Helen Yaffe, "We Are Cuba!: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World" (Yale UP, 2020)
In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced the start of a crisis that decimated its economy. Helen Yaffe examines the astonishing developments that took place during and beyond this ...
17 Feb 20231h 50min
Making Meaning Episode 14: The Challenge of Choice
The vast range of choices we can make about our lives is one of the great blessings of modernity. But that very freedom makes it hard to know what to believe or where we belong. Even more difficult is...
17 Feb 202311min
John Peters and Don Wells, "Canadian Labour Policy and Politics" (UBC Press, 2022)
For many, the COVID-19 pandemic has awakened them to the dangers attendant to a lot of the working conditions in society today—for others, it has made what they already knew to be the dangers of their...
17 Feb 202356min
Victor Roy, "Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines" (U California Press, 2023)
Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines (U California Press, 2023) takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance ov...
17 Feb 202351min
Marnia Lazreg, "Foucault's Orient: The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan" (Berghahn Books, 2020)
Foucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the “Orient” constitute the “limit” of...
17 Feb 202353min
The Future of the Liberal Order: A Discussion with James E. Cronin
Has the liberal order been taken for granted? The post war consensus and the impact of the cold war may have helped establish a way of doing politics that in fact was on less secure foundations that i...
16 Feb 202347min
Philip Nel, "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books" (Oxford UP, 2017)
Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structu...
16 Feb 202348min
Historians Examine Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology
Andrew Popp, a professor of history at Copenhagen Business School, and Jonathan Coopersmith, a professor (retired) of history at Texas A&M, talk about a recent special issue they edited in the journal...
15 Feb 20231h 14min
