Jacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media" (Basic Books, 2022)

Jacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from...

Up next

Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley et al. eds., "Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media" (Routledge, 2025)

Studying Chinese media has never been a stable intellectual enterprise. As Professor Yuezhi Zhao once observed, it often resembles aiming at a target that appears clear from a distance but becomes elusive on closer inspection. Over the past decade, that target has grown even more ...  Show more

Leslie James, "The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935-1960" (Harvard UP, 2025)

In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With small staffs and shoestring budgets, these newspapers nonetheless became powerful vehicles for the expre ...  Show more

Recommended Episodes

Pauline W. Chen, "Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality" (Vintage, 2008)
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

Too often keeping patients alive gets in the way of helping them as they approach death. Dr. Pauline Chen shares her experiences as a medical student and transplant surgeon and how they’ve shaped the way she practices medicine. Chen is the author of Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflec ...  Show more

What Reality TV Says About Us
New Books in Communications

Reality TV shapes and reflects how we see ourselves, and what we regard as normal. Professor Danielle J. Lindemann watched thousands of hours of reality tv to decode its influence on society. She joins us to discuss her book True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us (FSG, 2022). ...  Show more

Reality TV
New Books in Critical Theory

In this episode of High Theory, Olivia Stowell speaks with Saronik about Reality TV. In the episode she talks about the genesis of the genre in Candid Camera, An American Family, COPS and America’s Most Wanted, before the watershed moment of The Real World in the 1990s. She refer ...  Show more

Samantha Nogueira Joyce, "Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities" (Lexington Books, 2022)
New Books in Anthropology

In Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities (Lexington Books, 2022), Samantha Nogueira Joyce examines representations of Blackness on Brazilian TV, interrogating the role of mass media in developing racial equality and social change. Nogueira Joyc ...  Show more