Episodes

  • Keith Merith, "A Darker Shade of Blue: A Police Officer's Memoir" (ECW Press, 2024)

    Keith Merith, "A Darker Shade of Blue: A Police Officer's Memoir" (ECW Press, 2024)
    Jun 28 2025
    A transparent first-hand account of a Black officer maneuvering through three terrifying yet rewarding decades of policing, all while seeking reform in law enforcementWhen 16-year-old Keith Merith finds himself pulled over, berated, and degraded by a white police officer, he’s outraged. He’s done nothing wrong. But the officer has the power, and he doesn’t. From that day on, he vows to join a police service and effect change from within.Twelve years and a multitude of infuriating applications later, Merith is finally hired by York Regional Police. Subjected to unfair treatment and constant microaggressions, he perseveres and gradually rises through the ranks, his goal of systemic change carrying him through. After a stellar career, Merith retires at the rank of superintendent, but his desire for sustained and equitable reform is stronger than ever.In A Darker Shade of Blue: A Police Officer's Memoir (ECW Press, 2024), Merith shares both his gut-wrenching and heart-warming experiences and advocates for immediate police reform in a balanced and level-headed manner. He praises the people in blue, but he also knows on a visceral level that there are deep issues that need to be rectified — starting with recruitment. He knows that law enforcement agencies should reflect the communities they serve and protect, and that all citizens should be treated equally. Entrusted with the duty to serve, Merith delivers an evocative perspective of policing by providing the opportunity to walk in his shoes, as a Black man, and as a police officer on the front lines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 16 mins
  • Stacy Horn, "Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York" (Algonquin Books, 2019)

    Stacy Horn, "Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York" (Algonquin Books, 2019)
    Jun 27 2025
    Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, New York's Blackwell's Island, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals, quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, "a lounging, listless madhouse." Digging through city records, newspaper articles, and archival reports, Stacy Horn tells a gripping narrative through the voices of the island's inhabitants. We also hear from the era's officials, reformers, and journalists, including the celebrated undercover reporter Nellie Bly. And we follow the extraordinary Reverend William Glenney French as he ministers to Blackwell's residents, battles the bureaucratic mazes of the Department of Correction and a corrupt City Hall, testifies at salacious trials, and in his diary wonders about man's inhumanity to his fellow man. Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad and Criminal in 19th Century New York (Algonquin Books, 2019) shows how far we've come in caring for the least fortunate among us--and reminds us how much work still remains. Stacy Horn shows that in setting up institutions for the humane treatment of social outcasts, New York City was so quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers confined to the Insane Asylum, Workhouse, Almshouse, Penitentiary and Hospital, that what emerged was a veritable gulag on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island. Based on a careful reading of both remarkably candid official documents detailing widespread suffering and accounts by the intrepid undercover reporter Nellie Bly and the socially prominent Josephine Shaw Lowell, we come to appreciate the long shadow of history cast over the city’s remaining island of the damned—Rikers. James Wunsch is Emeritus Professor of Historical and Educational Studies at SUNY Empire State. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    34 mins
  • American Gangster

    American Gangster
    Jun 23 2025
    American Gangster (2007) is Ridley Scott’s homage to The French Connection: it’s got the right cars, clothes, and colors and is based on another true story of an obsessed cop trying to take down a drug kingpin. The feature (or the bug, depending on how you look at it) is Denzel Washington in the title role. Is an actor so charismatic that everyone talks as if they are on a first-name basis with him actually a liability in a movie that wants to tell a story of a large-scale heroin dealer who, in the movie’s first scene, burns a man alive? Can an actor’s star power ever backfire? John McCarty’s Bullets Over Hollywood (Grand Central Publishing, 2005) traces the gangster film and explores the enduring appeal of the genre. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on The New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    25 mins
  • Ben Snyder on Spy Plane: Inside Baltimore’s Surveillance Experiment

    Ben Snyder on Spy Plane: Inside Baltimore’s Surveillance Experiment
    Jun 16 2025
    In this 100th episode (!!!) of Peoples & Things, host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Benjamin H. Snyder, Associate Professor of Sociology at Williams College, about his recent book, Spy Plane: Inside Baltimore’s Surveillance Experiment (University of California Press, 2024). Spy Plane examines how the city of Baltimore, Maryland, came to adopt a corporate-run surveillance program using aerial surveillance planes that could supposedly photograph and track every person in public. Snyder bases his account on incredible access and direct observations inside the for-profit tech startup that ran the program. He also examines the complex reactions of community members in the neighborhoods that were surveilled and how the program eventually fell to pieces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Jeffrey P. Rogg, "The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Jeffrey P. Rogg, "The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Jun 9 2025
    Intelligence is all around us. We read about it in the news, wonder who is spying on us through our phones or computers, and want to know what is happening in the shadows. The US Intelligence Community or IC, as insiders call it, is more powerful than ever, but also more vulnerable than it has been in decades. It is facing the threat of rival intelligence services from countries like Russia and China while fighting to keep up with new technology and the private sector. Still, the IC's greatest struggle is always with the American people, who expect it to keep them safe but not at the cost of their liberty and principles. This foundational problem is at the center of The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2025). Based on original research and a new interpretation of US history, this masterful book offers a complete history of American intelligence from the Revolutionary War to the present day. Jeffrey Rogg explores the origins and evolution of intelligence in America, including its overlooked role in some of the key events that shaped the nation and the historical underpinnings of intelligence controversies that have shaken the country to its constitutional core. With the American public in mind, he introduces the concept of US civil-intelligence relations to explain the interaction between intelligence and the society it serves.While answering questions from the past, The Spy and the State poses new questions for the future that the United States must confront as intelligence gains ever greater importance in the twenty-first century. Jeffrey P. Rogg is Senior Research Fellow at the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida. He previously held academic positions at the Joint Special Operations University at US Special Operations Command, the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at The Citadel, and the National Security Affairs Department at the US Naval War College. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Brittany Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)

    Brittany Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)
    Jun 5 2025
    In Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, Dr. Brittany Friedman delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques—including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists—to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. Drawing from original interviews with founders of Black political movements such as the Black Guerilla Family, white supremacists, and a swath of little-known archival data, Dr. Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad. This episode considers: what the official records omit, how the questions we ask guide the answers we find, pattern mapping, racial categorization systems, surveillance mechanisms, the importance of outsider archives, protecting your sources, and why we need to awaken. Our guest is: Dr. Brittany Friedman, who is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast. Listeners may enjoy this playlist: The Social Constructions of Race Hands Up, Don't Shoot The Names of All the Flowers Freemans Challenge Stitching Freedom The Emerson Prison Initiative The Journal of Higher Education in Prison Education Behind The Wall Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help to support the show by posting about, downloading, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    51 mins
  • Daniel Karpowitz, "College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration" (Rutgers UP, 2017)

    Daniel Karpowitz, "College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration" (Rutgers UP, 2017)
    Jun 1 2025
    Over the years, American colleges and universities have made various efforts to provide prisoners with access to education. However, few of these outreach programs presume that incarcerated men and women can rise to the challenge of a truly rigorous college curriculum. The Bard Prison Initiative is different.In his book, College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Daniel Karpowitz chronicles how, since 2001, Bard College has provided hundreds of incarcerated men and women across the country access to a high-quality liberal arts education. Earning degrees in subjects ranging from Mandarin to advanced mathematics, graduates have, upon release, gone on to rewarding careers and elite graduate and professional programs. Yet this is more than just a story of exceptional individuals triumphing against the odds. It is a study in how the liberal arts can alter the landscape of some of our most important public institutions giving people from all walks of life a chance to enrich their minds and expand their opportunities.Drawing on fifteen years of experience as a director of and teacher within the Bard Prison Initiative, Daniel Karpowitz tells the story of BPI’s development from a small pilot project to a nationwide network. At the same time, he recounts dramatic scenes from in and around college-in-prison classrooms pinpointing the contested meanings that emerge in moments of highly-charged reading, writing, and public speaking. Through examining the transformative encounter between two characteristically American institutions—the undergraduate college and the modern penitentiary—College in Prison makes a powerful case for why liberal arts education is still vital to the future of democracy in the United States. Interviewee: Daniel Karpowitz has worked on public and private sector systems change for over twenty-five years. He is the former director of policy and academics for the Bard Prison Initiative and the cofounder of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, an organization that launches and cultivates college-in-prison programs across the country. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 17 mins
  • Jake Monaghan, "Just Policing" (Oxford UP, 2023)

    Jake Monaghan, "Just Policing" (Oxford UP, 2023)
    May 8 2025
    Policing is a source of perennial conflict and philosophical disagreement. Current political developments in the United States have only increased the urgency of this topic. Today we welcome philosopher Jake Monaghan to discuss his book, Just Policing (Oxford UP, 2023), which applies interdisciplinary insights to examine the morality of policing. Though the injustices of our world seemingly require some kind of policing, the police are often sources of injustice themselves. But this is not always the result of intentionally or negligently bad policing. Sometimes it is an unavoidable result of the injustices that emerge from interactions with other social systems. This raises an important question of just policing: how should police respond to the injustices built into the system? Just Policing attempts an answer, offering a theory of just policing in non-ideal contexts. Monaghan argues that police discretion is not only unavoidable, but in light of non-ideal circumstances, valuable. This claim conflicts with a widespread but inchoate view of just policing, the legalist view that finds justice in faithful enforcement of the criminal code. But the criminal code leaves policing seriously underdetermined; full enforcement is neither possible nor desirable. Police need an alternative normative framework for evaluating and guiding their exercise of power. Just Policing critiques popular approaches to police abolitionism while defending normative limits on police power. The book offers a defense of police discretion against common objections and evaluates controversial issues in order maintenance, such as the policing of "vice" and homelessness, democratic control over policing, community policing initiatives, police collaborations and alternatives like mental health response teams, and possibilities for structural reform. Jake Monaghan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Buffalo. His research is primarily in moral and political philosophy. He is interviewed by Tom McInerney, an international lawyer, scholar, and strategist, who has worked to advance rule of law and development internationally for 25 years. He has taught in the Rule of Law for Development Program at Loyola University Chicago School of Law since 2011. He writes the Rights, Regulation and Rule of Law newsletter on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 4 mins