Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

If you are tired of reading the same, Washington-based, consensus, 'realist' and or 'neo-conservative', critiques of American foreign policy, here is something to salivate on: Jeffrey D. Sachs', A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (Columbia University Press, 2018). By turns, noted author Jeffrey Sachs' book is unorthodox, iconoclastic, novel and indeed at times eccentric. A New Foreign Policy provides a road map for a U.S. foreign policy that embraces globalism, cooperation, international law, and aspirations for worldwide prosperity---not nationalism and illusory dreams of empty and past glory. You may not agree with him, indeed you may believe that he is completely wrong and his facts do not add up. Regardless, Sachs' book is the one that foreign policy experts will be discussing this Fall.Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.

There are many who believe Moses parted the Red Sea and Jesus came back from the dead. Others are certain that exorcisms occur, ghosts haunt attics, and the blessed can cure the terminally ill. Though miracles are immensely improbable, people have embraced them for millennia, seeing in them proof of a supernatural world that resists scientific explanation.In The Miracle Myth: Why Belief in the Resurrection and the Supernatural Is Unjustified (Columbia University Press, 2016), Professor Larry Shapiro helps us to think more critically about our belief in the improbable, casting a skeptical eye on attempts to justify belief in the supernatural and laying bare the fallacies that such attempts commit. Through arguments and accessible analysis, Larry Shapiro sharpens our critical faculties so we become less susceptible to tales of myths and miracles and learn how, ultimately, to evaluate claims regarding vastly improbable events on our own. Shapiro acknowledges that belief in miracles could be harmless, but cautions against allowing such beliefs to guide how we live our lives. His investigation reminds us of the importance of evidence and rational thinking as we explore the unknown.Larry Shapiro is professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Besides his occasional inquiry into the status of miracles, he primarily researches philosophy of psychology and philosophy of mind, currently focusing on issues concerning multiple realization and embodied cognition. He is the author of a number of books and the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition (2014).Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.

From petty runs to organized trafficking, the illicit activity of smuggling on the China coast was inherently dramatic, but now historian Philip Thai has also identified China’s history of smuggling as a significant narrative about the expansion of state power. China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making...

Lily Wong‘s Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (Columbia University Press, 2018) traces the genealogy of the Chinese sex worker as a figure who manifests throughout the 20th century in moments of anti-Asian racism as well as moments of sexism and nationalism within Chinese communities. Yet for Wong, the tensions and visibility of this figure also allows alternative and alternating forms of solidarity rooted in stepping back from ideologies of nation, race and gender. The sex worker thus allows us to see Chineseness and other forms of collectivity as an affective product, an attachment that mobilizes our emotions and frames how we see others as well as ourselves. By charting representations of the Chinese sex worker through histories of Pacific Crossing, Cold War era ideologies, and contemporary globalization, Wong’s book shows the multiple ways that sex work and prostitution have unsettled forms of collectivity, while providing new spaces for dwelling.Christopher B. Patterson teaches at the University of British Columbia, Social Justice Institute. He is the author of Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific and Stamped: an anti-travel novel.

You should never trust celebrities, politicians, or activists for health information. Why? Because they are not scientists! Scientists often cannot compete with celebrities when it comes to charm or evoking emotion. Science is complex and often cannot provide the easy “soundbite” worthy answers that celebrities and politicians truly comprehend. Americans are flooded with misleading or incorrect claims about health risks. In his book Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information (Columbia University Press, 2018), Dr. Paul Offit sets the record straight.In this book, Dr. Offit shares his advice from his years of experience battling misinformation in science and public health. He has often found himself in the crosshairs of the anti-vaccine movement and other pseudoscience groups. He has received a significant amount of hate mail and even death threats for speaking out in the name of good science and the health of mankind. Bad science isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous. Luckily. Dr Offit offers his guide for taking on the quacks. This book is especially important due to the increased amounts of politicized attacks on science in the United States.Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

With Us and Against Us: How America’s Partners Help and Hinder the War on Terror (Columbia University Press, 2018) offers readers a fresh, insightful and new perspective on US counterterrorism cooperation with complex countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen and Mali. These US partners work with the United States to defeat militant groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Yet, they often are both firefighters and arsonists because they frequently simultaneously support groups that engage in political violence and/or pursue policies likely to produce a new generation of militants. US partners, moreover, at times adhere to worldviews that potentially create breeding grounds for extremism. Drawing on his extensive scholarship as well as his experience as a senior advisor to the US Department of Defense during the Obama administration, assistant professor Stephen Tankel takes the reader on a well-written, highly readable tour of the complexities and pitfalls of cooperation on counterterrorism in a post-Cold War world. Tankel unravels a minefield populated by unrealistic US expectations, an over-reliance on military tools, and lack of understanding of threat perceptions among America’s partners as well as the differing priorities that US partners have. In doing so, Tankel contributes to both the study of political violence and the far broader contexts that nourish it and the continuous debate among policymakers and pundits on how to counter it.James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

How do different professionals experience retirement? Michelle Pannor Silver’s new book Retirements and its Discontents: Why We Won’t Stop Working, Even If We Can (Columbia University Press, 2018), explores this question and more through interview with doctors, CEOs, elite athletes, professors, and homemakers. These retirees experience a sense of loss or felt like strangers in their own lives, but they also experience a sense of purpose in their new pursuits and find new ways to become themselves. Doctors are required to commit their whole lives to their job and retirement introduces a new life with free time and flexibility that was not there before. CEOs also had a diverse set of experiences including some who were forced into retirement, an experience shared across the other professionals as well. Elite athletes are an interesting group because sometimes they are retiring at, what would be considered for retirement, very young ages. Professors also experience a diverse range of retirement experiences and here Silver talks more about the idea of working in place, similar to the idea of aging in place. Silver also explores the retirement experiences of homemakers, a group typically ignored in the retirement literature. Overall, she leaves the reader with some key takeaways.This book will be of interest to a wide audience, from retirees themselves to Sociologists and Gerontologists. A strength of this book is its accessible organization and style of writing; the presentation of case studies makes the materials relatable and interesting. Sections of this book or the whole book could be easily digested by an undergraduate audience, and this text would be an important addition to a graduate course in aging or work.Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch

Environmentalists often talk like revolutionaries but agitate like reformers. But however moderate its tactics, environmentalism has led Americans to questions rarely asked: Is economic growth necessary? Must individual freedom and democracy be paramount? Can human reason save us? And, especially, are nature and humanity of equal worth? These questions haunted mainstream groups aiming to gain popular support. They have also animated fringe groups, especially in the American West, which are frequently criticized, lampooned, or dismissed. But these are questions that need our attention, says historian Keith M. Woodhouse, author of the important new intellectual and political history of environmentalism’s most radical lines of thought and the people who have fought hardest for them: The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism (Columbia University Press, 2018). Woodhouse mines the writings of EarthFirst! and other groups and finds that their insistence on a moral equivalence between humans and nature has, as critics charged, led them to dismiss social and economic inequality and sometimes permitted racist and fascist musings. Yet they also had a demonstrable influence on the Sierra Club and other mainstream groups. And, even more importantly, they persistently foregrounded the importance of humility, doubt, and even pessimism, which he argues environmentalism abandons at its peril.Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

Human rights as a concern in U.S. foreign policy and international politics has been well-documented, particularly in studies of the Carter Administration. However, how human rights emerged as an issue in U.S. domestic politics has received less attention, which is what Sarah Snyder’s From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press, 2018) studies and illuminates. Snyder’s research draws on both traditional diplomatic source material from the State Department, but also materials from NGOs and the papers of a number of congressmen who were involved in these issues. Using the framework of the “long 1960s,” Snyder lays bare some of the issues that sparked and sustained growing interest in human rights as a global issue, and the role that Americans ought to play in protecting human rights around the globe.Snyder points to a variety of factors that cultivated U.S. attention to human rights, particularly transnational connections between foreign and domestic actors, as well as the broader context of the 1960s in the United States, particularly the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement. She draws on five case studies to lay bare these connections: the Soviet Union, Rhodesia, South Korea, Greece, and Chile. Some of the activism in these case studies was sustained by citizen groups and NGOs such as churches, while in other instances academics, officers within the State Department, or members of Congress directed much of the attention. Snyder then concludes by showing how Congress evolved in this period too, as hearings on human rights led to a number of important institutional changes in government.Snyder concludes by noting that while interest in human rights surged by 1976, attention has in many respects waned since the 1980s. Attention to these issues is not inevitable and it cannot be sustained without continuing participation from different sectors of civil society. Paying close attention to the ways that these interests were cultivated in the 1970s is one way that the activists of the 21st century might try cultivating awareness of the problems confronting the world today.

Who benefits from mass incarceration in the U.S.? In her new book Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Columbia University Press, 2017), Lauren-Brooke Eisen explain how, when and why the for-profit prison system emerged, the ways in which it functions throughout the criminal justice system today, and what we might do to improve it.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics and Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017).