Today I was joined by Martijn Konings from Australia where he is Associate Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. We had a conversation on his most recent book Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason (Stanford Uni...

How did President Lyndon Johnson engineer one of the biggest bursts of liberal legislation in American history? And did his vision of a Great Society successfully alleviate poverty and reduce inequality? In Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Joh...

The biggest problem in American health care is us. Do you know how to tell good health care from bad health care? Guess again. As patients, we wrongly assume the best care is dependent mainly on the newest medications, the most complex treatments,

When the state takes over, can local democracy survive? Over 100 school districts have been taken over by state governments since the late 1980s. In doing so, state officials relieve local officials, including those elected by local residents,

Voting rights are always in the news in American politics, and recent court decisions and an upcoming election in 2018 make this especially true today. Most discussions come back to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and whether it will continue to provide th...

A leading doctor offers answers on the one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we prevent the next global pandemic? The 2014 Ebola epidemic in Liberia terrified the world―and revealed how unprepared we are for the next outbreak of an infec...

In her new book, The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia (NewSouth Books, 2018), Christina Twomey, Professor of History at Monash University, explores the “battle within,” the individual and collective challenge of rehabilitating Australian prison...

Medicaid provides health care for around 1 in 5 Americans. Despite the large number served, the programs administration by state and local governments means very different things in different places. The geography of federalism matters a lot for Medica...

In Institutions and Democracy in Africa: How the Rules of the Game Shape Political Developments (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the contributors challenge the argument that African states lack effective political institutions as these have been und...

An interview with Alex Vitale

When first enacted at the start of the twentieth century, primaries were to decrease the power of party bosses to dominate the choice of who ran for office. Primaries were a feature of the progressive agenda to limit political corruption and democratiz...

Betsy DiSalvo, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, joins us in this episode to discuss the recently published co-edited volume entitled, Participatory Design for Learning: Perspectives from Pra...

American Cicero: Mario Cuomo and the Defense of American Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a compelling exploration of the political life of Governor Mario Cuomo as well as the concepts of American liberalism, presidential politics,

What role has the World Bank played in influencing health sector reform in Latin America? In her new book, Banking on Health: The World Bank and Health Sector Reform in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017),

In the last few weeks, minimum wage workers in 18 states saw their wages go up; in Maine a full dollar increase. Why states have taken the lead on raising the minimum wage is the topic of the new book from Christopher Witko and William Franko,

What are the lives of young incarcerated Latinas like? And what were their lives like before and after their incarceration? In his new book, Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wrap-Around Incarceration (University of California Press, 2017),

As debates on globalization rage in the twenty-first century, many countries and the people within them have been challenged socially, economically, and legally. At the same time, our world is now more bordered geopolitically than ever before.

Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (Princeton University Press, 2016) is an important analysis of both congressional and presidential power, and how these two branches interact,

In Freedom From Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2017), Daniel Fridman explores what it means to be an economic subject in what different people call the new economy,

The concept of late-night basketball gained prominence in the late 1980s when G. Van Standifer founded Midnight Basketball League as a vehicle upon which citizens, businesses, and institutions can stand together to prevent crime, violence,

Like many cities, Cleveland has gone through periods of decline and renewal, yet the process there has followed a process where these periods were not always obvious and often failed because of a lack of cohesiveness among civic leaders,

Claire Schmidt is not a prison worker, rather she is a folklorist and an Assistant Professor at Missouri Valley College. However, many members of her extended family in her home state of Wisconsin either were or are prison workers and it is their work-...

In The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters (Wharton Digital Press, 2017), Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther summarize six major cognitive biases that explain why humans fail to adequately prepare for potential disasters.

AIDS is one of the primary causes of death in Africa. Of the more than 24 million Africans infected with HIV, only about 54% have access to the treatment that they need. Despite the progress made in mitigating this disease in the global north,

As a historian I find myself constantly asking the question “Is that really new, or is it rather something that looks new but isn’t?” If you read the headlines, particularly those concerning the on going “Digital Revolution,