Bangkok is one of the world’s great cities, and the central artery of that city is the Chaophraya River. Michael Hurley’s book, Waterways of Bangkok: Memory, Landscape, and Twilight (NUS Press, 2025) just published by National University of Singapore Press, is an evocative reflection on the river’s place in Thai history, society, and culture. The author describes the Chaophraya River as the “binding thread of the Thai heartland”. He uses the river to examine historical legacies, the role of diverse ethnic groups that have contributed in various ways to Bangkok, and the country’s fractious politics. The book is also a meditation on the important, but today barely noticed, shift in Thai social life from a waterborne lifestyle to a land-based one, a shift which is barely a century old. Flooding, water pollution, and Bangkok’s notorious traffic jams, are all related to this movement away from an earlier aquatic culture.

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Italian Dumplings and Chinese Pizzas: Transcultural Food Mobilities (Fordham UP, 2025) by Dr. Gaoheng Zhang designs a novel analytical framework to approach transcultural food mobilities, a culinary phenomenon that has been with us for decades as a result of colonialism and globalization.
Why is it surprising for some of us to read the pairing of “Chinese” with “pizzas” and “Italian” with “dumplings,” such as proposed in the book’s title? After all, in some regions of the two countries, Italians eat frequently dumplings, and Chinese frequently make baked, steamed, or fried flatbread with toppings or fillings. Furthermore, when dumplings are made in Italy by Chinese migrants or Chinese Italians, or when pizzas are made in China by Italian migrants, Chinese Italians, or Chinese without apparent ties with Italy, are these culinary products Chinese, Italian, Chinese-Italian, or something else? Why do we need to care for such labeling dilemmas?
This book shows how China-Italy food mobilities relayed in popular culture helped forge Chi­nese and Italians’ socioeconomic identities in recent decades by fundamentally shaping contempo­rary Chinese and Italian consumer cultures. This book addresses China-Italy food cultures against the backdrops of two epoch-making socioeconomic processes. During the 1980s, Chinese cuisine became the first non-European food widely available in Italy, thanks to the widespread presence of Chinese eateries. Only American fast food, which established itself in Italy around the same time, enjoyed comparable popularity as a destination for Italian culinary tourism. Meanwhile, in the early 1990s, together with American hamburgers and fried chicken, the American food chain Pizza Hut’s pizzas and spaghetti were the first non-Asian foods that post-Mao Chinese customers recognized as “Western.” The book proposes a critical framework that analyzes transcultural food mobilities by seriously assessing the confluence of diverse mobilities and their impact on food cultures. Ulti­mately, the study shows that a sophisticated interpretation of transcultural food mobilities can help address alterity and build understanding in a world of increasing political and cultural polarization.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In both the United States and France, each side of the legal battle over same-sex marriage and parenthood relied heavily on experts. Despite the similarity of issues, however, lawmakers in each country turned to different sets of authorities: from economists and psychoanalysts to priests and ordinary people. They even prized different types of expertise—empirical research in the United States versus abstract theory in France.
Exploring the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States and France, Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer sheds new light on the power of experts to influence high-stakes democratic debates. Drawing on extensive interviews and ethnographic observation, Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer traces the divergences between the two countries, showing why some experts are ubiquitous in one but absent in the other. He argues that lawmakers, judges, lawyers, journalists, and activists covet something only experts can provide: the credibility and aura of authority, or “expert capital,” which they deploy to advance their agendas. Expert capital is not derived from scientific or technical merit alone but is produced through cultural norms, material resources, and social relationships, which vary greatly across national contexts.
Through the story of the fight over gay rights, By the Power Vested in Me: How Experts Shape Same-Sex Marriage Debates (Columbia UP, 2025) reveals how and why certain experts—but not others—obtain the authority to shape public opinion and policy. At a time of soaring public distrust in experts, this book offers new ways to understand the contested political role of expertise and its consequences.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University, where he specializes in the cultural and interpretive study of space, behavior, and identity. His scholarship examines how designed environments shape social interaction, connectedness, and moral life across diverse settings. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His current research projects include the study of escape rooms as emotion-structured environments, temporal urban environments in rural historical towns, student experiences of hanging out and being at home while at college and university, and a more recent study on the making of rodeo. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website, Google Scholar profile, or connect with him on Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social) or Twitter/X (@ProfessorJohnst). He can also be reached directly by email.

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How healthy you are is dependent on where you live. Americans suffer more cancers, heart disease, mental illness, and other chronic diseases than those who live in other wealthy nations, despite having the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Why? Embark on a journey to unravel the profound impact of public policies on American health from before birth in Born Sick in the USA: Improving the Health of a Nation (Cambridge UP, 2026). Delve into the intricate web where economic inequality weaves a tapestry of sickness stemming from a highly stressed society. This compelling read illuminates the need for transformative change in social safety nets and public policies to uplift national health and well-being. Through vivid storytelling, the book unveils the symptoms, diagnosis, and 'medicine' required to steer the nation toward a healthier future. Join the movement for a healthier America by embracing the insightful revelations and empowering calls to action presented within the pages of this eye-opening book. Contact the author at: [email protected] 

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Saundra Weddle joins fellow Venetianist Jana Byars to talk about her pathbreaking new release, The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice (Penn State UP, 2026). This book deepens our understanding of women’s engagement in urban life through a close study of Venice’s sex trade. Centering questions of gender, agency, and mobility, it reveals how sex workers were embedded in the social and spatial fabric of the city. From the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the Venetian government attempted to control commercial sex by segregating it in municipal brothels in Rialto and later by minimizing the public’s contact with sex workers, limiting their profits, and cracking down on recruitment. These decentralized efforts proved ineffective, and women who performed this labor lived and worked throughout the city. This book traces the diffusion of sex work from the brothels to the alleys, gondola landings, taverns, bathhouses, and peripheral squares of Venice. Saundra Weddle uses legislation, criminal records, contemporary chronicles, and other archival sources to reconstruct the networks of sex workers, procuresses, clients, landlords, and others who facilitated or profited from their labor. Using maps and photographs of key sites, Weddle demonstrates how the built environment both constrained and enabled women’s practices, offering an alternative urban history that foregrounds embodied experiences and vernacular spaces. By assigning new meanings to everyday locations and spatial conditions, this study challenges monument- and elite-centered narratives of Venice and redefines the place of women within its urban history. It will be of interest to scholars of architectural and urban history, women and gender studies, early modern social history, and Italian studies.

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Jonathan Gleason spent ten years writing the ten essays in his debut collection, Field Guide to Falling Ill (Yale UP, 2026). In them, Gleason braids together strands from a variety of sources – from his experience with a potentially-lethal blood clot, to his imprisoned uncle, to his journey to access medication to prevent HIV – to analyze America’s healthcare system and the humiliating, confusing, and depersonalizing effects it can often have. The essays approach medicine from a variety of viewpoints, from Jonathan’s perspective as a gay man analyzing the development of HIV medications like AZT and Truvada, to his experience as a Spanish language medical interpreter at a free clinic in Iowa City. But each essay also reminds readers of the importance of understanding the history of our healthcare institutions, and the necessity of feeling less alone when confronted by their myriad failures. Lyrical, poignant, and deeply human, Field Guide to Falling Ill is a poetic approach to understanding medicine in America.

For more information on Jonathan and his writing, visit:

Jonathan’s website: here

Jonathan’s Substack, Histories of Present Illness: here 
Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her new book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, will be released in April 2026.

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Since its release in 1976, ABBA's song "Fernando" has been loved by fans around the globe both for its sing-along chorus and its revolutionary spirit.

In Fernando: A Song by ABBA (Duke UP, 2025), Kay Dickinson takes readers from Sweden and Chile to Australia and Poland, tracing the complicated ways the song could express support with anticapitalist and Third World liberation struggles while remaining an unrepentant commodity.

A song about freedom fighters was unlikely to become a pop mega-hit, yet as Dickinson demonstrates, ABBA's lucrative, longstanding appeal rests on their ability to bridge contradictions within everyday life.

Five decades later, "Fernando's" rousing calls for freedom continue to resonate with gay liberation movements and other social struggles, demonstrating how a song can be both revolutionary and an envoy for global capital.

Kay Dickinson is Programme Convenor for Creative Arts and Industries at the University of Glasgow and author of Supply Chain Cinema: Producing Global Film Workers.

Kay on the University of Glasgow’s website.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival.

Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky.

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Fantasies of Hong Kong Disneyland: Attempted Indigenizations of Space, Labor, and Consumption (Rutgers UP, 2025) examines the attempt to transplant Disney's "happiest place on Earth" ethos to Hong Kong—with unhappy results. Focusing on the attempted localization and indigenization of this idea in a globalized transnational park, the book delves into the three-way dynamics of an American culture-corporation's intentions, China's government investment, and Hong Kong. The triple actors introduce an especially complex case as two of the world's most powerful entities, the nominally Communist state of China and corporate behemoth Disney, come together for a project in the third space of Hong Kong. The situation poses special challenges for Disney's efforts to manage space, labor, and consumption to achieve local adaptation and business success.

Jenny Banh is a keynote speaker, curriculum developer, and professor of Asian American Studies and Anthropology at California State University, Fresno. Her current research examines the barriers/bridges to Southeast Asian American students, Asian Foodways, and a Hong Kong corporation. In her community work, she has conducted, coded, and transcribed over 40 oral histories of Southeast Asian Americans who live in California’s Central Valley. She donated all the oral histories to the school’s library to create the Central Valley Southeast Asian American Successful Voices Archive. Recently, she helped to co-create the ASAM-Asian Major, nineteen new Asian American studies courses, and three certificates. She has been awarded two teaching awards and four service awards.

Donna Doan Anderson is the Mellon research assistant professor in U.S. Law and Race at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Today we are joined by Dr. Lindsay Krasnoff, who is an historian, specializing in global sport, communications and diplomacy. She is also the Director of FranceandUS, and she lectures on sports diplomacy at New York University Tisch Institute of Global Sport. We met to talk about her most recent book: Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA (Bloomsbury, 2023). In our conversation, we discussed the rise of basketball in France, the differences between French and American basketball, and the way that French basketball stars such as Boris Diaw exemplify the new global “empire” of basketball that incorporates Africa, France and its overseas departments, and the USA.

Krasnoff divides Basketball Empire into three parts that together investigate how French basketball developed from a low point in the middle of the 20th century to a global powerhouse contributing players to the NBA and the WNBA almost every year. Krasnoff argues that French basketball’s success hinges on their ability make use of their connections both with the United States and with their former empire. In examining the growth of basketball in France, Krasnoff traces a sporting genealogy that links together players, coaches, and even commentators from around the globe who compete together in France and help produce a distinctive French style of basketball that nevertheless has appeal outside of the hexagon.

In Basketball Empire, Krasnoff’s first section takes off from her previous work on French association football, which looked at the development of Les Bleus. In the 1950s and 1960s, French basketball too was in crisis. In response, the French government, the Fédération française de basket-ball (FFBB), and even some sporting associations sought out new ways to improve the quality of play in France. Paris University Club brought in Americans who had played basketball in the NCAA but were now living in France to teach American approaches to the game. Individual players, including one of the earliest female French basketball stars Elisabeth Riffiod, watched film of American professionals like Bill Russell. The government redeveloped a national training centre: the National Institute of Sport, Expertise, and Performance (INSEP.) The French League professionalized in 1987. Since the 1990s, French basketball has enjoyed a rising number of successful EuroBasket and Olympic campaigns, including a men’s silver and a women’s bronze in 2020/21.

Basketball Empire’s second section uses micro-biographies to explore the ways that contemporary French players developed their skills, how they made their moves into the NCAA, the NBA or the WNBA, and the challenges and opportunities that these moves provided them as players. In this section in particular, Krasnoff’s ability land and conduct interviews shines. She shows how diverse players, including Boris Diaw, Sandrine Gruda, Nicolas Batum, Marine Johannès, Diandra Tchatchouang, Evan Fournier, Mickaël Gelabale, and Rudy Gobert have become not only basketball stars but also informal diplomats that help build connections and translate between Africa, France and the United States.

In the final section, Krasnoff considers why the French have been so successful at producing high quality men’s and women’s basketball players. She credits la formation à la française: the specific French training system that includes a national sports training center (the INSEP) as well as local and regional basketball academies (pôles espoirs). The future looks bright for French basketball and in our interview Krasnoff predicts French and US success in the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympiad.

Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history.

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Is culture good for you? In Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives (Cornerstone Press, 2026) Daisy Fancourt, a Professor of Psychobiology & Epidemiology and head of the Social Biobehavioural Research Group at University College London offers a comprehensive and compelling argument for the ways arts and culture offer health and social benefits for individuals and societies. The book offers both the evidence for the benefits of arts and culture, whilst at the same time showing how many people and places are missing out and excluded from the positive impact of engagement and experiences. A powerful call for the importance of art and culture, backed by a blend of rigorous scientific and medical evidence, as well as engaging personal stories and narratives, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities and sciences.

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