Whether watching Studio Ghibli adaptations of British children's books, visiting Harry Potter sites in Britain or eating at Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurants in Tokyo, the Japanese have a close and multifaceted relationship with British children's literature. In British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderlands and Looking-Glasses…

Following Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte's groundbreaking examination of time management and stress, the prizewinning journalist now turns her attention to the greatest culprit in America's quality-of-life crisis: the way our economy and culture conceive of work. Americans across all demographics, industries, and socioeconomic levels report exhaustion…

After years of research, journalist Kathleen Lippa has written about the shocking crimes of a trusted teacher who wrought lasting damage on Inuit communities: Arctic Predator: The Crimes of Edward Horne Against Children in Canada’s North (Dundurn Press, February 2025). In the 1970s, a young schoolteacher from British Columbia was becoming the darli…

Every movie in our current moment, regardless of quality, seems to have spawned sequels, prequels, and reboots; in this episode, we lament that the one film that we wish had been the beginning of a series didn’t make enough money to do so. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Peter Weir’s 2003 adaptation of Patrick O’Brien’s novels, is …

If you walk into David Cecchetto‘s classroom, you might find people wearing audio devices that simulate hearing with a thousand-foot wide head. Or gadgets that swap their ears so that the left ear hears what the right should and vice versa. David is a media theorist who draws on his background as an artist/musician, to create what he calls “engagem…

How the US asylum process fails to protect against claims of gender-based violence. Through eyewitness accounts of closed-court proceedings and powerful testimony from women who have sought asylum in the United States because of severe assaults and death threats by intimate partners and/or gang members, Private Violence: Latin American Women and th…

The 1950s looks placid from the outside, but underneath that calm post-war exterior roiled the intellectual and activist beginnings of the political movements that tore through the 1960s and 1970s. In Women in American Operas of the 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes (University of Rochester Press, 2023), Monica A. Hershberger considers the main fe…

When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (U California Press, 2023) investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other life-forms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation and species classification by late ancient Palestinian rabbis and other thinkers in the Roman Empire, Rafael R…

This special episode features a discussion between Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and Michael Sacasas, author of The Convivial Society substack newsletter and Executive Director of the Christian Studies Center of Gainesville, Florida. In the first part, Sacasas gives a presentation - riffing on the title of Martin Heidegger’s famous essay, “The…

One of the twentieth century's great paleontologists and science writers, Stephen Jay Gould was, for Bruce S. Lieberman and Niles Eldredge, also a close colleague and friend. In Macroevolutionaries: Reflections on Natural History, Paleontology, and Stephen Jay Gould (Columbia UP, 2024), they take up the tradition of Gould's acclaimed essays on natu…

Listen to this interview of Zejun Zhang, Research Scientist, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. We talk about her coauthored paper Hard to Read and Understand Pythonic Idioms? DeIdiom and Explain Them in Non-Idiomatic Equivalent Code (ICSE 2024). Zejun Zhang : "Following my presentation of the paper at ICSE, it was interesting. I mean, th…

Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023) tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American …

In our engaging interview, Rachel talks about her hilarious new [picture book, How to Pee Your Pants: The Right Way (published by Feiwel & Friends, October 15, 2024) and the embarrassing real first-grade event which prompted her to write it (According to Rachel, it was 'directed by my little kid self'). Rachel grew up in Utah in a book-loving famil…

The Tabletop Revolution: Gaming Reimagined in the 21st Century (McFarland, 2023) is an overview of the ongoing revolution in tabletop gaming design and culture, which exploded to unprecedented levels of vitality in the 21st century, leading to new ways of creating, marketing, and experiencing a game. Designers have become superstars, publishers hav…

Meltdown: Scandal, Sleaze and the Collapse of Credit Suisse (Pegasus Books, 2024) is a great business history book. It meticulously chronicles the story of a large and once revered Swiss Bank, Credit Suisse, from its foundation in 1856 until how a series of scandals, driven by a culture of greed and entitlement among its bankers, led to the bank´s …

The system of prostitution imposed and enforced by the Japanese military during its wartime occupation of several countries in East and Southeast Asia is today well-known and uniformly condemned. Transnational activist movements have sought to recognize and redress survivors of this World War II-era system, euphemistically known as "comfort women,"…

The Western welfare state model is beset with structural, financial, and moral crises. So-called scroungers, cheats, and disability fakers persistently occupy the centre of public policy discussions, even as official statistics suggest that relatively small amounts of money are lost to such schemes. In Fraudulent Lives: Imagining Welfare Cheats fro…

Ben Berman Ghan is the author of the bestselling novel, The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024). The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits is a gorgeously complex work of literary speculative fiction. With elements of science fiction and horror dropped in amongst stunning literary prose, the debut novel spans centuries, covering humanity’s co…

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and willful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas. The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Work…

Andrew Laird, of Brown University, discusses Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2024). In 1536, only fifteen years after the fall of the Aztec empire, Franciscan missionaries began teaching Latin, classical rhetoric, and Aristotelian philosophy to native youths in central Mexi…

Amrita Narayanan is a practicing Clinical Psychologist (Psy.D. 2007) and Psychoanalyst (Indian Psychoanalytic Society, 2019). She is the author of Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress (Oxford University Press, 2023). She was the Editor of and essayist in The Parrots of Desire: 3000 years of Erotica in India (Aleph Books, 201…

California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a to base exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry (University of Texas Press, 2024) examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to …

The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781–1844 (Getty, 2022) is an architectural history and media-archaeological study of changing theories and practices of government archives in Enlightenment Spain. It centers on an archive created in Seville for storing Spain's pre-1760 documents about the N…

This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production abo…

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023) explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and …

Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the US government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis o…

Unlocking the Torah Text (Gefen Books, 2014) provides an in-depth journey into the Torah portion through a series of studies on each parsha. In clear and incisive fashion, each study carefully examines deep philosophical issues and perplexing textual questions. Helpful distinction is made between pshat (straightforward literal meaning) and Midrash …

When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. Penr…

RuFF (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2024) is Rod Carley’s highly-anticipated fourth novel. This historical fiction transports us to Elizabethan England, where we witness Shakespeare struggling through a midlife crisis while trying to win a national play competition to secure the King’s business. Hilarious hijinks ensue, with whip-smart dialogue and a cap…