New Books In Communications

This week on Madison’s Notes, we welcome Ramesh Ponnuru, renowned journalist and Editor of National Review. In this episode, we dive into his journey, starting with his formative years at Princeton University, where he began shaping his intellectual perspective as an undergraduate. We explore the highlights of his career in journalism, the principles that guide his writing, and his unique insights into the evolution of political magazines in today’s media landscape. Join us for an engaging and thought-provoking conversation with one of the leading voices in American political commentary. Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingca

From Broadway to the Bronx: New York City’s History through Song (Intellect, 2024) tells the history of New York City in song across a variety of different genres that the city has been home to and instrumental in developing, covering everything from early twentieth-century sheet music to Broadway’s musical theater, hip-hop, disco, punk, dancehall, but also contemporary metal, rock, and pop. It features an analysis of the work of artists with intimate connections to the city like Billy Joel, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Debbie Harry, Shinehead, and the Wu-Tang Clan, as well as an exclusive interview with RENT original cast member, Anthony Rapp. The collection includes essays from authors across the disciplines of cultural studies, media studies, cultural history, and musicology, resulting in a far-ranging treatment of the interconnection of the city space and its musical history. Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoic

Cosplay, born from the fusion of ‘costume’ and ‘play’, transcends mere dress-up by transforming enthusiasts of TV shows, movies, books or video games into living embodiments of their cherished characters. Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Vivian Asimos is a close exploration of the vibrant world of cosplay, showing what makes it so captivating for so many. The book frames cosplay as an enactment and embodiment of mythology, revealing its inherent complexity, and providing valuable insight into cosplayers’ experiences. Exploring cosplay performances, the skills involved and its community, the book shows how cosplayers build a strong connection to the characters and stories they treasure, and ultimately how they are constructing their own identities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Moza

The World According to Sound is the brainchild of two rogue audionauts who rebelled against the NPR mothership: Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. It began as a micro podcast that held one unique sound under the microscope for 90 seconds each episode. Then it became something much more ambitious: a live sonic Odyssey in 8-channel surround sound. Starting January, Harnett and Hoff bring their realtime soundtrips direct to your home headphones via the internet in their winter listening series. We are sure that Phantom Power listeners will love this experience. And right now, you can buy tickets for 25% off with the promo code phantompower25. (As a public university employee, I should probably note that I am not receiving financial compensation through this promo code. –Mack) In this episode, host Mack Hagood talks to Harnett and Hoff about why they grew frustrated with working in public radio and how they now assemble sonic experiences that don’t impose a fixed narrative on their listeners. We also listen to some fant

When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis became First Lady of the United States over sixty years ago, she stepped into the public spotlight. Although Jackie is perhaps best known for her two highly-publicized marriages, her legacy has endured beyond twentieth-century pop culture and she remains an object of public fascination today. Drawing on a range of sources– from articles penned for the women’s pages of local newspapers, to esteemed national periodicals, to fan magazines and film– Our Jackie: Public Claims on a Private Life (NYU Press, 2024) evaluates how media coverage of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis changed over the course of her very public life. Jackie’s interactions with and framing by the American media reflect the changing attitudes toward American womanhood. Over the course of four decades, Jackie was alternatively praised for her service to others, and pilloried for her perceived self-interest. In Our Jackie, Karen M. Dunak argues that whether she was portrayed as a campaign wife, a loyal widow, a selfish

Millions of GIs returned from overseas in 1945. A generation of men who had left their families and had learned to kill and to quickly dispatch sexual urges were rapidly reintegrated into civilian life, told to put the war behind them with cheer and confidence. Many veterans struggled, openly or privately, with this transition. Others in society wondered what the war had wrought in them. As Erin Lee Mock shows in this insightful book, the “explosive” potential of men became a central concern of postwar American culture. This wariness of veterans settled into a generalised anxiety over men’s “inherent” violence and hypersexuality, which increasingly came to define masculinity. Changed Men: Veterans in American Popular Culture after World War II (University of Virginia Press, 2024) by Dr. Erin Lee Mock engages with studies of film, media, literature, and gender and sexuality to advance a new perspective on the artistic and cultural output of and about the “Greatest Generation,” arguing that depictions of men’s

Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Nicholas Baer reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the "crisis of historicism" widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century. Through bold new analyses of five legendary works of German silent cinema—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm 21, The Holy Mountain, and Metropolis—Dr. Baer argues that films of the Weimar Republic lent vivid expression to the crisis of historical thinking. With their experiments in cinematic form and style, these modernist films revealed the capacity of the medium to engage with fundamental questions about the philosophy of history. Reconstructing the debates over historicism that unfolded during the initial decades of moving-image culture, Historical Turns proposes a more reflexive mode of historiography and expands the field of film and media philosophy. The book excavates a rich archive of ideas that illuminate our own moment of rapid media t

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanisation of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harboured profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyse these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Dr. Hannah Pollin-Galay explores Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech

In If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi (Columbia UP, 2024), Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with written text artifacts and a new approach to theorizing and writing Hindi literary history. He responds to recent developments in quantitative and qualitative approaches to book history - including tools developed within the digital humanities - by applying new as well as traditional techniques of paleography, codicology, and bibliography to handwritten copies of romances, epics, songbooks, treatises, and scriptures.  To make the book more accessible and enjoyable for cross-disciplinary readers, Williams bookends (so to speak) each chapter with the story of a specific artifact - an ascetic's notebook, a Mughal general's storybook, a pandit's textbook, or a guru's copy o

What good is a good sense of humour especially when the humour may be ethically questionable? Although humour seems a valuable part of a good conversation and indeed a good life, jokes have never seemed more morally problematic than they do now. How can we then evaluate quips, gibes, pranks, teasing, light mockery, sarcasm when they can all too often be mean, deceitful, disrespectful, humiliating, cruel? And how is a moral philosopher to evaluate such dilemmas without taking himself and morality too seriously or too lightly?  In Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2024), David W. Shoemaker considers the interplay between humor and morality. With wit and evident joy, Shoemaker considers how "wisecracks" between family and friends are of ethical value despite how morally suspect they may appear. In arguing for the moral status of a wisecrack or a joke as partly resting on the wisecracker's intentions and motives, Shoemaker goes on to show just how complicated and someti

From The Wire to Intervention to Girls, postmillennial American television has dazzled audiences with novelistic seriality and cinematic aesthetics. Yet this television is also more perverse: it bombards audiences with misogynistic and racialized violence, graphic sex, substance abuse, unlikeable protagonists, and the extraordinary exploitation of ordinary people.  In Uncomfortable Television (Duke UP, 2024), Hunter Hargraves examines how television makes its audiences find pleasure through feeling disturbed. He shows that this turn to discomfort realigns collective definitions of family and pleasure with the values of neoliberal culture. In viscerally violent dramas, cringeworthy ironic comedies, and trashy reality programs alike, televisual unease trains audiences to survive under late capitalism, which demands that individuals accept a certain amount of discomfort, dread, and irritation into their everyday lives. By highlighting how discomfort has been central to the reorganization and legitimization of te

The horror genre has endured a long and controversial success within popular culture. Fraught with accusations pertaining to its alleged ability to harm and corrupt young people and indeed society as a whole, the genre is constantly under pressure to suppress that which has made it so popular to begin with - its ability to frighten and generate discussion about society's darker side.  In The Myth of Harm: Horror, Censorship and the Child (Bloomsbury, 2022), Dr. Sarah Cleary analyses controversies, myths, and falsehoods surrounding the genre of horror. Focusing on five major controversies, the text examines how horror media has become a scapegoat for political and social issues, platforms for “moral entrepreneurs” and tools of hyperbole for the news industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The Routledge Handbook of Esports (Routledge, 2024) offers the first fully comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of esports, one of the fastest growing sectors of the contemporary sports and entertainment industries. Global in coverage, the book emphasizes the multifaceted nature of esports and explores the most pressing issues defining the competitive video gaming landscape today. Featuring the work of 93 leading esports academics and industry specialists from around the world, and rigorously peer-reviewed, the book is structured around ten key themes: 1) Introduction to Esports, 2) Esports Research, 3) Esports Players, 4) Esports Business and Management, 5) Esports Media and Communication, 6) Esports Education, 7) Critical Concerns in Esports, 8) Global Esports Cultures, 9) Esports Future Directions, and 10) Key Terms Definitions. Examining the current state of esports, emerging areas of interest and the ongoing debates shaping the esports industry, each of the 62 chapters offers key highlights, an assessm

I spoke with Hannah Gabel, Literary Director of the Texas Book Festival. The Festival first began in 1995, and has since donated over $3.5 million to Texas public libraries and hundreds of thousands of books to students across the state. This year, more than 250 authors will speak and 40,000 people are expected to attend. The festival takes place in downtown Austin, Texas on November 16th and 17th this year and is free and open to all who wish to attend. I’m excited today to speak with Hannah about what people can expect from this incredible event. Books mentioned in this intervew: Bone of the Bone by Sarah Smarsh Trippy by Ernesto Londoño We Are Home by Ray Suarez Our Hidden Conversations by Michele Norris The God of the Woods by Liz Moore Real Americans by Rachel Khong Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey Hannah Gabel is the Literary Director of Texas Book Festival. She also runs the book blog, Bookmarkp

Focusing on games that examine a range of national histories and heritages from across Central and Eastern Europe, Central and Eastern European Histories and Heritages in Video Games (Routledge, 2024) looks beyond the diversity of the local histories depicted in games, and the audience reception of these histories, to show a diversity of approaches which can be used in examining historical games – from postcolonialism to identity politics to heritage studies. The book includes chapters on Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Estonia, Slovakia, Czechia, Finland, and (a Western guest with regional connections) Luxembourg. Through the lens of video games, the authors address how nations struggle with the legacies of war, colonialism, and religious strife that have been a part of nation-building - but also how victimized cultures can survive, resist, and sometimes prevail. Appealing primarily to scholars in the fields of game studies, heritage studies, postcolonial criticism, and media studies, this

The Association of University Presses (AUPresses), a global organization of 161 mission-driven publishers, is proud to announce a collection of 123 books, journals, and projects that embody the #StepUP theme of this year’s University Press Week, happening Nov. 11 to 15. The featured publications, curated by AUPresses members in 12 countries, present thought-provoking concepts, new points of view, and inspiring ideas, many of which advocate for social change. For a complete list of UP Week events, see here For the gallery of 103 publications, see here To work at a university press, see here Anthony Cond is director of Liverpool University Press and president of the Association of University Presses Caleb Zakarin is editor at 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/communications

A veteran music journalist argues that the rise of music streaming and the consolidation of digital platforms is decimating the musical landscape, with dire consequences for the future of our culture ... In The Endless Refrain: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Threat to New Music (Melville House, 2024), former Washington Post writer and editor David Rowell lays out how commercial and cultural forces have laid waste to the cultural ecosystems that have produced decades of great American music. From the scorched-earth demonetizing of artist revenue accomplished by Spotify and its ilk to the rise of dead artists "touring" via hologram, Rowell examines how a perfect storm of conditions have drained our shared musical landscape of vitality. Combining personal memoir, intimate on-the-ground reporting, industry research, and cultural criticism, Rowell's book is a powerful indictment of a music culture gone awry, driven by conformity and subverted by the ways the internet and media influence what we listen to and how we li

Elia Powers' book Performing the News: Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality (Rutgers UP, 2024) explores how journalists from historically marginalized groups have long felt pressure to conform when performing for audiences. Many speak with a flat, “neutral” accent, modify their delivery to hide distinctive vocal attributes, dress conventionally to appeal to the “average” viewer, and maintain a consistent appearance to avoid unwanted attention. Their aim is what author Elia Powers refers to as performance neutrality—presentation that is deemed unobjectionable, reveals little about journalists’ social identity, and supposedly does not detract from their message. Increasingly, journalists are challenging restrictive, purportedly neutral forms of self-presentation. This book argues that performance neutrality is a myth that reinforces the status quo, limits on-air diversity, and hinders efforts to make newsrooms more inclusive. Through in-depth interviews with journalists in broadcasting and podcasting

In Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Hannah Weaver examines the mediaeval practice of interpolation—inserting material from one text into another—which is often categorised as being a problematic, inauthentic phenomenon akin to forgery and pseudepigraphy. Instead, Weaver promotes interpolation as the signature form of mediaeval British historiography and a vehicle of historical theory, arguing that some of the most novel concepts of time in mediaeval historiography can be found in these altered narratives of the past. For Weaver, historiographical interpolation constitutes the traces of active experimentation with how best to write history, particularly the history of Britain. Historians in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Britain recognized the difficulty of enfolding complex events into a linear chronology and embraced innovative textual methods of creating history. Focusing on the Brut tradition but also analysing the long history of in

The British love to complain that words and phrases imported from America--from French fries to Awesome, man!--are destroying the English language. But what about the influence going the other way? Britishisms have been making their way into the American lexicon for more than 150 years, but the process has accelerated since the turn of the twenty-first century. From acclaimed writer and language commentator Ben Yagoda, Gobsmacked! is a witty, entertaining, and enlightening account of how and why scores of British words and phrases--such as one-off, go missing, curate, early days, kerfuffle, easy peasy, and cheeky--have been enthusiastically taken up by Yanks. After tracing Britishisms that entered the American vocabulary in the nineteenth century and during the world wars, Gobsmacked!: The British Invasion of American English (Princeton UP, 2024) discusses the most-used British terms in America today. It features chapters on the American embrace of British insults and curses, sports terms, and words about foo