New Books Network

Are we driving our technology, or is it starting to drive us? In this thought-provoking conversation, Eli Karetny sits down with researcher and author Eduardo Albrecht to explore the invisible, rapidly encroaching frontier of AI governance and data surveillance.Moving far beyond traditional debates about data privacy, Albrecht warns of a near future where the state and corporate partners bypass human speech entirely, relying instead on "sentiment detection" to ascribe thoughts and make decisions that impact our physical lives. Together, they trace the historical trajectory of control—from early fingerprinting and eugenics to modern biometrics and neural implants—and challenge the modern illusion of state efficiency at the expense of human agency.Tune in for a deep dive into the two fundamental rights required to safeguard the future of democracy: absolute transparency over our data, and an evolving, radical defense of our collective freedom of thought.

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Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary China: Volunteering, Infrastructures and Civic Imaginations (Leiden University Press, 2026) examines

The book argues that volunteering has become an urban practice

NOTE: The book Ka-ming Wu mentioned in the interview is Stephen Graham’s Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism

Wu Ka-ming is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural and

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of

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In The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties: Hot Dogs and Crêpes Suzette (Oxford UP, 2026), the first ever published on The Patty Duke Show (1963-66), Caryl Flinn and Dana Polan examine the significance of this classic US sitcom within popular culture and within American society at the time. Child acting sensation Patty Duke plays the all-American Patty as well as her staid British counterpart Cathy, who comes to live with Patty's family in Brooklyn. Far from being a frivolous show, the show's use of twin girls--and their comic antics--offers glimpses into different identities and possibilities to try on, in keeping not only with girls' popular culture of the time but the optimism of John F. Kennedy's Camelot years.
At the same time, the series plugged into many of the contradictions of the mid-1960s. It flirted, as much of the US did, with foreign cultures, such as Julia Child's mediation of Frenchness, only to return to and reaffirm core US values. Like Kennedy, who encouraged the country's youth to engage with the world at large, the show gestures towards a cosmopolitanism that, ultimately, retreats into an American-based perspective, as evidenced in the series' preferential treatment of Patty over Cathy--despite the two characters being played by one actor.
Drawing on archival research, Flinn and Polan bring to light the show's production background, which has until now been largely lost to history, as well as considering the series's conception, reception, its many tie-in products, and its ongoing afterlife in the decades since its initial broadcast. In so doing, they reveal hidden and overt issues that shaped American culture and ideology of the 1960s.

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M. G. Sheftall has lived in Japan since 1987. He has a PhD in international relations and modern Japanese history from Waseda University in Tokyo. Since 2001, he has been a professor of modern Japanese cultural history and communication at the Faculty of Informatics of Shizuoka University. He lives in Hamamatsu, Japan.

Amy Chavez talks about Sheftall's books on the Asia Pacific War, in particular Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses and Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses both oral histories featuring interviews with survivors of the atomic bombs.

Has Japan's 80 years of peace education been all for naught? The book serves as a prescient warning given the current political climate and Japan's complex relationships with the US, Taiwan, China, and the broader world. Recent developments—including Nihon Hidankyo's 2024 Nobel Peace Prize and the ongoing protests against revising Article 9—bring this subject into sharp focus. Against this backdrop, the author offers his own perspective on Japan's nuclear future.

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

Podcast host Amy Chavez is author of The Widow, the Priest, and the Octopus Hunter: Discovering a Lost Way of Life on a Secluded Japanese Island, and Amy's Guide to Best Behavior in Japan.

Subscribe to the BOA podcast from your favorite podcast service.

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Homosexuality in Central Asia: Stories of Hardship and Hope

Cholpon Ramizova is a London-based creator and researcher. She holds a

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What does it really mean to go "beyond the letter of the law"? In

For generations, lifnim mi-shurat ha-din has been understood

By tracing how this idea developed from in the Talmud, Barer uncovers

Together, Barer and Katz explore why improvisation matters in Jewish

Deborah Barer is Senior Faculty with the Shalom Hartman Institute of

Rabbi Marc Katz is the senior Rabbi at Temple Ner

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Hindu nationalism is transforming India as an increasingly dominant

Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism

Sachin Nikarge has

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In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Yana Skorobogatov about her book, Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union

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The definitive feminist analysis of reproductive and ‘caring’ labor to emerge from Italian feminism of the 1970s.

Emerging from the great social upheavals that contested the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Leopoldina Fortunati’s classic work expands and transforms how we analyze the sphere of reproduction, redefining the value of the individual’s life and the labor performed in the home.

Released here for the first time in its unabridged form with historical notation and contemporary commentary, The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital (Verso, 2025) is a foundational text and essential contribution to today’s discussions of social reproduction and the history of Italian feminism. Fortunati’s work provides some of the earliest theorizations of ‘immaterial,’ ‘affective,’ and ‘caring’ labor, and of the role of technology in reproduction, articulated decades before their popular reception in English academic literature. Reading this work some 50 years after its original publication gives us the tools to analyze the contemporary state of capitalist development and of women’s lives today. The text remains prefigurative and essential in our era of digital labor.

Leopoldina Fortunati was a core member of Lotta Femminsta and the Wages for Housework Movement internationally. Along with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici, she composed many of the group’s core theoretical and political texts. Her early work continues to inform movements concerned with struggles over reproduction globally and in subsequent work as a theorist of media and technology, Fortunati has been at the vanguard of contemporary theory addressing the relation between gendered labor and technology.

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.

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Today we're looking at a book that fills a gap that has existed for a long time. Korean Buddhism: Selected Readings from Primary Texts (U Hawaii Press, 2026), edited by Jin Park and Sumi Lee and published this year by the University of Hawai'i Press, is the first comprehensive introduction to the Korean Buddhist tradition built entirely around primary sources. Bringing together twenty-five foundational texts spanning the seventh to the twenty-first centuries, each translated and introduced by a leading scholar, it offers an unparalleled window into the intellectual and spiritual heritage of Korean Buddhism.

The volume opens with the towering figures of Wŏnhyo and Ŭisang and, over the course of the book, introduces readers to other foundational figures such as Chinul and his influential synthesis of sudden awakening and gradual cultivation, Hyech'o's pilgrimage to India, the great nineteenth-century Buddhist reviver Gyeongheo, and pioneering nun and feminist Kim Iryŏp.

Each selection is accompanied by a scholarly introduction that places the text in its historical and doctrinal context. Together, the readings explore the full breadth of the Korean Buddhist tradition, covering doctrine, philosophy, meditation, pilgrimage, monastic life, interreligious debate, social engagement and reform, feminism, and the distinctive character of Korean Buddhism itself.

Whether you are a scholar, a practitioner, or simply curious about Korean Buddhism, this volume provides an ideal gateway to exploring its greatest thinkers, texts and ideas. By bringing together the writings of its most influential figures throughout the span of fourteen centuries of Korean Buddhism, this volume puts on full display the richness, sophistication, originality, and complexity of one of the world's great yet vastly underappreciated Buddhist traditions.

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