Author: podmeister

Eli Zaretsky: Why America Needs a Left

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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?

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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

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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”

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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”?

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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

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  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].

Robin Dunbar on the Science of Love

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Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar has spent many years investigating human mating strategies. What that means is that he can spend time pondering why we kiss, what the point of high heels is, and why a GSOH is so often on the shopping list of desirable traits in a partner. Here in under four minutes he tackles some of those questions.

Jon Agar – Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

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Jon Agar‘s new History of Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond goes beyond the limitations of disciplinary and national histories of science to look at the broad themes in the science of the last eleven decades. He shows the close connections between science and warfare, politics and the commercial world, and charts the rise of new fields and the impact of new discoveries. He also tells the stories of some of the remarkable individuals, both well known and less familiar, who shaped twentieth-century science. Jon Agar is senior lecturer in science and technology studies at University College London. He is the editor of the British Journal for the History of Science; his previous publications include histories of the computer and the mobile phone. To listen to the complete interview, click here. For excerpts, click on the links below. 1. “One of the interesting things about twentieth-century science is that a lot of the really exciting stuff has happened at the edges of disciplines.” Jon Agar explains here why he set out to write a …

Ash Amin on Land of Strangers

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“I wanted to look for a politics for the stranger, and of the stranger, which didn’t require of strangers to become friends with each other or with the host community. I felt that that kind of politics was just too narrow and impossible quite frankly in a very cosmopolitan age.” My guest in this podcast is Ash Amin, who until last year was professor of geography at the University of Durham, and now holds the 1931 chair in geography at Cambridge. I met Ash Amin in Cambridge recently to talk about his latest book, Land of Strangers. Most modern Western societies are nothing more than a collection of strangers, Amin maintains; public and political awareness of the stranger has become acute: nobody wants the immigrant or the asylum seeker. The stranger has become a figure of fear and hate, to be contained and disciplined. Land of Strangers argues that humanist policies of inclusiveness are not up to the demands of our extraordinarily cosmopolitan age. The book instead calls for a different kind of politics of …

Le Monde diplomatique podcast – Greece in Chaos

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In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I speak to Noëlle Burgi about the heavy toll that austerity measures are exacting in her homeland, Greece. Noëlle, who is a researcher at the Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Sciences Politique (CESSP), Sorbonne University, Paris, describes Athens and Thessaloniki as “dying cities”, in which drug use, mental health problems, domestic violence and prostitution are all on the increase. Not least of the Greeks’ problems is a feeling of powerlessness as their welfare state becomes hollowed out and their household incomes plummet. To listen to the interview, click here. And to read Noëlle Burgi’s article, click here.