New Books Network

Nana Osei-Opare, historian and author exploring Ghanaian and Black internationalist history. He traces Ghana’s 1957 independence as a Black socialist experiment. The conversation highlights Ghana–Soviet interactions, everyday racism faced by Ghanaians in the Eastern Bloc, contested development projects, petitions shaping diplomacy, and archival detective work across multiple countries.

Alan McDougall, a history professor and lifelong Liverpool supporter, offers a people-focused history of Liverpool F.C. He explores Anfield as pilgrimage and the Kop’s role in fan culture. He traces Shankly’s reshaping of club and city, examines Heysel and Hillsborough’s differing impacts, and reflects on race, women’s football, and Klopp’s modern echo of Shankly.

J. S. Nelson, a law professor who designs compliance and governance systems, talks about making business ethics practical for managers and organizations. He explores blending law, philosophy, and psychology to reduce rationalization. Topics include corporate governance, balancing stakeholders, managerial discretion under Delaware law, ownership models, and designing organizations that encourage dissent and trust.

Daniel Poppick, a poet and novelist who also works as a copywriter, reads playful retail copy and reflects on poetic form. He discusses how poetic attention shapes a hybrid novel, the strange humor of product descriptions, and the politics of poetry as refusal. Conversations range from notebooks and time to phones, presence, and the craft overlap between advertising and lyric writing.

Esther Goldenberg, an author and educator who reimagines biblical stories from women’s perspectives, discusses Song of the Bluebird, the third book in her Desert Songs trilogy. The conversation covers why Serrah (Blue) became the protagonist, Blue’s agelessness and role across generations, reclaiming erased women’s stories, and creative choices about family, trauma, and life in Egypt and the desert.

Jeremy Dauber, Columbia professor of Yiddish literature and author of The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem, guides a lively tour of Sholem Aleichem’s life and art. He explores the writer’s shift to Yiddish, the creation and multilayered appeal of Tevye, Aleichem’s blend of humor and sorrow, his professional craft, and the varied afterlives and adaptations that kept his work alive.

David Bather Woods, associate professor at Warwick and Schopenhauer scholar, discusses his new philosophical biography. He explores Schopenhauer’s life, tone, and how pessimism coexists with compassion. Conversations touch on influence on artists, the porcupine parable, boredom versus suffering, suicide and madness, sex and gender, and why Schopenhauer still matters today.

Ken Chitwood, a scholar of religion and author of Borícua Muslims, explores Puerto Rican converts to Islam through multi-sited and digital ethnography. He discusses everyday cosmopolitanism, food and identity tensions, mosque dynamics and solidarities linking Puerto Rico and Palestine. Music and cultural expression also feature as ways communities make meaning.

Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist and bestselling author, explores common knowledge and how it shapes coordination, politics, money, and social life. He explains signals that create shared awareness like laughter and eye contact. He also examines how deniability, diplomacy, internet censorship, and rituals hide or reveal what everyone knows.

Steffan Blayney, historian of health and labor turned labor organizer, explores how 19th–20th century science recast workers as machines. He discusses mechanical metaphors, the medicalization of fatigue, time-and-motion visualizations, Taylorism and assembly lines, and how efficiency ideas migrated into wellness, advertising, and modern labor struggles.