New Books in Journalism

The remarkable political ascent of Donald J. Trump and his sustained grip on a certain segment of American society have given fresh life to a question as old as Tocqueville’s visit to Jacksonian America a century ago: How do foreigners regard America, Americans and the American experiment? I explore this question in a conversation with Madeline Schwartz, founder and editor in chief of The Dial, an...

British daily newspapers transformed rapidly at the turn of the nineteenth century, ballooning in size and radically reorganizing staffing and production decade by decade. By mid-century, newspapers had grown from the folded single sheets of the previous century to large multi-page broadsheets, so impressive in the quantity of print they held and their speed of production that one of their nicknam...

In 1897 when the Forverts was founded, the need for a Jewish newspaper—a Yiddish newspaper that is—was self-evident: millions of Yiddish speaking Jewish immigrants needed a reliable daily source of news in their own language. In the first few decades of the 20th century the Yiddish press blossomed in New York, peaking at five different daily papers and an estimated daily readership of approximatel...

The COVID-19 pandemic delivered its first and most devastating strike in the United States in New York City in the Spring of 2020. Closely connected to the world by air travel, with a virus able to circle the globe in a single flight, and with a population always living life largely in public spaces, sickness swept through the city, with the daily death toll reaching, at its worst point in April 2...

From Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist Anand Gopal, an epic and enthralling account of six Syrians fighting for a better world, in the tradition of classic works by Philip Gourevitch and Katherine Boo. In 2011, in a northern Syrian city, a small group of men and women began a movement that overthrew a brutal dictatorship. For the next eighteen months, many of the citizens of Manbij carried...

How Western media shapes public understanding of Gaza, Palestine, and conflict through language, political narratives, and global power structures. In this Nordic Asia Podcast episode, Khaled Ezzelarab, Director of the Middle East Institute Program at the American University in Cairo and a former journalist, discusses how Western media narratives shape public understanding of the Gaza war and the...

Robin Andersen's latest book, The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel's Genocide in Gaza (OR Books, 2026), is a forensic and unflinching examination of how establishment media abandoned journalistic integrity to manufacture consent for the genocide in Gaza, creating an environment in which unprecedented escalations and war crimes have become a terrifying new normal. Since October 7th 202...

Jeremy Harding has long been one of the premier essayists and journalists of our day. Elegant, committed and free of cant, Harding's writing has often appeared in the London Review of Books, from which a number of these essays were drawn. Harding explores the intersection of politics and culture on the African continent, and unearths stories that explain the dialectical relations between the two s...

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, US officials identified the so-called battle for hearts and minds as the “second front” in the war on terror. A wave of funding flowed into public diplomacy in the Middle East, seeking to change views of the United States through Arabic-language communications—often while hiding the traces of American origins. To what extent did this vast propaganda apparat...

In U.S. Militarism and the Terrain of Memory: Negotiating Dead Space (Taylor & Francis, 2024), John Bechtold examines how the US military understands information and the media as a contested terrain. Focusing on the assaults on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004, Bechtold shows the efforts the US military went through to make sure it was able maintain control over the battles’ narrative. This effo...

Rolling Stone's first decade was truly rock and roll: chaotic, wild, and unpredictable. Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine (U California Press, 2026) by Peter Richardson charts the origins and evolution of the magazine during its formative early years in San Francisco. Founded in 1967 by a 21-year-old college dropout, Rolling Stone and its editors were steeped in the Bay Area'...

How the rise of the culture wars afflicts the politics of education.  On August 9, 2022, the Denton Independent School District held a meeting to address complaints about its libraries. Like so many districts in Texas and across the country, Denton had been responding to accusations that children had access to inappropriate books at school. During the public comment session, a local man stood up t...

The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel “viewed history as consisting of stages punctuated by times of upheaval,” the author John B. Judis wrote in a recent essay for NOTUS, and “assigned to what he called ‘world-historical individuals’ a special role in spurring the transition from one era to another.” Trump, Judis posited, “is exactly such an individual,” comparable in this respect to Alexander the Great,...

In Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against The Press (Columbia UP, 2026), A.J. Bauer examines the history of the idea of a “liberal media bias.” Rather than trying to show whether or not “liberal media bias” is an accurate description, Bauer shows how this idea has been an animating force for conservative political activists and media figures. Bauer shows the lineage o...

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On October 10, 2025, NYU’s Journalism Institute hosted a day-long conference titled Podcast Intellectuals: Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their resear...

Hitler and My Mother-in-Law (OR Books, 2025) is a riveting memoir that explores the intersection of truth—both familial and political—through the colorful and complex life of the author's mother-in-law. In a time like our own of intense propaganda and manipulation, the only WWII female correspondent who covered both theaters of war, Pat Hartwell identified Hitler from a pile of ashes for the US mi...

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On October 10, 2025, NYU’s Journalism Institute hosted a day-long conference titled Podcast Intellectuals: Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their resear...

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On October 10, 2025, NYU’s Journalism Institute hosted a day-long conference titled Podcast Intellectuals: Producing Original Scholarship with Audio. Over the course of three panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their resear...

As news reporters, we are in the story-telling business, the eye witnesses to history, writing, it's ‎said, ‘the first draft of history'.‎ The fall of the Berlin Wall. Lockerbie. Hillsborough. Dunblane. Mad Cow disease. 9/11. ‎These are all events that have entered our national, and international, consciousness. Events so ‎momentous that we can all say where we were, what we were doing, when the...

In Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights (Legacy Lit, 2026) reporter Amy Littlefield investigates the secret killers and hidden motives behind the death of abortion rights. They are going to kill people, investigative reporter for The Nation Littlefield knew, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. As a journalist covering abortion for more than a dec...

This episode features Yashica Dutt, journalist and author of Coming Out as Dalit. We began with a discussion of her choice to write a memoir, the significance of the memoir as a genre of Dalit writing, the politics around passing as upper caste, and what her mother’s role in the life taught her about Dalit feminism as a counter to Brahminical patriarchy. We then moved on to what her work as a jour...

Most of us would agree that American journalism has problems. Rushed reporting and thin coverage. Timidity in the face of adversity. Polarized perspectives and euphemistic language. Groupthink about complicated events. While much blame has been levelled at big tech, in How the Cold War Broke the News: The Surprising Roots of Journalism's Decline (Polity, 2025) Dr. Barbie Zelizer traces the decline...

Studying Chinese media has never been a stable intellectual enterprise. As Professor Yuezhi Zhao once observed, it often resembles aiming at a target that appears clear from a distance but becomes elusive on closer inspection. Over the past decade, that target has grown even more fragmented and mobile. Media systems across the Chinese-speaking world—including the People’s Republic of China (PRC),...

Jacob Mchangama, founder and director of the think tank Justitia, has written a one-volume history of freedom of thought, which ranges from the lone Demosthenes of 4th-century BCE Athens to the recent controversies regarding Donald Trump. In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (Basic Books, 2022), Mchangama argues that the history of freedom of thought has recurrent themes, suc...

In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With small staffs and shoestring budgets, these newspapers nonetheless became powerful vehicles for the expression of Black political thought. Drawing on papers from Trinidad, Jamaica, Ghana, and Nigeria, Leslie James shows how t...