New Books Network

The idea of civility goes back to classical Rome and the ways in

I had the pleasure of discussing Civility Unbound

The various contributing authors to Civility Unbound

We discussed the First America podcast during the conversation. Here is a link to the podcast website: First America Podcast

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics

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Amid global dialogue on the nature of human enhancement, this book traces humanity's pursuit of self-transcendence and enhancement from ancient times to the present, as reflected in diverse traditions across the globe. Transhumanism and Divine Humanity in Global Traditions (Routledge, 2026) examines how the term "transhuman" can move beyond its scientific and technological origins by linking it to ideas, symbols, and practices of transcending human limits found in Asian and global religions and philosophies, including spiritual practices.  Ultimately, the book argues that many religions in Asia and beyond emphasise the desire to transcend human limits, addressing life enhancement both spiritually and physically, and advancing a philosophy of self-transcendence that embraces the physical nature of human existence. By bridging perspectives from scholars of Indic spirituality, Buddhist tantric, and transhumanist philosophical discourse, the book facilitates the ability for mutual understanding, and will be of use to researchers studying philosophy of religion, Asian philosophy, the philosophy of science, and philosophical anthropology. Those working in the fields of posthumanism and transhumanism studies will also find the volume of use.

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What do the people closest to power really think about the system they serve? That’s perhaps one of the most important questions one could ask about North Korea, still one of the world’s least understood countries. 

Today, we’re joined by Jieun Baek, author of Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness (Yale UP, 2026). She draws on in-depth interviews with North Korean elite escapees—from senior party cadres and diplomats to military officers and wealthy, politically connected figures—to explore a group often assumed to be secure, influential, and loyal.

She finds that even those with access to better housing, education, overseas postings, and material comforts remain subject to a political system in which one misstep can have devastating consequences—not only for themselves, but for their families.  We talk about what it means to be an elite in North Korea, why some people defect while others stay, and what elite grievances can and can’t tell us about the country’s future.

Jieun Baek is an author and scholar specializing in authoritarian governance, regime stability, elite political behavior, and information access in closed societies, with a particular focus on North Korea and Burma. Her research draws on more than fifteen years of fieldwork and sustained engagement with hard-to-reach populations, including defectors, dissidents, diplomats, former officials, and individuals operating within and across tightly controlled political systems. She is also the author of North Korea’s Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society (Yale University Press: 2016). 

She can be found on LinkedIn and Instagram.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Privileged But Powerless. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 book Artificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien. A distinguished historian, philosopher, academic leader, and Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) based at the University of Adelaide, my guest explores how the logic of history, defined around trivalent logic (the “maybes,” the “ifs,” the ontological uncertainties), intersects with and challenges the logic of dominant AI algorithms.

The book raises urgent questions about the changing status of human agency, the ethics of AI-powered data collection about us, and the de facto histories that AI is writing about us every second—histories that may decide whether we can travel, access education, or receive medical care. We talk about the opportunities that this perspective on AI presents to humans (and historians in particular!), how some non-Western conceptions of history—for instance, those of the Indigenous nations of Australia—complicate the dominant Western understanding of what history is, and the challenges we must address as we hand over more and more data and delegate the writing of actual human histories to AI.

Aristotle makes a cameo, and my guest talks about how the economy might be shifting from knowledge bias to ethics bias.

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The Grant Writing Guide: A Road Map for Scholars (Princeton UP, 2023) is an essential handbook for writing fundable grants. This easy-to-use guide features writing samples, a glossary of important terms, answers common questions, and explains pitfalls to avoid. Dr. Betty Lai focuses on skills that are universal to all grant writers, not just specific skills for one type of grant or funder. She explains how to craft phenomenal pitches and align them with your values, structure timelines and drafts, communicate clearly in prose and images, solicit feedback to strengthen your proposals, and much more. This incisive book walks you through every step along the way, from generating ideas to finding the right funder, determining which grants help you create the career you want, and writing in a way that excites reviewers and funders.

This episode explores: how to align your values and interests with a grant opportunity;

why most of us will end up needing a grant; things you can learn from a grant proposal that succeeded, and from one that didn’t; what your grant reviewer really needs from you and why; and how to use the funder’s guidelines and terminology to your advantage.

Guest: Dr. Betty S. Lai is an associate professor in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, among others. Her work has been recognized with awards from the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Foundation.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is the producer of the both Academic Life podcast and the show’s weekly newsletter. She is a writing coach and developmental editor for academics.

Listeners to this episode may be interested in:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 325+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

This episode was originally published on Feb 2, 2023.

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Between 1933 and 1935, a trial was held in Bern against members of the Swiss extreme right-wing National Front who had distributed “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a widely disseminated antisemitic publication that spread lies about Jews. The real target of the Jewish organizations that initiated the trial, however, was the pamphlet itself, its origin, its dissemination, and its use in Europe's fascist movements.

During the course of the trial, both sides received ample support in the form of material assistance and propaganda. The defendants and their supporters in Nazi Germany were able to rely on an extensive network that had been established in the early 1920s to combat “Judaeo-Bolshevism.” This conspiratorial “Antisemitic International” united German völkisch circles, Italian fascists, Russian monarchists, and French conspiracy theorists. On the other side, the plaintiffs actively sought to expose the “Protocols” as a forgery in the hope that this would counteract their impact.

In this lecture, Michael Hagemeister will use the Bern trial as a case study of Jewish legal self-defense in order to shed light on both the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and the concerted efforts against the “Antisemitic International” in the 1930s, which have received little attention from historians.

Read more about Michael Hagemeister's research on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

This lecture originally took place on April 10, 2024.

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In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old protein bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story one hundred years in the making.
In 2003, Sand Daw’s golden boy Coll is putting the finishing touches on the town’s annual historical reenactment. But when an upstart would-be author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city—and himself.
In 1902, town founder, gunslinger, and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy’s disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence?
These three strangers are separated by time and circumstance. But Sunrise’s many secrets are like gunpowder: quiet, contained, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht’s novel Sunrise (Random House, 2026) challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the people and places to which we lay claim, and, most of all, of our own lives.

Téa Obreht is the internationally bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, Inland, and The Morningside. Her novels have won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Southwest Book Award, and have been finalists for the National Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, among others. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, she divides her time between Dublin, Ireland, and Wyoming.

Recommended Books:

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick chats with Dr. Nicole Marinaro, a sociolinguist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg. Her work explores how language policies shape people's experiences of accessing healthcare and other public services. Dr. Marinaro’s research focuses on linguistic justice, examining how communication barriers affect patients who speak a language other than the majority language and how these barriers can lead to unequal access to care. Today she and Brynn discuss her 2025 paper "Operationalising linguistic unease for the evaluation of language policies in healthcare".

In this paper, Dr. Marinaro expands on the concept of "linguistic unease" as a practical framework for evaluating whether healthcare language policies truly meet patients' communication needs. Through her research, Dr. Marinaro aims to help policymakers and healthcare organizations create more inclusive systems that ensure everyone can communicate confidently and receive equitable care.

References

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture

With original research and clear

At its core, Divination Engines

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book

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John Ross speaks with Scott Forbes Crawford about his book The Han-Xiongnu War, 133 BC–89 AD (Pen & Sword Military, 2024) For more than two centuries, Han China fought a bitter struggle against the Xiongnu, a powerful confederation of horse-riding nomads from the Asian steppe. This was far more than a border war. It helped shape the future of China, transformed Central Asia, and opened the routes that would become known as the Silk Road.

In writing this history, Scott followed the example of China’s greatest historian, Sima Qian (the subject of BOA episode 82 ), and took a biographical approach. We learn about remarkable figures such as Modun, the ruthless founder of the Xiongnu Empire; Li Guang, the legendary “Flying General”; the explorer Zhang Qian; and Princess Jieyou, a royal diplomat/spy who spent decades advancing Han interests deep in Central Asia.

Notes:

The full title of Scott Crawford’s book is: The Han-Xiongnu War, 133 BC–89 AD: The Struggle of China and a Steppe Empire Told Through Its Key Figures (Pen & Sword, 2023)

To learn more about Scott’s work, including his novel Silk Road Centurion, visit his website : https://www.scottforbescrawfor...

The Books on Asia Podcast is co-produced with Plum Rain Press.

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