Yes, the title of this post is admittedly a little misleading – the popes in the podcast (popecast?) are not necessarily the favourites of my guest, Eamon Duffy, but those who he thinks have had the greatest impact on history – The Ten Popes who Shook the World. Eamon’s popes range from Saint Peter to [...]
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Incoming!
The asteroid belt is not the way it’s portrayed in Star Wars… It’s not this busy violent place with things colliding all the time… The ...
Louise Foxcroft on (historical) celebrity dieters
Louise Foxcroft on Calories and Corsets from George Miller on Vimeo.
Pieter Spierenburg on Violence and Punishment
“Pieter Spierenburg is one of the world’s experts on the history of violent crime, and his writings are filled with fascinating facts and thought-provoking insights.” Steven Pinker, Harvard University Pieter Spierenburg is professor of historical criminology at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. In 2008 Polity published his History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle [...]
Le Monde diplomatique podcast – Chase Madar on America’s ever-growing state security apparatus
George Miller’s guest on Le Monde diplomatique‘s October 2012 podcast is New York-based human rights lawyer Chase Madar. His article in this month’s edition of the paper is entitled “Land of the Ever Less Free”, and it looks at how America’s security state apparatus has been significantly augmented under President Obama – contrary to election [...]
Michael Klare on China’s resource hunger
In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, Michael Klare of Amherst College discusses a critical element of China’s foreign policy: its increasing dependence on foreign providers of resources such as oil and gas to underpin its spectacular economic growth. In a world of depleting resources, what are the implications for China’s future stability, [...]
Eva Illouz on Why Love Hurts
“The grand ambition of this book is to do to emotions – at least to romantic love – what Marx did to commodities: to show that they are shaped by social relations; that they do not circulate in a free and unconstrained way; that their magic is social; and that they contain and condense the [...]
Eli Zaretsky: Why America Needs a Left
The United States today cries out for a robust, self-respecting, intellectually sophisticated left, yet the very idea of a left appears to have been discredited. In this brilliant new book, Eli Zaretsky rethinks the idea by examining three key moments in American history: the Civil War, the New Deal and the range of New Left [...]
Peter Nolan: Is China Buying the World?
China is the world’s second biggest economy and its largest exporter. It possesses the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves and has 29 firms in the FT 500 list of the world’s largest companies. ‘China’s Rise’ preoccupies the global media, which carry regular articles suggesting that it is using its financial resources to ‘buy the world’. [...]
Consumption and its consequences: “rethinking our relationship to the material world”
My guest in this programme is Professor of Material Culture at UCL, Daniel Miller. Daniel appeared in an earlier Polity Books podcast to talk about his previous book, Tales from Facebook, which looked at how people really use Facebook as a form of social interaction, as opposed to how media commentators would have us think [...]
Wikileaks – “significant, symptomatic but not game-changing”?
WikiLeaks is the most challenging journalistic phenomenon to have emerged in the digital era. It has provoked anger and enthusiasm in equal measure from across the political and journalistic spectrum. Its use of new technologies and its methods of disseminating information raise profound questions about the role of journalism and its future in the contemporary [...]
