Harvard University Press Blog

Relax, it's a joke

Humor is notoriously tough to explain (to me, Bergson's explication still stands, 100 years later, as the most perceptive), although naturally that hasn't stopped people from trying. Such is the subject of Mary Beard's latest essay for the New York Review of Books, and its accompanying podcast. Beard is the author of The Roman Triumph and the forthcoming The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found.

Second generation immigrants inherit NYC

At the heart of the immigration issue is the question of assimilation--just what sort of Americans will new immigrants become? According to the authors of Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age, out now from HUP, "even those who think that immigration has a generally benevolent economic impact often worry that the huge numbers of largely nonwhite immigrants who have come to the United States since the mid-1960s will not 'assimilate' or will put native born minorities at a further disadvantage."

But the conclusions outlined in Inheriting the City, which draws on the results of a ground-breaking study of young adults of immigrant parents in metropolitan New York, suggest that such worries may be unfounded. Listen to the authors discuss their findings on "The Leonard Lopate Show," based out of WNYC in New York. For a quick synopsis of what the study was all about, check out an excerpt from the book's Introduction, hosted on the HUP site.

American Catholics and the Pope

On the occasion of Pope Benedict XVI's first visit to Boston, WBUR's "Here and Now" interviews James O'Toole, author of The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America, in which he tells the story of this ancient church from the perspective of ordinary Americans, the lay believers who have kept their faith despite persecution from without and clergy abuse from within.

Charlie Veron on ABC Radio National

Like many coral specialists fifteen years ago, Charlie Veron thought Australia's Great Barrier Reef was impervious to climate change. "Owned by a prosperous country and accorded the protection it deserves, it would surely not go the way of the Amazon rain forest or the parklands of Africa, but would endure forever. That is what I thought once, but I think it no longer." A Reef in Time: The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to End is Veron's Silent Spring for the world's coral reefs.

Veron, a former Chief Scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, recently appeared on ABC Radio National's "Breakfast" program to discuss the possibility that the reefs could disappear once and for all within the next 40 years. You can listen to the podcast here.

Donald Critchlow interviewed at NRO Online

A new audio interview up at the National Review Online website features Donald Critchlow, author of The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History, discussing his contention that the rise of the conservative movement constitutes the most significant post-WWII development in American politics, as well as the National Review's signal role in fostering that development.

Michael Levi radio interviews

As a follow-up to our previous post, here are three radio interviews with Michael Levi, author of On Nuclear Terrorism:

• KUOW--Seattle Public Radio -- "Today we go inside the lives and minds of terrorist leaders with Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations. We'll look at the decisions they face and the obstacles that stand in their way. Could the US Defense Department be bolstered by understanding the terrorist point of view? What scenarios are they already planning for?"

• KQED Forum -- "The show talks with Michael Levi, author of "On Nuclear Terrorism" and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations."

• KPBS Radio--San Diego NPR -- "...But what are the chances that a terrorist would be able to cross a border with a nuke in his backpack? In fact, some people question whether Iran, itself, really has the capability to develop nuclear weapons anytime soon. We're going to spend a little time talking about proliferation and ask what we should reasonably worry about."

Also you can hear Levi's remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a fellow, from November 20, 2007, or check out a YouTube episode of "Conversations with History" for additional discussion.. Enjoy!

"The Tyranny of Markets" podcast up at EconTalk

Americans are by now accustomed to the litany of economists and ideologues shouting that "the free market" is a magical device that will fix everything if we just let it. But do markets really give us what we want? Joel Waldfogel asks this question in his latest book, The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

EconTalk, the excellent podcast series run by Russ Roberts, has a new interview with Professor Waldfogel. Discussed are markets and the political process, the role of fixed costs in limiting what's available on the "free" market, why the standard textbook treatment of markets is a bit rosy for Professor Waldfogel's taste, and much more.

Loads of new author interviews up

We've been busy adding new author interviews to the HUP website, bringing the total to 21. Here's a rundown of the latest ones.

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Mary Beard is the author of The Roman Triumph. She has a Chair of Classics at Cambridge and is a Fellow of Newnham College. She is classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and author of the blog "A Don's Life."

Listen to the interview with Mary Beard.

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Sarah McFarland Taylor is the author of Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology.
She is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Northwestern University.

Listen to the interview with Sarah McFarland Taylor.

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Tom Griffiths is the author of Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica.
He teaches history and the environment at the Australian National University in Canberra and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Listen to the interview with Tom Griffiths.

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James Dawes is the author of That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity.
He is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at Macalester College.

Listen to the interview with James Dawes.

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Margaret Hogan is the coeditor, with C. James Taylor, of My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams. She is Managing Editor of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Listen to the interview with Margaret Hogan.

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Jon Latimer is the author of 1812: War with America.
He is a guest lecturer at the Joint Services Staff College and a former officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

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You'll find these and more in the audio section of the HUP website.

"Prophet of Innovation" podcast up at Econtalk

Thomas McCraw, author of Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, sat down with Russ Roberts for an Econtalk podcast interview to "discuss innovation, business strategy, the role of mathematics in economics, and Schumpeter's vision of competition embodied in his most important idea--creative destruction." Have a listen over at the Econtalk site.

David Linden on "the accidental mind"

After spending yesterday tooting our own podcast horn, we figured that today we'd toot someone else's. Here's an audio interview with David Linden, author of The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God. Linden is Professor of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the purpose of his book is to relieve us of the comforting notion that the brain is somehow the result of an ordered process of elegant "design," showing instead how the human brain consists basically of "a weird agglomeration of ad-hoc solutions that have been piled on through millions of years of evolutionary history" (as our science editor so aptly put it).

||| Click here for the interview.