Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, "American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15" (FSG, 2023)
In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon t...
20 Feb 20241h 4min
Max Felker-Kantor, "DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools" (UNC Press, 2023)
With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the c...
17 Feb 20241h 2min
Laurence Cox et al., "Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Social Movements" (Edward Elgar, 2024)
Addressing practice-oriented questions, this handbook engages with both theoretical and political dimensions, unpacking the multidimensional nature of social movement research for new and established ...
17 Feb 202434min
Mirelsie Velazquez, "Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City, 1940-1977" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children's classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in thei...
17 Feb 202459min
Ryan Manucha, "Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups: Canada's Quest for Interprovincial Free Trade" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
Today I talked to Ryan Manucha about his new book Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups: Canada's Quest for Interprovincial Free Trade (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022). In 2012, after Gerard Comeau ...
14 Feb 202454min
James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson, "Judging Inequality: State Supreme Courts and the Inequality Crisis" (Russell Sage, 2021)
Soaring levels of political, legal, economic, and social inequality have been documented by social scientists – but the public conversation and scholarship on inequality has not examined the role of s...
12 Feb 202458min
Rob Percival, "The Meat Paradox: Eating, Empathy, and the Future of Meat" (Pegasus, 2022)
Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies, by geopolitical tensions, and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo-- pandemics ...
12 Feb 202447min
William Gale, "Fiscal Therapy: Curing America's Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future" (Oxford UP, 2019)
The US government is laboring under an enormous debt burden, one that will impact the living standards of future generations of Americans by limiting investment in people and infrastructure. In his ne...
12 Feb 202446min
