Jens Ludwig, "Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal con...
2 Feb 1h 4min
Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine
Despite reform efforts that have grown in scope and intensity over the last two decades, the machine of American mass incarceration continues to flourish. In Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: R...
29 Jan 41min
Stephen Bezruchka, "Born Sick in the USA: Improving the Health of a Nation" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
How healthy you are is dependent on where you live. Americans suffer more cancers, heart disease, mental illness, and other chronic diseases than those who live in other wealthy nations, despite havin...
29 Jan 37min
Tara Lohan, "Undammed: Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life" (Island Press, 2025)
Undammed: Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life (Island Press, 2025) is not Tara’s first book, she authored one at age eight. From their she followed her passion to become an accomplished en...
27 Jan 37min
Colette Einfeld and Helen Sullivan, "How to Conduct Interpretive Research: Insights for Students and Researchers" (Edward Elgar, 2025)
What happens when an academic supervisor and their former student get together to write and edit a book on researching our social world? In How to Conduct Interpretive Research: Insights for Students ...
27 Jan 43min
Terry Williams, "Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused peop...
26 Jan 28min
George Fisher, "Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)
George Fisher, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, just released his new book Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America’s Drug War, with Oxford University ...
26 Jan 59min
Lesly-Marie Buer, "RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky" (Haymarket, 2020)
Using the narratives of women who use(d) drugs, this account challenges popular understandings of Appalachia spread by such pundits as JD Vance by documenting how women, families, and communities cope...
26 Jan 42min
