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The University of Chicago Press Podcast

The University of Chicago Press Podcast

Auteur(s): New Books Network
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 Interviews with authors of University of Chicago Press books.New Books Network Art Monde
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  • Dan Davies, "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

    Dan Davies, "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)
    Sep 1 2025
    For this episode of Liminal Library, I interviewed Dan Davies about The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind (U Chicago Press, 2025). Davies examines how we've systematically engineered responsibility out of our institutions, creating a world where major decisions happen without clear human accountability. Davies draws on Stafford Beer's cybernetics to explain how modern organizations function as systems with their own patterns and responses. As he puts it, "the system is not conscious and so does not have incentives, but it has consistent patterns of response to stimuli." This isn't about individual moral failures – it's about the industrialization of decision-making itself. We've moved from Harry Truman's "The Buck Stops Here" to complex processes and standardized criteria that diffuse responsibility across multiple layers. When things go wrong – financial crises, environmental failures, social breakdowns – no single person can be held accountable because no single person actually made the decision. Davies traces this transformation through three revolutions: the managerial revolution that shifted control from owners to professional administrators, the cybernetic revolution that offered tools to understand these systems but never fully materialized, and the neoliberal revolution that reshaped society while ignoring that increasingly, systems rather than people make the decisions affecting our lives. These accountability machines, as Davies calls them, operate according to their own logic and constraints. Understanding them is essential for grasping why institutional failures seem both inevitable and impossible to prevent within our current frameworks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    53 min
  • Lucy Delap, "Feminisms: A Global History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

    Lucy Delap, "Feminisms: A Global History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
    Aug 31 2025
    Today Jana Byars talks to Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University, about her new book Feminisms: A Global History (University of Chicago Press, 2020). This outstanding work, available later this year, takes a thematic approach to the topic of global feminist history to provide a unified vision that maintains appropriate nuance. Delap is a gender historian, writ large. Her first book, The Feminist Avant Garde (Cambridge 2007), examined the development of feminism in the Anglo-American context, tracing the ideas as developed in trans-Atlantic discourse. She then directed her gaze back to her homeland in subsequent publications, including Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford 2011) and the 2013 Palgrave release, Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Britain since 1890, Delap explore another expression of gender altogether. The breadth of her scholarship – women and men, intellectual elites and domestic servants, adults and children – prepared her to write this broad but fairly concise work of history. Enjoy our lively discussion! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 min
  • Daniel Wortel-London, "The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

    Daniel Wortel-London, "The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)
    Aug 30 2025
    Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: what’s good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances depend on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments lavish public subsidies on their behalf. Whatever form this strategy takes—tax-exempt apartments, corporate incentives, debt-financed mega projects—its rationale remains consistent and assumed to be true. But this wasn’t always the case. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, a wide range of activists, citizens, and intellectuals in New York City connected local fiscal crises to the greed and waste of the rich. These figures saw other routes to development, possibilities rooted in alternate ideas about what was fiscally viable. In The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981 (U of Chicago Press, 2025), Daniel Wortel-London argues that urban economics and politics are shaped by what he terms the “fiscal imagination” of policymakers, activists, advocates, and other figures. His survey of New York City during a period of explosive growth shows how residents went beyond the limits of redistributive liberalism to imagine how their communities could become economically viable without the largesse of the wealthy. Their strategies—which included cooperatives, public housing, land value taxation, public utilities, and more—centered the needs and capabilities of ordinary residents as the basis for local economies that were both prosperous and just. Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) holds an MPhil in intellectual history from the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    30 min
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