The University of Chicago Press Podcast

The idea that a woman may leave a biological trace on her gestating offspring has long been a commonplace folk intuition and a matter of scientific intrigue, but the form of that idea has changed dramatically over time. Beginning with the advent of modern genetics at the turn of the twentieth century, biomedical scientists dismissed any notion that a mother--except in cases of extreme deprivation or injury--could alter her offspring's traits. Consensus asserted that a child's fate was set by a combination of its genes and post-birth upbringing.Over the last fifty years, however, this consensus was dismantled, and today, research on the intrauterine environment and its effects on the fetus is emerging as a robust program of study in medicine, public health, psychology, evolutionary biology, and genomics. Collectively, these sciences argue that a woman's experiences, behaviors, and physiology can have life-altering effects on offspring development.Tracing a genealogy of ideas about heredity and maternal-fetal effects, Sarah S. Richardson's The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (U Chicago Press, 2021) offers a critical analysis of conceptual and ethical issues--in particular, the staggering implications for maternal well-being and reproductive autonomy--provoked by the striking rise of epigenetics and fetal origins science in postgenomic biology today. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The idea that a woman may leave a biological trace on her gestating offspring has long been a commonplace folk intuition and a matter of scientific intrigue, but the form of that idea has changed dramatically over time. Beginning with the advent of modern genetics at the turn of the twentieth century, biomedical scientists dismissed any notion that a mother--except in cases of extreme deprivation or injury--could alter her offspring's traits. Consensus asserted that a child's fate was set by a combination of its genes and post-birth upbringing.Over the last fifty years, however, this consensus was dismantled, and today, research on the intrauterine environment and its effects on the fetus is emerging as a robust program of study in medicine, public health, psychology, evolutionary biology, and genomics. Collectively, these sciences argue that a woman's experiences, behaviors, and physiology can have life-altering effects on offspring development.Tracing a genealogy of ideas about heredity and maternal-fetal effects, Sarah S. Richardson's The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (U Chicago Press, 2021) offers a critical analysis of conceptual and ethical issues--in particular, the staggering implications for maternal well-being and reproductive autonomy--provoked by the striking rise of epigenetics and fetal origins science in postgenomic biology today. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The contemporary opioid crisis is widely seen as new and unprecedented. Not so. It is merely the latest in a long series of drug crises stretching back over a century. In White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America (U Chicago Press, 2020), David Herzberg explores these crises and the drugs that fueled them, from Bayer's Heroin to Purdue's OxyContin and all the drugs in between: barbiturate "goof balls," amphetamine "thrill pills," the "love drug" Quaalude, and more. As Herzberg argues, the vast majority of American experiences with drugs and addiction have taken place within what he calls "white markets," where legal drugs called medicines are sold to a largely white clientele.These markets are widely acknowledged but no one has explained how they became so central to the medical system in a nation famous for its "drug wars"--until now. Drawing from federal, state, industry, and medical archives alongside a wealth of published sources, Herzberg re-connects America's divided drug history, telling the whole story for the first time. He reveals that the driving question for policymakers has never been how to prohibit the use of addictive drugs, but how to ensure their availability in medical contexts, where profitability often outweighs public safety. Access to white markets was thus a double-edged sword for socially privileged consumers, even as communities of color faced exclusion and punitive drug prohibition. To counter this no-win setup, Herzberg advocates for a consumer protection approach that robustly regulates all drug markets to minimize risks while maintaining safe, reliable access (and treatment) for people with addiction.Accomplishing this requires rethinking a drug/medicine divide born a century ago that, unlike most policies of that racially segregated era, has somehow survived relatively unscathed into the twenty-first century.By showing how the twenty-first-century opioid crisis is only the most recent in a long history of similar crises of addiction to pharmaceuticals, Herzberg forces us to rethink our most basic ideas about drug policy and addiction itself--ideas that have been failing us catastrophically for over a century.David Herzberg is an associate professor of history at the University of Buffalo is also the author of Happy Pills in America from Milltown to Prozac. David is also the co-editor of the journal Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Jay Shifman is a vulnerable storyteller, a stigma-destroying speaker, and the founder of Choose Your Struggle podcast. A guy in long-term recovery, Jay is dedicated to ending stigma and promoting fact-based education around Mental Health, Substance Misuse & Recovery, and Drug Use & Policy. You can learn more about Jay at his links here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Political Scientist Efrén Pérez’s new book, Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity (U Chicago Press, 2021), explores the term and category “people of color” and how this grouping has been used within politics, but also how it is has been used by those who are classified as people of color. Pérez examines group identity, language and public opinion, and implicit cognition to explain how marginalization of non-white groups can form a collective group identity that is interchangeable for the individual. Diversity’s Child fills in a rather substantial gap in research about racial and ethnic identity in the United States by surveying people of color about how they think and feel about racial disparities that impact them as well as other groups that are often categorized as people of color. Part of what Pérez finds in the multi-method approach is that politics can be seen as a solution to the inequality that many of those within this broad umbrella category experience and understand. Pérez’s training and research in both political science and political psychology allows him to bring together these connected social science threads and frameworks in exploring the understanding of broad group identity as well as intergroup identity.Diversity’s Child: People of Color and the Politics of identity both conceptualizes and analyzes the identity of people of color by developing meaningful measurements and using Social Identity Theory to examine connections to differing identities. Pérez’s work also thinks through the evolving demographic shifts in the United States, exploring the projection that white Americans will become the minority population by 2050, and what the political ramifications are for the new majority minority. Although the term “people of color” has been used to identify Black, Latino, and other races for some time, Pérez research examines how these groups that are often pulled together under this common identity actually share in this broader category, and whether there are commonalities and concerns across ethnic, racial, and national identities. He does this by gathering data through opinion surveys, experiments, content analysis of newspapers and congressional archives, and in-depth interviews. Pérez’s research indicates that a person’s “color” identity exists and can be measured, and that identifying as a person of color shapes how minorities view themselves and their position within the political system. Diversity’s Child introduces a new perspective into the ongoing conversation about shifting political demographics, and elaborates on how the people of color identity has the capacity to mobilize groups and shape American politics. Pérez’s research also indicates how and where this umbrella category can essentially come undone—how the unifying qualities can be undermined by intergroup antagonisms. As he notes in our discussion, the research that highlights the capacity to bring together African Americans, LatinX Americans, and Asian Americans under the title of “people of color” also has within it the fissures and factions that can disconnect these groups from each other and from shared political pursuits.Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Political Scientist John Dearborn’s new book, Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation (U Chicago Press, 2021), weaves together three connected threads in the course of his analysis: the role and capacity of ideas to make political change, the evolution of the position and understanding of the President of the United States as a representative of the citizens of the United States, and the way in which congressional legislation also works to shift the constitutional or institutional relationship between Congress and the President. This is a propulsive book, which is not necessarily the norm for academic publications, and Dearborn keeps the reader engaged through fascinating details about legislation that Congress passes in the midst of the 20th century that not only sets up policy outcomes but also provides the president with the power to create those outcomes. Dearborn then traces the ways, in the latter part of the 20th century, in which Congress attempts to wrangle some of that power back from the president, or to develop its own power to rival or parallel the president’s power.Power Shifts focuses on this concept of the president as a national representative, which was not necessarily the idea that the Founders had for the president at the time of the Constitutional Convention. Some thought was given to how this national office would operate, but because of the way that the president is elected, at a remove from the people, the idea that the president was the voice or tribune of the people was not the key concept in the design of the presidency. Dearborn takes the reader through the evolution of this concept during the 19th and 20th century, highlighting how the presidents made claim to this particular role, while noting that it became clear that the veto power was not sufficient to reflect the voice of the people. During a number of decades in the midst of the 20th century, Congress builds up the presidency as an institution, formalizing presidential agenda-setting capacities and giving the presidency the organizational capacity to function as the center of the governmental structure and as the representative of all of the people. In examining several congressional acts, including the Budget Act of 1921, the Reorganization Act of 1939, and other particular constructions by Congress, Power Shifts examines how these creations centered presidential representation as the key to the design for these legislative moves. In the second part of the book, Dearborn explores the period of congressional resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s, and how Congress created connected legislation that sought to pull some of these powers away from the president, or at least provide Congress with sufficient capacity to challenge the president in a number of different arenas. And again, the arguments around the legislation dive into the question of whether the president is operating as a national representative, with a focus on the best interests of the people and the country.Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It's happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz led the economics community in the 1960s to reevaluate its view of what caused the Great Depression, the same may be happening now to our understanding of the first economic crisis of this century.Foregoing the usual relitigating of the problems of housing markets and banking crises, renowned monetary economist Scott Sumner argues that the Great Recession came down to one thing: nominal GDP, the sum of all nominal spending in the economy, which the Federal Reserve erred in allowing to plummet. The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is an end-to-end case for this school of thought, known as market monetarism, written by its leading voice in economics. Based almost entirely on standard macroeconomic concepts, this highly accessible text lays a groundwork for a simple yet fundamentally radical understanding of how monetary policy can work best: providing a stable environment for a market economy to flourish.Scott Sumner is the Ralph G. Hawtrey Chair of Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is also Professor Emeritus at Bentley University and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious.With the internet always at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) (U Chicago Press, 2018), Sam Wineburg offers answers, beginning with this: We definitely can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-questions-at-the-back snoozefest we’ve subjected students to for decades!If we want to educate citizens who can sift through the mass of information around them and separate fact from fake, we must explicitly work to give them the necessary critical thinking tools. Historical thinking has nothing to do with test prep–style ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg draws on surprising discoveries from an array of research and experiments to paint a picture of a dangerously mine-filled landscape, but one that, with care, attention, and awareness, we can all learn to navigate.It’s easy to look around at the public consequences of historical ignorance and despair. Wineburg is here to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way.The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The discussion of factions in American politics is as old as the republic itself. But there is more to consider, particularly in terms of the way that contemporary factions operate within our current political landscape. Political Scientist Rachel Blum, in her new book, How TheHow the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics (U Chicago Press, 2020), focuses on the Tea Party’s rise, as a new faction within a long line of factions, and how the Tea Party infiltrated the Republican Party—impacting the disposition of the party itself and how it now operates. Blum’s personal background and political interests contributed to her capacity to analyze and evaluate the strategies and approaches used by the Tea Party, helping her to understand the structure and the sometimes-confusing tactics that these activists used to pursue their goals. Blum’s book also examines the Republican Party as an organization that, at its core, is aimed at getting Republicans elected to office, and how the Tea Party was able to take advantage of the structure and organization of the GOP at the most local levels, as well as at state and national levels, to aid in the drive to activate the Tea Party agenda within the Republican Party itself. Ultimately, the Tea Party would push against the GOP like a party within a party.How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics is a multi-method investigation into the Tea Party and the Republican Party, constructed out of an elaborate collection of evidence including network analysis, the use of text-as-data, and long-form interviews with Tea Party activists. Blum started her research as a result of a conversation with a Tea Party activist in 2012 where, rather than discussing President Obama’s re-election, Obamacare, or government spending, Blum was surprised to find the activist preferred to discuss their distrust of the Republican Party. Why would this lifelong Republican choose to be upset with his own party, rather than with the Democrats? This is the question that drove Blum’s investigation of political polarization within the Republican party itself, and this led to a complex matrix of approaches to weave together the analysis of what was going on between the Tea Party and the Republican Party. Blum’s understanding of factions within factions presents a new way to understand the Tea Party’s political strategies, but it also helps us to understand the more expansive polarization across the political spectrum in the United States. Blum’s work also outlines how candidate Donald Trump picked up on the topics and the rhetoric of the Tea Party, and how the Trump/MAGA faction has also been able to take over the current Republican Party. How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics is an elegant and articulate exploration of the Tea Party, including an analysis of the Tea Party strategies, message, and its insurgent approach to politics. How the Tea Party Captured the GOP also formulates a lesson that guides the reader to better understand party dynamics, both inside the parties themselves and in competition with each other.Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is a memoir? What makes a memoir both nonfictional and literary? What are the memoirist’s moral obligations to the people they write about besides themselves, and to their potential readers? And is the writing of a memoir just indulging in narcissism, or revenge? In Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Helena De Bres examines the philosophical issues that the memoir genre raises, given the doubts we may have about whether people can write the truth about themselves, whether the demands of literature overwhelm the demands of truth-telling, and even whether there is such a thing as a unified, persisting self to write about. De Bres, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Wellesley College, defends the nonfiction status of memoir while acknowledging that memories fail, we often engage in self-justification, and it can be difficult to draw a line between the “experiential truth” the memoirist tries to capture and falsity. De Bres deftly navigates issues in metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics in this highly readable examination of an evolving literary form.Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To many observers, Congress has become a deeply partisan institution where ideologically-distinct political parties do little more than engage in legislative trench warfare. A zero-sum, winner-take-all approach to congressional politics has replaced the bipartisan comity ofpast eras. If the parties cannot get everything they want in national policymaking, then they prefer gridlock and stalemate to compromise. Or, at least, that is the conventional wisdom.In The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era (U Chicago Press, 2020), James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee challenge this conventional wisdom. By constructing legislative histories of congressional majority parties’attempts to enact their policy agendas in every congress since the 1980s and by drawing on interviews with Washington insiders, the authors analyze the successes and failures of congressional parties to enact their legislative agendas. Their conclusions will surprise many congressional observers: Even in our time of intense party polarization, bipartisanship remains the key to legislative success on Capitol Hill.Frances E. Lee is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. James Curry is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah. Their book, The Limits of Party, won the American Political Science Association's Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book in the field of US national policy.Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices