Edward Duffield (1730–1803) was a colonial Philadelphia clockmaker, whose elegant brass, mahogany, and walnut timekeepers stand proudly in major American museums and collections. Duffield, unlike other leather-apron ‘mechanics,’ was born rich and owned a country estate, Benfield, and many more properties. He was deeply involved in civic and church …

For all of his importance as a medieval ruler, there are surprisingly few biographies in English of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa (c. 1122-1190). John Freed fills this gap with his new book, Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth (Yale University Press, 2016), which offers readers both an account of Frederick’s life and his posthum…

It’s 2006, and S. L. Wisenberg is teaching writing at one of Chicago’s great universities and living a busy life when she’s gobsmacked by a sudden cancer diagnosis. In small but powerful journal entries, she bemoans friends who’ve died, expresses disdain for her body, worries about her future, recalls previous adventures, and jokes about the seriou…

Jim McCann fondly remembers his humble beginnings in Queens, growing up the son of a working-class Irish Catholic family. He worked plenty of jobs before he finally bought a flower shop, with plans to become a florist and build a business. After ten years in the florist game, he had acquired nearly 40 flower shops. But the world around Jim was chan…

In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker's midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse. The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker (Mariner Books, 2024…

Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, had nothing left to lose. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt. Together, Joséphine and Téré…

A wordsmith, an extempore poet and a satirist, Kāḷamēkam (also known as Kāḷamēka Pulavar; fifteenth century) is widely known for his taṉippāṭals or 'self-contained verses', on a panoply of topics. These splendid but notoriously provocative verses were composed during a transitional phase of Tamil literature, by now in deep conversation with Sanskri…

In her latest memoir, Landed: A Yogi's Memoir of Places & Poses (2024, Vine Leaves Press), American-born Jennifer traces her journey-both on and off the yoga mat-reckoning with her adopted country (Israel), midlife hormones (merciless), cross-cultural marriage (to a Frenchman) and their imminent empty nest (a mixed blessing), eventually realizing t…

The first in-depth study of the collaborative intellectual exchange between the European and the Arabic Republics of Letters. Beyond Orientalism: Ahmad Ibn Qasim Al-Hajari Between Europe and North Africa (U California Press, 2023) reformulates our understanding of the early modern Mediterranean through the remarkable life and career of Moroccan pol…

Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; the critical essay collection Carceral Capital…

Today I talked to Aliza Arzt about Turning the Pages: Conversations Through Time with Rabbi Isador Signer (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024) In 1924, Rabbi Isidor Signer was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City. He had been born in Romania and raised in Montreal. He would go on to lead congregations in Bethlehem, Pennsylvan…

Steven Wang caught the startup bug early, launching his first business in the 1st grade. His parents immigrated from China, hoping to give their son a chance at the American Dream. That got complicated when Steven dropped out of high school. Once free from school, he wasted no time. He built and sold a VR company. By the age of 18, he was an engine…

In 1939, when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation's collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants. In …

Today I talked to Christopher Paul Clohessy about Half of My Heart: The Narratives of Zaynab, Daughter of Alî (Gorgias Press, 2020). As Abû ʿAbd Allâh al-Ḥusayn, son of ʿAlî and Fâṭima and grandson of Muḥammad, moved inexorably towards death on the field of Karbalâʾ, his sister Zaynab was drawn ever closer to the centre of the family of Muḥammad, t…

Ryan Serhant has worn quite a lot of hats. From soap opera star to off-off-Broadway actor, before eventually settling on hustling real estate agent. Remembering his earliest experiences living in New York City as humbling ones, as the city had been rough on him financially, mentally, and physically. Giving up was tempting, but Ryan was certain this…

Today’s book is: Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action (University of Rochester Press, 2024) by Dr. Donna J. Nicol, which examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities…

Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav’s book Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood (Penguin Random House India, 2024) undertakes a systematic intellectual study of Lala Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought through four decades of his active political life, lived between 1888 and 1928. It contests the dominant scholarly interpretation of Lajp…

In 1994, the New York Rangers were in a drought—they hadn’t won a national hockey championship in 54 years. Enter goalie Mike Richter and his team, who would lead the Rangers all the way to a Stanley Cup. Reaching the heights of his hockey career in his 20’s, he never could have anticipated his next puck save would be his last. After suffering two …

Growing up in West Texas, Jane Little Botkin didn’t have designs on becoming a beauty queen. But not long after joining a pageant on a whim in college, she became the first protégé of El Paso’s Richard Guy and Rex Holt, known as the “Kings of Beauty”—just as the 1970’s counterculture movement began to take off. A pink, rose-covered gown—a Guyrex cr…

In Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington, 2012), William Altman shines a light on the pedagogical technique of the playful Plato, especially his ability to create living discourses that directly address the student. Reviving an ancient concern with reconstructing the order in which Plato intended his dialogues to be taught as opp…

When three people in Philadelphia inhale dust developed by a scientist who has discovered parallel universes, they are transported into an interdimensional no-man's-land that is populated by supernatural beings. From there, they go on to an alternate-future version of Philadelphia—a frightening dystopian nation-state in which citizens are numbered,…

Jack Palmer’s Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) invites us to reconsider a figure who sociology thought it knew well. Presenting Bauman as occupying an ‘exilic’ position as ‘in, but not of, the West’ Palmer presents a number of paths through Bauman’s sociology which speak to conte…

In the city of New York from the 1930s to the 1990s, Irish attorney Paul O’Dwyer was a fierce and enduring presence in courtrooms, on picket lines, and in contests for elected office. He was forever the advocate of the downtrodden and marginalized, fighting not only for Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland but for workers, radicals, Jews, and Africa…

Growing up the kid of Spanish immigrants living in Queens, New York—Frank was always looking up at the sky to catch a glimpse of the incredible planes flying right above him. Soaring into adulthood, he committed himself to his studies at Columbia and later Harvard Business School, determined to make his dreams a reality. He went on to manage multip…

This book explores the confrontation of radically assimilated Jews with the violent collapse of their envisioned integration into a cosmopolitan European society, which culminated during the Holocaust. This confrontation is examined through the biography of the German-speaking intellectual and prominent communist theoretician of the Jewish question…

The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army (Reaktion, 2024) exposes the history and the future of the Wagner Group, Russia’s notorious and secretive mercenary army, revealing details of their operations never documented before. Using extensive leaks, first-hand accounts, and the byzantine paper trail left in its wake, Jack Margolin traces the…

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde's teachings on "the creative power of difference" may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today…

Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish emigrant to the United States, an author, professor and political philosopher. Born in 1899 in Kirchhain in the Kingdom of Prussia to an observant Jewish family, Strauss received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1921, and began his scholarly work in the 1920s, as well as participating in the German Zio…

Today I talked to Will Grant about his book Populista: The Rise of Latin America's 21st Century Strongman (Bloomsbury, 2021). or more than six decades, Fidel Castro's words have echoed through the politics of Latin America. His towering political influence still looms over the region today. The swing to the Left in Latin America, known as the 'Pink…

Today I talked to Philip Freeman about his new book Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor (Yale UP, 2023). Flavius Claudius Julianus, or Julian the Apostate, ruled Rome as sole emperor for just a year and a half, from 361 to 363, but during that time he turned the world upside down. Although a nephew of Constantine the Great, the first Christian empero…

Just out of college at age 22, a cancer diagnosis upended the life Loren had planned on. After a year of chemotherapy and a stricter diet, she earns a clean bill of health, and along with it not just the will to live, but the will to thrive. Armed with a new understanding of nutrition and a delicious, healthy, vegan cookie recipe of her own design,…

Paul Robeson's Voices (Oxford UP, 2023) is a meditation on Robeson's singing, a study of the artist's life in song. Music historian Grant Olwage examines Robeson's voice as it exists in two broad and intersecting domains: as sound object and sounding gesture, specifically how it was fashioned in the contexts of singing practices, in recital, concer…

Macau was supposed to be a sleepy post for John Reeves, the British consul for the Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast. He arrived, alone, in June 1941, his wife and daughter left behind in China. Seven months later, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, invaded Hong Kong, and made Reeves the last remaining British diplomat for hundreds of miles, …

The brainchild of an obscure Yugoslav physician, Krebiozen emerged in 1951 as an alleged cancer treatment. Andrew Ivy, a University of Illinois vice president and a famed physiologist dubbed “the conscience of U.S. science,” wholeheartedly embraced Krebiozen. Ivy’s impeccable credentials and reputation made the treatment seem like another midcentur…

In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the world was at hand. As Jews everywhere rejected the traditional laws of Judaism in favor of new norms established by Sabbetai Zevi, and abandoned reason for the ecstasy of messianic enthusiasm, one ma…

What’s better than one friend…Two Friends! Liz is joined by Matt Halper and Eli Sones of the dynamic EDM DJ/Producer Duo, Two Friends. They share how a friendship that began on the playground in the 7th grade catapulted to taking Madison Square Garden by storm. Matt and Eli share what’s in store for the next volume of their “big bootie mixes.” Lear…

In the first book in the Modern Music Masters series, Tom Boniface-Webb examines the Manchester band Modern Music Masters-Oasis (MMM, 2020). Founded in 1994 and playing together until their spectacular and abrupt breakup in 2009, during their time together Oasis made an imprint on British music that will last for generations, impacting fans through…

If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry is bound to appear. As a lawyer, philosophe, and Enlightenment polymath, Moreau created and compiled an immense archive that remains a vital window into the social, political, and intellectual fau…

The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971–87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed “Chez Baldwin.” In Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France (Duke UP, 2018), Magdalena J. Zaborowska employs Baldwin’s home space as a lens through which to expand his biography and explore the politics…

In our interview about Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), James M. Scott discusses the principles and personalities involved in the most destructive air attack in history. Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies…

An illuminating deep-dive into everything Fleetwood Mac--the songs, the rivalries, the successes, and the failures—Dreams: The Many Lives of Fleetwood Mac (Pegasus Books, 2024) evokes the band's entire musical catalog as well as the complex human drama at the heart of the Fleetwood Mac story. Fleetwood Mac has had a ground-breaking career spanning …

Many historical figures have their lives and works shrouded in myth, both in life and long after their deaths. Charles Darwin (1809–82) is no exception to this phenomenon and his hero-worship has become an accepted narrative. Darwin Mythology: Debunking Myths, Correcting Falsehoods (Cambridge UP, 2024) unpacks this narrative to rehumanize Darwin's s…

In the shadow of recent turmoil, Join the Conspiracy: How a Brooklyn Eccentric Got Lost on the Right, Infiltrated the Left and Brought Down the Biggest Bombing Network in New York (Fordham University Press, 2024) transports readers to a pivotal moment of division and dissent in American history: the late 1960s. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam W…

Is religion indispensable to public life? What can Gandhi’s thought contribute to the modern state? With an intense focus on both the depth and practicality of Mahatma Gandhi's political and religious thought this book reveals the valuable insights Gandhi offers to anyone concerned about the prospects of liberalism in the contemporary world. In Gan…

In Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia(New York University Press, 2019), Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History Emerita at New York University, shifts the lens on the well-known narrative of Virginia’s founding to reveal the previously untold and utterly compelling story of the youths who, often u…

On this special episode commemorating Labor Day, Liz revisits conversations of passion, persistence, and grit. In this one-hour special, Liz sits down with entrepreneurs and executives about their journey from the mailroom to the boardroom and all the roadblocks along the way. Interviews featured: Retired professional boxer & entrepreneur Laila Ali…

Lise Butler’s Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left, 1945-70 (Oxford UP, 2020) invites us to revisit a figure who, in Butler’s words, is both a ‘relatively obscure’ yet also ‘curiously ubiquitous’ in the political and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain. The book uses Young, a policy maker and sociology to explore the role of…

In Marx’s Literary Style, the Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx’s work results from a failure to understand his literary mode of expression. Through meticulous readings of key passages in Marx’s oeuvre, Silva isolates the key elements of his style: his search for an “architectonic” unity at…

Though traditionally regarded as a monarch who failed to arrest the gradual decline of his kingdom, the Korean king Chŏngjo has benefited in recent decades from a wave of new scholarship which has reassessed both his reign and his role in Korean history. The latest to do so is Christopher Lovins, who in his book King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot …

Mia Zapata and the Gits: A True Story of Art, Rock and Revolution (Ferel House, 2024) by Steve Moriarty, shares the story of the Seattle based The Gits and their charismatic front person Mia Zapata. The Gits were on the verge of international rock stardom but on July 7, 1993, days before their third US tour, Mia Zapata, The Gits 27-year-old singer-…