New Books Network

Welcome to the Museum of Shapes. Alma is the curator of the museum. She decides which shapes should go where. Triangles have three sides and three angles. Can you help Alma find all the triangles on the shelves? Almas favorite shape is a circle. All the points on the edge of a circle are the same distance from its center. Not all shapes are geometric. Some lines are wiggly and messy. Can you make a wiggly line with your body?

The Museum of Shapes (Cicada Books, 2025) is an engaging and informative book about the shapes that make up our world. The narrative framework is complemented by interactive texts and gorgeous, minimalist illustration, shedding new light on the beauty of geometry.

Sven Völker is Professor for Experiment and Strategy in Graphic Design at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. He studied at the University of Art in Bremen and received an master degree from Middlesex University in London. In 2004 he was appointed professor for graphic design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe and since 2010 tought at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art in Halle.

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Since Xi Jinping’s accession to power in 2012, nearly every aspect of China’s relations with Africa has grown dramatically. Beijing has increased the share of resources it devotes to African countries, expanding military cooperation, technological investment, and educational and cultural programs as well as extending its political influence.

China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement (Columbia University Press, 2023) examines the full scope of contemporary political and security relations between China and Africa. David H. Shinn and Joshua Eisenman not only explain the specific tactics and methods that Beijing uses to build its strategic relations with African political and military elites but also contextualize and interpret them within China’s larger geostrategy. They argue that the priorities of Chinese leaders―including the conflation of threats to the Communist Party with threats to the country, a growing emphasis on relations in the Global South, and a focus on countering U.S. hegemony―have combined to elevate Africa’s importance among policy makers in Beijing.

Ranging from diplomacy and propaganda to arms sales and space cooperation, from increasingly frequent People’s Liberation Army Navy port calls in Africa to the rising number of African students studying in China, this book marshals extensive and compelling qualitative and quantitative evidence of the deepening ties between China and Africa. Drawing on two decades of systematic data and hundreds of surveys and in-person interviews, Shinn and Eisenman shed new light on the state of China-Africa relations today and consider what the future may hold.

Byline

Nomeh Anthony Kanayo, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, with research interest in Africa's diaspora relations, African-China relations, Great power rivalry and IR theories.

Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699

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Why do states start conflicts that they ultimately lose? Why do leaders possess inaccurate expectations of their prospects for victory? Bureaucracies at War (Cambridge UP, 2024) examines how national security institutions shape the quality of bureaucratic information upon which leaders base their choice for conflict – which institutional designs provide the best counsel, why those institutions perform better, and why many leaders fail to adopt them. Author Tyler Jost argues that the same institutions that provide the best information also empower the bureaucracy to punish the leader. Thus, miscalculation on the road to war is often the tragic consequence of how leaders resolve the trade-off between good information and political security.

Employing an original cross-national data set and detailed explorations of the origins and consequences of institutions inside China, India, Pakistan, and the United States, this book explores why bureaucracy helps to avoid disaster, how bureaucratic competition produces better information, and why institutional design is fundamentally political.

Our guest is Tyler Jost, an assistant professor of political science and the Watson Institute Assistant Professor of China Studies at Brown University.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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On July 30, 1902, tens of thousands of mourners lined the streets of New York’s Lower East Side to bid farewell to the city’s chief rabbi, the eminent Talmudist Jacob Joseph. All went well until the procession crossed Sheriff Street, where the six-story R. Hoe and Company printing press factory towered over the intersection. Without warning, scraps of steel, iron bolts, and scalding water rained down and injured hundreds of mourners, courtesy of antisemitic factory workers. The police compounded the attack when they arrived on the scene; under orders from the inspector in charge, who made no effort to distinguish aggressors from victims, officers began beating up Jews, injuring dozens.
To the Yiddish-language daily Forverts (Forward), the bloody attack on Jews was not unlike those that many Russian Jews remembered bitterly from the old country. But this was America, not Russia, and the Jewish community wasn’t going to stand for such treatment. Fed up with being persecuted, New York’s Jews, whose numbers and political influence had been growing, set a pattern for the future by deftly pursuing justice for the victims. They forced trials and disciplinary hearings, accelerated retirements and transfers within the corrupt police department, and engineered the resignation of the police commissioner. Scott D. Seligman’s The Chief Rabbi's Funeral (U Nebraska Press, 2024) is the first book-length account of this event and its aftermath.

Scott D. Seligman is a national award-winning historian and biographer with a special interest in the history of hyphenated Americans. He holds an undergraduate degree in American history from Princeton University and a master’s degree from Harvard University.

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

Mentioned in the podcast:

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Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express resistance to India and Indianness? What does this reveal about how non-Western literatures are read, taught, and understood? Drawing on years of experiences in classrooms and on U.S. university campuses, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan explores how writers, critics, teachers, and students of Indian English literatures negotiate and resist the categories through which the field is defined: ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone.

Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (Columbia UP, 2025) considers major contemporary authors who disavow identity even as their works and public personas respond in varied ways to the imperatives of being “Indian.” Chapters examine Bharati Mukherjee’s rejection of “ethnic” Americanness; Chetan Bhagat’s “bad English”; Amit Chaudhuri’s autofictional literary project; and Jhumpa Lahiri’s decision to write in Italian, interspersed with meditations on the iconicity of the theorists Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said. Through an innovative method of accented reading and sharing stories and syllabi from her teaching, Srinivasan relates the burdens of representation faced by ethnic and postcolonial writers to the institutional and disciplinary pressures that affect the scholars who study their works. Engaging and self-reflexive, Overdetermined offers new insight into the dynamics that shape contemporary Indian English literature, the politics of identity in literary studies, and the complexities of teaching minoritized literatures in the West.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is assistant professor of English at Rice University. Her books include the essays What is We? (2025) and the coedited Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (2023), and her public writing has appeared in numerous venues.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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From an award-winning historian and New York Times reporter comes the timely story about McCarthyism that both “lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible…[and] describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end” (The New Yorker)—based in part on newly declassified sources.

Now, for the first time in a generation, Clay Risen delivers a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America (Simon and Schuster, 2025). This period, known as the Red Scare, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, and the terrifying onset of the Cold War. Marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria, this was a defining moment in American history, completely unlike any that preceded it. Drawing upon newly declassified documents and with “scenes are so vivid that you can almost feel yourself sweating along with the witnesses” (The New York Times Book Review), journalist Clay Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their deluded pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies.
Beginning with the origins of the era after WWI through to its conclusion in 1957, Risen brings to life the politics, patriotism, courage, and delirium of those years. Red Scare takes us beyond the familiar story of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists and toward a fuller understanding of what the country went through at a time of moral questioning and perceived threat from the Left, and what we were capable of doing to each other as a result.

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To seek asylum, people often have to cross borders undocumented, embarking on perilous trajectories. Due to the war in Afghanistan, the rule of the Taliban, and severe human rights violations, over the past decades thousands of people have risked their lives to seek safety. By what means do they make these journeys, especially when they lack money and passports?
Over the course of three years, Hannah Pool accompanied a group of Afghan friends and families as they attempted "The Game" - Game zadan: the route to Europe to seek asylum. The resulting ethnography follows them across their entire trajectories: through Iran, Turkey, Greece, and along the so-called Balkan route. In each place, Pool details the economic interactions and social relationships essential for acquiring, saving, borrowing, spending, and exchanging money to facilitate their undocumented migration routes.
The Game: The Economy of Undocumented Migration from Afghanistan to Europe (Oxford UP, 2025) bridges economic sociology and migration studies to illustrate how migrants decide to trust people to facilitate their movement along these routes, focusing particularly on debt, special monies, bribes, donations, and gift-giving. Throughout the migration trajectory, relationships with family, fellow migrants, smugglers, humanitarian actors, and border control officials shape and are shaped by access to financial resources.
Ultimately, the book highlights the dangers in undocumented border-crossing and delves into the core of what it means to flee: Who has the means to escape dangerous conditions to seek asylum?

Hannah Pool is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

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The global wave of democratic backsliding has undermined the ascendancy of democracy in the twenty-first century. So what do democracies need to do to insulate themselves against this trend? Join Nic Cheeseman as he talks to Francis Fukuyama, one of the world’s best-known political scientists, about why democracies need to show they can make progress without sacrificing accountability in order to restore and sustain citizen’s confidence. Drawing on his new article in the Journal of Democracy with Chris Dann and Beatriz Magaloni, he argues that delivery for citizens is crucial to rebuilding the social contract and hence support for democracy – and warns about the dire consequences of failing this challenge.

This episode is based on Francis Fukuyama, Chris Dann and Beatriz Magaloni’s article “Delivering for Democracy: Why Results Matter” that was published in the April 2025 issue of the Journal of Democracy, and is part of an ongoing partnership between the Journal of Democracy and the People, Power, Politics podcast.

Guest: Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and professor (by courtesy) of political science at Stanford University. He is the author of some of the best-known book published on politics in the last thirty years, including The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Trust (1995), The Origins of Political Order (2011), Political Order and Political Decay (2014), and Identity (2018). His books have won numerous awards, including the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Arthur Ross Book Award, and the Fred Riggs Award for Lifetime Achievement in International and Comparative Public Administration (2024).

Presenter: Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR.

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham!

Transcript here

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It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we review Taylor Swift’s new album “The Life of a Showgirl.” We consider the album’s themes: love, nostalgia, how hard it is to be famous, and how the internet is bad. We set the songs in the context of Taylor’s wider career and public persona.

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Why should we ask students to learn about genocides? What outcomes do we aim for from this learning? How successful are we being and how can we do better? And why, in the end, does it matter?

These questions form the heart of a recent special edition of Genocide Studies International titled “The Future of Genocide Education.” The stem from a conference at Rowan University co-sponsored by Rowan and the Zoryan Institute. The papers and conversations held there have been reworked into a series of articles that form the heart of the special issue.

 I talk with two of the authors, James Waller and Maureen Hiebert, about their contributions to the issue, there experience at the conference, and their concerns and successes in teaching students about genocide.

New Books in Genocide Studies has partnered with Genocide Studies International to bring you conversations with authors of cutting edge research and reflection that may not be reflected in published monographs. You can find more about the journal here. GSI is a housed at the Zoryan Institute. Learn more about the Institute here

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