Year: 2012

Pieter Spierenburg on Violence and Punishment

Published by podmeister

“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 Ages to the Present, and in autumn 2012 they published a collection of his essays entitled Violence and Punishment: Civilizing the Body through Time. The book looks not only looks at broad trends in crime and punishment since the middle ages, but also attempts to explain the reduction in incidences of violent crime and in the severity of punishments. Spierenburg – who was taught by Norbert Elias and whose work is influenced by his – also looks at the interrelationship between gender, honour and the body, which he situates within his broad analysis of the civilizing process. The angle of the lens widens still further in the final chapters, which tackle corollary developments to the decline of violence, such as …

Chase Madar on the US’s growing state security apparatus

Published by podmeister

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 promises. So today the federal government employs 30,000 Americans to monitor the phone conversations of their fellow citizens, and in 2011 alone Washington classified 92m documents, almost double the number made secret just two years before. Chase Madar explores some of the causes and effects of a bloated security state in this interview. To listen to the interview, click here.

Michael Klare on China’s resource hunger

Published by podmeister

  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, and what does it mean for the often unstable regimes it does business with? To listen to the podcast, click here.

Eva Illouz on Why Love Hurts

Published by podmeister

“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 institutions of modernity… “Men’s and women’s romantic unhappiness contains, stages, and enacts the conundrums of the modern freedom and capacity to exercise choice.” – Eva Illouz Few of us are spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we’re abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged – these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience. Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, …

Eli Zaretsky: Why America Needs a Left

Published by podmeister

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 movements in the 1960s and after including the civil rights movement, the women’s movement and gay liberation. In each period, he argues, the active involvement of the left – especially its critical interaction with mainstream liberalism – proved indispensable. American liberalism, as represented by the Democratic Party, is necessarily spineless and ineffective without a left. Correspondingly, without a strong liberal center, the left becomes sectarian, authoritarian, and worse. On a recent visit to London, George Miller spoke to Eli Zaretsky about the book. To listen to the complete interview, click here. To listen to extracts from Eli Zaretsky’s answers, click on the links below. And at the bottom, you’ll find a video interview containing different content. 1. Eli Zaretsky’s book …

Peter Nolan: Is China Buying the World?

Published by podmeister

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’. Is there any truth to this idea? Or is this just scaremongering by Western commentators who have little interest in a balanced presentation of China’s role in the global political economy? In this short book Peter Nolan – Professor of Chinese Management at the University of Cambridge and one of the leading international experts on China and the global economy – probes behind the media rhetoric and shows that the idea that China is buying the world is founded on misapprehensions. To listen to extracts from an interview with Peter Nolan about this book, click on the links below. To listen to the complete interview, click here. 1. Peter Nolan begins by discussing the prevailing discourse in Western media, which …

Merchants of Culture – new edition for a changing industry

Published by podmeister

When John Thompson‘s Merchants of Culture appeared in the summer of 2010, it was the first serious study of the publishing industry in many years. Thompson compared himself to an anthropologist studying his subjects in order to explain a field of human activity that strikes many outsiders as baffling and often irrational. The industry recognized itself in the portrait that Thompson drew. One reviewer said succinctly: “If you want to understand the publishing industry, read this book” and one New York Times bestselling author called it “a must-read for anyone hoping to become a published writer, or who already is one”. Now, some eighteen months later, comes a substantially revised paperback edition which takes into account the profound changes affecting the industry as print sales shrink and uncertainty grows over where power will reside in an electronic future in which the roles of publishers, authors and agents are set to change. To listen to the complete interview, click here. For my original interview from the summer of 2010, click here. And to listen to extracts …

Consumption and its consequences: “rethinking our relationship to the material world”

Published by podmeister

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 they use it. In his new book, Consumption and its Consequences, Daniel takes a similar approach, examining how we behave as consumers by paying close attention to what we do, rather than heeding received ideas about consumption. Of course, with consumption, the stakes are potentially very high, as our patterns of consumption have direct bearing on the earth’s resources and its climate. So the questions Daniel addresses here, while informed by academic research, are of much more than just academic interest. Understanding how and why we consume is, the book argues, a prerequisite for finding ways to consume without completely exhausting our planet’s resources. And to pursue these issues, Daniel opens and closes the book with an imaginary three-way conversation …

Wikileaks – “significant, symptomatic but not game-changing”?

Published by podmeister

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 world. What are the responsibilities of the journalist? What are the limits on freedom of expression? How far does the public’s “right to know” extend? These and other questions are tackled in Charlie Beckett and James Ball‘s Wikileaks: News in the Networked Era (Polity, 2012), which eschews fixation on the personalities of the key players in favour of engaging with the substantive issues. Charlie Beckett is director of Polis, the journalism and society think-tank in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before POLIS, Charlie Beckett was a programme editor at ITN’s Channel 4 News editing coverage on 9/11, 7/7 and the RTS award-winning series of live News From Africa broadcasts before …

The Olympic spirit, ancient-style

Published by podmeister

  Earlier this week, I interviewed archaeologist and broadcaster Neil Faulkner about his forthcoming book on the ancient Greek Olympics (Yale University Press, 2012). It’s eye-opening, often shocking stuff: full lurid details of what a chaotic, violent, hedonistic experience it was will be provided in my forthcoming podcast for Blackwell Online (link here when it’s available). In the meantime, here’s Neil reading a short extract from the book in which he describes the bloody confrontations that took place between ancient Greek boxers. Click here to listen [4:02].