New Books Network

Why we crave enjoyment from news, how our news use divides us, and what we can do to create better news and more informed citizens. TikTok. Short-form reels. Late-night TV monologues. Podcasts. The way news is delivered has changed dramatically and so has the way we consume it. Now, we no longer look to the news just to learn and be informed; we expect enjoyment as well. In Enjoyment Is Breaking News: How We Became Less Informed and More Divided (and How to Fix It) (MIT Press, 2026), Jennifer Hoewe (Purdue University) explains how and why this shift toward news enjoyment occurred and what we can do to address the information crisis we now face. Evidence shows that enjoyment-driven decisions are leaving us less informed—despite what we might expect—because they lead us to ignore other news that matters. This book explains why we don’t always select the best sources of news, how we respond to the news sources we do select, and how that information impacts our political knowledge and decisions. 

Hoewe also offers solutions for how to improve news creation and news use moving forward. Specifically, she shows how news consumers can escape their “self-righteous” consumption cycles; how news and social media companies can play a role in curbing our automatic amplification of enjoyable news; and how we can all do better when it comes to the information we seek and share.

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Focusing on U.S. academic libraries, The Reinvention of the U.S. Academic Library: 1990 – 2025 (2025, Bloomsbury) provides a concise history of the traditional role and function of academic libraries from their earliest times up to the dawn of the Digital Age and the spread of digital technology into all aspects of academic research and scholarly communication. This book analyzes how digital technology has transformed, over the course of a few swift decades, not only the role and function of academic libraries, but also the nature of scholarly communication itself.

Specifically, The Reinvention of the U.S. Academic Library: 1990 - 2025 discusses how digital technology has changed the way academic libraries acquire and exercise bibliographic control over collections, provides equitable access to information, and instructs and guide students, faculty, and others.

Guest: Donald A. Barclay worked as an academic librarian from 1990 until his retirement in 2022, holding during his library career positions at New Mexico State University, the University of Houston, the Texas Medical Center, and the University of California, Merced. During his career, he devoted much of his time and interest to teaching students how to think critically about the information they encountered in their academic, professional, personal, and civic lives. Working in academic libraries during a time when digital technology was expanding into every aspect of human life allowed him to both closely observe and actively participate in the biggest technological changes to humanity’s relationship with information since the advent of printing from moveable type. 

Barclay has authored numerous articles and books over the course of his career on topics ranging from the literature of the American West to children’s literature to library and information science. 

Barclay earned his bachelor’s degree from Boise State University and holds masters’ degrees in both English and Library and Information Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is a Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Ciara Breathnach is Professor of Irish Gender History at University College Cork. She has published widely on Irish socio-economic, gender, cultural and health history. Her last monograph Ordinary lives, death and social class: Dublin City Coroner’s Court, 1876-1902 (Oxford University Press, 2022) won the American Conference of Irish Studies, James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize for Books on History and Social Sciences in 2023.  

In this interview she discusses her new book Absence in the Archives (Cambridge UP, 2026). 

Absence in official records can have profound implications for social memory, civil rights, restorative and transitional justice, citizenship, social welfare, and redress for historical abuse. Scholars of archivistics and early modern New World imperial contexts have uncovered the epistemological problems that archival silences pose for historical research, and the author contends that absence deserves separate conceptual treatment. Archival absences, both permanent and temporary, have particular resonances for postcolonial countries, and are an ongoing threat under totalitarian regimes. Using Britain and Ireland as primary examples, this Element traces how absence took root in the domestic and subsequently the colonial archive, and how through legal mechanisms it became an accepted part of archival praxis. The aim of this Element is to raise awareness of archival absence in order to prevent more losses, particularly in the abundance of the digital age. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. 

Absence in the Archives was recently published with Cambridge University Press, as part of their Elements short book series. 

Aidan Beatty teaches in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University.

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What if Pirkei Avot has a bigger story to tell? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Joseph G. Rosenstein to discuss Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers): The Big Picture (Academic Studies Press, 2026), a fresh approach to one of Judaism’s most beloved collections of rabbinic wisdom.

The 123 teachings of Pirkei Avot often seem to jump from one subject to another: Torah study, ethics, the afterlife, relationships, leadership, and the responsibilities of living a meaningful Jewish life. Rosenstein argues that beneath this seemingly disconnected collection is a larger conceptual framework. Instead of following the mishnayot in their traditional order, he groups them by theme, revealing connections that can be easy to miss when each teaching is studied on its own.

The result is a new way of seeing Pirkei Avot—not as a collection of isolated aphorisms, but as a coherent work that reflects how Judaism was reshaped in the generations following the destruction of the Temple. Rosenstein also turns the book’s ethical teachings into 90 concrete principles for living, organized into 16 themes and accompanied by kavvanot, short meditations designed to help readers put those ideas into practice.

Together, Rosenstein and Katz explore what Pirkei Avot is really trying to teach, why its teachings were assembled the way they were, and what happens when ancient rabbinic wisdom is read not simply as something to study, but as a guide for how to live.

About the Guest

Joseph G. Rosenstein is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Rutgers University. In addition to his careers in mathematics and mathematics education, he has written extensively on Jewish prayer and thought. He is the author of Reflections on Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers): Not Just What My Rebbe Taught Me and has published the traditional-yet-unconventional prayer books Siddur Eit Ratzon and Machzor Eit Ratzon – Memorable Verses in the Torah. His website, joerosenstein.com, reflects his wide-ranging work in mathematics, education, and Jewish life.

About the Host

Rabbi Marc Katz is the rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid and the author of several books on Jewish thought and the Talmud including Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life (JPS). 

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Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges (Fordham, 2025) investigates the consequences of unfolding catastrophes across the world and the displacement they continue to produce. Through recent narratives and media representations of the refugee “crisis” at Europe’s edges, it tells a new story about those on the move, the technologies unleashed on them at borders, the racialized and colonial histories that inform these technologies, and the artistry with which migrants and allies bear witness to displacement. The book reorients us toward the creativity and movement of migrants themselves– their “arts of the border”—as well as toward the political force of the arts that represent them, whether in literature, documentary film, or art installations. Sanyal proposes kino-aesthetics as a framework for capture and fugitivity at borders. From kino—to set in motion—and aesthetics— relating to sensory perception—kino-aesthetics conveys the force of bodies in motion and the image in its circulation. The book examines the simultaneity of capture and escape at thresholds of illegalization, from airport detention zones to Calais’s “jungle” and the Euro-African border at Ceuta and Melilla. What emerges throughout these case studies is a portrayal of border violence in its racial and colonial forms as well as an archive of refusal, fugitivity, and un-bordered imagining.

Guest Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, and currently holds the Zaffaroni Family Chair of Undergraduate Education. Affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Institute of European Studies, her teaching and research interests span 19th -21st-century French and Francophone literature, memory studies, aesthetics and bio/necropolitics, critical human rights and refugee studies. She is a recipient of the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award (2012) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021-2022). She is currently co-PI on the Mellon-funded A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times (2024-2027). Besides Arts of the Border, Dr. Sanyal has authored Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015), translated into French as Mémoire et Complicité: Au Prisme de la Shoah (PUV, 2019); and The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006).  She has guest-edited “Time and Politics in Contemporary Critique: Entanglements and Aftermaths” (Critical Times, 2018), ha also co-edited, with Éric Fassin, Demos Anxiety: Genealogies, Rhetorics, and Politics of Great Replacement (forthcoming in Patterns of Prejudice); with Damon Young and Mario Telò, Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler (Representations 2022), and, with Michael Rothberg and Max Silverman, Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture (Yale French Studies 118-119).

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press.

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Los Angeles in the late nineteenth century was bustling with the rise of industrialization, but the growing labor force that propelled it, mostly consisting of Mexican and Chinese men, was met with exclusion policies and deportation campaigns. Nevertheless, Chinese and Mexican women, children, and men built vibrant residential and business districts—until they were all but eradicated in the 1930s. In her compelling and textured history, Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles, Dr. Isabela Seong Leong Quintana unearths the entwined stories of Chinatown and Sonoratown through the everyday lives of their residents.

In this conversation, we talk about the significance of comparative Latinx and Asian American Studies, the importance of spatial analysis in urban history, and the methodological challenges of locating Mexican and Chinese women and children in the archives. 

Dr. Quintana is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, with affiliations in Culture & Theory and Chicané/Latiné Studies. Her work explores the interconnected histories of Asian Americans and Chicanés/Latinés, centering women and children within U.S. borderlands and recovering unarchived voices. Quintana also co-directs The Five Chinatowns Project at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, a community-based research initiative documenting Chinese American Los Angeles through oral histories, archival creation, and youth mentorship.  She is the author of Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2026). 

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Han Hsien Liew’s fascinating and insightful new book, Preaching Pious Rulership in Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Jawzi’s Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2026) offers a new way of understanding the political thought of one of medieval Islam’s most influential preachers, Ibn al-Jawzi. Although Ibn al-Jawzi is often remembered primarily as a preacher, moralist, and religious scholar, Han Hsien challenges conventional accounts of medieval Islamic political thought by showing how piety, preaching, and emotional formation shaped his vision of political authority. Rather than focusing simply on the ruler’s ability to maintain order, Ibn al-Jawzi placed extraordinary emphasis on the ruler’s moral character and on cultivating emotions such as fear, humility, remorse, and compassion. Han Hsien argues that this vision of pious rulership emerged from what he calls “homiletic piety,” revealing how the moral and emotional world of hortatory preaching shaped ideas about what it meant to rule well. By placing Ibn al-Jawzi’s writings in their historical and political context—including his relationship with the Abbasid caliphate and his controversial intervention in debates over the cursing of Yazid—Han Hsien challenges simplistic distinctions between political “quietism” and “activism” and reveals a thinker deeply invested in influencing those who wielded political power.

In our conversation, Han Hsien explains why he chose Ibn al-Jawzi as the subject of the book and what we can learn about medieval Islamic politics by taking preachers seriously as political thinkers. We discuss the concept of “homiletic piety” and Ibn al-Jawzi’s approach to exhorting rulers, including the rhetorical strategies he believed scholars could use to encourage rulers toward greater humility, kindness, and moral responsibility. We also explore Ibn al-Jawzi’s relationship with the Abbasid caliph al-Mustadi and what his writings reveal about the particular concerns of the ruler to whom they were addressed. Han Hsien discusses the complicated relationship between scholars and political power, including the historical debate over sharia and siyasa (or politics), and explains why Ibn al-Jawzi does not fit neatly into categories such as “quietist” or “activist.” We also talk about the significant role of emotions—including fear, remorse, humility, and compassion—in Ibn al-Jawzi’s understanding of political authority and consider whether he actually believed rulers could be transformed through preaching. Finally, we discuss Ibn al-Jawzi’s intervention in the debate over Yazid and what this reveals about his commitment to the idea of pious rulership.

This book will be of tremendous interest to scholars and students of Islamic studies, medieval Islamic history, Islamic political thought, and the history of preaching, as well as anyone interested in the relationship between religion, morality, and political power. It will also appeal to readers interested in a different way of thinking about politics, one that takes seriously the power of preaching, persuasion, and moral and emotional formation to shape those who govern.

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What would a postcarbon future look like? What would it take to build and maintain a more just, regenerative world? How would it feel to live—and to thrive—in that world? In Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2026), Billy Fleming and a wide set of contributors critically engage with the above questions and more.

Around the globe, people are transforming their social, ecological, and economic systems in response to the climate crisis. This book guides readers through 29 of these exemplary works, which span 43 nations and 6 continents. From Cuba to Kiribati, Iceland to the Andes, the prairies of North America to the expanding Gobi Desert, these case studies foreground the tactics and modes of practice being employed, often by marginalized peoples, to create more humane, hospitable places. With dispatches from more than a dozen leading scholars working on the front lines of the climate justice movement, Building Postcarbon Futures is both a celebration of action underway and a clarion call to the planners, designers, policymakers, and activists who are pushing this planet toward a future of collective flourishing.

Billy Fleming is a leading voice on the role of design in responding to the climate crisis in our cities, communities, and landscapes. He is founding codirector of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank focused on climate and political economy, and assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia. 

This interview was conducted by Timi Koyejo. He is an urbanist and housing policy researcher at the Climate and Community Institute.

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In John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian’s Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), the authors put forward a comprehensive new theoretical approach to understanding laughter and the humour we use to inspire it. Applying an evolutionary and biological lens to these complex and universal human behaviours, the book distinguishes itself from classical and contemporary theories by focusing not simply on laughter’s causes and effects, but on what can be gleaned from considering its communicative meaning.

At the centre of the book is the Mutual Vulnerability Theory (MVT) of Laughter, which understands laughter as a vital form of nonverbal communication, one that seeks in various ways to “lift” or “lower” moments of physical, emotional, cognitive, or social vulnerability between people. From this perspective, laughter sheds light on the social dynamics that govern human interaction, both positive and negative. It reveals the importance of vulnerability and status in our conscious and subconscious lives, while also underscoring our desire to cooperate, our respect for those who compete fairly, and our disdain for those who do not.

Wide-ranging and highly accessible, Understanding Laughter and Humor will be of interest to general readers, humour scholars, psychologists, anthropologists, comedians, and anyone curious about a seemingly mundane but vital aspect of everyday life — one intrinsic not only to human sociality, but also deeply connected to our great ape relatives and evolutionary past.

Additional content mentioned in the episode:

Understanding Laughter and Humor: A Companion and Guide, Volume 1, the first in a companion-guide series applying MVT to examples of humour and laughter across different media and formats.

John’s Psychology Today blog, Laughter and Humor 101, which expands on and explores various aspects of the Mutual Vulnerability Theory.

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As law enforcement agencies deploy increasingly advanced technologies to suppress dissent, hunt migrants, and target marginalized communities, The Carceral Surround (U Minnesota Press, 2026) offers a powerful new theory of police and prison power in the digital age. Making sense of the rapid expansion of digital carceral infrastructure in a nation that claims to value freedom and individual rights, R. Joshua Scannell moves beyond familiar debates over privacy to show that understanding digital policing requires confronting the political and racial logics that sustain police power. Drawing on digital media theory, science and technology studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and carceral theory, The Carceral Surround reveals how twenty-first-century policing is less about managing crime than about governing possibility. Carceral power now operates across every register of daily life through predictive analytics, risk modeling, and algorithmic systems that track, sort, and preempt. From social media archives and facial recognition software to satellite mapping and radiation sensors, Scannell charts how seemingly disparate media converge into an environment of control that links technocratic governance to the maintenance of racial hierarchy and capitalist order. Tracing today?s technoauthoritarian regime from the NYPD?s assault on Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition?s campaign to end predictive policing contracts, The Carceral Surround is a rare hybrid of critique and refusal, illuminating the digital logic of US authoritarianism while imagining pathways for collective resistance beyond its grasp. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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