We are nearly a decade removed from the start of the Great Recession, and many indicators show that the economy is doing relatively well. But during this economic catastrophe, a significant number of people faced long-term unemployment,

Anita Hannig‘s first book, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is an in-depth, ethnography of two fistula repair and rehabilitation centers in northern Ethiopia.

In May, a tunnel filled with radioactive waste collapsed at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, making international news. This incident highlighted the costs and challenges of cleaning up this deactivated nuclear facility,

Anxiety has become a social epidemic. People feel anxious all the time about nearly everything: their work, families, and even survival. However, research shows that some of us are more prone to chronic anxiety than others,

In Latino City: Immigration and Urban Crisis in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1945-2000 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Dr. Llana Barber explores the transformation of Lawrence into New England’s first Latina/o-majority city during the second hal...

Sonic Rupture: A Practice-led Approach to Urban Soundscape Design (Bloomsbury 2016) by Jordan Lacey offers a practice-led alternative approach to urban soundscape design. Rather than understanding the functional noises of the city as solely problematic...

What is Black Power? Does it still exist in the so-called post-racial 21st Century? How does Black Power relate to similar movements, like Black Lives Matter? There as so many questions, but there may now be a scholar and text to help answer many of th...

The book discussed here is entitled The Calculus of Happiness: How a Mathematical Approach to Life Adds Up to Health, Wealth, and Love (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Oscar Fernandez. If the thought of calculus makes you nervous, don’t worry,

In Animal Welfare in Australia: Politics and Policy (Sydney University Press, 2016), Peter John Chen, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Sydney, explores the issue of animal welfare in Australia through the lens of political sc...

Mary E. Adkins has written Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution (University Press of Florida, 2016), an account of the reformation of the Florida state constitution in the 1960s.

Urban sociologists typically use a few grand narratives to explain the path of the American city through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. These include industrialization, mass immigration, the “Great Migration,” deindustrialization,

Lee Trepanier, Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, edited this important analysis of why the humanities matter, especially within higher education. Trepanier’s collection,

What is a welfare state? What is it for? Does the U.S. have one? Does it work at cross-purposes to a free-market economy or is it, in fact, essential to the functioning of modern, post-industrial societies? Join us as we speak with David Garland,

Brian F. Harrison and Melissa R. Michelson‘s, Listen, We Need to Talk: How to Change Attitudes about LGBT Rights (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a broad interrogation of the way that public opinion is formed (or reformed) and activated,

How do you make taxpayers comply? Lotta Bjorklund Larsen‘s ethnography, Shaping Taxpayers: Values in Action at the Swedish Tax Agency (Berghahn Books, 2017) offers a vivid, yet nuanced account of knowledge making at one of Sweden’s most esteemed bureau...

Do you think that what poor people most need to escape poverty is grit? Join us as we speak with Stefanie Deluca, co-author, along with Susan Clampet-Lundquist and Kathryn Edin, of Coming of Age in the Other America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2016),

Among the most powerful and equally insidious aspects of the new global politics of religion is the discourse of religious moderation that seeks to produce moderate religious subjects at ease with the aims and fantasies of liberal secular politics.

John Hudak‘s book Marijuana: A Short History (Brookings Institutions Press, 2016) is an accessible and informative dive into marijuana on a number of levels and from a variety of perspectives. Hudak unpacks and explains the historical place of marijuan...

Many environmentalists approach the problem of motivating environmentally friendly behavior from the perspective that nature is good and that we ought to act so as to maximize the good environmental consequences of our actions and minimize the bad ones...

In this episode, I speak with Tim Walker, the author of Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017). This book stems from recent interest in Finland’s educational system resulting from its success on in...

Alcoholism is a strange thing. That it exists, no one seriously doubts. But it’s not entirely clear (diagnostically speaking) what it is, who has it, how they get it, or how to treat it. The answers to these questions depend, apparently,

Psychological and psychoanalytic principles are often associated with individuals and therapist-client pairs, though they have plenty to bear on understanding and helping organizations in trouble. In particular,

Over half of Americans approaching retirement age report having no money saved for retirement, but how did we get here as a nation? In his book, Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal (ILR/Cornell Universit...

Humans engage in a wide variety of collective behaviors, ranging from simple customs like wearing a heavy coat in winter to more complex group actions, as when an audience gives applause at the close of a musical performance.

A heritage food in France, and a high-priced obscurity in the United States. But in both countries, foie gras, the specially fattened liver of a duck or goose, has the power to stir a remarkable array of emotions and produce heated debates.