In Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Crown, 2023), anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks…
Today I spoke with Lesley Nicole Braun to talk about her new book on Congo’s dancers. Dance music plays a central role in the cultural, social, religious, and family…
On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo (Duke University Press, 2025) by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereign futures for those…
Hans Van Eyghen’s book The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs (Routledge, 2023) assesses whether belief in spirits is epistemically justified. It presents two arguments in support of the existence of spirits…
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…
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…
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…
The Caribbean port city of Veracruz is many things. It is where the Spanish first settled and last left the colony that would go on to become Mexico.…
While humanitarian organizations and media outlets often reduce Syrian refugees to statistics or brief anecdotes, the real story of displacement unfolds in the intimate spaces of family life.…
Borrowing from the traditional alphabet book genre for children, An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World with Eyes Closed (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Sharon Sliwinski provides adult…
A digital world in relentless movement—from artificial intelligence to ubiquitous computing—has been captured and reinvented as a monoculture by Silicon Valley “big tech” and venture capital firms. Yet…
In Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street (U California Press, 2022) Megan Tobias Neely, a former hedge fund worker takes an ethnographic approach to hedge funds. Manager? A greedy…
Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet (Cornell University Press, 2025) concerns the Tibetan Buddhist revival in China, illustrating the lives of…
For as long as cats have coexisted with humans, they have been feared, revered and respected. They appear as dynamic hunters in Palaeolithic carvings and cave paintings; were…
“Create A More Positive Rehoboth” was a decades-long goal for progress and inclusiveness in a charming beach town in southern Delaware. Rehoboth, which was established in the 19th…
In today’s episode, we talk to Tom Bratrud about his ongoing, long-term work with city-dwellers who migrate to rural parts of Norway. This research forms the basis of Tom’s forthcoming…
Centering collaborations and frictions around a Japanese town’s pottery industry, Crafting Rural Japan: Traditional Potters and Rural Creativity in Regional Revitalization (Routledge, 2024)n discusses the place of creative village policy in…
Renovation, an urban renewal plan in Moscow that was announced in the spring of 2017, proposed to demolish thousands of socialist-era apartment buildings. In a country where it…
The Babushka Phenomenon: Older Women and the Political Sociology of Ageing in Russia (UCL Press, 2025) by Dr. Anna Shadrina examines the social production of ageing in post-Soviet Russia,…
Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas (U Michigan Press, 2024) offers a new lens for examining diaspora and borderlands texts and performances that considers the inseparability of…
Hailed in the New York Times as “a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler,” Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a…
The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere (U Nebraska Press, 2021) is a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the…
We the Young Fighters: Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone (U Georgia Press, 2023) by Dr. Marc Sommers is at once a history of a nation, the…
Grave (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Allison C. Meier takes a ground-level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and how they continue to change. As a cemetery tour…