Episodios

  • David Morris, "Stealing The Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia" (Watkins Media, 2025)

    David Morris, "Stealing The Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia" (Watkins Media, 2025)
    Jan 7 2026
    Stealing the Future is the first book to tell the true and full story of Sam Bankman-Fried and his historic crimes. It chronicles the $11 billion FTX fraud with the detail and nuance of a financial fraud expert and cryptocurrency insider – but unlike any book before it, it also traces the ideas that enabled the crime. “Effective Altruism” and related tendencies, such as longtermism and transhumanism, remain dangerously influential in today’s Silicon Valley. Despite Bankman-Fried’s pose as a cuddly liberal philanthropist, they are now center stage in the global rise of the far right, and also lie at the heart of OpenAI, the tech darling that took FTX’s place as the face of the future. In this interview, Morris explains how some of the key thought processes that drive today's techno-billionaires and how we can spot the next fraudsters in our midst. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 h
  • Bo Tao, "Cooperative Evangelist: Kagawa Toyohiko and His World, 1888-1960" (U Hawaii Press, 2025)

    Bo Tao, "Cooperative Evangelist: Kagawa Toyohiko and His World, 1888-1960" (U Hawaii Press, 2025)
    Jan 6 2026
    Cooperative Evangelist: Kagawa Toyohiko and His World, 1888-1960 (University of Hawai’i Press, 2025) by Bo Tao uncovers the extraordinary world of a Japanese man who was once described as the “Saint Francis” or the “Gandhi” of Japan. A renowned religious figure on the world stage, Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960) received wide acclaim for his work as a street preacher in the slums of Kobe as well as his espousal of nonviolent methods of social reform. His reputation as a pacifist figure, however, rested uneasily with his wartime actions, which became increasingly supportive of the Japanese government and its expansionist policies. Reluctant to speak up against Japan’s increasing aggression in the late 1930s, he emerged as a full-blown apologist during the Pacific War, appearing on several Radio Tokyo broadcasts as a propagandist defending the interests of the state. Adopting a transnational approach that accounts for the rapid flow of information between Japan and the United States, Bo Tao examines the career of Kagawa as it unfolded within the context of the wars, imperialism, and economic depression of the early to mid-twentieth century. Using official documents and personal correspondence that have received scant attention in previous works, Tao reveals, for the first time at this level of detail, the extent of Kagawa’s cooperative relationship with the Japanese government, as well as the ways in which his idealized image was carefully constructed by his ardent missionary supporters. This book provides a window into the global dimensions of broader cultural shifts during the interwar period, such as the rise of Christian internationalism and the Depression-era popularity of cooperative economics. Offering a holistic and nuanced exploration of the tensions resulting from Kagawa’s hybrid identity as a Japanese Christian, Cooperative Evangelist adds a new layer to our understanding of religion, empire, and politics in the shaping of social and international relations. Bo Tao is Lecturer in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Chiba University in Chiba, Japan. His research interests include global history, U.S.-Japan relations, religion and politics, modern Japanese history, and the history of Christianity. Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 h y 24 m
  • Kelsey Klotz, "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    Kelsey Klotz, "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness" (Oxford UP, 2023)
    Jan 5 2026
    How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes, and in doing so, held to a belief system that, during the civil rights movement, modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true that it took Brubeck, like others, some time to understand the full spectrum of racial power dynamics at play in post-WWII, early Cold War, and civil rights-era America. Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness (Oxford UP, 2023) uses Brubeck's performances of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand the ways in which whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy more fully manifested in mid-century America. How is whiteness performed and re-performed? How do particular traits become inscribed with whiteness, and further, how do those traits, now racialized in a listener's mind, filter the sounds a listener hears? To what extent was Brubeck's whiteness made by others? How did audiences and critics use Brubeck to craft their own identities centered in whiteness? Drawing on archival records, recordings, and previously conducted interviews, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness listens closely for the complex and shifting frames of mid-century whiteness, and how they shaped the experiences of Brubeck's critics, audiences, and Brubeck himself. Throughout, author Kelsey Klotz asks what happens when a musician tries to intervene, using his privilege as a tool with which to disrupt structures of white supremacy, even as whiteness continues to retain its hold on its beneficiaries. Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 h y 10 m
  • D. J. Taylor, "Orwell: The New Life" (Pegasus Books, 2023)

    D. J. Taylor, "Orwell: The New Life" (Pegasus Books, 2023)
    Jan 4 2026
    A fascinating exploration of George Orwell--and his body of work--by an award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, presenting the author anew to twenty-first-century readers. We find ourselves in an era when the moment is ripe for a reevaluation of the life and the works of one of the twentieth century's greatest authors. This is the first twenty-first-century biography on George Orwell, with special recognition to D. J. Taylor's stature as an award-winning biographer and Orwellian. Using new sources that are now available for the first time, we are tantalizingly at the end of the lifespan of Orwell's last few contemporaries, whose final reflections are caught in this book. The way we look at a writer and his canon has changed even over the course of the last two decades; there is a post-millennial prism through which we must now look for such a biography to be fresh and relevant. This is what Orwell: The New Life (Pegasus Books, 2023) achieves. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    46 m
  • Ashley Brown, "Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    Ashley Brown, "Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson" (Oxford UP, 2023)
    Jan 3 2026
    From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. In this comprehensive biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927-2003). Based on extensive archival work and oral histories, Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson (Oxford UP, 2023) sets Gibson's life and choices against the backdrop of the Great Migration, Jim Crow racism, the integration of American sports, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and second wave feminism. Throughout her life Gibson continuously negotiated the expectations of her supporters and adversaries, including her patrons in the black-led American Tennis Association, the white-led United States Lawn Tennis Association, and the media, particularly the Black press and community's expectations that she selflessly serve as a representative of her race. An incredibly talented, ultra-competitive, and not always likeable athlete, Gibson wanted to be treated as an individual first and foremost, not as a member of a specific race or gender. She was reluctant to speak openly about the indignities and prejudices she navigated as an African American woman, though she faced numerous institutional and societal barriers in achieving her goals. She frequently bucked conventional norms of femininity and put her career ahead of romantic relationships, making her personal life the subject of constant scrutiny and rumors. Despite her major wins and international recognition, including a ticker tape parade in New York City and the covers of Sports Illustrated and Time, Gibson endeavored to find commercial sponsorship and permanent economic stability. Committed to self-sufficiency, she pivoted from the elite amateur tennis circuit to State Department-sponsored goodwill tours, attempts to find success as a singer and Hollywood actress, the professional golf circuit, a tour with the Harlem Globetrotters and her own professional tennis tour, coaching, teaching children at tennis clinics, and a stint as New Jersey Athletics Commissioner. As she struggled to support herself in old age, she was left with disappointment, recounting her past achievements decades before female tennis players were able to garner substantial earnings. A compelling life and times portrait, Serving Herself offers a revealing look at the rise and fall of a fiercely independent trailblazer who satisfied her own needs and simultaneously set a pathbreaking course for Black athletes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    46 m
  • Richard Wolin, "Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology" (Yale UP, 2023)

    Richard Wolin, "Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology" (Yale UP, 2023)
    Jan 2 2026
    What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century's most important philosopher? Martin Heidegger's sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement's philosophical preceptor, "to lead the leader." Yet for years, Heidegger's defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger's "Black Notebooks," it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger's philosophy was suffused with it. In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (Yale University Press, 2022), Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas--and why his legacy remains radically compromised. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 h y 53 m
  • Richard Bradford, "Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

    Richard Bradford, "Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
    Dec 29 2025
    Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, firstly in 1969 for The Armies of the Night and again in 1980 for The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer's life comes as close as is possible to being the Great American Novel: beyond reason, inexplicable, wonderfully grotesque and addictive.The Naked and the Dead was acclaimed not so much for its intrinsic qualities but rather because it launched a brutally realistic sub-genre of military fiction - Catch 22 and MASH would not exist without it. In Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer (Bloomsbury, 2023), Richard Bradford combs through Mailer's personal letters - to lovers and editors - which appear to be a rehearsal for his career as a shifty literary narcissist, and which shape the characters of one of the most widely celebrated World War II novels. Bradford strikes again with a merciless biography in which diary entries, journal extracts and newspaper columns set the tone of this study of a controversial figure. From friendships with contemporaries such as James Baldwin, failed correspondences with Hemingway and the Kennedys, to terrible - but justified - criticism of his work by William Faulkner and Eleanor Roosevelt, this book gives a unique, snappy and convincing perspective of Mailer's ferocious personality and writings. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics (Twitter @15MinFilm). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 h y 12 m
  • Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, "Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

    Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, "Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
    Dec 27 2025
    Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today, I speak with Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, author of the new artist’s biography Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (Simon & Schuster, 2025). The book was recently named one of NPR’s Books We Loved for 2025. Pollack-Pelzner is a cultural historian, theater critic, and teacher at Portland State University, whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. Pollack-Pelzner’s biography offers a captivating exploration of Miranda’s artistic journey—from a sensitive child in Manhattan’s Washington Heights to the visionary creator of Hamilton whose voice has reshaped musical theater and popular culture. This book captures a living artist in motion, weaving together countless threads of collaboration, cultural synthesis, and personal revelation that define Miranda’s work. In our conversation, we focus on the challenge of writing biography itself. How does a scholar and critic approach the story of someone whose art feels both deeply personal and expansively historical? How does one trace the education of an artist who learned not in isolation, but through community, heritage, and creative exchange? Pollack-Pelzner guides us through these questions with the grace of a storyteller and the precision of a historian, drawing on unparalleled access to Miranda’s inner circle and his own interviews with the artist. This is a book about how an artist finds his voice, and a conversation about how a biographer finds the shape of a life. Join me for this engaging discussion with the delightful Daniel Pollack-Pelzner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
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    1 h
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