In his new book Bridge & Tunnel Boys, historian Jim Cullen discusses how Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen represented what he calls “the metropolitan sound of the American century.” In this episode of the podcast, we talk with Cullen about how Joel...
Mounk, a defender of liberal values and a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, is the author of Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. Jonathan Kay interviews him at Quilette. Here is a taste: Jonathan Kay:...
The Atlantic is running an excerpt from a new book by Harvard political scientists Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt titled, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. They write: “Born of compromise and improvisation, the U.S....
92-year-old John McPhee talks to the Commonweal podcast about his creative non-fiction, “big” writing projects, his “desk drawer projects,” and his new book. Listen here....
Check out Matt McManus‘s review of Sohrab Ahmari’s Tryanny , Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty–and What to Do About It at Jacobin. As I noted in an earlier post, socialists really like this book despite Ahmari’s social conservatism....
Some of you may know the name Sohrab Ahmari from his 2019 argument with David French over the meaning of conservatism. Since that debate, Amari has co-founded Compact, a journal critical of liberalism of both the left and the right...
What is American evangelicalism? In her new book The Evangelical Imagination, Karen Swallow Prior, one of the most careful observers of, and participants in, evangelical life, analyzes the literature, art, and popular culture that has surrounded the movement and unpacks some of...
When you hear presidential candidates like Tim Scott and Mike Pence quote the Bible on the campaign trail for the purposes of advancing their political agendas, please realize that this is not a new thing. Here is a taste of...
Over at The Nation cultural critic George Scialabba reviews a new biography of Catholic moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (Chris Shannon reviewed it for Current here) and a collection of essays by political philosopher Richard Rorty. Here is a taste: Fifty...
Over at Commonweal, Brendan Ruberry reviews Richard V. Reeves’s book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. Here is a taste: “…today, around the industrialized world, men seem...
We publish a lot of book reviews in Current features section. For those of you who love books and ideas that come from books, we have gathered all of our reviews and placed them under the “Reviews” tag above. Enjoy!...
Over at Jacobin, Jacob Sugarman reviews Daniel Knowles’s book Carmaggedon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It. Here is a taste: On February 3, a Norfolk Southern train approximately 150 cars long derailed near the town of East...
Over at Dissent, political scientist Jared Loggins reviews Adolph Reed’s The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives and Imani Perry’s South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation. (See my review of...
In this episode we talk with historian and biographer Nancy Koester about her new book on nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Sojourner Truth. Our discussion focuses on Truth’s lifelong pursuit of a just society, a deeper knowledge of God, and...
The Princeton University historians are the editors of Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About our Past. Here is a taste of their recent interview with Vanity Fair: I know both of you are particularly public-facing...
The American Revolution happened in the midst of a smallpox epidemic. In one of the timeliest history books of the publishing season, historian Andrew Wehrman visits the podcast to talk about what the patriots of the American Revolution and the...
Some of you are familiar with the online magazine Contingent. Historian Erin Bartram has put together a great team of historians who do not work in tenure-track history teaching jobs at colleges and universities. I encourage you to check it...
According to historian Kathryn Gin Lum, Americans have long viewed the world as a realm of suffering heathens whose lands and lives needed their intervention to flourish. The term “heathen” fell out of common use by the early 1900s, but...
Does the American Left have religion problem? What can progressives learn from people like Dorothy Day, Ignazio Silone, Henry Wallace, Staughton Lynd, and Cornel West? Many of these thinkers and activists offered a powerful vision for a moral and just...
Check out Carrie Gates’s recent interview with Notre Dame historian John McGreevy. They discuss his new book Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis. A taste: In the book, you address many of the challenges the...
