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New Books Network episodes

July 23Cast Out: A Call For A Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration
In Cast Out: A Call For A Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration (Beacon Press, 2026), civil rights lawyer Joseph Margulies insists that those who commit even the most heinous crimes are one of us and should be judged in a spirit of forgiveness. He explains that American society is too often unforgiving, preferring to cast out those we consider irredeemable by fixating narrowly on the question What did they do? and imagining that those who have done great wrongs have no past worth learning and no future worth preserving.
Through intimate interviews, his rich chapters bring to life 6 men and women, sharing their (sometimes brutal) crimes, the grim but all-too-human paths that led them there, and their evolution and insights. Eye-opening and unflinching, Cast Out makes us truly see those society locks away—the so-called “worst of the worst.” It challenges the reader to see us in them and them in us, and in that way, to recognize the humanity we all share.
Guest: Joseph Margulies is a writer, litigator, Professor of the Practice of Law and Government at Cornell University. He was Counsel of Record in Rasul v. Bush (2004), and in Munaf v. Geren (2008). His books include Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power; and Cast Out.
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the creator, producer and host of the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
The Coroner's Silence

Ghost In The Criminal Justice Machine

Hands Up Don't Shoot

Freemans Challenge

The Journal Of Higher Education In Prison

Education Behind The Wall

Secrets Of The Killing State

Stitching Freedom

The Emerson Prison Initiative

The Names Of All The Flowers

Pink Crime

Carceral Apartheid

The Criminal Record Complex
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 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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1 hr 1 min
July 23 Mohamed Alyahyai, "The War" (Dararab for Publishing and Translation, 2026)
A psychological Arabic novel in English translation, The War by Mohamed Alyahyai follows a man who begins to question whether he is truly the one who returned from war.
On a winter night, Issa Saleh prepares a small gathering at his home. By the end of the evening, they are gone—and he is no longer certain they were ever there.
As memory fractures, the war resurfaces not as event but as instability, where identity itself begins to slip and the narratives that sustain survival unravel.
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33 min
July 23 Dana Burchardt, "The Authority of International Courts: A Behavioural Framework" (Hart Publishing, 2026)
Why do some international courts wield broad authority while others face pushback or fade into irrelevance? The Authority of International Courts: A Behavioural Framework
(Hart Publishing, 2026) by Dr. Dana Burchardt provides novel
theoretical and empirical insights into this question. It offers a
fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on the authority of international
courts, drawing from law, political science and behavioural research.
It
develops, in Part I, a theoretical model and analytical framework for
assessing these questions. The model explains how authority
relationships between courts and their audiences—such as states, NGOs,
individual applicants, and domestic courts—are formed, maintained,
or contested. In Part II, the book applies this analytical framework to
in-depth case studies of two selected international courts: the
European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the Economic
Community of West African States. These studies not only provide deeper
insights into the authority of these courts but also demonstrate
how the analytical framework can be applied to other international
courts to generate an enhanced understanding of international court
authority.
The
book sheds new light on why some courts enjoy enduring authority and
others face pushback, offering powerful tools for understanding the
behaviour of international courts and their audiences.
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.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
58 min
July 23 Building A Freedom Infrastructure in the Age of Networked Control
Host Licia Cianetti talks to Venezuelan democracy activist and co-founder of the World Liberty Congress Leopoldo López. As part of PPP’s ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Democracy they discuss Leopoldo’s recent article on Democracy in an Age of Networked Control. They discuss the technological challenges that democracy activists worldwide face today, and how some activists are rethinking their use of technology to elude the infrastructure of control and create new infrastructures for freedom.
Guest:
Leopoldo López is a Venezuelan democracy activist and the cofounder of the World Liberty Congress, which is a global network that connects democracy advocates and leaders from across the world. From 2014 to 2020 he was imprisoned for leading peaceful protests and civil resistance against the regime of Nicolás Maduro. Currently he is a Fellow at the Wilson Center.
Presenter:
Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR. She is the Principal Investigator of an upcoming research project on “Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions” (funded by the EU under Horizon Europe grant no. 101286676).
Transcript here
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.
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35 min
July 22 David I. Waddington, "The Hidden Curriculum of Video Games" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026)
Despite decades of inflammatory rhetoric, the real risk of video games lies not in their violent imagery but in the ethical and political sensibilities they normalize. Video games reward speed, efficiency, control, and meritocratic mastery, training players to align with a technolibertarian worldview - one that celebrates individual will, technological power, and skepticism toward collective forms of governance. Rather than asking whether games produce violent individuals, we might more productively ask how they contribute to a commitment to radical capitalism and a belief in highly individualistic worldviews. In this unsettling work David Waddington traces the philosophical roots of technolibertarianism, founded on faith in technological progress and personal freedom. He identifies a darker turn in this thinking, animated by the ideals of Ayn Rand and her archetype of the "tech hero of capitalism." Many games, Waddington argues, invite players to inhabit this archetype, treating mastery, control, and relentless striving as moral virtues. While educational research often praises games for motivating students and fostering problem-solving, Waddington asks a deeper question: What kinds of people do games help us become? Drawing on Martin Heidegger and other thinkers, he explores whether gameplay expands human possibility or narrows it by habituating players to efficient yet restrictive systems. The Hidden Curriculum of Video Games (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026) critiques mainstream game design and educational technology, offering hopeful alternatives and examining reflective games that resist dominant gameplay logics. Written with clarity, passion, and philosophical depth, this thought-provoking work opens new horizons on technology, education, and the moral imagination of play.
Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.
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43 min
July 22 Nick Yablon, "From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: C. G. Hine's 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway" (Columbia UP, 2026)
In 1905, when Broadway was already the most famous thoroughfare in
New York City, a recreational photographer from Newark, New Jersey named
Charles Gilbert Hine set out to document the street’s entire length.
Taking
pictures from downtown Bowling Green and its skyscrapers to uptown
Inwood with its fields and wildflowers, Hine depicted a Broadway
animated by the presence of the past and the relentless pressures of
change.
Through his lens appear shanties, brownstones and country houses;
horse-drawn wagons and trolley cars; downtown sex workers and uptown
famers.
Hines’ photographs lingered in the collection of the New York
Historical until they were discovered by Nick Yablon, a professor of
history and American Studies at the University of Iowa.
Now they appear in Nick’s new book, From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: C.G. Hine’s 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway (Columbia University Press, 2026).
Combining
Hines’ photographs with his own analysis, along with maps and other
images, Nick has produced an illuminating book that depicts Broadway,
its peoples, its buildings, and the many neighborhoods that Broadway
traverses, at a distinct moment in time.
A digital companion to From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower, with a selection of Hine’s photographs, an interactive map of Broadway, and more, can be found here.
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38 min
July 22 Michael Patrick Cullinane, "Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Court Cabinet" (U Nebraska Press, 2026)
In his final days in office in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt invited dozens of friends to the White House for lunch. They had never met as a group, but they had one thing in common: Each played tennis with the president and advised on policy matters. Roosevelt half-joked that the public would never know how much these tennis partners did to make his administration a success. Journalists dismissively called them the “Tennis Cabinet,” making light of their contribution, but Roosevelt knew otherwise.
In Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Court Cabinet (Potomac Books, an Imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2026), Michael Patrick Cullinane explains that the inner circle led the administration’s campaigns against corporate greed, investigated public health violations, and formulated consumer protections. They founded environmental conservation policies, prosecuted civil rights violations, and implemented bureaucratic efficiencies that saved the government billions. Roosevelt’s tennis mates shaped the nation’s diplomacy, ending wars and promoting American interests abroad.
Never had a more eclectic group advised a U.S. president. The Tennis Cabinet included legendary frontier lawman Seth Bullock and the starched-shirt corporate lawyer Henry Stimson, who served in five presidential administrations. Texas wolf wrangler Jack Abernathy played with stuffy bureaucrats like Labor Commissioner Charles Patrick Neill and social activist James Bronson Reynolds. The French ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand spun yarns with football hero George Washington Woodruff and Roosevelt’s college friend and banker Robert Bacon. James Garfield, namesake son of a martyred president, sipped mint juleps with Supreme Court Justice William Henry Moody. And J. P. Morgan’s silver-spooned son-in-law Herbert Satterlee kept company with rugged soldier Luther “Yellowstone” Kelly.
For all their differences, these men shared a desire to help the president transform the nation from a parochial nineteenth-century republic into an imperial and industrial global power. They have escaped the attention of reporters and historians only because of Roosevelt’s towering celebrity. Turning away from Roosevelt as the singular force behind his administration, it is possible to see how the contributions of his Tennis Cabinet quietly sowed the seeds of the American Century.
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55 min
July 22 Mark Crinson, "Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape" (Paul Mellon Centre, 2026)
Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape (Paul Mellon Centre, 2026) by Professor Mark Crinson is the first critical study to examine how a major international airport takes shape on the ground, and what that means for the landscape around it. Focused on Heathrow airport, it traces how the area has been formed and reformed by overlapping systems of architecture, infrastructure and enclosure, from the common land of Hounslow Heath in the eighteenth century to the global transport hub of the present day. 
The book explores the different forces that have shaped the airport’s environment: the remaking of landforms, the design of terminal buildings, and the surrounding sprawl of hotels, schools, factories, and business parks. At the same time, it shows how the Heathrow area has been moulded by wider shifts in energy, mobility, and the economy, and how the airport has in turn left a lasting mark on its surroundings, both materially and ecologically.
Drawing on previously unpublished material, Aviationland includes close studies of key sites, as well as figures who shaped how we see the airport today, including Richard Rogers, Patrick Abercrombie, and J. G. Ballard. Bringing together architectural, landscape, and infrastructural histories that are seldom read in tandem, this volume makes the case for Heathrow as a distinctively modern landscape. The result is a nuanced account of how local places become entangled within global systems, and what happens when they do.
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.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
1 hr 17 min
July 22 Martin Shaw, "The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges After Gaza" (Agenda Publishing, 2025)
The Israeli destruction of Gaza has returned the idea of genocide
to the center of world politics, with sharp conflicts between the
protesters and lawyers who invoke it and the governments and media that
deny it. The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges After Gaza (Agenda Publishing, 2025), by the foremost sociological theorist of genocide, Martin Shaw, defends
the idea against thinkers who have questioned it, and argues that it is
essential to the understanding of mass atrocities. It maintains that
Gaza has opened a new age in which the West not only fails to prevent,
but also participates in genocide.
As well as discussing the
genocide idea, the book analyses the Gaza genocide in the context of the
longer histories of the problem, both globally and in Palestine.
Further chapters deal with "forgotten genocides," the attempted Russian
elimination of Ukraine, and the history of British complicity.
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1 hr 18 min
July 22 Debolina Dutta, "A Jurisprudence of Conversations: Law, Life and Feminism in Post-colonial India" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Grounded in empirical studies, this book is both a history of the
emergence of feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India and a model
of innovative legal research. The book inaugurates a creative practice
of scholarly activism that engages a new way of thinking about law and
feminist jurisprudence, one that is geared to acknowledge and take
responsibility for the hierarchies in Indian academic practices. Its
method of conversation and accountability continues the feminist
tradition of taking reciprocity and the time and place of collaboration
seriously. It helps make visible the specific ties between post-colonial
life and law and joins the work of refusing and reimagining the
hierarchical formation of legal knowledge in a caste-based Indian
society. A significant contribution to the history and practice of
feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India, A Jurisprudence of Conversations: Law, Life and Feminism in Post-colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2026) will appeal to both an academic and activist readership.
Debolina
Dutta is a Research Fellow at Melbourne Law School's Centre of
Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (CEVAW)
Saumya Dadoo is a PhD Candidate at MESAAS, Columbia University
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2 hr 2 min