New Books in Public Policy

Today I’m speaking with Garrison Lovely, technology journalist and author of the new book, Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us — and How to Stop It (OR Books, 2026). Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most discussed and most misunderstood topic today. Even to the experts and captains of industry, the frontier large language models are essentially black boxes. AI poses many reasons to be both skeptical and optimistic, yet it also poses a fundamental threat to our current economic order and social contract. If AI succeeds, what will it mean for workers, consumers, and the huddled masses who do not own the multi-trillion dollar companies directing the global economy? Garrison Lovely has coined the term, Obsoleting Project to describe the goal of AI companies to build machines that outperform humans on nearly every task. It reimagines technology, not as a tool of efficiency, but rather as a tool that replaces labor full-stop. What happens to our society if they succeed? Garrison’s Obsolete is a fantastic round-up of the most important social and economic challenges posed by AI. I’m thrilled today to have Garrison on The Truth About Bullshit to understand a bit more about the Obsoleting Project.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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The Real Pain of Punishment: Prison, Belonging, and the Quest for Humanized Justice (Cambridge UP, 2026) highlights the concept of 'belonging' as an unprecedented lens for critically interrogating the legitimacy of incarceration across penal theory, sentencing practice, and human rights frameworks. The chapters chart pathways for bridging the gap between the normative idea of punishment and the stark realities of prison life. The final chapter, written with scholars currently and formerly incarcerated in a New York State facility, reflects on how embracing belonging within penal approaches can inform responses to harm grounded in humanization, proximity, empowerment, and collaboration. With this chapter and more, the book, advances a call for deeper epistemic dialogue within legal discourse on crime, punishment, and justice. 

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In this episode, Lilyanna D'Amato speaks with Rahim Kurwa about his book Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing (U California Press, 2025), which examines the policing of housing in Los Angeles' northernmost suburb, Antelope Valley. Kurwa traces the suburbs' relationship with Los Angeles from post WWII to the early 2000s and 2010s, when the region saw increased Black migration as result of the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program, the largest rental assistance program for low-income families in the nation. Kurwa contextualizes the adoption and reception of the voucher system in Los Angeles at the end of the 20th century, and explores the participatory policing and criminalization practices used to evict Black residents and re-segregate the region.

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Can we expect leadership and responsibility from the Asian Global South in climate change governance? India, China, and Climate Change Governance: Leadership and Responsibility in the Asian Global South(Routledge, 2026) is a new book published by Routledge, edited by scholars from Singapore, Estonia, and Poland, explores this intriguing question by examining not only the domestic challenges Asian countries face in exercising leadership and assuming responsibility, but also the international cooperation and competition that shape their regional and global roles. Although the book is focused on India and China, its chapters also dedicate attention to the US, Europe and international organizations.

Amit Ranjan is a Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

Agnieszka Nitza-Makowska is a Research Fellow at the Asia Centre, University of Tartu, Estonia, and an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science and International Relations, Civitas University, Warsaw, Poland.

The episode is hosted by Linas Didvalis, an Associate Professor at Centre for Asian Studies at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

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Climate action is at an impasse. Its political opponents are stronger than ever, its advocates powerless. Almost every major government and corporation expresses their commitment to tackling climate change, yet decades of discussion, governance, and action have failed to stop carbon emissions advancing to record annual levels. How has so little been achieved for so long on such an urgent issue? In Climate Hegemony: Confronting the Politics of Environmental Impasse (LSE Press, 2026), Laurie Parsons shows how the architecture of environmental thinking has been locked into ineffective pathways. We don’t need to be coerced into inaction on climate, because our understanding is constrained by metaphors, rhetoric and assumptions so embedded we have long since ceased to see them. To confront this, Climate Hegemony brings us a human’s-eye view of the climate crisis, building up from lived experience to reveal the interests and politics that underpin the impasse. Drawing on almost two decades’ research at the frontline of global development in Cambodia, Parsons reveals the chasm between how climate change appears in a newspaper, or a policy bulletin, and how it appears to those immersed in the places it affects. From this perspective, the limitations of current environmental thinking become clear, but so too do a great many alternatives. In this powerfully argued work, Parsons set out how, if we were to rethink the perspective from which we understand climate change, we can build knowledge from and for marginalised communities, from the ground upwards, challenging the impasse and creating new pathways to address and adapt to the social impacts of climate breakdown.

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Kenneth R. Feinberg's What is Life Worth? New Edition with Reflections 25 Years After 9/11 (Rivertown Books, 2026) shares the story that inspired the acclaimed motion picture Worth, told by the man behind the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund—a moving saga of national tragedy and healing.

Now with the author’s reflections on how today’s hyper-partisan America needs to unite to face our greatest challenges. Just days after September 11, 2001, attorney Kenneth Feinberg was appointed by Congress to administer the federal 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund—a unique effort to compensate families victimized in the terror attacks. He was given an unlimited budget and total authority over how to spend it.

Feinberg soon found himself under attack and mired in controversy. Traumatized and angry, some families threatened to sue over awards they considered skimpy; others were insulted by the very idea that a dollar value could be placed on the lives of their loved ones. Feinberg spent three years meeting 9/11 survivors and families, hearing their stories and absorbing their grief.

 Gradually, Feinberg earned the respect and support of the 9/11 families, over 97 percent of whom chose to participate in the fund rather than sue. What Is Life Worth? shares the lessons Feinberg learned about the power of compassion and the limits of any effort to place a value on human life.

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For those concerned with how city hall can shape the look and feel of a neighborhood, the mere mention of zoning may invite denunciation of zoning practices that contributed substantially to the housing crisis and so limited neighborhood development that you have to get in your car to pick up a quart of milk.

In her readable Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World (Norton, 2024), Sara Bronin, the Freda Alverson Professor of Law at George Washington University, points out if you want to put up a single-family house of around 2,500 square feet, then at a minimum you may be required to purchase a 43,350 square foot (one acre) lot on which you but nobody else can build. No wonder we have a housing shortage. And after you move in, you will likely find yourself living in a neighborhood zoned “residential,” that is without stores or businesses within walking distance. So it will be necessary to own a car for shopping and just about everything else. 

In this conversation and in Key to the City, Professor Bronin suggests addressing the housing shortage by amending local zoning to make it possible to build several houses per acre. Then too neighborhoods currently zoned “residential” might re-designated for “mixed uses” so that one might walk to stores and restaurants. But Bronin cautions that however inviting the notion of strolling over to the grocery, café or bookstore, how would you feel if a gas station, used car lot or strip joint opened in your neighborhood?

By no means confined to the ivory tower, Professor Bronin, who served for seven years on Hartford’s Planning and Zoning Commission, recognizes that the underlying purpose of zoning––to protect the homeowner from unwanted intrusions––remains valid. And after showing how Hartford, Minneapolis, Tucson, and Baltimore went about revising their zoning ordinances, she concludes that zoning remains an essential tool for developing decent neighborhoods. She then implicitly invites us to take a walk around the block to consider what might be done to make our neighborhood all the better.     

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In Sugar Coated: Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America's Favorite Breakfast Food (U California Press, 2026), world-renowned food politics expert Marion Nestle joins forces with former cereal executive Lisa Sutherland to examine what cereal boxes reveal about American culture and food politics. If you want to understand how the food business works, just have a look at a box of breakfast cereal. Hardly anything on supermarket shelves is bigger, bolder, or more deliberately designed. The fiercely competitive industry that brings us Cheerios, Froot Loops, and Trix sells a distinctly American dream: indulgence and health in one convenient package. Cereal boxes chronicle our shifting national obsessions with health, ingredients, dietary advice, and American culture. They show us what sells food: cartoons for kids, athletes for men, weight loss for women. And hidden in the history of cereal package designs, we find clues to the corporate lobbying that shapes agricultural policy, health claims, and labeling regulations. Sugar Coated unboxes the influence of cereal companies on food policy and the power of marketing, revealing, in the process, why Big Food is so good at selling profitable products regardless of their effects on health.

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Environmental politics is clearly at an impasse, increasingly foreclosed by a fragmenting elite consensus on climate change, an escalating populist backlash on the right, and a pervasive sense of climate doom on the left. This book considers what new openings might be offered by a labor-centered transition focused on our creative agency and our collective capacities to design new worlds.

Whilst political mobilizations and smart policy are vital for making progress on decarbonization, Designing the Just Transition: Design-Politics, Labor, and the Battle for Post-Carbon Futures (Bloomsbury, 2026) suggests that a more environmentally and socially just future will also have to be materialized and built, coded and created, imagined, desired, and enacted by many hands, many skills and many forms of visible and invisible design labor. The mainstream design industry is not to be trusted. Nevertheless, this book brings political ecology and environmental-labor studies into dialogue with critical design praxis, activism, and scholarship. It critically appraises traditions of worker-centered design, ecological and regional planning, sustainable and climate-smart architecture, and 'design when everyone designs.'

Rather than embracing a scolding green politics of limits or techno-utopian propaganda, Designing the Just Transition points to a wealth of resources for thinking about how we still might engage in democratic world-making on a warmer, more restless, and more turbulent planet.

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The twenty-first century has seen major transformations in the US electricity sector—but while the use of coal power wanes and the need for renewable energy becomes more urgent, financial actors maintain a complicating influence on the trajectory of energy transition. Brokers of Power: The Financialization of the US Electricity System (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) identifies changing patterns of investment intertwined with the shift from state-regulated electricity monopolies to a market-driven price model and the embrace of wind and solar hookups to the grid. 

Drawing from case studies such as catastrophic Winter Storm Uri that hit Texas in 2021 and in-depth interviews with people working in the electricity and financial sectors, Dr. Conor Harrison reveals how the various entanglements of private equity, investment banking, and financial modeling are shaping the future and raising the costs of this vital infrastructure. Today’s financial firms, he shows, are engaged in the electricity industry beyond matters of investment: they own electricity generation infrastructure, trade electricity on markets, capture federal renewable energy tax credits, and advise on electricity firm operating strategy. 

Looking beyond technology and policy, Dr. Harrison interrogates what it means to have powerful financial institutions as the primary agents of change in the fraught and ongoing energy transition. A timely and invaluable contribution to the fields of geography, environmental studies, and the energy social sciences, Brokers of Power is a cautionary account delving into the complexities surrounding the push for decarbonization. 

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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