Episodios

  • Graham Harman, "Waves and Stones: The Continuous and the Discontinuous in Human Thought" (Allen Lane, 2025)

    Graham Harman, "Waves and Stones: The Continuous and the Discontinuous in Human Thought" (Allen Lane, 2025)
    Dec 15 2025
    A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world’s most influential philosophers.How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction – the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world – permeates every area of human life. What’s more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself. In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter.To explore the relationship between the continuous and the discrete, Harman shows, is to consider the very fabric of reality. With this dazzling new book, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the bewilderingly complex world in which we live.Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas
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    1 h y 8 m
  • Reading the Bible with AI?: A Conversation with John Kaag, Philosopher and Co-Founder of Rebind AI

    Reading the Bible with AI?: A Conversation with John Kaag, Philosopher and Co-Founder of Rebind AI
    Dec 3 2025
    Rebind combines reading with AI-chat to deepen learning and simulate the experience of conversing with some of the greatest scholars and thinkers. With Rebind, you can read A Tale of Two Cities with Margaret Atwood, Huck Finn with Marlon James, and Candide with Salman Rushdie. John and his team have recently launched the Rebind Study Bible, an interactive way to read, listen, and interpret the Bible with insight from scholars. As we head further into a world augmented by AI tools, Rebind is on the frontlines of embracing AI without destroying the art of deep, contemplative engagement. To give so insight into how Rebind is marrying scholarship with AI tools, I’m thrilled today to have John Kaag on the podcast. For a free 7-day trial, visit this link John Kaag is an American philosopher and chair and professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is co-founder of Rebind Publishing. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas
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    43 m
  • Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)

    Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)
    Nov 19 2025
    In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies--the United States and China--have fallen short of expectations. To appreciate why we cannot depend on any AI-fueled great leap forward, Frey offers a remarkable and fascinating journey across the globe, spanning the past 1,000 years, to explain why some societies flourish and others fail in the wake of rapid technological change. By examining key historical moments--from the rise of the steam engine to the dawn of AI--Frey shows why technological shifts have shaped, and sometimes destabilized, entire civilizations. He explores why some leading technological powers of the past--such as Song China, the Dutch Republic, and Victorian Britain--ultimately lost their innovative edge, why some modern nations such as Japan had periods of rapid growth followed by stagnation, and why planned economies like the Soviet Union collapsed after brief surges of progress. Frey uncovers a recurring tension in history: while decentralization fosters the exploration of new technologies, bureaucracy is crucial for scaling them. When institutions fail to adapt to technological change, stagnation inevitably follows. Only by carefully balancing decentralization and bureaucracy can nations innovate and grow over the long term--findings that have worrying implications for the United States, Europe, China, and other economies today. Through a rich narrative that weaves together history, economics, and technology, How Progress Ends reveals that managing the future requires us to draw the right lessons from the past. Carl Benedikt Frey is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas
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    54 m
  • On Democracy and Bullshit with Hélène Landemore

    On Democracy and Bullshit with Hélène Landemore
    Nov 18 2025
    Today I’m speaking with Hélène Landemore, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, about Democracy and Bullshit, with a special focus on her 2020 book, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2020). Bullshit is a feature of both democracies and dictatorships alike, but it takes different forms. In democracies, while citizens enjoy the freedom of speech and the right to vote, a range of forces often conspire to limit their real power in favor of competing elites. The political and economic elite’s toolkit includes the art of bullshit—the persuasive use of language without regard for truth. Whether meritocratic or populist, elites alike have mastered this form of manipulation, amplified by modern tools of dissemination and authority. To help us understand the challenges that bullshit poses to democratic citizens, I’m pleased to welcome Hélène Landemore. Hélène Landemore is a professor of political science at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas
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    1 h y 6 m
  • The Technological Soul: Alex Priou on Modernity, Ideology, and the Limits of Reason

    The Technological Soul: Alex Priou on Modernity, Ideology, and the Limits of Reason
    Nov 6 2025
    In this episode of International Horizons, RBI acting director Eli Karetny speaks with Alex Priou, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Austin, about how technology and ideology shape the modern soul. From Machiavelli’s “dikes and dams” to Odysseus’s struggle against the Sirens, Priou traces how modernity’s drive for control has left us materially fulfilled yet spiritually impoverished. The conversation explores liberalism’s crises, the moral stakes of AI, the American “technological republic,” and why revisiting Homer and Plato may be key to recovering wisdom and restraint in an age of restless innovation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas
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    1 h y 14 m
  • brian bean, "Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition" (Haymarket, 2025)

    brian bean, "Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition" (Haymarket, 2025)
    Nov 4 2025
    Where do cops come from and what do they do? How did “modern policing” as we know it today come to be? What about the capitalist state necessitates policing? In this clear and comprehensive account of why and how the police—the linchpin of capitalism—function and exist, organizer and author brian bean presents a clear case for the abolition of policing and capitalism. Their End Is Our Beginning traces the roots and development of policing in global capitalism through colonial rule, racist enslavement, and class oppression, along the way arguing how police power can be challenged and, ultimately, abolished. bean draws from extensive interviews with activists from Mexico to Ireland to Egypt, all of whom share compelling and knowledgeable perspectives on what it takes to—even if temporarily—take down the cops and build a thriving community-organized society, free from the police. The lessons they offer bring nuance to the meaning of “solidarity” and clarity to what “abolition” and “revolution” look like in practice. Featuring illustrations by Chicago-based artist Charlie Aleck, Their End Is Our Beginning is an incendiary book that offers a socialist analysis of policing and the capitalist state, a vital discussion of the contours of abolition at large, and the revolutionary logic needed for liberation. Guest: brian bean is a Chicago-based socialist organizer, writer, and agitator originally from North Carolina. They are one of the founding editors of Rampant magazine. Their work has been published in Truthout, Jacobin, Tempest, Spectre, Red Flag, New Politics, Socialist Worker, International Viewpoint, and more. In addition to Their End Is Our Beginning, brian coedited and contributed to the book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, also published by Haymarket Books. Host: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas
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    1 h y 1 m
  • Jane G. Goldberg, "Wired for Why: How We Think, Feel, and Make Meaning" (2025)

    Jane G. Goldberg, "Wired for Why: How We Think, Feel, and Make Meaning" (2025)
    Oct 31 2025
    WIRED FOR WHY: How We Think, Feel and Make Meaning. (Self-Published 2025) spans eighteen chapters exploring everything from how we manage to stay alive against all odds, to why language separates us from other species, to whether death might be a metaphor. It's a journey through neuroscience, psychoanalysis, history, and philosophy that challenges readers to reconsider their most basic assumptions about human experience. In WIRED FOR WHY, Dr. Jane Goldberg dismantles fundamental assumptions about human consciousness, memory, and experience. Humans have no "now"—we're perpetually living in the past as our brains lag behind reality, processing what has already happened. Memory, Goldberg argues, is an illusion, an unreliable collection of patterns distributed throughout our bodies rather than faithful recordings of our lives. This challenges everything we believe about identity and selfhood. The book explores how beer created civilization, why coffee shaped the Industrial Revolution, why "B" students often outperform "A" students, and why the brain is the only entity on Earth that named itself—a fact that reveals something profound about human self-awareness. Beyond neuroscience, Goldberg tackles pressing cultural questions: why one in six Americans takes psychiatric medication and children Google "how to completely kill all my emotions." She argues we're medicating away normal human experiences at great cost to our emotional intelligence. Against our productivity-obsessed culture, she makes the counterintuitive case that spacing out and daydreaming fuel creativity, that intelligence is fundamentally a team sport requiring connection rather than isolation, and that our minds and bodies continuously eavesdrop on each other in ways we barely understand. The book doesn't offer simple life hacks but instead provides a more honest reckoning with what it means to live inside brains that lie to us, confabulate truth, and imagine reality on a non-stop basis—and suggests we need humility, openness to being wrong, and peace with our beautifully flawed human nature. Christopher Russell is a psychoanalyst working with individuals and groups. He is a member of the faculty at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies; a licensure qualifying institute in New York. CMPS is also the New York campus for the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; the only accredited, independent graduate school of psychoanalysis in the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas
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    1 h y 4 m
  • Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship" (MIT Press, 2025)

    Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship" (MIT Press, 2025)
    Oct 23 2025
    AI is changing democracy. We still get to decide how.AI’s impact on democracy will go far beyond headline-grabbing political deepfakes and automated misinformation. Everywhere it will be used, it will create risks and opportunities to shake up long-standing power structures.In this highly readable and advisedly optimistic book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (MIT Press, 2025), security technologist Bruce Schneier and data scientist Nathan Sanders cut through the AI hype and examine the myriad ways that AI is transforming every aspect of democracy—for both good and ill.The authors describe how the sophistication of AI will fulfill demands from lawmakers for more complex legislation, reducing deference to the executive branch and altering the balance of power between lawmakers and administrators. They show how the scale and scope of AI is enhancing civil servants’ ability to shape private-sector behavior, automating either the enforcement or neglect of industry regulations. They also explain how both lawyers and judges will leverage the speed of AI, upending how we think about law enforcement, litigation, and dispute resolution.Whether these outcomes enhance or degrade democracy depends on how we shape the development and use of AI technologies. Powerful players in private industry and public life are already using AI to increase their influence, and AIs built by corporations don’t deliver the fairness and trust required by democratic governance. But, steered in the right direction, AI’s broad capabilities can augment democratic processes and help citizens build consensus, express their voice, and shake up long-standing power structures.Democracy is facing new challenges worldwide, and AI has become a part of that. It can inform, empower, and engage citizens. It can also disinform, disempower, and disengage them. The choice is up to us. Schneier and Sanders blaze the path forward, showing us how we can use AI to make democracy stronger and more participatory. Nathan E. Sanders is a data scientist focused on making policymaking more participatory. His research spans machine learning, astrophysics, public health, environmental justice, and more. He has served in fellowships at the Massachusetts legislature and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas
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    44 m