Episodes

  • Kit Chapman, "The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry" (Profile Books, 2026)

    Kit Chapman, "The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry" (Profile Books, 2026)
    Jul 9 2026
    The first chemists were Sri Lankan forgers who crafted unimaginably strong steel millennia before it should have been possible. They were alchemists in Roman Egypt, who designed apparatus still in use today. They were Stone Age leatherworkers, Tang Dynasty herbalists and Mayan stoneworkers. The Enlightenment is usually credited with the origins of chemistry, but in truth, the science blossomed gradually. As early innovators distilled, smelted, forged and fermented their way through the centuries, they blurred science and mysticism in search of answers to life's greatest mysteries. In reading The Age of Alchemy: How Early Innovators Shaped Modern Chemistry (Profile Books, 2026), join Kit Chapman on a global quest to achieve immortality, cure all disease and transmute lead into gold as he reveals the illuminating stories of how the alchemists first broke new ground and shaped the scientific method. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
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    1 hr and 19 mins
  • Aswin Punathambekar, Adrienne Shaw and Jonathan Gray eds., "Planet Digital: A Global Media Cultures Reader" (NYU Press, 2026)

    Aswin Punathambekar, Adrienne Shaw and Jonathan Gray eds., "Planet Digital: A Global Media Cultures Reader" (NYU Press, 2026)
    Jul 7 2026
    In the three decades since the rise of the global internet, digitalization has transformed how media are made, circulated, and consumed, reshaping culture on a planetary scale. Yet the story of global media is not one of seamless connection or cultural homogenization. Planet Digital: A Global Media Cultures Reader (NYU Press, 2026) challenges the myth of a “global village,” revealing instead how regional histories, infrastructures, economies, and power relations shape the uneven terrains of our digital world. Edited by the series editors of Critical Cultural Communication, this field-defining anthology gathers leading scholars to examine the texts, genres, platforms, and industries that define today’s global entertainment landscape. From TikTok to Squid Game, K-Pop to Marvel, Bluey to Nollywood, each chapter offers a focused case study that illuminates how digital media both reflect and remake global cultural life. Spanning influencer culture, streaming platforms, esports, and beyond, Planet Digital shows how digital technologies and global media flows continually reshape one another, producing hybrid forms of creativity, circulation, and control. Together, these essays provide a vital framework for understanding how the world’s screens, sounds, and networks are rewriting the relationship between culture and power in the twenty-first century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Tyler Girard, "Financial Inclusion: How an Idea Became a Global Agenda" (Stanford UP, 2026)

    Tyler Girard, "Financial Inclusion: How an Idea Became a Global Agenda" (Stanford UP, 2026)
    Jul 5 2026
    The number of people in the world with a bank account or money service provider increased by 2 billion over the past decade. This phenomenon reflects what Dr. Tyler Girard calls the global financial inclusion agenda. This agenda emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and quickly became a prominent feature of global economic governance.  The core idea of financial inclusion is that all individuals and businesses should have access to and use formal financial services, including bank accounts, payment services, credit, and insurance. Today, the widespread ability to digitally store and transfer money has impacted every aspect of our lives. What explains the emergence and evolution of the global financial inclusion agenda? And what does the politics of the agenda tell us about the impacts of new technologies on global politics and how ideas become global agendas?  Drawing on an original collection of primary documents and interviews with elites from Ghana, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland, Financial Inclusion: How an Idea Became a Global Agenda (Stanford University Press, 2026) traces the global financial inclusion agenda over time and interrogates its adaptation in specific contexts and issue areas. Through the concept of participatory ambiguity, Dr. Girard offers a novel explanation of the agenda that advances important debates in international relations and international political economy on the distribution of power and authority in global governance. 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.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
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    40 mins
  • How “They” See “Us” with editor Madeleine Schwartz

    How “They” See “Us” with editor Madeleine Schwartz
    Jul 4 2026
    The remarkable political ascent of Donald J. Trump and his sustained grip on a certain segment of American society have given fresh life to a question as old as Tocqueville’s visit to Jacksonian America a century ago: How do foreigners regard America, Americans and the American experiment? I explore this question in a conversation with Madeline Schwartz, founder and editor in chief of The Dial, an online publication. She wrote the Introduction to a collection of essays featuring work commissioned by The Dial, the new book titled How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump (The New Press, 2026). We discuss perspectives from Italy, Argentina and South Africa, among other places Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
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    39 mins
  • Sadiah Qureshi, "Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction" (Penguin, 2025)

    Sadiah Qureshi, "Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction" (Penguin, 2025)
    Jul 4 2026
    Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction? Extinction, Professor Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept—and a phenomenon that’s not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to determine that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans. Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to pervasive, and even inevitable. Yet Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Penguin, 2025) shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s a political choice that has led to devasting consequences. Europeans and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion. Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished weaves together pioneering original research and breath-taking storytelling to show us extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
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    40 mins
  • 250 Years of Special Providence: On American Grand Strategy Since the Declaration with Walter Russell Mead

    250 Years of Special Providence: On American Grand Strategy Since the Declaration with Walter Russell Mead
    Jul 3 2026
    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.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Daniel Krcmaric, "Above the Law" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

    Daniel Krcmaric, "Above the Law" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
    Jun 30 2026
    The United States has traditionally been a great promoter of international justice – forging the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals after World War II and leading the way in creating tribunals to address genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda after the Cold War. Yet the US views the International Criminal Court – the culmination of the tribunal-building process – as a dire threat. The US voted against its establishment, passed legislation threatening to invade The Hague, and tried to destroy the ICC with economic sanctions. Delving into the uneasy relationship between the world's superpower and one of its most prominent international institutions, Above the Law: The United States and the International Criminal Court (Cambridge UP, 2026) explains how the desire to shield American soldiers from unwanted ICC scrutiny is the ultimate source of tension. Offering a sophisticated analysis of the ICC's track record that shows how American fears are overblown, Daniel Krcmaric argues that a more cooperative US policy toward the ICC would benefit both sides. Our guest is Daniel Krcmaric, an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Northwestern University. Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
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    30 mins
  • Infrastructure, Nickel, and the Politics of Polyalignment in Indonesia

    Infrastructure, Nickel, and the Politics of Polyalignment in Indonesia
    Jun 24 2026
    Indonesia is often framed as a key arena of China-Japan-US competition in the Second Cold War. In this episode, we talk with Trissia Wijaya about her book on the political economy of Chinese and Japanese infrastructure financing in Indonesia. She challenges the view that it is simply an instrument of competition and instead situates infrastructure finance within Indonesia’s own development strategies. She shows how development assistance, commercial loans, export credits, and public-private partnerships are shaped by contestation among Chinese and Japanese capital, as well as Indonesian civil society, state actors, and labor. We also link these dynamics to the country’s changing industrial policy, from energy infrastructure to Nickel processing to the planned capital of Nusantara, asking how Indonesia uses strategies of polyalignment and foreign finance to pursue its own developmental ambitions. — Trissia Wijaya is a McKenzie Research Fellow at the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne. Prior to this role, she worked as a Senior Research Fellow at Asia-Japan Research Organization, Ritsumeikan University, and taught at the College of Global Liberal Arts. She received her PhD in Politics from Murdoch University, Australia, and remains affiliated as an Honorary Research Fellow at the Indo-Pacific Research Centre there. She has also worked at the Asian Development Bank and UNDP Indonesia, cultivating an interest in the political economy of development and evidence-informed policymaking. Her research spans green infrastructure financing, industrial policy, and critical mineral development. She has conducted intensive fieldwork across Indonesia, Japan, and China. The Political Economy of Japanese and Chinese Infrastructure Financing Governance: Organizing Alliances, Institutions, and Ideology (Bristol University Press 2025) Indonesia, nickel, and the political economy of polyalignment in the Second Cold War in Third World Quarterly An EV-fix for Indonesia: the green development-resource nationalist nexus in Environmental Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
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    43 mins