Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

In recent years the phrase “revisionist history” has emerged as a label for politically-correct reexaminations of an unalterable understanding of our past. As James M. Banner, Jr. demonstrates in his book The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History (Yale UP, 2021), such a definition ignores how historical knowledge in the West has always been fluid and subject to reinterpretation by scholars. As Banner illustrates, such revisionism occurs in a variety of ways and can reflect everything from the discovery of new information to the reconsideration of the past from different perspectives the present. These approaches are evident even in the earliest works of history, and reflect the changes that have taken place in civilization over time. By addressing recent public controversies at which revisionism was at the heart, Banner shows that It is through this process that we better understand who we are today and the course we will take as a society going forward.

Eve Rosen's The Voucher Promise: 'Section 8' and the Fate of an American Neighborhood (Princeton UP, 2020) examines the Housing Voucher Choice Program, colloquially known as "Section 8," and the effect of the program on low-income families living in Park Heights in Baltimore. In a new era of housing policy that hopes to solve poverty with opportunity in the form of jobs, social networks, education, and safety, the program offers the poor access to a new world: safe streets, good schools, and well-paying jobs through housing vouchers. The system should, in theory, give recipients access to housing in a wide range of neighborhoods, but in The Voucher Promise, Rosen examines how the housing policy, while showing great promise, faces critical limitations. Rosen spent over a year living in a Park Heights neighborhood, getting to know families, accompanying them on housing searches, spending time on front stoops, and learning about the history of the neighborhood and the homeowners who had settled there decades ago. She examines why, when low-income renters are given the opportunity to afford a home in a more resource-rich neighborhood, they do not relocate to one, observing where they instead end up and other opportunities housing vouchers may offer them.Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale men’s barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. 

Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today’s researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way we build and collaborate with our environment. Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution (Princeton UP, 2021) is a provocative guide to this emerging, often mind-bending reality, presenting a bold vision for harnessing the intelligence embedded in the material world.Drawing on his pioneering work on self-assembly and programmable material technologies, Skylar Tibbits lays out the core, frequently counterintuitive ideas and strategies that animate this new approach to design and innovation. From furniture that builds itself to shoes printed flat that jump into shape to islands that grow themselves, he describes how matter can compute and exhibit behaviors that we typically associate with biological organisms, and challenges our fundamental assumptions about what physical materials can do and how we can interact with them. Intelligent products today often rely on electronics, batteries, and complicated mechanisms. Tibbits offers a different approach, showing how we can design simple and elegant material intelligence that may one day animate and improve itself—and along the way help us build a more sustainable future.Compelling and beautifully designed, Things Fall Together provides an insider’s perspective on the materials revolution that lies ahead, revealing the spectacular possibilities for designing active materials that can self-assemble, collaborate, and one day even evolve and design on their own.

A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (Princeton UP, 2021) provides a fresh account of US involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. From the decline of modernization programs to the rise of microcredit, Joanne Meyerowitz looks beyond familiar histories of development and explains why antipoverty programs increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor. When the United States joined the war on global poverty, economists, policymakers, and activists asked how to change a world in which millions lived in need. Moved to the left by socialists, social democrats, and religious humanists, they rejected the notion that economic growth would trickle down to the poor, and they proposed programs to redress inequities between and within nations. In an emerging “women in development” movement, they positioned women as economic actors who could help lift families and nations out of destitution. In the more conservative 1980s, the war on global poverty turned decisively toward market-based projects in the private sector. Development experts and antipoverty advocates recast women as entrepreneurs and imagined microcredit—with its tiny loans—as a grassroots solution. Meyerowitz shows that at the very moment when the overextension of credit left poorer nations bankrupt, loans to impoverished women came to replace more ambitious proposals that aimed at redistribution. Based on a wealth of sources, A War on Global Poverty looks at a critical transformation in antipoverty efforts in the late twentieth century and points to its legacies today.Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

Can classical economics help figure out climate change and support policies that slow global warming? Yale Sterling Professor of Economics William Nordhaus thinks so. In his new book, The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World (Princeton UP, 2021), Nordhaus tackles the "externality" that is pollution and carbon emissions. By making several adjustments to how we treat this externality in economic terms, it can be brought back into the "system" whereby sensible regulation, market relations, and innovation can lead to markedly lower levels of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The most important of those adjustments is getting the price of carbon right. In many parts of the world, there is no formal price of carbon. Setting it at $40 per ton (or higher) will not be easy, not least because competing nation-states will need to agree to and abide by a universal carbon tax.   Despite these challenges, Nordhaus ends on an optimistic note. We have the means, we have the technology.... And as an example, he points to how a Covid vaccine was developed in record time after adjustments to the system of incentives and regulations. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves...

In this ground-breaking work, Michael Sells (the Barrows Professor Emeritus of the History and Literature of Islam and Professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of Chicago) translates sixty-one poems that form the Tarjuman al-ashwaq or The Translator of Desires by Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi (Princeton University Press, 2021). The poems are presented here both in Arabic and English, and are accompanied by an introduction and commentary. The masterful and accessible translations are truly a thrilling literary experience. Ibn ‘Arabi’s poems evoke numerous themes, such as of flora and fauna, nature, sacred spaces, especially of the Kaaba, love, longing, and grief. For instance, the longing of a lost beloved, which Sufis would have read as the Divine, is a central thematic thread woven throughout the collection of poetry, and is gendered feminine. The collection of poems along with Sells critical introduction and notes provides stunning insights to both the tradition of Arabic love poetry and to the mystical thought and poetic prowess of Ibn 'Arabi. This collection of poems will be of interest to anyone interested in Arabic poetry, Islamic literature, Ibn 'Arabi, Sufism, and much more.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier.

Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Princeton UP, 2020) by Matthew Clair is a powerful ethnographic study of the experiences and perspectives of criminal defendants. While many studies have demonstrated the existence of race and class disparities in the criminal justice system, Clair conducted a rare and compelling study that puts heart and emotion into these disparities. As he argues and shows, not only should we care about quantitative inequalities in criminal justice, but "[w]e should [also] be concerned about differences in the quality of the court experience" for so many defendants.Clair did extensive interviews with and observed criminal defendants, defense lawyers, judges, police officers, and others interact with each other in the Boston court system. What he shows is a system that operates differently for people of privilege compared to people without. While many criminal defendants face struggles of alienation from societal structures, the underprivileged often resort to crime out of necessity, whereas privileged defendants were more likely to enter the system because of pleasure-seeking or to avoid pain. Once in courtrooms, underprivileged defendants, especially racial minorities, develop profound mistrust of their court-appointed attorneys. These defendants face, and have often repeatedly been represented by overworked lawyers who often refuse to listen or to develop relationships of trust with their clients, which led many of these defendants to "withdraw," as Clair coins it, from the attorney-client relationship. Some resisted the lawyer or the court: complaining openly about the lack of diligence, asking the court to appoint new counsel, or taking it upon themselves (often with group support) to learn the law and make the arguments their lawyers refused to make. Others developed what Clair calls an attitude of resignation, recognizing the futility of their situation, and essentially giving up the fight. The experience is fundamentally different for privileged defendants. These defendants often have broad social circles that include the police or lawyers. Because of those connections, they are able to obtain counsel of their choice. The payment of fees engenders trust in the relationship. These defendants defer to their lawyers, trust their judgment, and feel genuinely satisfied with the representation.Clair argues that courts punish those defendants who withdraw from their lawyers and reward those who defer to them. He calls on lawyers to develop more trusting relationships with their clients and to work toward a more holistic style of defense that considers more than just the legal issues in the case. He encourages courts to allow defendants to choose their court-appointed attorney and to encourage a more participatory legal system in which defendants are not punished for expressing dissatisfaction with their lawyer. Clair's study is replete with compelling and personal examples. The narrative is what makes this study especially moving. Clair gives voice to those who repeatedly tried, but failed to get their lawyers and courts to listen. Because of Clair's work, we can now hear them.Samuel P. Newton is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Idaho.

Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus (Princeton UP, 2020), esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt’s attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today’s poetry readers.Skillfully combining intricate patterns of sound and classical precedent with the very modern concerns of sex, gender, love, death, and technology, these poems speak with a twenty-first century voice, while also opening multiple gateways to ancient worlds. This Callimachus travels the Mediterranean, pays homage to Athena and Zeus, develops erotic fixations, practices funerary commemoration, and brings fresh gifts for the cult of Artemis. This reimagined poet also visits airports, uses Tumblr and Twitter, listens to pop music, and fights contemporary patriarchy. Burt bears careful fealty to Callimachus’s whole poems, even as she builds freely from some of the hundreds of surviving fragments. Here is an ancient Greek poet made fresh for our current times. An informative foreword by classicist Mark Payne places Burt’s renderings of Callimachus in literary and historical context.After Callimachus is at once a contribution to contemporary poetry and a new endeavor in the art of classical adaptation and translation.Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.

The scene is Turkey in the mid-to-late Seventies. A young male college student hops onto a bus. He sits next to a cute female student from his class, but before they can strike up a conversation, they see a right-wing passenger, walk up to another passenger and hit him on the head with a hammer. The young woman screams. The two students get off the bus, only for the female student to call the male student a “disgusting fascist” and leave in anger.Scenes like this are seen in Turkish Kaleidoscope: Fractured Lives in a Time of Violence (Princeton University Press, 2021) is a graphic novel written by Professor Jenny White and illustrated by Ergün Gündüz. The book combines Jenny’s own experiences in Turkey with insights gleaned from interviews to illustrate Turkey’s political conflict in the late 1970s, between right-wing and left-wing movements.You can watch a promotional video for the book, and the book can be ordered from the Princeton University Press website. Jenny has also put together a Spotify playlist of songs from the era. Those interested in an academic treatment of these ideas can read her 2017 article in The Brown Journal of World Affairs titled “Spindle Autocracy In The New Turkey”.In this interview, I ask Jenny to talk about central figures in her telling of Turkish politics, and how their views developed over time. We talk about that period of Turkish contemporary history and what it was like. And we also discuss her choice of format: why write a graphic novel?Jenny White is a social anthropologist and professor at the Institute for Turkish Studies at Stockholm University. She is former president of the Turkish Studies Association and former president of the American Anthropological Association Middle East Section. She has published four books and numerous articles about contemporary Turkish society and politics. She also has published a series of three novels set in 1880s Istanbul.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Turkish Kaleidoscope. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

For years, American Jewish philanthropy has been celebrated as the proudest product of Jewish endeavors in the United States, its virtues extending from the local to the global, the Jewish to the non-Jewish, and modest donations to vast endowments. Yet, as Lila Corwin Berman illuminates in The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton University Press, 2020), the history of American Jewish philanthropy reveals the far more complicated reality of changing and uneasy relationships among philanthropy, democracy, and capitalism.With a fresh eye and lucid prose, and relying on previously untapped sources, Berman shows that from its nineteenth-century roots to its apex in the late twentieth century, the American Jewish philanthropic complex tied Jewish institutions to the American state. The government’s regulatory efforts―most importantly, tax policies―situated philanthropy at the core of its experiments to maintain the public good without trammeling on the private freedoms of individuals. Jewish philanthropic institutions and leaders gained financial strength, political influence, and state protections within this framework. However, over time, the vast inequalities in resource distribution that marked American state policy became inseparable from philanthropic practice. By the turn of the millennium, Jewish philanthropic institutions reflected the state’s growing investment in capitalism against democratic interests. But well before that, Jewish philanthropy had already entered into a tight relationship with the governing forces of American life, reinforcing and even transforming the nation’s laws and policies.The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex uncovers how capitalism and private interests came to command authority over the public good, in Jewish life and beyond.Lila Corwin Berman is Professor of History at Temple University.Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.