New Books in Public Policy

Interviews with Scholars of Public Policy about their New Books

Science
Social Sciences
1801
Marianne Constable, “Our Word is Our Bond: How ...
Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford UP, 2014), by UC Berkeley Professor of Rhetoric Marianne Constable, impels its readers to reassess the dominant methods of considering what is law. Constable’s study of law is informed by both philo...
63 min
1802
John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen, The Natio...
John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen are the authors of The National Origins of Policy Ideas: Knowledge Regimes in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark (Princeton University Press, 2014). Campbell is the Class of 1925 Professor of Sociology ...
19 min
1803
Josh Lerner, “Making Democracy Fun: How Game De...
Josh Lerner is the author of Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics (MIT Press, 2014). Lerner earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from The New School for Social Research,
19 min
1804
Judith Kelley, “Monitoring Democracy: When Inte...
Judith Kelley is the author of Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works, and Why It Often Fails (Princeton University  Press, 2012). Kelley is associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University.
18 min
1805
Thomas A. Bryer, “Higher Education Beyond Job C...
Thomas A. Bryer joins the podcast to discuss his book Higher Education Beyond Job Creation: Universities, Citizenship, and Community (Lexington Books 2014). Dr. Bryer is the director of the Center for Public and Nonprofit Management University of Centr...
47 min
1806
Darren Halpin, “The Organization of Political I...
Darren Halpin is the author of The Organization of Political Interest Groups: Designing Advocacy (Routledge 2014). Halpin is associate professor and reader in Policy Studies, and the Head of School of Sociology,
18 min
1807
Suzanne Mettler, “Degrees of Inequality: How th...
From 1945 to the mid-1970s, the rate at which Americans went to and graduate from college rose steadily. Then, however, the rate of college going and completion stagnated. In 1980, a quarter of adult Americans had college degrees; today the figure is r...
54 min
1808
Nick Smith, “Justice through Apologies: Remorse...
Most people say “I’m sorry” a lot. After all, we make a lot of mistakes, most of them minor, so we don’t mind apologizing and expect our apologies to be accepted or at least acknowledged. But how many of our apologies are what might be called “strategi...
72 min
1809
Patrick Burkart, “Pirate Politics: The New Info...
The mid-’00s saw the rise of a political movement in Europe concerned with technocratic impositions on the ideals of free culture, privacy, government transparency and other technology policy issues. Led by online file sharers and developers,
40 min
1810
David C. Berliner, Gene V. Glass et al., “50 My...
David C. Berliner, Gene V. Glass, and associates are the authors of 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools: The Real Crisis in Education (Teachers College Press, 2014). Dr. Berliner is Regents’ Professor of Education Emeritus at Arizo...
50 min
1811
Austin Sarat, “Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Exe...
When we discuss the death penalty we usually ask two questions: 1) should the state be in the business of killing criminals?; and 2) if so, how should the state put their lives to an end? As Austin Sarat shows in his fascinating book Gruesome Spectacle...
54 min
1812
Douglas M. Thompson, “The Quest for the Golden ...
Earlier this spring, I drove to a small beaver pond near my home in Colorado, snapped together my fishing rod, and cast a silver lure into the pond’s crystalline waters. Within twenty minutes, I’d caught dinner: a pair of glittering rainbow trout,
41 min
1813
Olivier Zunz, “Philanthropy in America: A Histo...
Olivier Zunz is the author of Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton University Press 2014). The paperback addition of the book has recently been published with a new preface from the author. Zunz is Commonwealth Professor of History at the Univ...
31 min
1814
Jane Maienschein, “Embryos Under the Microscope...
Why do we study the history of science? Historians of science don’t just teach us about the past: along with philosophers of science, they also help us to understand the foundations and assumptions of scientific research,
72 min
1815
Morris B. Hoffman, “The Punisher’s Brain: The E...
Why do we feel guilty–and sometimes hurt ourselves–when we harm someone? Why do we become angry–and sometimes violent–when we see other people being harmed? Why do we forgive ourselves and others after a transgression even though “the rules” say we rea...
59 min
1816
Emery Roe, “Making the Most of Mess” (Duke UP 2...
Emery Roe is the author of Making the Most of Mess: Reliability and Policy in Today’s Management Challenges (Duke UP 2014). Roe is senior associate with the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at the University of California, Berkeley.
23 min
1817
Marci A. Hamilton, “God vs. the Gavel: Religion...
The constitution guarantees Americans freedom of religious practice and freedom from government interference in the same same. But what does religious liberty mean in practice? Does it mean that the government must permit any religious practice,
57 min
1818
Amy Stambach, “Confucius and Crisis in American...
Dr. Amy Stambach is the author of Confucius and Crisis in American Universities: Culture, Capital, and Diplomacy in U.S. Public Higher Education (Routledge, 2014). Dr. Stambach is a lecturer in Comparative and International Education at University of O...
53 min
1819
Kevin J. Dougherty and Vikash Reddy, “Performan...
Kevin Dougherty and Vikash Reddy are the authors of Performance Funding for Higher Education: What Are the Mechanisms What Are the Impacts (Jossey-Bass, 2013). Dr. Dougherty is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Education Policy at Teachers Co...
48 min
1820
Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger, “Rob...
  In early America, the practice of “warning out” was unique to New England, a way for the community to regulate those who might fall into poverty and need assistance from the town or province. Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonia...
43 min
1821
James W. Russell, “Social Insecurity: 401(k)s a...
Jim Russell is a sociologist and it was his encounter with the hidden realities of his own 401(k) retirement plan that touched off his crusade to demystify for himself, and then others, just what was at stake in the options presented by private and pub...
50 min
1822
Sharon K. Farber, “Hunger for Ecstasy: Trauma, ...
It may seem silly to ask why we seek ecstasy. We seek it, of course, because it’s ECSTASY. We are evolved to want it. It’s our brain’s way of saying “Do this again and as often as possible.” But there’s more to it than that. For one thing, there are...
58 min
1823
Denise Brennan, “Life Interrupted: Trafficking ...
Denise Brennan‘s second book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States (Duke University Press, 2014), examines how individuals who were trafficked into forced labor go about rebuilding their lives afterward.
64 min
1824
Benjamin Radcliff, “The Political Economy of Ha...
Americans are very politically divided. Democrats say we need a more powerful welfare state while Republicans say we need to maintain the free market. The struggle, we are constantly informed, is one of ideas.
62 min
1825
Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction: An Un...
The paleontologist Michael Benton describes a mass extinction event as a time when “vast swaths of the tree of life are cut short, as if by crazed, axe wielding madmen.” Elizabeth Kolbert‘s new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Ho...
54 min