New Books Network

The idea of civility goes back to classical Rome and the ways in
which citizens engaged one another within the republic. The term itself
is often used in a number of different ways, reflecting expected
behavior, particularly in public spaces, and as a mechanism to manage
human interaction. But civility and the use of this idea often shape
hierarchical relationships within society and within politics and may
define who is to be included within the polis and who may be excluded.
Thus, the conversations that led to the new book, Civility Unbound: Contesting a Democratic Value,
interrogated the idea of civility in many of its facets and did not
necessarily settle on a simple definition or means of implementing
civility within contemporary society. Michael DiNiscia, Director of
Research and Strategic Initiatives at New York University’s Brademas
Center, and Ellyn Toscano, Director of the Hawthorndon Foundation,
edited this valuable exploration of the idea of civility within
democracy. In so doing, they brought together academics, politicians and
former politicians, activists, artists, and individuals from the
foundation world to discuss this controversial idea of civility,
unpacking the term, the way it is used, and how society may consider
civility within the realm of politics and public life.

I had the pleasure of discussing Civility Unbound
with Michael DiNiscia and Hussein Rashid, one of the contributing
authors. Our conversation covered the content of the book, tracing the
sections that include philosophy and political theory, democratic
institutions and politics, social justice and protest, media engagement,
and lessons from arts and culture. The chapters are fascinating and
accessible. As a reader, you feel as though you are part of the ongoing
conversation with the various authors, since the chapters are in
dialogue with each other and with the reader, without coming to a
consensus on the role and capacity of civility within democratic society
but with many paths to consider. The impetus for this book, and for
focusing on the idea of civility, grew out of the events of January 6,
2021, and an overarching question about whether the United States could
return to a state of civility in our politics, after we had witnessed
the violent insurrection that attempted to stymie the constitutional
process of tallying Electoral College votes. Civility Unbound: Contesting a Democratic Value brings many voices together to, in a way, respond to this violence, this incivility that had been demonstrated by a group of American
citizens.

The various contributing authors to Civility Unbound
take up the theory and practice of civility, trying to determine what it
actually means and the rules around civility and political engagement.
Across the chapters we find that there is a paradox around civility,
around who is asked to “remain civil” and who gets to define what
civility means. Civility may well reside within power relationships and
dynamics, with rules applied to some groups or individuals and not to
others. Invoking civility may well surface inequalities and the unequal
places and footing of those engaging in politics and society. This is
particularly important to consider in context of American democracy, and
the unequal distribution of power and state violence inherent in the
American state. Civility Unbound: Contesting a Democratic Value prompts the reader to consider how democratic engagement works and how we are to participate in attempts at self-rule.

We discussed the First America podcast during the conversation. Here is a link to the podcast website: First America Podcast

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics
(University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social
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What do the people closest to power really think about the system they serve? That’s perhaps one of the most important questions one could ask about North Korea, still one of the world’s least understood countries.

Today, we’re joined by Jieun Baek, author of Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness (Yale UP, 2026). She draws on in-depth interviews with North Korean elite escapees—from senior party cadres and diplomats to military officers and wealthy, politically connected figures—to explore a group often assumed to be secure, influential, and loyal.

She finds that even those with access to better housing, education, overseas postings, and material comforts remain subject to a political system in which one misstep can have devastating consequences—not only for themselves, but for their families. We talk about what it means to be an elite in North Korea, why some people defect while others stay, and what elite grievances can and can’t tell us about the country’s future.

Jieun Baek is an author and scholar specializing in authoritarian governance, regime stability, elite political behavior, and information access in closed societies, with a particular focus on North Korea and Burma. Her research draws on more than fifteen years of fieldwork and sustained engagement with hard-to-reach populations, including defectors, dissidents, diplomats, former officials, and individuals operating within and across tightly controlled political systems. She is also the author of North Korea’s Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society (Yale University Press: 2016).

She can be found on LinkedIn and Instagram.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Privileged But Powerless. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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Stephen Lee Naish's Point Break: Movies Minute by Minute (Bloomsbury,
2026), in Bloomsbury's Timecodes Series, is a detailed,
minute-by-minute critical exploration of Kathryn Bigelow's 1991 action
film "Point Break". Moving sequentially through the film's two-hour
runtime, the book blends formal analysis, cultural history and theory,
action genre study, and personal reflection and interpretation. It
positions Point Break as both a quintessential action spectacle and a
film layered with thematic tensions: masculinity, spirituality,
individual risk, personal freedom, environmental awareness, and the
search for one's identity. Each minute of the film is treated as a
self-contained unit. The cinematography, editing, sound design,
performances, and narrative beats are discussed in relation to broader
social contexts including surfing subculture, mid-to-late-20th-century
American politics, post-Vietnam War attitudes, and the evolving media
images of Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. Drawing on a wide array of
sources, such as film theory, cultural criticism, and surf memoirs, the
book reframes "Point Break" as not merely an adrenaline-driven thriller,
but as a work rich in symbolism, mythology, homoerotic desires, and
philosophical inquiry. This approach reveals how Bigelow crafts a
kinetic, expressive cinema where bodies, landscapes, and motion collide,
and how the film's characters operate within intersecting personal,
cultural, and ideological currents. The result is a hybrid of
scholarship and creative writing that reanimates the film by slowing it
down, revealing layers of meaning often obscured by its velocity.
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Can laws be unjust and yet remain, in some sense, morally legitimate? In Political Philosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice (Princeton UP, 2026), Jonathan Quong considers central issues in political philosophy through the lens of this single question. He explores and evaluates recent influential work on this topic and then proposes a novel approach of his own. The puzzle at the heart of his account is the phenomenon of legitimate injustice—laws and policies that are substantively unjust yet may be legitimately imposed by government officials. How can such laws be legitimate if, as some have argued, justice is the first virtue of social institutions?

Quong analyzes the work of those who deny that injustice committed by states can be legitimate simply by virtue of its democratic or procedural pedigree; the Kantian account of legitimate institutions and justice; instrumental approaches to political legitimacy; and the recent wave of work in democratic theory focused on its egalitarian character. Arguing that these analyses do not offer an adequate solution to the puzzle and that there are compelling reasons to revise or reject them, Quong lays out his view and explains the implications for more general theories of political morality. He argues that we can explain legitimate injustice by appeal to distributive justice. If political disagreement is inevitable, then unjust legislation is largely unavoidable; it constitutes a burden that must be distributed according to just principles. Quong’s novel and illuminating framework offers a unique introduction to crucial questions in political philosophy.
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Elisa Tamarkin, an English prof of high repute (Anglophilia and Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance) at UC Berkeley, joins RTB to discuss Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon. It is an extended reflection on the last day of the Vietnam War, set against the imminent disappearance of war coverage in the nation’s city newspapers, and framed through her own stepfather's experience covering the war.

Tamarkin anatomizes curious forms of self-delusion that flourished in the American Me generation and traces the subtle trajectory that stretching from the journalistic autonomy of the mid-century to the "embedded reporters" of the US war in Iraq to today's implacable governmental hostility to truthful reportage. Back in the 1960's Hannah Arendt and others warned that bubbles of non-information and delusive self-deceit got propagated within the corridors of power and out in the larger public realm. Now cloudy misinformation is the property of a near-ubiquitous social media realm whose corrosive effect (the power to unthink) is far less circumscribed.

Mentioned

Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics" (subject of an earlier RTB episode) and "Home To Roost".

Frank Kermode Sense of an Ending (1967).

The philosopher John Pollock published a book called Knowledge and Justification in 1975.

Jamie Cohen-Cole The Open Mind

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973).

Ursula Le Guin The Lathe of Heaven 1971 (Elisa also mentions John's book on Le Guin).

R. A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome (1971).

Thomas Harris, I'm OK, You're OK (1967).

Recallable Books:

Adam Phillips, On Giving Up.

Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955).

Read the transcript of the episode here.
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