New Books Network

A lively and entertaining cultural history of a supremely annoying intellectual vice Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation, even downright aggression. Many learned individuals have cast such hostility as a badge of honor, a sign of envy, or a form of resistance to inconvenient truths. On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All (Princeton University Press, 2025) offers an altogether different perspective, revealing how the excessive use of learning has been a vice in Western culture since the days of Socrates. Taking readers from the academies of ancient Greece to today’s culture wars, Arnoud Visser explains why pretentious and punctilious learning has always annoyed us, painting vibrant portraits of some of the most intensely irritating intellectuals ever known, from devious sophists and bossy savantes to hypercritical theologians, dry-as-dust antiquarians, and know-it-all professors. He shows how criticisms of pedantry have typically been more about conduct than ideas, and he demonstrates how pedantry served as a weapon in the perennial struggle over ideas, social status, political authority, and belief. Shifting attention away from the self-proclaimed virtues of the learned to their less-than-flattering vice, Visser makes a bold and provocative contribution to the history of Western thought. Drawing on a wealth of sources ranging from satire and comedy to essays, sermons, and film, On Pedantry sheds critical light on why anti-intellectual views have gained renewed prominence today and serves as essential reading in an age of rising populism across the globe.

Arnoud S. Q. Visser is professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school for cultural history.

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

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In 1788, Mary Smith was ruined and banished from "civilised" society when her neighbor accused her of carrying a bastard child. To silence the ruinous rumors and vindicate her name, Smith sued him for defamation. But in court, she faced the onerous burden, entrenched within English law of sexual slander, of proving "special damage." Smith should have lost her case, but her action set off a remarkable reform movement.

In Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law (Stanford University Press, 2025), Dr. Jessica Lake offers a comparative legal history of gendered hate speech, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment across 19th-century America, Australia, and England. Drawing upon original archival material, she tracks the creation of the Slander of Women reforms that made it easier for women to sue when called "whores." Dr. Lake reveals, for the first time, the cases brought by women that spurred and benefitted from these reforms. In doing so, she details how debates about women, speech, and reputation circulated through transnational common law networks, connecting countries, colonies, and continents.

The Slander of Women movement furthered legal protections for women, but also created links between ideas of whiteness, femininity, chastity, and civilization. Special Damage tells a compelling story that questions the costs and compromises of legal progress in a patriarchal and unequal "civilised" New World.

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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An ethnography of indigenous lives amidst subsistence labor, large-scale logging, and unrealized schemes, We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea (U Arizona Press, 2024) traces how hopes for development in New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, are cultivated, frustrated, and yet continually renewed.

On New Hanover Island in Papua New Guinea, Lavongai communities have long pursued transformative development through logging and large-scale agroforestry projects, only to see forests disappear and livelihoods deteriorate. In We Stay the Same, Jason S. Roberts follows the various Lavongai encounters with multinational special agricultural and business leases that promised sustainable growth but instead deepened inequality and risk. Blending ethnographic and ecological research, Roberts traces how Lavongai people navigate subsistence, dispossession, and what he calls a “political ecology of hope,” showing how aspirations for a better life are continually cultivated, disappointed, and yet never fully abandoned.

Jason S. Roberts is a practicing anthropologist who currently works on subsistence policy and natural resource management issues in Alaska. He completed his PhD at the University of Texas at San Antonio and previously served as a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Drew University. His work and research engages interests in development, sustainability, climate change, hope, and environmental justice.

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic while others don't, Ludwig shows gun violence to be more circumstantial—and more solvable—than our traditional approaches lead us to believe.
Drawing on decades of research and Ludwig’s immersive fieldwork in Chicago, including “countless hours spent in schools, parks, playgrounds, housing developments, courtrooms, jails, police stations, police cars, and lots and lots of McDonald's,” Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is a breakthrough work at the cutting edge of behavioral economics. As Ludwig shows, progress on gun violence doesn’t require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.

Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He is the Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago's Crime Lab, codirector of the National Bureau of Economic Research's working group on the economics of crime, elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and a member of the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Science.

Alfred Marcus is the Edson Spencer Professor at the Carlson School, University of Minnesota.

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Twentieth Century (1934) is a screwball comedy that moves like a runaway train and we are delightfully tied to the tracks. John Barrymore’s audacious performance as director Oscar Jaffee is awe-inspiring; Carole Lombard is equal to the task of pushing back against the man who, in a sense, created her. It’s Frankenstein meets His Girl Friday; it’s ninety minutes of screaming and yelling; it’s filled with as many coincidences as a Wodehouse novel; it’s a great portrait of theatrical types; and it’s laugh-out-loud funny from the first scene to the last. Join us for a ride!

Incredible bumper music by John Deley.

Michael Morrison’s John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor tells the story of Barrymore’s triumphs as Hamlet and Richard III, which informed his performance as the overly-dramatic Oscar Jaffee.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Letterboxd and email us any time at [email protected] with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Read Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day.

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TCP’s inaugural episode features Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao, two scholars whose academic work and activism have helped to set the parameters of the contemporary debate on caste. In our conversation, we addressed the challenge of defining caste, their individual pathways into researching and writing on the caste question, and the virtues and limitations of comparing caste and race as two enduring forms of social stratification. We ended with a discussion of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the runaway bestseller that made caste and its relationship to race a topic of mainstream debate in the United States.

Guests:

Suraj Yengde: scholar, public intellectual, and anti-caste activist.

Anupama Rao: Professor of History and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University

Mentioned in the episode:

B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste

IITs: the Indian Institutes of Technology

IIMs: the Indian Institutes of Management

Reserved candidates: beneficiaries of India’s system of affirmative action

B.R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India”

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Anupama Rao, The Caste Question

Suraj Yengde, Caste Matters

Suraj Yengde, Caste: A Global Story

Shaadi.com: an Indian matrimonial website

Phule: Jyotirao Phule was an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra.

Periyar: E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, commonly known as Periyar, was a writer, social revolutionary, and politician who was one of the principal ideologues of the Self-Respect Movement.

Begumpura, or “city without sorrow” expresses the notion of a casteless, classless utopia and was first formulated by Sant Ravidas (c. 1450-1520).

Dalit Panthers was a revolutionary, anti-caste organization founded in 1972. It was based in Maharashtra and drew inspiration from the American Black Panther Party.

Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948)

Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue

Meet the Savarnas: 2025 book by Ravikant Kisana

Ramesh Bairy, Being Brahmin, Being Modern

Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus

Daniel Immerwahr, “Caste of Colony?”

Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction

Ajantha Subramanian is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center and host of The Caste Pod.

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In this eye-opening chronicle of scientific research on the brain in the early Cold War era, the acclaimed historian Andreas Killen traces the complex circumstances surrounding the genesis of our present-day fascination with this organ.

The 1950s were a transformative, even revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Using new techniques for probing brain activity and function, researchers in neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychology achieved dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment of illnesses like epilepsy and schizophrenia, as well as the understanding of such faculties as memory and perception. Memory was the site of particularly startling discoveries. As one researcher wrote to another in the middle of that decade, “Memory was the sleeping beauty of the brain—and now she is awake.” Collectively, these advances prefigured the emergence of the field of neuroscience at the end of the twentieth century.

But the 1950s also marked the beginning of the Cold War and a period of transformative social change across Western society. These developments resulted in unease and paranoia. Mysterious new afflictions—none more mystifying than “brainwashing”—also appeared at this time. Faced with the discovery that, as one leading psychiatrist put it, “the human personality is not as stable as we often assume,” many researchers in the sciences of brain and behavior joined the effort to understand these conditions. They devised ingenious and sometimes transgressive experimental methods for studying and proposing countermeasures to the problem of Communist mind control. Some of these procedures took on a strange life of their own, escaping the confines of the research lab to become part of 1960s counterculture. Much later, in the early 2000s, they resurfaced in the War on Terror.

These stories, often told separately, are brought together by the historian Andreas Killen in this chronicle of the brain’s mid-twentieth-century emergence as both a new research frontier and an organ whose integrity and capacities—especially that of memory—were imagined as uniquely imperiled in the 1950s. Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War (Harper, 2023) explores the anxious context in which the mid-century sciences of the brain took shape and reveals the deeply ambivalent history that lies behind our contemporary understanding of this organ.

Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at [email protected] and @PFLerner.

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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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Coined in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "voodoo" has been deployed largely by people in the U.S. to refer to spiritual practices--real or imagined--among people of African descent. "Voodoo" is one way that white people have invoked their anxieties and stereotypes about Black people--to call them uncivilised, superstitious, hypersexual, violent, and cannibalistic.

In Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Danielle N. Boaz explores public perceptions of "voodoo" as they have varied over time, with an emphasis on the intricate connection between stereotypes of "voodoo" and debates about race and human rights. The term has its roots in the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s, especially following the Union takeover of New Orleans, when it was used to propagate the idea that Black Americans held certain "superstitions" that allegedly proved that they were unprepared for freedom, the right to vote, and the ability to hold public office. Similar stereotypes were later extended to Cuba and Haiti in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1930s, Black religious movements like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam were derided as "voodoo cults." More recently, ideas about "voodoo" have shaped U.S. policies toward Haitian immigrants in the 1980s, and international responses to rituals to bind Nigerian women to human traffickers in the twenty-first century. Drawing on newspapers, travelogues, magazines, legal documents, and books, Dr. Boaz shows that the term "voodoo" has often been a tool of racism, colonialism, and oppression.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Vanessa R. Sasson's book The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women (Equinox, 2023) is a retelling of the story of the first Buddhist women's request for ordination. Inspired by the Therigatha and building on years of research and experience in the field, Sasson follows Vimala, Patachara, Bhadda Kundalakesa, and many others as they walk through the forest to request full access to the tradition. 

The Buddha's response to this request is famously complicated; he eventually accepts women into the Order, but specific and controversial conditions are attached. Sasson invites us to think about who these first Buddhist women might have been, what they might have hoped to achieve, and what these conditions might have meant to them thereafter. By shaping her research into a story, Sasson invites readers to imagine a world that continues to inspire and complicate Buddhist narrative to this day.

Dr. Victoria Montrose is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Furman University.

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