New Books Network

This episode takes listeners into the latest issues of Gastronomica, with a special feature on microbes. Sarah Elton and Maya Hey talk with Dan Bender of the Gastronomica Editorial Collective about their special section on microbes and food. In a conversation that spans food systems, environment, health, dietetics, and culture, they explore human microbial relationships from the soil to the processing plant, at the grocery store, in home kitchens, and beyond. Sarah and Maya share how they each came to the study of microbes, discuss what microbes are and what it means to center microbes in food studies research, and reflect on some of the policy implications. Their two-part special section in the Spring and Summer 2026 issues of Gastronomica brings together 11 articles on microbes in food and food systems from researchers around the world.

Listeners can find "Making Microbes Explicit: Introduction to Microbes, Food, and Food Systems" by Maya Hey and Sarah Elton, and their co-written follow-up piece, "Finding the Microbes in Food Studies” in Gastronomica (issues 26.1 and 26.2).

Sarah Elton is an assistant professor and Eakin Chair in Critical Qualitative Health Research Methodology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She has published widely, with her research appearing most recently in journals such as Nature Cities, Social & Cultural Geography, Qualitative Inquiry and Gastronomica. She is also the author of Locavore (HarperCollins Canada 2010) and Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Maya Hey is based in Stockholm at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where she is a postdoctoral researcher with the Environmental Humanities Laboratory. Her interdisciplinary work on microbes draws on her background in food studies, dietetics, and communication. Her new book, Singing with Invisible Worlds: Fermenting Sake on Microbial Time will be published later this year by the University of Minnesota Press.

Daniel E. Bender is a professor of food studies, environmental studies, and history at the University of Toronto, the President of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS), and Co-Chair of the Editorial Collective at Gastronomica.

Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network here. Subscribe to Gastronomica’s podcast feed to stay updated on the newest episodes.

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This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On May 13, 2026, Princeton’s Center for Human Values hosted a day-long conference titled Audio and Ideas: Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting. It was co-sponsored by Princeton’s Journalism program, and the NYU Podcast Initiative. Over the course of four panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalists discuss how academics might employ the techniques of narrative audio as part of their research.

In the third panel, Allison Carruth and Ellen Horne discussed the relationship between podcasting and science. Carruth is a professor at Princeton’s Effron Center for the Study of America and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. At Princeton, she directs the Program in Environmental Studies and leads Blue Lab, an environmental media and storytelling studio. Her research and teaching areas include climate storytelling, environmental art and narrative, contemporary food movements and the evolving relationships between technology and environmentalism in American culture. She is the author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food.

Horne directs the Podcasting and Audio Reportage concentration at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Her research is focused on performance, documentation, the perception of authority in voice, labor and production in audio and podcasting. Horne was producer for Admissible: Shreds of Evidence, a 13-episode investigative podcast that told the story of shocking misconduct at a Virginia state crime lab. Admissible won the Gold Award for Best Documentary at the Signal Awards; an Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association, and the Public Media Award NETA for Best Podcast. Horne was an executive producer at Audible and an executive producer for WNYC’s Radiolab.

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In this debut story collection Patchwork Dolls (Blair, 2026), Ysabelle Cheung weaves an eerie fabulism with tales that cross continents, technology, and time.

Set in Hong Kong and America--between the present day and an uncannily altered future--this story collection warps the familiar rules of our world to ask: what does it mean to be Asian and a woman--living under the specter of state and technological surveillance--or trying to break free from it?

In the title story, a young woman of color realizes she can make her fortune by surgically selling her facial features to whiter, wealthier clients. In "Please, Get Out and Dance," a group of rebels escapes a city that is literally disappearing around them--building by building, person by person--to migrate to a new home beneath the ocean, defying their government's mandate. "Herbs" follows an elderly widow who, when the clones of her dead husband start to appear uninvited in her home, must grapple with her memories.

In each of these stories, Cheung tilts the world just slightly off its axis to bring together a haunting meditation on what it means to survive within our increasingly digitized and mechanized world.

Ysabelle Cheung is a writer and art critic based in Hong Kong. Her Fiction has appeared in Granta, Slate, and The Rumpus. She was awarded the 2023 Aspen Words Fellowship and was in residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation in 2024. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Atlantic, Artforum, and Lit Hub. She is the co-founder of a contemporary art gallery in Hong Kong called the PhD Group.

Recommended Books:

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Max Weinreich spent the entirety of his adult life building YIVO and the field of Yiddish Studies. A 'convert' to the cause of Yiddishism in his adolescence, he pursued a doctorate in German philology in Weimar Germany with the explicit goal of returning to Eastern Europe to contribute to the project of building a modern, secular Yiddish culture. His study visits to Yale University and Vienna in the early 1930s proved transformational in broadening and revising his understanding of the role of the social sciences in Jewish life as a tool for strengthening Jews' psychological and material resources. The destruction of the traditional Yiddish heartland in Eastern Europe and his experiences leading YIVO in post-WWII New York City added yet another dimension to Weinreich's conception of the importance of both Yiddish and Jewish Studies for the future of American and world Jewry. Would Max Weinreich recognize Yiddish studies today?

Moderated by Kalman Weiser and featuring Naomi Seidman, Kenneth Moss, and Jeffrey Shandler, this panel will examine Weinreich's evolving understanding of the meaning of Yidishe visnshaft (Yiddish studies) and the role of Yiddish in Jewish life throughout his career.

This panel discussion originally took place on June 15, 2023.

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To celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary, Madison’s Notes is having a special Fourth of July episode to close out the season. So in Episode 12 of Season 5, I have as our guest Walter Russell Mead to talk about American grand strategy since the Declaration of Independence.

A Yale graduate, Mr. Mead is a professor at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School and a fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Foreign Affairs contributor and a Wall Street Journal columnist, as well as the host of the podcast, “What Really Matters.”

Drawing on his book, Special Providence (2001), we discuss the history of the four American schools of foreign policy—the Hamiltonians, Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and Wilsonians—and how his analysis of the American traditions has held up nearly a quarter of a century later.

Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.”

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Ukraine’s modernist buildings are an extraordinary blend of function,

With an introduction by renowned architecture critic Owen Hatherley, complete with historical images, Ukrainian Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine (Fuel, 2025) cements these buildings in a cultural and political context.

Dmytro Soloviov is a photographer, tour guide, and activist, and the creator of the popular Ukrainian Modernism Instagram page. He frequently leads tours of modernist architecture in different cities in Ukraine.

Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics. She is the author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023).

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Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan: State Violence and Resistance, 1949–2024

By exploring interactions among Beijing, the Yunnan provincial government, county officials, CCP Muslim cadres, and Shadian

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book

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Tamil Śiva Temples, Āgamas, and Śivabrāhmaṇas/Ādiśaivas addresses the issue of whether members of all castes can become priests in Tamil Śiva temples. The history of the Śivabrāhmaṇas or Ādiśaivas as priests in Tamil Śiva temples is described using the epigraphic corpus as well as other Śaiva texts in Tamil along with information from the Śaiva studies of the likes of Richard Davis, Alexis Sanderson, Dominic Goodall, and Michael Gollner.

Find the open access PDF here

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Picture book author, Jilanne Huffmann's first middle-grades novel, Heartland (Little Brown Books, 2026). Out of the Dust meets Me and Marvin Gardens in this coming-of-age novel about a young misfit searching for the truth of her family's past, set against the backdrop of an environmental cover-up. Twelve-year-old Xyla is sick of two things: working on her family's sixth-generation Iowa farm and her mother's nagging words, "Pay attention!" But Xyla can't help getting lost in the thoughts that fill her head, sometimes leaving a wake of costly mistakes. If only her mother would tell her something, anything, about her father, who left when she was little. When Xyla finds her mother's hidden childhood diary, she's soon sucked into the story of a hardscrabble life on the family farm in the 1980s. Can she find the key to her past and her father in the pages? Xyla's life grows even more complicated as a new family begins renting a vacant house on the farm, and the daughter Alegría is focused and motivated--the kind of kid Xyla is sure her mother prefers. But when the girls stumble upon an environmental disaster right next door, Xyla must trust her new friend and her complicated mother to figure out how to stop it. Alternating timelines in prose and verse connect the quiet desperation of Iowa farmers in the late 1980s to the modern farming landscape in this layered and voice-driven middle grade debut.

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I chatted with brand planner Mark Rukman about his quest to translate historical ways of thinking into advertising. Mark likes to joke that, as a historically obsessed, private-sector strategist, he thinks of himself as a nineteenth-century gentleman scholar working in the "Department of Analogies." We discuss Mark's journey from a childhood in the USSR to the lifeblood of capitalism: the advertising industry. Along the way, we explore the nonlinearity of life choices, historical rhythms and events, and even a few unresolved differential equations. Throughout our conversation, we return to history as a surprisingly powerful source of order and clarity in a chaotic world—and as an underused source of insight for brand strategy. Last but not least, we talk about Mark's witty new show, "Old Takes," in which he tackles the hottest cultural trends and historicizes them, showing that if we look back far enough, we've often seen them before.

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