Best Evan J Thomas Podcasts (2025)

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What Does China Want? The Authors of a New Paper Challenge the DC Consensus 1:29:32

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10h ago1:29:32

1:29:32

This week on Sinica, I chat with Dave Kang (USC), Zenobia Chan (Georgetown), and Jackie Wong (American University in Sharjah, UAE) about their new paper in International Security titled "What Does China Want?" The paper, which has generated quite a bit of controversy, takes a data-driven approach to examine the claim that China seeks global hegemon…

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Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football 58:04

5d ago58:04

58:04

Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college footba…

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Maan Barua, "Plantation Worlds" (Duke UP, 2024) 58:49

5d ago58:49

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In Plantation Worlds (Duke UP, 2024), Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the…

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Trump's India Tariff Tirade: A Gift to Beijing? With Evan Feigenbaum 1:03:36

7d ago1:03:36

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This week on the Sinica Podcast, I welcome back Evan Feigenbaum, Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Evan served for many years as a State Department official, was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and Central Asia among his numerous positions in government, and was instrumental in buil…

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Vanessa Diaz, "Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood" (Duke UP, 2020) 50:01

7d ago50:01

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While Hollywood’s images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Duke University Press, 2020), anthropologist Vanessa Díaz examines the raced and gendered hierarchies and inequalities that are imbricated within the work …

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The Engineering State and the Lawyerly Society: Dan Wang on his new book "Breakneck" 1:32:43

12d ago1:32:43

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This week on Sinica, I'm delighted to be joined by Dan Wang, formerly of Gavekal Dragonomics and the Paul Tsai Law Center at Yale University, now with the Hoover Institute's History Lab. Dan's new book is Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, and it's already one of the year's most talked-about books. In this conversation, we go beyond w…

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Bettina Ng′weno, "No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi" (U of California Press, 2025) 53:28

13d ago53:28

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Bettina Ng’weno is Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis Nairobi, known as the Green City in the Sun, has taken shape through anti-urban ideologies that insist that the city cannot be home for most residents. Based on decades of experience in rapidly changing Nairobi, No Place Like Home in a New Ci…

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Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage 41:01

14d ago41:01

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Alexandra Grey speaks with Dr Zozan Balci about Zozan’s new book, Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage: Language, Identity and Belonging in the Lives of Cultural In-betweeners, published in 2025 by Routledge.. The conversation focuses on a study of adults with three languages ‘at play’ in their…

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Kate Herrity, "Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown" (Bristol UP, 2024) 1:07:54

17d ago1:07:54

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The soundscape of prison life is that of constant clangs, bangs and jangles. What is the significance of this cacophonous din to those who live and work with it? Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown (Bristol UP, 2024) tells the story of a year spent with a UK prison community, bringing its social world vividl…

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Ep. 178: Mimi Rogers & Matt Rogers 1:05:11

18d ago1:05:11

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It’s a bouquet of trivia on Go Fact Yourself! Mimi Rogers is an actor – best known these days for her role in the Amazon series “Bosch.” She’s acted in that family of shows for ten years, but she’ll tell us about how her part was never supposed to last that long. Plus, Mimi reveals some secrets about her time on the set of Austin Powers. Matt Roger…

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Chinese and U.S. AI Applications in Public Administration: Lessons and Implications for Ukraine 1:18:46

20d ago1:18:46

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Artificial intelligence has been a frequent topic on Sinica in recent years — but usually through the lens of the two countries that have produced the leading models and companies: the United States and China. We’ve covered generative AI, national strategies, governance frameworks, and the geopolitical implications of AI leadership. This webinar, b…

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Kevin P. Donovan, "Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty and Citizenship in East Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 1:02:03

21d ago1:02:03

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In his book, Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty and Citizenship in East Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Kevin Donovan argues that East African decolonization was not coterminous with political sovereignty but rather consisted of a longer process of reorganizing how value was legitimately defined, produced, and distributed. It is an…

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Nuclear Weapons, Ukraine, and Great-Power Competition 1:12:49

22d ago1:12:49

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Join me for a conversation with four fantastic panelists about nuclear safety and security issues brought on by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and more broadly on the state of nuclear security globally during this era of dramatic change. This program was made possible by the Ukrainian Platform for Contemporary China and the Center for Sla…

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Kirin Narayan, "Cave of My Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora" (U Chicago Press, 2024) 1:17:25

22d ago1:17:25

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On the podcast today I am joined by Kirin Narayan, emerita professor at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Kirin is joining me to talk about her new book, Cave of my Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora published by Chicago University Press in 2024, and in 2025 as an Indian edition by HarperColli…

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Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018) 1:12:16

26d ago1:12:16

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From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one t…

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The World AI Conference in Shanghai: Two tech veterans share their impressions 1:26:01

28d ago1:26:01

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This week on Sinica, Paul Triolo of DGA Albright Stonebridge and tech investor Ryan Cunningham join to talk about their observations and insights from the World AI Conference (WAIC), held in July in Shanghai, and what it tells them about China's ambitions in the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence. Don't miss this one! 04:21 - Ryan on his …

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"Age, Creativity and Culture: Reconsideration of how the Phases of Life Influence Knowledge, Experience, and Creation" 1:08:59

28d ago1:08:59

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“Age, Creativity and Culture: Reconsidering how the Phases of Life Influence Knowledge, Experience, and Creation” by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera appeared in Nuevos Horizontes in 2024. The article examines age as a dimension of identity, creativity and cognition, and in this episode, Heidi Landecker, Samuel Jay Keyser, and Jenny Wilson consider the importa…

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Lizzie Wade, "Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures" (Harper, 2025) 1:29:26

30d ago1:29:26

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A richly imagined new view on the great human tradition of apocalypse, from the rise of Homo sapiens to the climate instability of our present, that defies conventional wisdom and long-held stories about our deep past to reveal how cataclysmic events are not irrevocable endings, but transformations. A drought lasts for decades, a disease rips throu…

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Anand Pandian, "Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down" (Stanford UP, 2025) 52:22

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In 2016, Anand Pandian was alarmed by Donald Trump's harsh attacks on immigrants to the United States, the appeal of that politics of anger and fear. In the years that followed, he crisscrossed the country—from Fargo, North Dakota to Denton, Texas, from southern California to upstate New York—seeking out fellow Americans with markedly different soc…

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Klaus Bachmann, "The Genocide in Rwanda in Comparative Perspective: Death and Survival on the Lake Kivu Shore" (Routledge, 2025) 1:22:35

1M ago1:22:35

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The Genocide in Rwanda in Comparative Perspective: Death and Survival on the Lake Kivu Shore (Routledge, 2025) combines social science concepts, history and transitional justice studies to examine the social dynamics, specific actors and ideologies involved in the genocide in Rwanda and examines what makes this genocide a unique case of mass violen…

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NSP68 - The Tree of Liberty Thirsts with Zachary Woodman 1:47:31

1M ago1:47:31

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For Episode 68, we spoke with our friend Zak Woodman about philosophy, economics, artificial intelligence, immigration, right-wing hypocrisy, and the ways the State violates people's rights.Zachary Woodman is the podcast coordinator at Center for a Stateless Society, deputy editor of Notes on Liberty, and an independent scholar. His research intere…

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Ep. 177: Brendan Hunt & Ashly Burch 1:06:26

1M ago1:06:26

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BELIEVE! In trivia! Brendan Hunt is best known as Coach Beard on the Apple TV series “Ted Lasso.” He’ll tell us about how the show got started, why they decided to put out another season, and why fans always recognize him in airports. Ashly Burch is a well-known part of gaming culture. She’s voiced characters of such critically-acclaimed games like…

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Yuki Kato, "Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City" (NYU Press, 2025) 1:07:12

1M ago1:07:12

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Gardens are often spaces of hope, expected to solve many problems in a city including food insecurity and climate resilience. In fact, there has been a historical trend of urban gardening gaining popularity during times of crisis. Gardens of Hope is the story of urban gardening in New Orleans in the decade after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita…

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Chinese Cooking Demystified: Chris Thomas and Stephanie Li visit Shaxi! 1:17:54

1M ago1:17:54

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This week on Sinica: On my final two days in Shaxi in Yunnan, Chris Thomas and Stephanie Li, the hosts of the marvelous YouTube channel Chinese Cooking Demystified, joined me for some cooking and lots of chatting about food! We recorded this show together and focus our conversation on their heroic attempt at a taxonomy of different Chinese cuisines…

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Shani Adia Evans, "We Belong Here: Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place" (U Chicago Press, 2025) 32:37

1M ago32:37

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Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s Whitest city,” Black residents who grew up there made it their own. The neighborhoods of Northeast Portland, also called “Albina,” were a haven for and a hub of Black community life. But between 1990 and 2010, Albina changed dramatically—it became majority White. In We Belong Here, sociologi…

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Jess Reia, "Urban Music Governance: What Busking Can Teach Us about Data, Policy and Our Cities" (Intellect, 2025) 34:40

1M ago34:40

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What happens when precarious urban cultural laborers take data collection, laws, and policymaking into their own hands? Buskers have been part of our cities for hundreds of years, but they remain invisible to governments and in datasets. From nuisance to public art, this cultural practice can help us understand the politics of data collection, arch…

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Magdalena Maria Turek, "Buddhist Hermits in Eastern Tibet: Saint-Making and Ascetic Performance" (Routledge, 2025) 1:19:13

1M ago1:19:13

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Magdalena Maria Turek is an independent research scholar. She received her PhD from Humboldt University, Germany, and was a Research Fellow with the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies at the American Council of Learned Societies, USA. Her research examines how contemporary reiterations of Tibetan Buddhist orthopraxy, loca…

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Ela Przybylo, "Ungendering Menstruation" (U Minnesota Press, 2025) 40:35

1M ago40:35

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Ungendering Menstruation by Ela Przybyło discusses why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability. Honing a "cranky" approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstru…

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Nicholas Thomas, "Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific" (Apollo, 2020) 56:16

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In Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific (Apollo, 2020), the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas tells the story of the peopling of the Pacific. In clear, accessible language Thomas shows us that most Pacific Islanders are in fact 'inter-islanders', or people defined by their movement across the ocean and between islands, rather than 'tr…

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Ep. 176: Jodie Sweetin & Marc Evan Jackson 1:04:38

2M ago1:04:38

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We ask the questions, you give the reply on a brand new episode of Go Fact Yourself! Jodie Sweetin has been in show business for most of her life. She’s famous for her role as Stephanie Tanner on "Full House." She’ll tell us what it was like being on a major TV show at such a young age and how she revisited that time in her podcast, "How Rude Tanne…

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Adam Tooze Climbs the China Learning Curve 1:03:28

2M ago1:03:28

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I'm in Shaxi, a wonderful little town in the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, and I was joined here by the Columbia economic historian Adam Tooze, who shared his thoughts on what he sees happening on the ground in China. Adam's been in China for the last month and reflects on his experiences learning about the country — and even attempting the langu…

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Anahid Matossian, "Syrian-Armenian Women Migrants in Armenia: Gender, Identity and Painful Belonging" (Bloomsbury, 2025) 1:11:53

2M ago1:11:53

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After the outbreak of the 2011 Syrian War, a number Syrian-Armenians who had lived in the territory for generations, fled to the Republic of Armenia. This book traces the experiences of Syrian-Armenian women as they navigated their changing and gendered identities from their adopted 'homeland' to their socially constructed new 'ancestral' home in A…

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Laurie Denyer Willis, "Go with God: Political Exhaustion and Evangelical Possibility in Suburban Brazil" (U California Press, 2023) 47:05

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Through deep attention to sense and feeling, Go with God grapples with the centrality of Evangelical faith in Rio de Janeiro's subúrbios, the city's expansive and sprawling peripheral communities. Based on sensory ethnographic fieldwork and attuned to religious desire and manipulation, this book shows how Evangelical belief has changed the way peop…

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Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom 51:19

2M ago51:19

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Decolonizing Ukraine, by Dr. Greta Lynn Uehling, illuminates the untold stories of Russia's occupation of Crimea from 2014 to the present, revealing the traumas of colonization, foreign occupation, and population displacement. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in Ukraine, including over 90 personal interviews, Dr. Uehling brings her readers into the…

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Siri Schwabe, "Moving Memory: Remembering Palestine in Postdictatorship Chile" (Cornell UP, 2023) 49:58

2M ago49:58

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Two juxtaposed years frame the subject matter of Moving Memory: Remembering Palestine in Postdictatorship Chile. In one, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet’s troops stormed Chile’s presidential palace. In the other, 1948, Zionist militias expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland. That 1973 should move memories in Chile is obvi…

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Janet McIntosh, "Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics" (Oxford UP, 2025) 1:24:08

2M ago1:24:08

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Even casual observers of the military will notice the unique ways that service members use language. With all of the acronyms and jargon, some even argue that membership in the military requires learning a whole language. But rather than treat military-specific language as a cultural difference of the institution or a technical requirement for the …

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Myles Lennon, "Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2025) 1:06:47

2M ago1:06:47

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In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Both envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. However, as Myles Lennon argues in Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Sha…

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Michael Amoruso, "Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil" (UNC Press, 2025) 1:09:00

2M ago1:09:00

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In the sprawling city of São Paulo, a weekly practice known as devotion to souls (devoção às almas) draws devotees to Catholic churches, cemeteries, and other sites associated with tragic or unjust deaths. The living pray and light candles for the souls of the dead, remembering events and circumstances in a rite of collective suffering. Yet contemp…

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Ep. 175: Georgia Hardstark & Tim Bagley 1:02:40

2M ago1:02:40

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Get lost in a world of trivia on a brand new episode of Go Fact Yourself! Georgia Hardstark is best known for her incredibly popular podcast “My Favorite Murder.” It’s a show all about true crime, but she and her co-host still manage to find a lot of humor and heart in their subject matter. She’ll explain. Tim Bagley is an actor, comedian, and writ…

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Daanika Kamal, "Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The Legal Construction of 'Bad' and 'Mad' Women" (Oxford UP, 2025) 51:29

2M ago51:29

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Pakistani women are increasingly pursuing legal avenues against acts of domestic violence. Their claims, however, are often dismissed through character allegations that label them as 'bad' women in need of control, or 'mad' women not to be trusted. Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The Legal Construction of 'Bad' and 'Mad' Women (Oxford University Pre…

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Heather Sutherland, "Seaways and Gatekeepers: Trade and State in the Eastern Archipelagos of Southeast Asia, C.1600-c.1906" (NUS Press, 2021) 55:47

2M ago55:47

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The eastern archipelagos stretch from Mindanao and Sulu in the north to Bali in the southwest and New Guinea in the southeast. Many of their inhabitants are regarded as “people without history”, while colonial borders cut across shared underlying patterns. Yet many of these societies were linked to trans-oceanic trading systems for millennia. Indee…

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Shayna M. Silverstein, "Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria" (Wesleyan UP, 2024) 54:30

2M ago54:30

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A vivid and intricate study of dance music traditions that reveals the many contradictions of being Syrian in the 21st century Dabke, one of Syria's most beloved dance music traditions, is at the center of the country's war and the social tensions that preceded conflict. Drawing on almost two decades of ethnographic, archival, and digital research,…

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Carnegie's Tong Zhao on the Expansion of China's Nuclear Arsenal 1:10:21

2M ago1:10:21

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This week on Sinica, in a show taped in early June in Washington, Kaiser chats with Tong Zhao (赵通) of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a leading expert on Chinese nuclear doctrine, about why the PRC has, in recent years, significantly increased the size of its nuclear arsenal. Zhao offers a master class in the practice of strategic e…

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Maya J. Berry, "Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and the Black Corporeal Undercommons" (Duke UP, 2025) 1:25:12

2M ago1:25:12

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In Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and the Black Corporeal Undercommons (Duke University Press, 2025), anthropologist and dancer Maya J. Berry examines rumba as a way of knowing the embodied and spiritual dimensions of Black political imagination in post-Fidel Cuba. Historically a Black working-class popular dance, rumba, Berry contends, is a…

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Thiago P. Barbosa, "Racializing Caste: Anthropology Between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905-1970)" (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) 43:04

2M ago43:04

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Racializing Caste: Anthropology Between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905-1970) (De Gruyter, 2025) analyzes how racial knowledge has circulated in transnational entanglements, particularly between Germany and India, into the research on human variation in India, racializing the understanding of caste and ethnicity. It focuses …