Episodios

  • Matti Friedman, "Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai" (Spiegel & Grau, 2022)

    Matti Friedman, "Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai" (Spiegel & Grau, 2022)
    Feb 9 2026
    In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen—thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end—traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. Moving around the front with a guitar and a group of local musicians, Cohen met hundreds of young soldiers, men and women at the worst moment of their lives. Those who survived never forgot the experience. And the war transformed Cohen. He had announced that he was abandoning his music career, but he instead returned to Hydra and to his family, had a second child, and released one of the best albums of his career. In Who by Fire, journalist Matti Friedman gives us a riveting account of those weeks in the Sinai, drawing on Cohen’s previously unpublished writing and original reporting to create a kaleidoscopic depiction of a harrowing, formative moment for both a young country at war and a singer at a crossroads. Matti Friedman is an award-winning journalist and author. Born in Toronto and based in Jerusalem, his work has appeared regularly in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, and elsewhere. Friedman's last book, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, won the 2019 Natan Prize and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for history. Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War was chosen in 2016 as a New York Times Notable Book and one of Amazon's 10 best books of the year. His first book, The Aleppo Codex, won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize and the ALA's Sophie Brody Medal. Matti Friedman on Twitter. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h y 3 m
  • Brian Martin, "From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War" (ECW Press, 2022)

    Brian Martin, "From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War" (ECW Press, 2022)
    Jan 12 2026
    Despite all we know about the Civil War, its causes, battles, characters, issues, impacts, and legacy, few books have explored Canada’s role in the bloody conflict that claimed more than 600,000 lives. Until From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War (ECW Press, 2022) by Brian Martin. A surprising 20,000 Canadians went south to take up arms on both sides of the conflict, while thousands of enslaved people, draft dodgers, deserters, recruiters, plotters, and spies fled northward to take shelter in the attic that is Canada. Though many escaped slavery and found safety through the Underground Railroad, they were later joined by KKK members wanted for murder. Confederate President Jefferson Davis along with several of his emissaries and generals found refuge on Canadian soil, and many plantation owners moved north of the border. Award-winning journalist Brian Martin will open eyes in both Canada and the United States to how the two countries and their citizens interacted during the Civil War and the troubled times that surrounded it. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    39 m
  • Sonya Lea, "American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture" (UP of Kentucky, 2025)

    Sonya Lea, "American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture" (UP of Kentucky, 2025)
    Jan 9 2026
    Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just four and a half minutes to find him guilty. Bethea is hanged near the banks of the Ohio River in Owensboro, Kentucky, with more than twenty thousand white people in attendance. The crowd turns the violent spectacle of Bethea's hanging—the last documented public execution in the United States—into a brutal carnival. Bethea's story came to author Sonya Lea through her family, and it is through her family that she reckons with its truths. At her grandmother's funeral, Lea received an oral history recorded by a neighbor. In its pages, Lea, who is descended from white Kentuckians on both sides, discovered that two of the spectators at Bethea's execution were her grandparents, teenage newlyweds Sherrel and Frances Ralph. Lea's research would also divulge that she was related to the prosecuting attorney for the Commonwealth, the man considered most responsible for Bethea's hanging. American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture (University Press of Kentucky, 2025) combines memoir with reportage and cultural criticism to interrogate and complicate the traditional narrative about how lynch culture is created in families, communities, and institutions. The essays in this collection grapple with our complicity in these atrocities—including the agreement in our silences—and demonstrate how we, as descendants, might take responsibility and bring new scrutiny to ancestral and communal crimes. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    49 m
  • Robin F. Hansen, "Prison Born: Incarceration and Motherhood in the Colonial Shadow" (U Regina Press, 2024)

    Robin F. Hansen, "Prison Born: Incarceration and Motherhood in the Colonial Shadow" (U Regina Press, 2024)
    Dec 26 2025
    With rigorous scrutiny and deep care, Robin Hansen's Prison Born: Incarceration and Motherhood in the Colonial Shadow (U Regina Press, 2024) offers crucial insight into the intersections of ongoing colonial harms facing Indigenous mothers in Canada. Building from an unplanned call to Hansen from a pregnant, incarcerated Indigenous woman in 2016, Prison Born highlights how custodial prison sentences cause discriminatory and swift harm—automatically separating mothers from their children, immediately after birth. Using Access to Information requests along with extensive research, Hansen examines the legal rights of these women—the majority of whom are Indigenous—and finds that Jacquie and her son are by no means alone: automatic mother-infant separation without due process remains the norm in most jurisdictions in Canada. Prison Born calls attention to the colonial and gendered assumptions that continue to underpin the legal system—assumptions that so frequently lead to the violation of the rights and denial of personhood for children and their mothers. Robin Hansen is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Saskatoon. Her research focuses on legal personhood; public and private international law; and systems theory of law.Rine Vieth is an FRQ Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. They are currently studying how anti-gender mobilization shapes migration policy, particularly in regards to asylum determinations in the UK and Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    40 m
  • Éléna Choquette, "Land and the Liberal Project: Canada’s Violent Expansion" (UBC Press, 2024)

    Éléna Choquette, "Land and the Liberal Project: Canada’s Violent Expansion" (UBC Press, 2024)
    Dec 6 2025
    In 1867, Canada was a small country flanking the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes, but within a few years its claims to sovereignty spanned the continent. With Confederation had come the vaunting ambition to create an empire from sea to sea. How did Canada lay claim to so much land so quickly? Land and the Liberal Project: Canada’s Violent Expansion (UBC Press, 2024) by Dr. Éléna Choquette examines the political, legal, and rhetorical tactics deployed by Canadian officialdom in the cause of nation making, from the first articulation of expansionism in the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act to the consolidation of authority over the prairies following the North-West Resistance of 1885. Drawing on numerous archival sources, Dr. Choquette contends that although the dominion purported to favour a gentle absorption of Indigenous lands through constitutionalism, administration, and law, it resorted to police repression and military force in the face of Indigenous resistance. She investigates the liberal concept that underpinned land appropriation and legitimized violence: Indigenous territory and people were to be “improved,” the former by agrarian capitalism, the latter by so-called protection and enforced schooling. By rethinking this tainted approach to building a transcontinental state, Dr. Choquette’s clear-eyed exposé of the Canadian expansionist project offers new ways to understand colonization. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h
  • Is a River Alive?: A Conversation with Robert Macfarlane

    Is a River Alive?: A Conversation with Robert Macfarlane
    Dec 1 2025
    Hailed in the New York Times as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? (W.W. Norton, 2025) is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada--imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, a stream who flows through his own years and days. Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers--and always has. Robert Macfarlane's best-selling books include Is a River Alive? and Underland. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has won many prizes around the world. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Darius Cuplinskas is director at The Ideas Workshop of the Open Society Foundations. He is based in London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    34 m
  • Basit Kareem Iqbal, "The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution" (Fordham UP, 2025)

    Basit Kareem Iqbal, "The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution" (Fordham UP, 2025)
    Nov 14 2025
    Basit Kareem Iqbal's new book The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (Fordham UP, 2025) uses ethnographic scenes from Jordan and Canada to contextualize the role of Muslim charities and community organizations that support displaced refugees from the Syrian catastrophe. Through these encounters, however, we learn not only of the limitations of secular humanitarian projects, but we are also privy to the deep theological enterprise of notions of trial and tribulation of those caught between mobility and immobility and various entangled temporalities. Iqbal and his interlocutors grapple with the asymmetrical realities of a Divine’s mercy and compassion set against violence, horror, and death. It is at these junctures that we encounter an ethnography of theology, that is, how Qur’anic principles are fundamentally tested, negotiated, and stretched by everyday survivors, be they activists or humanitarian aid workers, as they forge a path ahead in the world of the living. The interpretations that arise from Iqbal’s interlocutors, be they Salafi or Sufi oriented, challenges readers to contend with religious and theological sensibilities of a secular world of humanitarianism and international aid but also centers the voices of refugees. Iqbal’s book is beautifully crafted. It models how one can write of such topics with care and intention without ever escaping or sensationalizing the horrors and evils faced by displaced peoples. This book will be of interest to those who work on Syria, anthropology of Islam, Islamic theology, international aid and humanitarianism and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h y 17 m
  • Greg Soden, "Unscripted Moments: Conversations with Propagandhi (2020-2025)" (Earth Island Books, 2025)

    Greg Soden, "Unscripted Moments: Conversations with Propagandhi (2020-2025)" (Earth Island Books, 2025)
    Oct 22 2025
    Propagandhi formed in 1986 in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, Canada and are now based in Winnipeg. Their outspoken influence and consistency in anti-fascist, animal-friendly, gay-positive, and pro-feminist ideas have inspired thousands of hardcore, thrash metal and punk rock music fans across four decades. Unscripted Moments: A Podcast About Propagandhi began in 2020 as a fan-made song-by-song podcast exploring each release by the band. The podcast also features bonus episodes about touring, recording and more with friends, fans and collaborators from throughout the bands musical career. Among the hundreds of episodes about the band's music are more than fifteen hours of candid interviews with past and present members of Propagandhi recorded between 2020 and 2025. The conversations vary widely in topic and discuss songwriting, touring stories, favourite cover songs and side projects, as well as personal hobbies and interests of the band members. These edited interviews with Chris Hannah, Jord Samolesky, John Samson Fellows, Todd Kowalski, David Guillas, and Sulynn Hago span the career of the band from their earliest demos through to the recording of their eighth album, At Peace, released in May 2025. Propagandhi has released music with G7 Welcoming Committee, Recess Records, Fat Wreck Chords, and Epitaph Records. The 200+ episodes of Unscripted Moments: A Podcast About Propagandhi have been downloaded more than half a million times and are available to stream everywhere podcasts are available. Greg Soden is the host of 'Unscripted Moments: A Podcast About Propagandhi' and a super-fan of the band, with whom he worked to put together this book of candid conversations over the last five years. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    39 m