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A series of interview with authors of new books from Princeton University Press
In the decades before the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, native and immigrant Jews in Palestine mediated between Jewish and Arab c...
In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson famously argued that Shakespeare is enduringly popular because he “is above all writers, at least...
When Disneyland opened to the public in 1955, it demystified the hidden world of factory automation through its extraordinary new attraction...
Slavery was a key part of pre-modern Islamic society, spanning from soldiers to concubines. And one of the most revealing repositories of ev...
The story behind the mythical figure of "the Wandering Jew" is one of the most fascinating tales in European history. In I, Wandering Jew, N...
Described by Voltaire as “perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is often portrayed...
Daniel A. Bell joins the podcast to discuss his new book, Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters: Four Dialogues on China’s Past, Pre...
Doubts about the international dominance of the dollar are only growing amid worries about tariffs, political dysfunction, and fraying inter...
In Late Antiquity (ca. 200–600 CE), the world was alive with unseen forces—divine agents who influenced every aspect of daily life. For most...
The Origins of the New (Princeton University Press, 2026) presents a revolutionary approach to evolutionary success in all realms of life. I...
As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit--especially...
It’s one of the biggest questions in economic history: How did a richer, more advanced China fall behind Europe? Why was Europe the home of...
The African Gold Coast writer and statesman J. E. Casely Hayford (1866–1930) was a key figure in liberal anticolonial thought as well as Afr...
Why did Langston Hughes's translations of Mexican and Cuban stories go unpublished for nearly a century? A landmark book—the first complete...
Most employers in the United States routinely conduct criminal background checks on job applicants, weeding out those with criminal convicti...
In his new book, The Political Economy of Security (Princeton University Press, 2026), Stephen Brooks provides a systematic empirical and th...
What did slavery actually look like in the everyday lives of Jews in the medieval Middle East? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down wi...
James Bryce (1838–1922) was a leading figure in Britain’s Liberal Party and a distinguished historian, a versatile scholar-politician who mo...
How the urban-rural divide drives partisan polarization Why have Americans living in different places come to experience politics as a battl...
A sympathetic critique that attempts to free Left politics from its own snares, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princ...
Eleven days into the attack on Iran by the United States and Israel, starting on Feb. 28, 2026, I speak with Vali Nasr, a renowned analyst o...
Mothers and fathers use their time differently, with women spending roughly twice as many hours on family labor as men. But what about the g...
The story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes. Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (P...
Today I’m speaking with economist Bryan Caplan about education and bullshit, with a particular focus on his book, The Case Against Education...
Populist leaders around the world increasingly reject international organizations, decrying them as constraints on state power and rallying...
The rabbinic sages of antiquity are known for their sophisticated and creative reading of Scripture. But beginning in the third century CE,...
In the heyday of Islamic art collecting around the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of premodern ceramic objects circulated on the i...
The revelatory and urgent story of how an explosion of misogyny is driving a surge of mass and far-right violence throughout the West--from...
Each year, as many as 250 million Americans face civil legal problems like eviction, debt collection, and substandard housing. These problem...
Dr. Hanna Pickard has written a revolutionary new paradigm for understanding addiction. Why do people with addiction use drugs self-destruct...
In an age of growing wealth disparities, politicians on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm about the fading American Dream. Yet...
Political Theorist Laura Field has written an insightful and detailed exploration of the people and the ideas that have shaped the second Tr...
Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back (Princeton UP, 2025) shatters one o...
Parents are exhausted. When did raising children become such all-consuming, never-ending, incredibly expensive, and emotionally absorbing ef...
Between the nineteenth century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed th...
A lively and entertaining cultural history of a supremely annoying intellectual vice Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation,...
As Oscar Season rolls around, Recall This Book looks back to John's 2019 discussion with Columbia University professor Sharon Marcus about T...
In small villages, bustling cities, and crowded ghettos across early modern Europe, Jewish women were increasingly active participants in th...
Today, much of the Middle East is “Arab”—an identity that now extends across North Africa and up through the Near East to Syria. Yet how did...
Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity t...
As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontier...
Following the outbreak of World War I, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean volunteered as soldiers to fight on behalf of the...
Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism...
As migration carried Yiddish to several continents during the long twentieth century, an increasingly global community of speakers and reade...
A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has be...
Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate act...
Menstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years on end, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Scien...
A scion of the Protestant elite, Theodore Roosevelt was an unlikely ally of the waves of impoverished Jewish newcomers who crowded the docks...
Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (Princeton UP, 2025) is A panoramic biography of Japan's iconic mountain from the Ice Age to the present Moun...
Increasingly, people travel and communicate across borders. Yet, we still know little about the overall structure of this transnational worl...