New Books in Public Policy

Interviews with Scholars of Public Policy about their New Books

Science
Social Sciences
1751
Patricia Strach, “Hiding Politics in Plain Sigh...
For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we hear from Patricia Strach, the author of Hiding Politics in Plain Sight: Cause Marketing, Corporate Influence, and Breast Cancer Policymaking (Oxford University Press, 2016).
18 min
1752
Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore, “Fast Policy: Expe...
How do new policies move from one city or country to another, and is there something distinct about how those transfers work in our perpetually accelerating and ever-more interconnected world? Join us as Jamie Peck,
51 min
1753
John Owens, “Confessions of a Bad Teacher: The ...
As you spend more time working in one role, organization, or field, it can become easy to lose perspective on how your work is similar or different from that being done by people in other positions, places, and industries.
36 min
1754
Adam Benforado, “Unfair: The New Science of Cri...
Why is our criminal justice system so unfair? How do innocent men and women end up serving long sentences while the guilty roam free? According to law professor and scholar Adam Benforado, our systems problems stem from more than occasional bad apples;...
62 min
1755
Daniel Amsterdam, “Roaring Metropolis: Business...
On the podcast this week is Daniel Amsterdam, author of Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen’s Campaign for a Civic Welfare State (Penn Press, 2016). He is assistant professor in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Institute of Technology.
17 min
1756
Milton Chen, “Education Nation: Six Leading Edg...
It feels like schools are in the midst of unprecedented change — sometimes more in different places and sometimes more in different ways. Many people are thinking about education differently than they did a few years ago.
48 min
1757
James Waller, “Confronting Evil: Engaging Our ...
Today is the third of our occasional series on the question of how to respond to mass atrocities. Earlier this summer I talked with Scott Straus and Bridget Conley-Zilkic. Later in September I’ll talk with Carrie Booth Walling.
65 min
1758
Katherine Turk, “Equality on Trial: Gender and ...
Katherine Turk is assistant professor of history at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her book Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (University of Pennsylvania Press,
59 min
1759
Megan Tompkins Stange, “Policy Patrons: Philant...
Megan Tompkins-Stange is the author of Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence (Harvard Education Press, 2016). She is assistant professor at the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
18 min
1760
Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Am...
A decade and a half of exhausting wars, punishing economic setbacks, and fast-rising rivals has called into question America’s fundamental position and purpose in world politics. Will the US continue to be the only superpower in the international syste...
64 min
1761
Barbara Hahn and Bruce Baker, “The Cotton Kings...
With the recent economic collapse and rising income inequality, lessons drawn from turn-of-the century capitalism have become frequent. Pundits, policymakers, and others have looked to the era to find precursors to an unregulated market,
55 min
1762
Holly Allen, “Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: T...
In Forgotten Men and Fallen Women: The Cultural Politics of New Deal Narratives (Cornell University Press, 2015), Holly Allen offers a fascinating analysis of how notions of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship were challenged and defined during the...
48 min
1763
Darian M. Parker, “Sartre and New Child Left Be...
Darian M. Parker joins the New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, Sartre and No Child Left Behind: An Existential Psychoanalytic Anthropology of Urban Schooling (Lexington Books, 2015). Through an ethnographic lens,
34 min
1764
Donald Kettl, “Escaping Jurassic Government: Ho...
Donald Kettl is the author of Escaping Jurassic Government: How to Recover America’s Lost Competence (Brookings Press, 2016). Kettl is professor of public policy in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a nonresident fellow at t...
18 min
1765
Sam Quinones, “Dreamland: The True Tale of Amer...
In the early 2000s, the press–at least in Boston, where I was living at the time–was full of shrill stories about drug-crazed addicts breaking into area pharmacies in search of something called “Oxycontin.” I had no idea what Oxycontin was,
55 min
1766
Prerna Singh, “How Solidarity Works for Welfare...
Prerna Singh has written How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Singh is the Mahatma Gandhi Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Brown Univer...
27 min
1767
Nicole Nguyen, “A Curriculum of Fear: Homeland ...
It can be tempting to generalize certain attributes of schools as either being good or bad. Magnet and charter schools are often characterized as being inherently good. They usually offer special programs that ground all of their instruction.
40 min
1768
Grant Lichtman, “#EdJourney: A Roadmap to the F...
Whatever your role — teacher, principal, or superintendent — when you work in a school system, you experience tensions between your reasons for going into education and how you actually spend your time in schools.
41 min
1769
Matt Renwick, “Digital Student Portfolios: A Wh...
Most of the time, school performance is not like performance in other arenas. In music, we want people to play something for us. In sports, we want people to show us our skills. Performance in school is filtered through test scores and letter grades.
37 min
1770
Campbell F. Scribner, “The Fight for Local Cont...
Battles over school politics from curriculum to funding to voucher systems are key and contentious features of the political landscape today. Many of these familiar fights started in the 1970s. However, these battles have roots even earlier in mid-twen...
58 min
1771
Samantha Barbas, “Laws of Image: Privacy and Pu...
In her new book Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America (Stanford Law Books, 2016), Samantha Barbas provides a history of Americans’ use of law to manage their public image. She approaches this endeavor from the perspective of a legal and cultu...
65 min
1772
Ron Berger, et. al. “Learning that Lasts: Chall...
The school structures we present to teachers can sometimes resemble two extremes. In the first set of circumstances, teachers have enormous autonomy over what they teach, when they teach it, and how they teach it. In the second,
58 min
1773
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, “Migra! A History of the...
As evidenced by many of the conversations featured on this podcast, scholarship on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands composes a significant and influential genre within the field of U.S. Western History and Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies.
66 min
1774
Jason Stahl, “Right Moves: The Conservative Thi...
Jason Stahl is the author of Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture since 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Stahl is an historian and lecturer in the Department of Organizational Leadership and Policy Deve...
22 min
1775
Zachary Roth, “The Great Suppression: Voting Ri...
This week we feature two new books on the podcast, both about corporate power. First, Zachary Roth has written The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy (Crown, 2016).
40 min