press, 2022), Merlin Chowkwanyun shifts our focus, taking us to four very different places—New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and central Appalachia—to experience a national story through a regional lens. He shows how racial uprisings in the 1960s catalyzed the creation of new medical infrastructure for those long denied it, what local authorities did to curb air pollution so toxic that it made residents choke and cry, how community health activists and bureaucrats fought over who'd control facilities long run by insular elites, and what a national coal boom did to community ecology and health. In a country riven by regional differences, All Health Politics Is Local shatters the notion of a shared national health agenda. It shows that health has always been political and shaped not just by formal policy but also by grassroots community battles.Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Dr. Charles Smith performed autopsies at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, ON. The cops kept turning to him with new corpses, and he kept claiming that these deaths were the result of foul play. He was thought of as a God in his field–few people were willing to question his work. That is until a 2008 inquiry, which found evidence of errors in 20 of the 45 autopsies they reviewed. Dr. Smith’s judgements played a role in 13 wrongful convictions. On this episode, we tell one of those stories.—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————-You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.——————-ABOUT THE SHOW——————For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

When it comes to complex social problems, us “sensible” types turn to the experts, but what if they don’t actually know what they’re talking about? That happens to be the case with many forensic experts. Blood spatter, ballistics, hand-writing analysis, fingerprints, etc. They aren’t Gods, they aren’t magicians, they ain’t anything like what you see on CSI. In fact, they get things terribly wrong; and when they do, the consequences can be catastrophic. We’ll reveal the crisis in forensic expertise, and look for ways to fix it, featuring the American lawyer falsely arrested for the 2004 Madrid bombings because of a fingerprint.—————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————-You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.——————-ABOUT THE SHOW——————For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In the 1960s and 1970s, the exposure of Big Tobacco’s aggressive lobbying and internal efforts to obscure science showcasing the harmful effects of smoking changed U.S. public opinion of the industry and of product safety protocols, both of which had largely obscured these harms from public view for decades. Public awareness grew, triggering regulation on disclosure related to political influencing strategies, marketing tactics, and transparency regarding the devastating toll of tobacco products on many communities, including and especially children. As similar approaches to assessing the public health impacts of Big Oil and Big Pharma, among other industries, have gained traction in recent decades, Dr. Mélissa Mialon’s new book, Big Food & Co (Thierry Souccar Editions, 2021), adds the amalgamation of multinationals and transnational supply chains that make up Big Food, to that list.Rising health inequities across race, class, and geography are subtle, yet central themes throughout Dr. Mialon’s meticulous accounting of a complex puzzle in which the marketing and distribution strategies of soft drink companies and ultra-processed food manufacturers are quietly but steadily ushering in a new globalized era of related public health crises – measured by increasing rates of of diabetes, cancers, and heart disease, etc– a crisis that has long been felt in the United States.Whether branding t-shirts and games at summer camps in France for underprivileged children or blanketing entire streets in Mauritius with the unmistakable bright red and white flag of Coca-Cola, Dr. Mialon describes a taxonomy of commercial determinants of health common to nearly every example – whether multinational food companies’ policy advocacy in Colombia, public-private partnerships in Brazil, or culturally responsive branding for holidays in Southern Africa.Between academic research and investigative journalism, the survey of trends in Big Food’s operation, marketing, and regulatory capture, offered throughout the book are additionally grounds for laying out a policy roadmap with public health indicators at the center of a wide range of potential reforms including campaign finance and heightened disclosure protocols for public-private partnerships to mitigating conflicts of interest in scientific studies related to food, agriculture, and health, among many others.Dr. Mélissa Mialon is Associate Professor at Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland. She is a food engineer with a PhD in nutrition and co-coordinates the « Governance, Ethics and Conflicts of Interest in Public Health » (GECI-PH) network, based out of the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Her research focuses on commercial determinants of health, and particularly on the practices used by corporations to influence public health policy, research and practice.Anna Levy researches and teaches on emergency, crisis, and development practice & politics at Fordham & New York Universities. She is the founder and principal of Jafsadi.works, a research collective focused on advancing structural and participatory accountability in non-profit, movement, multilateral, city, and policy strategies. You can follow her @politicoyuntura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

We live in a time of food paradox. In a world of historically unprecedented abundance, many don’t have enough to eat.Life-limiting obesity coexists with malnutrition - at the same time, sometimes in the very same place.Food is the complex and critical subject that we will talk about today with Joseph Gitler who works to address the issue at a local, concrete level. He feeds the hungry.Back in 2003 Joseph Gitler was moved to act when he saw significant food waste in Israel at a time of rising poverty. He founded the nonprofit organization Leket, that has since become the largest food rescue organization in the country.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Today I talked to John List about his book The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale (Currency, 2022).Want to go on an exuberant, incisive ride through why so many initiatives flounder and how, conversely, you can increase the odds of success? Then listening to John List will be for you. List takes us through his favorite, highly relevant behavior economic principles: loss aversion, confirmation bias and framing among them. Then this episode digs into why 50 to 90% of initiatives fail to scale. List emphasizes the role that false positives and unscalable ingredients play. As to the secrets of building out an idea, knowing when to quit stands out for reasons worth listening in for. Finally, the importance of scaling a company’s culture explains why the gladiatorial culture at Uber wasn’t sustainable at scale.John List is a professor of economics at both the University of Chicago and the Australian National University. After being the chief economist at Uber and Lyft, he now holds that role at Walmart. He’s also previously been on the Council of Economic Advisers for The White House.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy