New Books Network

Host Licia Cianetti talks to Venezuelan democracy activist and co-founder of the World Liberty Congress Leopoldo López. As part of PPP’s ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Democracy they discuss Leopoldo’s recent article on Democracy in an Age of Networked Control. They discuss the technological challenges that democracy activists worldwide face today, and how some activists...

Why do some international courts wield broad authority while others face pushback or fade into irrelevance? The Authority of International Courts: A Behavioural Framework (Hart Publishing, 2026) by Dr. Dana Burchardt provides novel theoretical and empirical insights into this question. It offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on the authority of international courts, drawing from law, poli...

A psychological Arabic novel in English translation, The War by Mohamed Alyahyai follows a man who begins to question whether he is truly the one who returned from war. On a winter night, Issa Saleh prepares a small gathering at his home. By the end of the evening, they are gone—and he is no longer certain they were ever there. As memory fractures, the war resurfaces not as event but as...

In Cast Out: A Call For A Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration (Beacon Press, 2026), civil rights lawyer Joseph Margulies insists that those who commit even the most heinous crimes are one of us and should be judged in a spirit of forgiveness. He explains that American society is too often unforgiving, preferring to cast out those we consider irredeemable by fixating narrowly on...

Julia Azari, Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, has a new, award-winning[*] book centering on the connection between race and the American presidency, specifically in the reaction to presidents who made progress on the issue of race in the United States. Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History focuses on four different...

South Asia Before Religion: Reflections on an Anachronistic Concept (Knowledge Commons Works, 2026) critically examines the applicability of the concept of religion to premodern South Asian culture. I argue that premodern South Asia did not possess a concept equivalent to religion as understood today – neither as a distinct system of religious teachings and practices, nor as a fundamenta...

Many of us have watched the classic 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, the somewhat fictionalized work based on the life of T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt and the First World War. But Lawrence was part of the Arab Bureau, an effort to better understand and influence the region as Britain fought the Ottoman Empire for control of the Middle East. Chastened by their intelligence failures at Gallip...

Ilene Fischer is the founder and CEO of Sophia Network, where she guides executive leaders through the turbulence of disruptive change, mergers, reorganizations, and breakthrough innovations – applying her signature Innovation Ecosystems methodology to turn strategic vision into reality. Earlier in her career, she was a partner at Charlie Kiefer’s Innovation Associates and managing director at the...

In Corporate Power and the Politics of Change (Cambridge UP, 2025) Matteo Gatti examines how corporations have taken on roles traditionally reserved for governments – advocating on social issues, setting internal norms, and stepping in where public institutions fall short. This phenomenon, called corporate governing, takes two forms: socioeconomic advocacy, when companies take publ...

What made a generation of Jewish artists and intellectuals transform American culture? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with acclaimed cultural critic David Denby to discuss his book Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer (Henry Holt, 2025), a vibrant portrait of four extraordinary Americans whose Jewish identities helped shape the modern United States. Though they worked...

Grounded in empirical studies, this book is both a history of the emergence of feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India and a model of innovative legal research. The book inaugurates a creative practice of scholarly activism that engages a new way of thinking about law and feminist jurisprudence, one that is geared to acknowledge and take responsibility for the hierarchies in Indian...

The Israeli destruction of Gaza has returned the idea of genocide to the center of world politics, with sharp conflicts between the protesters and lawyers who invoke it and the governments and media that deny it. The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges After Gaza (Agenda Publishing, 2025), by the foremost sociological theorist of genocide, Martin Shaw,&nbsp...

Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape (Paul Mellon Centre, 2026) by Professor Mark Crinson is the first critical study to examine how a major international airport takes shape on the ground, and what that means for the landscape around it. Focused on Heathrow airport, it traces how the area has been formed and reformed by overlapping systems of architecture, infrastruc...

In his final days in office in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt invited dozens of friends to the White House for lunch. They had never met as a group, but they had one thing in common: Each played tennis with the president and advised on policy matters. Roosevelt half-joked that the public would never know how much these tennis partners did to make his administration a success. Journalists dismissively ca...

In 1905, when Broadway was already the most famous thoroughfare in New York City, a recreational photographer from Newark, New Jersey named Charles Gilbert Hine set out to document the street’s entire length. Taking pictures from downtown Bowling Green and its skyscrapers to uptown Inwood with its fields and wildflowers, Hine depicted a Broadway animated by the presence of the past and the relent...

Despite decades of inflammatory rhetoric, the real risk of video games lies not in their violent imagery but in the ethical and political sensibilities they normalize. Video games reward speed, efficiency, control, and meritocratic mastery, training players to align with a technolibertarian worldview - one that celebrates individual will, technological power, and skepticism toward collective forms...

Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. R. Joseph Parrott explores how anti-colonial movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau reshaped US activist engagement with the Global South from the 1960s through the 1970s and influenced American foreign policy as the Vietnam War drew to a close. The...

Will Miles is trapped. Trapped in tiny Greening, Michigan, where a toxic high school rumor has turned her into a social exile. Trapped in the predictable routines of her mother, and under the unrelenting gaze of her mother’s increasingly sinister boyfriend. But when Will stumbles across the early poems of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer forty years her senior who also grew up in Greening, she f...

False Idols: How Diversion is Destroying Democracy (Vernon Press, 2024) examines how modern forms of diversion shape civic life and weaken democratic responsibility. Drawing on the ancient Roman idea of “bread and circuses,” Kurt Warner explores how contemporary society is saturated with distractions that keep citizens focused on what is immediate, pleasurable, profitable, or spectacular...

Elad Lapidot is Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Indiana UP, forthcoming), Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: SUNY Press, 2025), Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semiti...

Kelly M. Duke Bryant’s Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848-1940 (U Mass Press, 2026)explores how colonial child protection policies and African children’s responses to them produced new ways of defining, measuring, documenting, and experiencing childhood in the French colony of Senegal from 1848 to 1940. In this groundbreaking book, Bryant tak...

Stealing the future and concealing the theft—capitalism’s method, as examined by the author of the acclaimed Carbon Democracy Today, extraordinary wealth seems to arrive from nowhere. The trick of conjuring this unearned wealth is, in fact, the key to understanding capital­ism’s origins and a clue to why the catastrophe of climate collapse is upon us: value is created by consuming the future. In T...

Contemporary digital gameplay is only accessible by navigating an ecosystem of interfaces that support its computational nature. Account logins, controllers, and an assortment of menus, settings, and other peripheral-to-gameplay elements support a range of practical and necessary functions that result from the transformation of gameplay into digital gameplay, as well as broader shifts toward an i...

In Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), naturalist, forager, and educator Maria Pinto uncovers strange and beautiful connections between the natural and human worlds, mingling reportage, research, memoir, and nature writing, touching on topics that rang...

From Suzy Hansen, whose previous book, Notes on a Foreign Country, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026) is a story for a world out of joint. An absorbing account of one neighborhood in Istanbul that has seen profound change, it offers lessons for all of us who feel the...