Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

I can still remember being an undergraduate student, going from dance class to dance class and working as hard as I could each day. In the midst of all of that sweat and hard work, I was often curious about the techniques I was required to study. Sure, we had...

Joseph Nye‘s latest book is Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era (Princeton University Press, 2013). Professor Nye is University Distinguished Professor and former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and...

William G. Howell (with David Brent) is the author of the new book Thinking about the Presidency: The Primacy of Power (Princeton UP, 2013). Howell is the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at the University of Chicago, where he holds a joint appointment in the Harris School of Public...

Indonesia is often highlighted as having the right kind of Islam, ‘moderate’ and ‘peaceful.’ Whether that remains true (if it ever was a reality) will be tested in the future but what about the past? How did we end up with this picture of Islam in Indonesia? Michael Laffan, Professor...

The advent of very powerful computers and the Internet have not “changed everything,” but it has created a new communications context within which almost everything we do will be somewhat changed. One of the “things we do” is governance, that is, the way we organize ourselves politically and, as a...

Daniel Stedman Jones is the author of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012). The book tells a portion of the intellectual history of neoliberalism through a focus on the period of the 1950s through the 1980s. Stedman Jones tracks the...

Today we’ll be discussing Lance Fortnow‘s bookThe Golden Ticket:P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible (Princeton University Press, 2013).The book focuses on the challenges associated with solving problems requiring significant computation, such as “What is the largest group of Facebook users, all of whom know each other?”If it is...

Most people who listen to this podcast will have heard of Joseph McCarthy and HUAC (The House Committee on Un-American Activities). His activities and those of HUAC were, however, only the tip of a very large iceberg. In the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. government conducted something like a “purge”...

In Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton University Press, 2012), Christopher I. Beckwith gives us a rare window into the global movements of medieval science. Science can be characterized not by its content, but instead by its methodology. Starting from this...

Texts have lives. They grow, travel, transform, fade, and are reborn into new and other lives. In The I Ching: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2012), Richard J. Smith has given us a wonderfully readable (and assignable, and shareable, and enjoyable) life of one of the most important texts in...