Political Junkie Podcast

In this episode, I welcome my friend and New School colleague, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, to join me in a conversation about the history of exercise culture in the United States. Her new book, Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2023), tracks the history of Americans’ investment in fitness. Taking her readers from late nineteenth-century per...

In this episode, I talk to Yale University historian Beverly Gage about her new biography of J. Edgar Hoover, just out from Viking Press, " G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century . " A meticulously researched and beautifully written book over ten years in the making, “ G-Man” has already received praise from readers as different as Harvard historian Jill Lepore and former FB...

In Episode 5, I talk to Slate’ s legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick about her book , Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America (Penguin/Random House, 2022). In this episode, we discuss women’s resistance to Donald Trump, Supreme Court ethics, the recent Hobby Lobby leak, Ginni Thomas, and more. Program notes: * Listen to Anita Hill’s complete opening statement about being sexually...

When I was a kid in the 1960s and `70s, I occasionally accompanied my mother to the post office in the Philadelphia suburb where we lived. While Mom waited in line, I would slide over to a corner of the bulletin board next to the service windows that housed the FBI’s Most Wanted posters. And there they were—Angela Davis, a Black philosophy professor from the University of California, on the run as...

In the last episode, we discussed the aspirations and limitations of the 19th-century Black freedom movement; this week, Black and white Progressives imagine a twentieth century without racism. My guest is Victoria W. Wolcott , professor of history at the State University of New York at Buffalo and author of Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement (University of Chicago...

In Episode 2 of “Why Now?” Kerri Greenidge talks to us about her new book, The Grimkés: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (Liveright, 2022.) Greenidge is Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University and an expert in abolitionism and 19th-century African-American history. She is also the author of the prize-winning biograph...

In this debut episode of “Why Now?” I interview Daniel Laurison, Associate Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College, who studies the connections between economic inequality, racial inequality, and racism in American society and how privilege shapes our political culture. Daniel is also a political junkie like me: not only does he write about politics, but when he was a graduate student at Berk...