New Books in American Politics

Living the Dream: The Contested History of Martin Luther King Jr. Day (UNC Press, 2022) tells the history behind the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the battle over King's legacy that continued through the decades that followed. Creating the first national holiday to honor an African American was a formidable achievement and an act of resistance against conservative and segregation...

In this episode of Cited: What it means to live in a place where your home can give you cancer. Richland, Washington is a company town that sprang up almost overnight in the desert of southeastern Washington. Its employer is the federal government, and its product is plutonium. The Hanford nuclear site was one of the Manhattan Project sites, and it made the plutonium for the bomb that devastated N...

Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don't know: Until Thomas went to law school, he was a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist.  In The Enigma of Clarence Thomas (Metropolitan Books, 2...

Utilizing a breadth of archival sources from activists, artists, and policymakers, Charlie Jeffries' Teenage Dreams: Girlhood Sexualities in the U.S. Culture Wars (Rutgers UP, 2022) examines the race- and class-inflected battles over adolescent women’s sexual and reproductive lives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States. Charlie Jeffries finds that most adults in this p...

In Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today...

Why They Hate Us: How Racist Rhetoric Impacts Education (Teachers College Press, 2021) examines how racist political rhetoric has created damaging and dangerous conditions for Students of Color in schools and higher education institutions throughout the United States. The authors show how the election of the 45th president has resulted in a defining moment in U.S. history where racist discourses,...

It was billed as “the biggest event in the history of the terminally online.” A debate: socialism vs. capitalism. On your left side, the esteemed Marxist economist Richard Wolff. On your right, a StarCraft player-turned-online intellectual: Steven Bonnel II, better known as Destiny. But this debate didn’t take place on TV, or in a university debate club… it was on Twitch.tv. The online streaming p...

In Citizens of the World: U.S. Women and Global Government (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Megan Threlkeld profiles nine American women in the first half of the 20th century who invoked world citizenship as they promoted world government. These women agreed neither on the best form for such a government nor on the best means to achieve it, and they had different definitions of peace and...

Recently a major outage took nearly a third of Canada offline. No phone, no internet… even access to 911 got shut down in some places. So why does one company get so much control over a vital service… the internet? This is the story in the USA as well as Canada, so at Darts and Letters we wanted to look for a different way. We also don’t necessarily believe the market is the solution… so what is?...

Who runs American politics? In Producing Politics: Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Privileged Few Shape Politics for All of Us (Beacon Press, 2022), Daniel Laurison, an associate professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, explores the hidden world of campaign professionals to offer a new sociological perspective on how contemporary politics works. The book explores how ‘politicos’...

The little-known and under-studied 1807 Insurrection Act was passed to give the president the ability to deploy federal military forces to fend off lawlessness and rebellion, but it soon became much more than the sum of its parts. Its power is integrally linked to the perceived threat of black American equity in what lawyer and critic Hawa Allan demonstrates is a dangerous paradox. While the Act w...

Every government agency in the United States, from Homeland Security to Departments of Motor Vehicles, has the authority to make its own rules for sex classification. Many transgender people find themselves in the bizarre situation of having different sex classifications on different documents. Whether you can change your legal sex to “F” or “M” (or more recently “X”) depends on what state you liv...

Freedom is often considered the cornerstone of the American political project. The 1776 revolutionaries declared it an inalienable right that could neither be taken nor granted, a sacred concept upon which the nation was established. The concept and actualization of freedom are also to be defended by the state. However, when such a concept has been arrogated, litigated, and delegitimized by a stat...

If you tuned in to our “ideas in strange places” themed programming last week, you would have heard an episode of Darts and Letters’ predecessor: Cited. (If you didn’t, check it out - there’s everything from science fiction to prison activism back there!) Today, as we continue exploring the politics of education, we’re bringing you another episode of Cited. This one was produced in collaboration w...

How do military organizations learn? Robert W. Tomlinson's book The Influence of Foreign Wars on U.S. Domestic Military Policy (Lexington, 2022) covers an important instance of military learning in which the United States military systematically examined the lessons of Israel's decisive victory in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and applied those lessons towards major doctrinal and equipment changes. The...

Why is so much right-wing money being funnelled at such a furious pace into universities across the US? Libertarian-minded billionaires like the Kochs and their partners have funded scholars and think tanks across the US, and similar things go on in Canada too. The money shows us that the right spends it because they care about education, for their own ideological reasons - and universities are al...

From the president of Wesleyan University, a compassionate and provocative manifesto, Safe Enough Spaces (Yale UP, 2021) on the crises confronting higher education In this bracing book, Michael S. Roth stakes out a pragmatist path through the thicket of issues facing colleges today to carry out the mission of higher education. With great empathy, candor, subtlety, and insight, Roth offers a sane a...

Welcome to week two of our Darts and Letters summer showcase! Darts and Letters is a show about the politics of ideas. We’re celebrating joining the New Books Network by bringing you some of our favourite past episodes of the show. Each week, we’re following a different theme. Last week’s was “ideas in strange places” - and today, we’re kicking off a week of episodes about the politics of educatio...

The protests of summer 2020 led to long-overdue reassessments of the legacy of racism and white supremacy in both American academe and cultural life more generally. But while universities have been willing to rename some buildings and schools or grapple with their role in the slave trade, no one has yet asked the most uncomfortable question: Does academic freedom extend to racist professors? It's...

In The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (Duke UP, 2022) Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new...

What is unfeeling? According to today’s guest, Xine Yao, unfeeling includes “a broad range of affective modes, including withholding, disregard, growing a thick skin, refusing to care, opacity, numbness, dissociation, inscrutability, frigidity, insensibility, obduracy, flatness, insensitivity, disinterest, coldness, heartlessness, fatigue, desensitization, and emotional unavailability.”  In short,...

For decades, immigration has been one of the most divisive, contentious topics in American politics. And for decades, urgent calls for its policy reform have gone mostly unanswered. As the discord surrounding the modern immigration debate has intensified, border enforcement has tightened. Crossing harsher, less porous borders makes unauthorized entry to the United States a permanent, costly undert...

Darts and Letters is a show about the politics of ideas, and this week we’re searching for progressive politics in strange places… such as pro-wrestling. There have been 37 Wrestlemanias. That’s a lot of wrestling. And a lot of entertainment for the millions of people who enjoy watching wrestling, including our host, Gordon Katic. Maybe you’re a fan, maybe not. Fans and non-fans alike have often d...

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals the unexplored impact of utopian thought on the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement. Utopian thinking is often dismissed as unrealistic, overly idealized, and flat-out impractical-in short, wholly divorced from the urgent conditions of daily life. This is perhaps especially true when the utop...

Hi! This is Darts and Letters. We’ve just become a part of New Books Network, so we want to introduce ourselves. Fundamentally, This is a show about the politics of ideas. Another way to say that would be “intellectuals”, but we don’t really gel with this classic idea of intellectuals being white guys at Harvard. We’re more populist than that, and we have a whole segment in this episode about what...