Mark Hlavacik, "Willing Warriors: A New History of the Education Culture Wars" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
How the rise of the culture wars afflicts the politics of education. On August 9, 2022, the Denton Independent School District held a meeting to address complaints about its libraries. Like so many ...
28 Maalis 29min
Thomas Hegghammer and Diego Gambetta eds., "Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Time spent and words spent—what does each signal? Deceptive mimicry—the manipulation of individual or group identity—includes passing off as a different individual, as a member of a group to which on...
28 Maalis 1h 5min
Sarah James, "The Politics of Failed Policies" (Oxford UP, 2025)
The Politics of Failed Policies (Oxford UP, 2025) examines how the interplay of politics and data affects when failed policies get recognized. It shows how compelling data and analysis is an important...
27 Maalis 28min
Maya L. Kornberg, "Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress" (JHU Press, 2026)
Why fifty years of changemaking and reform haven't fixed Congress—and what that reveals about American democracy. Congress, the central democratic institution in the United States, is hanging on by a ...
26 Maalis 49min
Tom Wells, "The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations" (Oxford UP, 2026)
A richly detailed collection of transcripts of Henry Kissinger's secretly recorded phone conversations from his time in the Nixon administration that touch on every important issue of Kissinger's day ...
26 Maalis 34min
On Trump as a “World Historical Individual” with author John B. Judis
The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel “viewed history as consisting of stages punctuated by times of upheaval,” the author John B. Judis wrote in a recent essay for NOTUS, and “assigned to what he called ‘worl...
25 Maalis 34min
How Authoritarians Exploit Gender
Gender is becoming a central battleground in contemporary authoritarian politics, but how do autocrats manipulate these debates to their own advantage? Some regimes now pursue a double strategy of sim...
25 Maalis 22min
Lucia Motolinia, "Unity through Particularism: How Electoral Reforms Influence Parties and Legislative Behavior" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Why do supposedly accountability-enhancing electoral reforms often fail in young democracies? How can legislators serve their constituents when parties control the necessary resources? Unity through P...
24 Maalis 28min
