New Books Network

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lucia Motolinia, political scientist and author studying electoral reform effects in Mexico. She discusses how re-election rules and party control interact. She explores staggered reforms as a natural experiment. She contrasts primaries and party appointments. She explains why reforms can boost party loyalty while shaping targeted, particularistic responsiveness.

Hsuan L. Hsu, Professor of English working at the intersections of environmental humanities, sensory studies, and critical ethnic studies. He explores smellscapes and how scent carries memory, race, and colonial histories. He discusses diasporic scents, speculative olfaction in fiction and art, toxic and extractive odor contexts, and how scent can reimagine more just atmospheres.

Claire Goldstein, Professor of French and humanities scholar at UC Davis, studies seventeenth-century French literature and material culture. She traces how comets sparked social panic, periodical news-making, court spectacle, and ballets. The conversation highlights archival sleuthing, theater and publication networks, and how comet mania shaped the rise of state science and the Paris Observatory.

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.

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.

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.