Mark R. Rank, "Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood since the beginnings of the country, with the rhet...
26 Jul 202540min
Joseph Gfroerer, "War Stories from the Drug Survey: How Culture, Politics, and Statistics Shaped the National Survey on Drug Use and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Joseph Gfroerer spent nearly 40 years working as a statistician for the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Starting in ...
26 Jul 202557min
Osita Nwanevu, "The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding" (Random House, 2025)
Frustrated with our political dysfunction, wearied by the thinness of contemporary political discourse, and troubled by the rise of anti-democratic attitudes across the political spectrum, journalist ...
25 Jul 202530min
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, "Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)
Our national conversation about the border has taken a religious turn. When televangelists declare, “Heaven has a wall,” activists shout back, “Jesus was a refugee.” For Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, the st...
21 Jul 202552min
Ben Westhoff, "Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic" (Grove Press, 2019)
Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative journalist whose best-selling 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Press, 2019), wa...
20 Jul 202545min
Dayna Bowen Matthew, "Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America" (NYU Press, 2022)
In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of the symptoms and results of that inequality. Racia...
19 Jul 202546min
Phyu Phyu Oo, "Conflict-related Sexual Violence in Myanmar: The Role of the State" (De Gruyter, 2025)
Systemic sexual violence by the Myanmar army and proxies began to be widely reported in the 2010s, in the course of genocidal violence against Rohingya in the country’s west. At the same time, the Mya...
17 Jul 202544min
Cat Dawson, "Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists Is Shaping the Memorial Landscape" (MIT Press, 2025)
For centuries, monuments have telegraphed the values and origin myths of dominant culture in public space and on massive scale. They have signaled both who is part of a culture and who is not, often o...
15 Jul 202539min
