New Books Network

Patricia B. O'Hara, Amherst professor of chemistry and author, brings food science to life with short, accessible lessons. She covers teaching chemistry through everyday foods. She explores how heat, acid, and mechanics transform ingredients. She discusses how our five senses shape flavor and the links between food waste, climate, and sustainable choices.

Gregory Smits, a Penn State professor of history and Asian Studies who has written extensively on Ryukyuan history. He explores the islands' deep past from ancient remains to modern times. He highlights archaeology overturning origin myths, the Ryukyus as a maritime trade hub, Korean and Chinese influences, tribute and taxation, and 20th-century American occupation and identity debates.

They unpack the idea of knowing a book before reading it and how that shapes expectations. Topics include how newspapers and social media build shared pre-reading knowledge. They explore everyday uses of pre-reading, its role in spoilers and plot twists, and its ethical and political consequences, including strategies for resisting book bans.

Alison Gadsby, a Canadian writer in Tkaronto/Toronto and founder of the Junction Reads prose series, discusses her 2026 short-fiction collection. The conversation covers the collection’s blend of weird, horror, and psychological realism. They explore water imagery, unsettling characters, power reversals among women, and the book’s dark humor and emotional intensity.

Andrew Coe, food writer and culinary historian known for chronicling Chinese food in America, traces how Chinese restaurants became woven into Jewish life. He maps the Lower East Side origins, holiday rituals like Christmas dining, suburban Sunday-night takeout, kosher adaptations, changing regional cuisines, and cultural meanings across a century.

Vojta Hybl, geologist and science illustrator who makes geology approachable through art. He walks through how to identify over 100 rock types and why we are 'rock blind'. Short practical ID tips like vinegar tests, plus surprising stories on carbonatite, umber, pseudotachylite and anthropic rocks. A lively take on seeing everyday stones as clues to deep Earth processes.

Paula Bialski, Associate Professor of Digital Sociology, offers ethnographic insight into digital communities. Ben Collier, Senior Lecturer and author of Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy, explores Tor’s history, infrastructure, and community. They discuss how Tor works, volunteer relay operators, political tensions within the project, Tor’s role against censorship and surveillance, and its mainstreaming into everyday tech.

Derek Krueger, emeritus UNC Greensboro scholar of Byzantine Christianity and monasticism. He explores Simeon the New Theologian’s strikingly homoerotic language of divine union. Short scenes cover monastic disciplining of desire, Byzantine homophobia, hymn readings about the divinized body, and how monasteries shaped queer devotional life.

Nikita Kaur Simpson, a medical anthropologist who studied the Gaddi people of the Western Himalayas. She explores the local concept of “tension” and how it links bodily symptoms to rapid social change. Short, vivid stories show gendered, household, and structural dimensions of distress. The conversation traces fieldwork methods, cultural metaphors, and how tension circulates across lives.

Kristin Ciupa, Associate Professor of Sociology and author of a new book on Venezuela’s oil political economy. She traces Venezuela’s shift from agrarian exportism to oil dependence. She examines state–oil capital rent relations, nationalization and PDVSA, the Chávez era’s rent distribution, and recent decline, sanctions, and shifting prospects for privatization and foreign investment.