Best Devon Harding Podcasts (2025)

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S4E29: Diamonds are Forever with No Notes 1:13:19

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3h ago1:13:19

1:13:19

It's that most festive of periods, that most goodwill of all men, that most silent and holy of nights, and you know what that means: We're skipping out on the usual postwar depictions of middle-aged men being miserable to see what exactly we remember about a movie we all last watched in May 2021. Spoilers: Not much! We're pretty certain a guy goes …

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Sean Minogue, "Prodigals" (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2025) 38:17

12m ago38:17

38:17

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Sean Minogue about this play, Prodigals (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2025). When a big-city dreamer from a small northern Ontario city returns to his hometown to testify in a murder trial, he faces old uncovered wounds in his circle of friends and discovers that his missed opportunities are more than…

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Henrike Kohpeiß, "Bourgeois Coldness" (Divided Publishing, 2025) 50:57

12m ago50:57

50:57

Bourgeois Coldness (Divided Publishing, 2025) refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediat…

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Aaron G. Fountain Jr., "High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America" (UNC Press, 2025) 44:33

12m ago44:33

44:33

In High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2025), Aaron G. Fountain Jr. highlights the crucial impact of high school activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Mid-twentieth-century student activism is a pivotal chapter in American history. While college activism has been well document…

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David Newheiser et al., "Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding" (Bloomsbury, 2025) 1:28:44

1h ago1:28:44

1:28:44

Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2025), edited by Professor David Newheiser, is a new collection asks if it’s possible to consider art-making as a spiritual practice independent of explicit religious belief or content. Where earlier research has focused on the religious significance of …

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Alastair McClure, "Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 57:44

1h ago57:44

57:44

Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Violence, and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922 (Cambridge UP, 2024) offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. Through a study of large-scale amnesties, the prerogative powers of pardon, executive commutation, and judicial sentencing practices…

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How to Fix Baseball with author Jane Leavy 58:27

12m ago58:27

58:27

For hard-core baseball folks, for anyone who cares for the future of the game, veteran baseball writer Jane Leavy compels attention with her provocative book, Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball And How To Fix It (Grand Central, 2025). Our conversation focuses on her proposed solutions to the core problem of a sport in the destr…

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Andrea Gevurtz Arai ed., "Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in Twenty-First-Century East Asia" (Rutgers UP, 2025) 1:22:45

1h ago1:22:45

1:22:45

An exciting collection of stories of change that most people don’t usually hear from the bottom up, from the grassroots, about what’s happening in East Asia. Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in Twenty-First-Century East Asia (Rutgers UP, 2025) brings together an exciting cross-regional interdisciplinary group of scholars, schol…

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Daniel M. Herskowitz, "The Judeo-Christian Thought of Franz Rosenzweig" (Liverpool UP, 2025) 1:10:08

1h ago1:10:08

1:10:08

The Judeo-Christian Thought of Franz Rosenzweig (Liverpool UP, 2025) offers a new interpretation of Franz Rosenzweig's magnum opus The Star of Redemption, commonly treated as one of the high points of modern Jewish thought, and demonstrates its profound immersion in the Protestant conceptuality of its time. It argues that appreciating the decisive …

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Ruby Oram, "Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930" (U Chicago Press, 2025) 57:54

1h ago57:54

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In Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930 (U Chicago Press, 2025) historian Ruby Oram tells the story of how middle-class, white women reformers lobbied the state to implement various public education reforms to shape the lives of girls and women in industrial cities between 1870 and 1930. Women such as …

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Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, "Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist" (Simon and Schuster, 2025) 59:59

12m ago59:59

59:59

Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today, I speak with Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, author of the new artist’s biography Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (Simon & Schuster, 2025). The book was recently named one of NPR’s Books We Loved for 2025. Pollack-Pelzner is a cultural historian, theater critic, and teacher a…

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Nicholas L. Caverly, "Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures" (Stanford UP, 2025) 49:56

1d ago49:56

49:56

In this episode, Nick Caverly talks about his new book, Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures (Stanford UP, 2025). For decades, Detroit residents, politicians, planners, and advocacy organizations have campaigned for the elimination of empty buildings from city neighborhoods. Leveling these structures, many argue, is essential to makin…

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Elizabeth Suhay, "Debating the American Dream: How Explanations for Inequality Polarize Politics" (Russell Sage Foundation, 2025) 31:15

1d ago31:15

31:15

Faith in the American Dream—the idea that anyone who works hard can achieve success—has waned in the 21st century. Decreases in economic mobility, increases in the wealth gap, and other economic shifts have undoubtedly influenced this decline. Politics, however, are an overlooked contributor to confidence, or lack of confidence, in the American Dre…

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Paul Kelly, "Against Postliberalism: Why ‘Family, Faith and Flag’ is a Dead End for the Left" (Polity, 2025) 40:20

1d ago40:20

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Post-liberalism is all the rage on the American right, finding a common cause between legal theorists like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen and rising political stars like J.D. Vance, the serving vice president. In the UK, on the other hand, the movement has been pioneered by left-wing thinkers seeking to return lost working-class voters to the L…

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Jonathan Sumption, "The Challenges of Democracy: And the Rule of Law" (Profile Books, 2026) 29:59

17h ago29:59

29:59

Across the globe, democracy is in crisis - in the UK alone, it has been rocked by Brexit, the pandemic and successive attempts by governments to bypass legal norms. But how did this happen, and where might we go from here? Jonathan Sumption cuts through the political noise with acute analysis of the state of democracy today - from the vulnerabiliti…

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Martin Herskovitz, "Son of the Shoah: Poems from a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor" (McFarland, 2025) 33:18

1d ago33:18

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As a third generation Holocaust survivor, this was an important conversation with a second generation survivor. Marty has been conducting workshops on writing memory for quite a while and that's where we met - in his workshops with Jewish Ethiopians in Israel. Son of the Shoah: Poems from a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor is his emotional reck…

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Anna Hájková, "People without History are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust" (U Toronto Press, 2025) 33:45

1d ago33:45

33:45

Queerness remains one of the most stigmatized and overlooked aspects of Holocaust history, often erased due to the lingering homophobia of survivors. People Without History Are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust (U Toronto Press, 2025) challenges this silence, weaving together compelling stories of German, Dutch, Czech, and Polish Jewish Holocaust…

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Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm, "Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life" (Reaktion, 2023) 37:03

1d ago37:03

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Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life (Reaktion, 2023) recreates medieval people’s experience of time: as continuous and discontinuous, linear and cyclical, embracing Creation and Judgement, shrinking to ‘atoms’ or ‘droplets’ and extending to the silent spaces of eternity. They might measure time by natural phenomena such as sunrise and suns…

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Joel S. Wit, "Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea" (Yale UP, 2025) 49:23

1d ago49:23

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After nearly four decades of negotiations, sanctions, summits, threats, and backdoor channels, the United States has failed to stop North Korea's nuclear program which now has the capability to strike American cities with weapons of mass destruction. In Fallout: The Inside Story of America's Failure to Disarm North Korea (Yale UP, 2025), Joel S. Wi…

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Andrew W. Bernstein, "Fuji: A Mountain in the Making" (Princeton UP, 2025) 1:01:37

1d ago1:01:37

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Fuji: A Mountain in the Making (Princeton UP, 2025) is A panoramic biography of Japan's iconic mountain from the Ice Age to the present Mount Fuji is everywhere recognized as a wonder of nature and enduring symbol of Japan. Yet behind the picture-postcard image is a history filled with conflict and upheaval. Violent eruptions across the centuries w…

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Robin F. Hansen, "Prison Born: Incarceration and Motherhood in the Colonial Shadow" (U Regina Press, 2024) 40:11

1d ago40:11

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With rigorous scrutiny and deep care, Robin Hansen's Prison Born: Incarceration and Motherhood in the Colonial Shadow (U Regina Press, 2024) offers crucial insight into the intersections of ongoing colonial harms facing Indigenous mothers in Canada. Building from an unplanned call to Hansen from a pregnant, incarcerated Indigenous woman in 2016, Pr…

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368- Self-Reg with Dr. Stuart Shanker: Round 2 1:35:23

6h ago1:35:23

1:35:23

You're listening to Voices of Your Village, and today we are rebroadcasting one of my all time favorite episodes. I got to sit down with someone I deeply admire—Dr. Stuart Shanker. His book Self-Reg was a game changer for me when I was teaching infants and toddlers, and honestly, it shaped so much of how I approach emotional development today. In t…

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Colin Williamson, "Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science" (U Minnesota Press, 2025) 51:40

2d ago51:40

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What do technical renderings of plant cells in trees have to do with Disney’s animated opus Fantasia? Quite a bit, as it turns out: such emergent scientific models and ideas about nature were an important inspiration for Disney’s groundbreaking animated realism. In Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science (University of Minnesota P…

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Suvi Rautio, "The Invention of Tradition in China: Story of a Village and a Nation Remade" (Springer Nature, 2024) 1:18:40

2d ago1:18:40

1:18:40

Today, anthropologist Professor Anru Lee is joining NBN as a guest host to interview me, Suvi Rautio, on my new book, The Invention of Tradition in China: Story of a Village and a Nation Remade published by Palgrave in 2024. In China, heritage projects are sprouting across the countryside carrying the promise of Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream” as a ca…

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Douglas Morris, "Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler's Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2020) 1:03:35

1d ago1:03:35

1:03:35

During the mid-1930s, Germans opposed to Adolf Hitler had only a limited range of options available to them for resisting the Nazi regime. One of the most creative and successful challengers in this effort was Ernst Fraenkel, who as an attorney sought to use the law as a means of opposing Nazi oppression. In Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler…

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Sustainability, Identity, Artisans and Designers 55:40

3h ago55:40

55:40

Long before the fashion industry formally addressed questions of sustainability and advocated for “slow fashion,” a husband-and-wife design duo were working to create handcrafted leather-goods and functional women’s sportswear that could be worn for decades. Active from the 1940s to the late 1960s, the Phelps quickly won acclaim, attracting a broad…

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Filip Kovacevic, "KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union" (U Toronto Press, 2025) 51:57

2d ago51:57

51:57

KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union (University of Toronto Press, 2025) offers a first-ever glimpse into the mysterious and long-ignored world and work of Soviet spies- and counterspies-turned-writers. Once out of active service, many former spies have turned to writing spy fiction. They drop the dagger and pick up the …

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Sven Beckert, "Capitalism: A Global History" (Allen Lane, 2025) 1:00:59

2d ago1:00:59

1:00:59

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organize our politics. Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton, places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework,…