New Books Network

A multimedia collection dedicated to John D. Smith on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, edited by Wendy J. Phillips Rodríguez and Simon Brodbeck.
Open Access here

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You Can See Everything is the new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of biotech startup Theranos, who was convicted of fraud and is currently serving a federal prison sentence. Or is it a work of performance art starring Nathan Fielder, the comedian behind Nathan for You, The Rehearsal, and The Curse? It's about truth, psychology, shame, simulacra, Silicon Valley, and a million other things besides. And we're going to get into it all.

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Dov Baron is also the author of Fiercely Loyal and One Red Thread. He’s one of the world’s foremost authorities on authentic leadership and cultural transformation. He’s been ranked among the top 30 Global Leadership Gurus and honored by Inc. magazine as one of the top 100 leadership speakers.
What do our formative years deliver each of us? The answer is an emotive “source code” that takes “hidden wounds” that magnifies them when we’re under stress on the job or elsewhere. What adds to workers’ stress? A pervasive feeling of loneliness created by circumstances in which people don’t feel like belong to an organization that cares about them. With compassion and eloquence, Dov Baron delves into everything from Vladimir Putin’s crippling lack of trust to Unilever’s success with purpose-driven training to lift employees’ intrinsic motivation in The Art of Belonging: How Conformity Silences Genius and How to Unleash It (Above the Noise, 2027). There’s even the bonus of learning what kind of music enthralls our guest, and why. Listening in here is, frankly, worth it even just for hearing Baron explain the dynamics of how stress is both helpful and not helpful in orchestrating change. Enjoy.
To learn more or contact Dov please visit his website here.
Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.comhttps://dovbaron.com/tag/belonging/

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In this episode, novelist Imbolo Mbue and critic Sarah Dimick dive into the literary ecosystem from an author’s perspective. Imbolo recalls her formative experiences in public libraries when she first emigrated from Cameroon to the United States, and how her encounters with American literature, especially Oprah’s Book Club picks, shaped her sense of literary possibility. Imbolo’s first novel, Behold the Dreamers, was itself an Oprah’s Book Club selection. In a conversation that moves across Imbolo’s career, from Behold the Dreamers to How Beautiful We Were to the newly released Every Story Is a Love Story, Imbolo and Sarah probe multiple dimensions of the literary ecosystem. They take up networks of literary production: how Imbolo writes both with and against readers’ expectations and desires; how her reading shapes her writing, particularly the memoirs of forgiveness (or the lack thereof) that informed Every Story Is a Love Story; the editorial pressures against which she has been glad to stand her ground, and the ones that have shaped her work for (in her assessment) the better, including a critical intervention from Random House’s Andy Ward that moved Every Story is a Love Story away from punishment and toward the urgent if unsexy problem of forgiveness. They also address what Sarah suggests is another unity across Imbolo’s fiction, in addition to a formal and thematic interest in aftermath: namely, the energy infrastructures—oil, transit, cars—that allow characters to move forward through the world even as they enact extractive harm.
Mentions:
Oprah's Book Club
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Chinua Achebe
Toni Morrison
Jonathan Franzen
Junot Díaz
Salman Rushdie's Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Michelle Obama's Becoming
Yiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely Grow
Roxane Gay, "Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof"
Random House's Andy Ward
Verdi’s Aida
Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me

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In the first half of the twentieth century, Asia's colonial trade, commerce, and enterprise pivoted on five cities- Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Calcutta, and Bombay. Today, among these, only Calcutta no longer plays a significant role in the Asian or global economy. Why? Agents of Inertia: Business, Urban Crisis, and Economic Decline in Twentieth-Century Calcutta (Cambridge UP, 2026) answers this question by investigating how Calcutta's British and Indian businesses have engaged with the city's infrastructural and economic challenges. It throws up a startling result: through the first seven decades of twentieth century, Calcutta's businesses, in contrast to their counterparts elsewhere, staunchly resisted several measures that intended to update and improve the city's infrastructure. It is this resistance, Agents of Inertia argues, that led to Calcutta's postcolonial urban crisis and contributed to capital- flight and economic decline. One of the first full-length monographs on Calcutta's postcolonial urban-economic decline, it shows how big businesses not only make but can also break a city's fortunes.

Gaurav C. Garg is a historian of modern South Asia, cities, mountains, and international development at Ashoka University, Delhi NCR.

Soumyadeep Guha is a fifth-year PhD student in the History Department at Binghamton University, New York. He is interested in historical research focusing on themes such as Agrarian/Environmental History, History of Science and Tech, Global History, and their intersections. His prospective dissertation questions are on the pre-history of the ‘Green Revolution’ in Eastern India.

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