Princeton UP Ideas Podcast

The world has changed dramatically in just the past few years and so has negotiation. Traditional negotiating tactics, while still effective, need to be
tailored to vastly different situations and circumstances. In Negotiation: The Game Has Changed (Princeton University Press, 2025), Harvard Business School professor Max H. Bazerman,
a legendary pioneer in the field of negotiation, shows how to negotiate
effectively today by adapting proven negotiation principles and
strategies to challenging new contexts. Negotiation is a fundamentally new way of thinking about the importance of context in negotiation.

Julia Azari, Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, has a new, award-winning[*] book centering on the connection between race and the American presidency, specifically in the reaction to presidents who made progress on the issue of race in the United States. Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History focuses on four different periods in American political history and a number of different presidential administrations including: Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump. Race and the American presidency are not usually topics that are looped together, and this is also part of the point that Azari is making in the book, since presidents often try to elide racial politics and policy issues. Race is also not usually connected to presidential impeachments, but this is yet another key point that Azari raises, connecting racial progress, the backlash responses, and the subsequent impeachments. In noting these connections, Azari threads examples over time where presidents directly confronted race in American politics, working towards more racial equality, and how these efforts also prompt a backlash response. The key case studies in Backlash Presidents are Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War in the 1860s, Lyndon Johnson’s efforts in the 1960s in regard to the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, as well as anti-poverty legislation, and finally Barack Obama as the first Black president of the United States, which was both symbolic and structural. Backlash Presidents traces not only the progress made during these administrations, but also the responses that followed in the subsequent administrations. It is these next administrations, of Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump, where each of these presidents were either impeached or were about to be impeached, and how this dynamic pulls together a variety of different threads to help us to understand presidential politics, institutional development, and American political history all in context of the question of race.

Azari’s research is connected to the idea of political time, but with the important addition of pulling out the problem of race in the United States. Backlash Presidents contributes to our thinking about not only the time and context of presidents and their administrations, but also to thinking about what it is that presidents do to politics itself. Part of this analysis also interrogates populism, positioning these movements within the context of racial backlash, while also building out the understanding of the president’s position within his own party, especially during these fraught periods. In each of the key examples, Azari highlights the ways in which Johnson, Nixon, and Trump were outsiders to what was going on inside their parties—in each case the Republican Party at the time—and how these shifting partisan foundations opened up different kinds of vulnerabilities for these presidents.

In each of the case studies, there is also the discussion of the role that the U.S. Congress plays, since they are the actors who move towards impeaching and trying the president. Members of the House of Representatives need to move beyond constraints in order to impeach a president, and in these instances, they have concluded that the president is not correct in some basic and meaningful way, that the president is not upholding his oath of office, and is also undermining the forward movement on race and racial equality.

Backlash Presidents: From Transformation to Reactionary Leaders in American History is a deeply researched analysis, with important historical context and details to help flesh out the particular time period under consideration. The examination is further complicated and built out with important understandings of party politics in the United States, and how president fits into their political party, or may be seen as an outsider. Racial dynamics in the United States undergirds the entire theory, and helps us see the tensions within partisan politics, presidential politics, and American democracy.

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

[*] The Presidents and Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association awarded Backlash Presidents the 2025 Richard E. Neustadt Best Book Award, given for the best book on executive politics published during the year.

In this interview, we speak with Laura B. McGrath, an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University and the author of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (Princeton University Press, 2026). Her writings have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Atlantic.

Middlemen rewrites
literary history from the perspective of one of its most important but
least visible figures: the literary agent. Chronicling the story of
agents in the United States from the 1950s to today, Laura McGrath
uncovers their critical role in the making of American literature. From
the famed three-martini lunch to the Frankfurt Book Fair, Middlemen
takes readers behind the scenes to show how agents influence what we
read. Along the way, it explains why many debut novelists never publish
another book, why agents champion short story collections even though
they sell poorly, how agents advocate for writers of color in a system
that values whiteness, and why there are so many New York novels.

Weaving
together original archival research, data analysis, and interviews with
scores of agents and other publishing professionals, Middlemen demonstrates
that agents—eighty percent of whom are in fact women—are much more than
“middlemen.” As intermediaries between author and publisher, agents act
as advocates, matchmakers, negotiators, and tastemakers, and they must
balance artistic values with the commercial imperatives of publishing
conglomerates. The book describes the decisive role agents have played
in celebrated novels—from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist—but
also in the creation of entire literary categories like the debut
novel, the story collection, postmodernism, multiethnic fiction, and
world literature.

Featuring profiles of agents past and present
such as Sterling Lord, Lynn Nesbit, Candida Donadio, Marie Brown, and
Andrew Wylie, along with perspectives from agents at all stages of their
careers, Middlemen is an entertaining and eye-opening account of how literary fiction—and the literary canon—is made.

All of life is profoundly shaped by the daily, monthly, and yearly cycles of our planet, and all creatures have internal timekeeping systems that rely on cues from the surrounding environment. With modern technology, we are changing our environments—and by proxy, the ecosystems around us—to override these innate rhythms of life. But at what cost? Life in Sync: The Science of Internal Clocks and How We're Disrupting Them (Princeton University Press, 2025) reveals how Earth’s rotations shape our biology, what human sleep cycles looked like before the advent of artificial light, and why technology can’t free us from the constraints of our circadian clocks.

Philippa Gander explores the science behind the biological rhythms that animate us and our world, blending captivating storytelling with illuminating examples ranging from migratory birds and hibernating squirrels to jet-lagged pilots and astronauts in space. She shows how genetic circadian clocks are an ancient evolutionary adaptation that we share with all life on the planet, and how our rapidly expanding use of artificial light at night disrupts the time cues for entire ecosystems. Gander explains why cutting back on sleep adversely affects our well-being, safety, and longevity, and how breakthroughs in sleep science offer solutions to bring our lives more in harmony with nature’s rhythms.

An astonishing journey of scientific discovery, Life in Sync unlocks the mysteries of biological time—and offers new perspectives for anyone who has ever given up a good night’s sleep for the sake of their hectic waking hours.

What has happened to Britain? As drivers on its roads can attest, it
is the pothole capital of Europe. Once-beautiful towns now feature
peeling paint, weeds, and broken railings. Public services are no longer
fit for purpose. A malaise seems to infect every aspect of British
life: its economy, polity, social order, sense of well-being, domestic
regional relationships, and place in the world. In The Land Where Nothing Works: How Britain Lost the Plot (Princeton
University Press, 2026), the distinguished historian A. G. Hopkins
offers an explanation, tracing Britain’s current problems to decisions
made in the 1980s that abandoned its postwar experiment in social
democracy and mimicked policies of deregulation and privatisation
promoted by the United States.

In 1945, the new Labour
government’s development programme aimed at creating a social democracy
that would benefit all members of society. The counterrevolution
launched by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979, which remains in
force today, promoted individualism and deregulation. The transition
from one programme to another was a response to the growth of finance
and services centred on the City of London, and to decolonisation, which
redirected trade to Europe. The expansion of credit led to the
financial crisis of 2008 and the years of austerity that followed, and
fuelled the populist movement that culminated in Brexit. Hopkins argues
that, instead of following the free-market policies of its mentor, the
United States, Britain should draw on its own history of social
democracy and borrow from its neighbours in Europe, where communitarian
principles continue to be upheld.