The University of Chicago Press Podcast

By: New Books Network
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  • Summary

  • Interviews with authors of University of Chicago Press books.
    New Books Network
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Art Literary History & Criticism World
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Episodes
  • David Shoemaker, "Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    David Shoemaker, "Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Nov 13 2024
    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 sometimes unwarranted the moral complaints against humor are, despite what many may think. Wisecracks may remain, at the book's end, far from benign or an unalloyed good, but unlike in Plato's ideal republic, Shoemaker is convinced we need to keep them coming. Damian Maher is a fellow by examination at All Souls College, University of Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    54 mins
  • Anthony Grasso, "Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Anthony Grasso, "Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Nov 11 2024
    The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet the U.S. has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. This disjuncture between the treatment of street and corporate crime is often narrated as hypocrisy. Others suggest that the disparity is rooted in a conservative backlash after the civil rights movement and the Great Society or a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the racialization of crime. In Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime (U Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Anthony Grasso interrogates the intertwined histories of street and corporate crime to find that the differences in punishment are more than modern hypocrisy. Examining the carceral and regulatory states' evolutions from 1870 through today, Grasso argues that divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference such as eugenics to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct. Even after eugenics was discredited, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Using an impressive array of sources and methods, Dr. Grasso analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America's legal system. Dr. Anthony Grasso is an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University Camden. His research focuses on American political development, law, and inequality. Mentioned: Susan’s interview with Dr. Joanna Wuest on Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (Beard Books, 1989) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    58 mins
  • Simeon Koole, "Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Simeon Koole, "Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Nov 4 2024
    When, where, and who gets to touch and be touched, and who decides? What do we learn through touch? How does touch bring us closer together or push us apart? These are urgent contemporary questions, but they have their origins in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, when new urban encounters compelled intense discussion of what touch was, and why it mattered. In this vividly written book, Simeon Koole excavates the history of these concerns and reveals how they continue to shape ideas about “touch” in the present. Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age (U Chicago Press, 2024) takes us to the bustling railway stations, shady massage parlors, all-night coffee stalls, and other shared spaces where passengers, customers, vagrants, and others came into contact, leading to new understandings of touch. We travel in crammed subway cars, where strangers negotiated the boundaries of personal space. We visit tea shops where waitresses made difficult choices about autonomy and consent. We enter classrooms in which teachers wondered whether blind children could truly grasp the world and labs in which neurologists experimented on themselves and others to unlock the secrets of touch. We tiptoe through London’s ink-black fogs, in which disoriented travelers became newly conscious of their bodies and feared being accosted by criminals. Across myriad forgotten encounters such as these, Koole shows, touch remade what it meant to be embodied—as well as the meanings of disability, personal boundaries, and scientific knowledge. With imagination and verve, Intimate Subjects offers a new way of theorizing the body and the senses, as well as a new way of thinking about embodiment and vulnerability today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Thomas J. Sojka, Lecturer in History at Southern New Hampshire University. He is currently writing a book about elite social life in interwar Britain. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as the Journal of British Studies, Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    32 mins

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