Jieun Baek, "Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness" (Yale UP, 2026)
What do the people closest to power really think about the system they serve? That’s perhaps one of the most important questions one could ask about North Korea, still one of the world’s least underst...
4 Sep 50min
Nikhil Kalyanpur, "Legal Weapons of the Wealthy: The Offshoring of Elite Conflict in Emerging Markets" (Cornell UP, 2026)
In Legal Weapons of the Wealthy: The Offshoring of Elite Conflict in Emerging Markets (Cornell University Press, 2026), Dr. Nikhil Kalyanpur examines a striking feature of today's global legal order:...
4 Sep 29min
Michael Diniscia and Ellyn M Toscano eds. "Civility Unbound: Contesting a Democratic Value" (NYU Press, 2026)
The idea of civility goes back to classical Rome and the ways in which citizens engaged one another within the republic. The term itself is often used in a number of different ways, reflecting expec...
3 Sep 58min
Jonathan Quong, "Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice" (Princeton UP, 2026)
Can laws be unjust and yet remain, in some sense, morally legitimate? In Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice (Princeton UP, 2026), Jonathan Quong considers central issues in polit...
3 Sep 1h
The Political Philosophy of Mark Twain: On His Absurd, Noble Americans with Ivan Kenneally
While many know that Mark Twain created some of the most famous characters in literature—Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Jim and Puddn’head Wilson—too few have understood that the Missouri author was...
2 Sep 1h 2min
Richard Ned Lebow, "Why Nations Still Fight" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Drawing on an original data set of interventions and wars from 1945 to the current day, as well as numerous short case studies, Richard Ned Lebow offers a novel account of their origins and outcomes -...
30 Aug 1h 10min
Srirupa Roy, "The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Defying the dire predictions that attended its birth as an independent nation-state in 1947, the Indian republic is more than seventy-five years old. And yet, it is a place where criticisms of act...
28 Aug 52min
Catherine Reyes-Housholder, "How Women Win Presidential Elections in Latin America" (Temple UP, 2026)
Between 1990 and 2020, women candidates won only 6% of the world’s presidential races. How Women Win Presidential Elections in Latin America (Temple University Press, 2026) explains the factors, strat...
28 Aug 55min
