Episodes

  • Eugene W. Holland, "Perversions of the Market: Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism" (SUNY Press, 2024)

    Eugene W. Holland, "Perversions of the Market: Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism" (SUNY Press, 2024)
    Feb 21 2025
    Perversions of the Market: Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism (SUNY Press, 2024) argues that capitalism fosters sadism and masochism--not as individual psychological proclivities but as widespread institutionalized patterns of behavior. The book is divided into two parts: one historical and the other theoretical. In the first, Eugene W. Holland shows how, as capital becomes global in scale and drives production and consumption farther and farther apart, it perverts otherwise free markets, transforming sadism and masochism into borderline conditions and various supremacisms. The second part then turns to Deleuze and Guattari's 'schizoanalysis,' explaining how it helpfully embeds Freud's analysis of the family and Lacan's analysis of language within an analysis of the capitalist market and its psycho-dynamics. Drawing on literature and film throughout to illuminate the discontents of modern culture, Holland maintains that the sadistic relations of production and masochistic relations of consumption must be eliminated to prevent capitalism from destroying life as we know it. Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University nathan.smith@yale.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day
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    1 hr and 49 mins
  • Claire C. Robison, "Bringing Krishna Back to India" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Claire C. Robison, "Bringing Krishna Back to India" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Feb 20 2025
    The Hare Krishnas have long been associated with American hippie culture and New Age religious movements. But they have developed deeply rooted communities in India and throughout the world over the past 50 years. Known officially as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), this once-marginal religious community now wields vast economic assets, political influence, and a posh identity endorsed by Indian business tycoons and Bollywood celebrities. Bringing Krishna Back to India (Oxford UP, 2024) examines this globalized religious community in Mumbai, India's business and entertainment capital, where ISKCON draws Indians from diverse backgrounds to adopt a socially conservative Krishna bhakti identity amidst a neoliberal megacity and the city's famed cosmopolitanism. As ISKCON fashions devout religious identities amidst urban spaces, such as college campuses, corporate wellness retreats, and Bollywood celebrity events, it promotes a religious Hindu modernity that reflects elite urban Indian aspirations and aesthetic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day
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    49 mins
  • The Anxious Generation: A Conversation with Jonathan Haidt

    The Anxious Generation: A Conversation with Jonathan Haidt
    Feb 19 2025
    In this episode of Madison's Notes, Jonathan Haidt, renowned social psychologist and author, dives deep into the impact of digital saturation on today's youth, drawing insights from his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Allen Lane, 2024). The discussion explores how growing up immersed in social media, video games, and smart technology is reshaping young people’s sense of self and influencing their political engagement. Haidt explains how the constant connectivity may be contributing to an increase in anxiety and how it’s altering their approach to both personal identity and societal participation. Haidt also addresses the potential for a "generational war," where differences between older and younger generations are often framed as inherent character flaws. He emphasizes the importance of understanding that many of Gen Z’s choices have been shaped by forces beyond their control, rather than pointing to a moral failing. This leads into a comparison with the themes explored in The Coddling of the American Mind, particularly the societal impact of overprotection and the lack of resilience-building among youth. The conversation then moves into practical territory, with Haidt discussing the importance of activating the brain’s inhibition system to help young people develop resilience and the ability to handle stress, conflict, and complex decision-making. He suggests that cultivating the inhibition system through thoughtful practices is key in fostering more resilient and independent young adults. Finally, Haidt examines the role of tech giants like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in shaping the digital landscape and their growing political influence. He discusses the challenges of addressing the negative impacts of social media, pondering whether government intervention will result in meaningful change or if the influence of tech leaders will prevent any real reform. This episode provides a compelling exploration of how technology, societal norms, and political dynamics intersect to shape the lives of younger generations and offers valuable insight into the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for both youth and society at large. 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day
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    57 mins
  • Yoni Appelbaum, "Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity" (Random House, 2025)

    Yoni Appelbaum, "Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity" (Random House, 2025)
    Feb 18 2025
    We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are inaccessible to all but the very wealthy. But, in America, this wasn’t always the case. Though for most of world history your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and for 200 years, that remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity. Then, as the twentieth century wound down, economic and geographic stasis set in, producing deep social polarization. What happened? In Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity (Random House, 2025), Yoni Appelbaum introduces us to the reformers who destroyed American mobility with discriminatory zoning laws, federal policies, and community gatekeeping. From the first zoning laws enacted to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California, to the toxic blend of private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in mid-century Flint, Michigan, Appelbaum shows us how Americans lost the freedom to move. Even Jane Jacobs’s well-intentioned fight against development in Greenwich Village choked off opportunity for strivers—and started a trend that would put desirable neighborhoods out of reach for most of us. And yet he also offers glimmers of hope. Perhaps our problems as a nation aren’t as intractable as they seem. If we tear down the barriers to mobility and return to the social and economic dynamism Americans invented, we might be able to rediscover the tolerance and possibility that made us distinctive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day
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    29 mins
  • Ray Brescia, "The Private Is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism" (NYU Press, 2025)

    Ray Brescia, "The Private Is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism" (NYU Press, 2025)
    Feb 17 2025
    As Americans increasingly depend upon their phones, computers, and internet resources, their actions are less private than they believe. Data is routinely sold and shared with companies who want to sell something, political actors who want to analyze behavior, and law enforcement who seek to monitor and limit actions. In The Private is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (NYU Press, 2025), law professor Ray Brescia explores the failure of existing legal systems and institutions to protect people’s online presence and identities. Examining the ways in which the digital space is under threat from both governments and private actors, Brescia reveals how the rise of private surveillance prevents individuals from organizing with others who might help to catalyze change in their lives. Brescia argues that we are not far from a world where surveillance chills not just our speech, but our very identities. Surveillance, he suggests, will ultimately stifle our ability to live full lives, realize democracy, and shape the laws that affect our privacy itself. Brescia writes that “The search for identity and communion with others who share it has never been easier in all of human history. At the same time, our individual and collective identity is also under threat by a surveillance state like none that has ever existed before. This surveillance can be weaponized, not just for profit but also to promote political ends, and undermine efforts to achieve individual and collective self-determination” The book identifies the harms to individuals from privacy violations, provides an expansive definition of political privacy, and identifies the ‘integrity of identity’ as a central feature of democracy. The Private is Political lays out the features of Surveillance Capitalism and provides a roadmap for “muscular disclosure”: a comprehensive privacy regime to empower consumers to collectively safeguard privacy rights. Professor Ray Brescia is the Associate Dean for Research & Intellectual Life and the Hon. Harold R. Tyler Professor in Law & Technology at Albany Law School. He is the author of many scholarly works including Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession (from NYU Press) and The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions (from Cornell UP). He is also the author of public facing work, most recently “Elon Musk’s DOGE is executing a historically dangerous data breach” on MSNBC. He started his legal career at the Legal Aid Society of New York where he was a Skadden Fellow, and then served as the Associate Director at the Urban Justice Center, also in New York City, where he represented grassroots groups like tenant associations and low-wage worker groups. Ray’s blog is “The Future of Change” and you can find him on LinkedIn. Mentioned: Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, Amy Howe, SCOTUSBLOG Kevin Peter He on “data voodoo dolls” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day
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    59 mins
  • Jessica A. Brockmole, "Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way Into the Driver's Seat" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)

    Jessica A. Brockmole, "Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way Into the Driver's Seat" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)
    Feb 16 2025
    Since the commercial introduction of the automobile, US automakers have always sought women as customers and advertised accordingly. How, then, did car culture become so masculine? In Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way into the Driver's Seat (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), Dr. Jessica Brockmole shares the untold history of women's relationship with automobiles: a journey marked by struggle, empowerment, and the relentless pursuit of independence. This groundbreaking work explores the evolution of women's automotive participation and the cultural shifts that have redefined their roles as drivers, mechanics, and consumers. Dr. Brockmole traces the rise of gendered marketing of automobiles over the course of the twentieth century. Auto companies created ads that conformed to commonly held ideas about women's relationships with automobiles. As the century progressed, marketing to women became less informative and even more gendered: the automotive industry portrayed women as passengers, props, or reluctant drivers, interested primarily in aesthetics. And yet, by the 1970s, female drivers were communicating directly with each other, forming clubs, and teaching each other through women-focused repair manuals. By examining market research studies, advertising archives, trade journals, women's magazines, newspapers, driving handbooks, and repair manuals, this book shows how women bought their way into the automobile and masculine car culture. Brockmole uncovers the stories of pioneering women who defied conventions, such as trailblazer Alice Ramsey, the first woman to drive across the United States in 1909, and Barb Wyatt, whose contributions to automotive manuals broke new ground. Women have always been users of technology, and this book illustrates how the auto industry evolved—as well as how it chose not to evolve—in response. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Glen L. Thompson, "Jingjiao: The Earliest Christian Church in China" (Eerdmans, 2024)

    Glen L. Thompson, "Jingjiao: The Earliest Christian Church in China" (Eerdmans, 2024)
    Feb 15 2025
    Many people assume that the first introduction of Christianity to the Chinese was part of nineteenth-century Western imperialism. In fact, Syriac-speaking Christians brought the gospel along the Silk Road into China in the seventh century. Glen L. Thompson introduces readers to the fascinating history of this early Eastern church, referred to as Jingjiao, or the “Luminous Teaching.” Thompson presents the history of the Persian church’s mission to China with rigor and clarity. While Christianity remained a minority and “foreign” religion in the Middle Kingdom, it nonetheless attracted adherents among indigenous Chinese and received imperial approval during the Tang Dynasty. Though it was later suppressed alongside Buddhism, it resurfaced in China and Mongolia in the twelfth century. Thompson also discusses how the modern unearthing of Chinese Christian texts has stirred controversy over the meaning of Jingjiao to recent missionary efforts in China. In an accessible style, Thompson guides readers through primary sources as well as up-to-date scholarship. As the most recent and balanced survey on the topic available in English, Jingjiao: The Earliest Christian Church in China (Eerdmans, 2024) will be an indispensable resource for students of global Christianity and missiology. Glen L. Thompson is professor emeritus of New Testament and historical theology at Asia Lutheran Seminary in Hong Kong. He has retired to Milwaukee, where he researches, works with students, and expands his Fourth-Century Christianity website. New Books in Syriac Studies is presented by Kristian Heal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • Paul Podolsky, "The Uncomfortable Truth About Money: How to Live with Uncertainty and Learn to Think for Yourself" (Harriman House, 2024)

    Paul Podolsky, "The Uncomfortable Truth About Money: How to Live with Uncertainty and Learn to Think for Yourself" (Harriman House, 2024)
    Feb 14 2025
    We are all stuck in a money cage. Money isn’t the most important thing, but it is a thing and you can’t get away from it. Birth costs money and death costs money. So even if you hate talking about money, you need to know the basics, the same way you need to know how to cook yourself a simple meal. The problem with most money books is that they are not written by practitioners and avoid hard truths. Paul Podolsky’s The Uncomfortable Truth About Money: How to Live with Uncertainty and Learn to Think for Yourself (Harriman House, 2024) breaks down walls around financial knowledge. What a weathered investor knows is that stocks are not always good for the long run. They know that being stingy helps accrue wealth. They know the big thing when you buy property has nothing to do with the property. They know the big thing is less what happens to the markets in a day than if the entire system holds together. And they know what to look for if it’s time to pull out. That’s what this book will teach you: a lifetime of money learnings distilled to a thin volume, like a basic cooking recipe you can follow. Paul Podolsky writes about macro–politics and money. For many years, he was the strategist and equity partner at the largest hedge fund in the world. Previous to that, he worked as a reporter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day
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    48 mins