Today I spoke with Lesley Nicole Braun to talk about her new book on Congo's dancers. Dance music plays a central role in the cultural, social, religious, and family lives of the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Among the various genres popular in the capital city of Kinshasa, Congolese rumba occupies a special place and can be counted as one of the DRC’s most well-known cultural exports. The public image of rumba was historically dominated by male bandleaders, singers, and musicians. However, with the introduction of the danseuse (professional concert dancer) in the late 1970s, the role of women as cultural, moral, and economic actors came into public prominence and helped further raise Congolese rumba’s international profile. In Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa (U Wisconsin Press, 2023), Lesley Nicole Braun uses the prism of the Congolese danseuse to examine the politics of control and the ways in which notions of visibility, virtue, and socio-economic opportunity are interlinked in this urban African context. The work of the danseuse highlights the fact that public visibility is necessary to build the social networks required for economic independence, even as this visibility invites social opprobrium for women. The concert dancer therefore exemplifies many of the challenges that women face in Kinshasa as they navigate the public sphere, and she illustrates the gendered differences of local patronage politics that shape public morality. As an ethnographer, Braun had unusual access to the world she documents, having been invited to participate as a concert dancer herself. Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

In 1956, Alfred Hitchcock focused his lens on an issue that cuts to the heart of our criminal justice system: the risk of wrongful conviction. The result was The Wrong Man, a bracing drama based on the real-life false arrest of Queens musician Christopher “Manny” Balestrero. Manny's ordeal is part of a larger story of other miscarriages of justice in the first half of the twentieth century.  In Nothing to Fear: Alfred Hitchcock and the Wrong Men (Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2023), attorney Jason Isralowitz tells this story in a revelatory book that situates both the Balestrero case and its cinematic counterpart in their historical context. Drawing from archival records, Isralowitz delivers a gripping account of Manny’ s trial and new insights into an errant prosecution. He then examines how Hitchcock’ s film bears witness to issues that animate the contemporary innocence movement. Given the hundreds of exonerations of the wrongfully convicted in recent years, this genre-bending work of true crime and film history is a must-read. Jason Isralowitz is a partner in the New York office of Hogan Lovells. A Queens native, Jason graduated from Boston University’s College of Communication with a bachelor’s in journalism and holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has practiced law in Manhattan since 1993. Jason lives in Summit, New Jersey with his wife, Jennifer. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes, and in doing so, held to a belief system that, during the civil rights movement, modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true that it took Brubeck, like others, some time to understand the full spectrum of racial power dynamics at play in post-WWII, early Cold War, and civil rights-era America. Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness (Oxford UP, 2023) uses Brubeck's performances of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand the ways in which whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy more fully manifested in mid-century America. How is whiteness performed and re-performed? How do particular traits become inscribed with whiteness, and further, how do those traits, now racialized in a listener's mind, filter the sounds a listener hears? To what extent was Brubeck's whiteness made by others? How did audiences and critics use Brubeck to craft their own identities centered in whiteness? Drawing on archival records, recordings, and previously conducted interviews, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness listens closely for the complex and shifting frames of mid-century whiteness, and how they shaped the experiences of Brubeck's critics, audiences, and Brubeck himself. Throughout, author Kelsey Klotz asks what happens when a musician tries to intervene, using his privilege as a tool with which to disrupt structures of white supremacy, even as whiteness continues to retain its hold on its beneficiaries. Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Drawing on memory studies and theatrical history, Commemorative Acts: French Theatre and the Memory of the Great War (University of Toronto Press, 2025) analyses a neglected body of plays staged in France after the Great War, between 1918 and 1937, to reveal their profound impact on collective memory and cultural identity. In the aftermath of the Great War, a remarkable wave of collective commemoration emerged, but the aesthetic diversity of this period has often been overshadowed by a singular focus on the combatant experience, primarily conveyed through fiction and memoir. This selective historical narrative has fostered a homogenized memory of the war, neglecting the rich array of cultural productions that also emerged alongside it. Commemorative Acts challenges these prevailing assumptions about the memory of the Great War and its literary expression in interwar France by spotlighting theatrical works that have largely been forgotten. The book uncovers how the dominance of first-person accounts of soldiers’ experiences has subtly, yet powerfully, narrowed our understanding of what the memory of the Great War can encompass. It explores how drama, structurally at odds with the first-person perspective and defined by its simultaneous modes of expression and reception, has been lost to collective memory. By examining the unique capacity of the dramatic form to capture war trauma, Commemorative Acts offers insights that differ from those of other literary genres, highlighting the theatre’s potential to provide a more expansive and nuanced understanding of interwar memorial culture. Author Susan McCready is Professor of French at the University of South Alabama and the co-director for the Center for the Study of War and Memory at South Alabama; she is also the author of 2016’s Staging France between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon and 2007’s The Limits of Performance in the French Romantic Theatre, as well as the co-editor of Novel Stages: Drama and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France in 2007. She has also co-edited a volume of Lingua Romana on France and Memory in the Great War, and has authored many academic articles and chapters on French theater and related topics, as well as a number of public humanities projects on war and memory.  Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan  France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

In 1966 Stanley Kubrick told a friend that he wanted to make “the world’s scariest movie.” A decade later Stephen King’s The Shining landed on the director’s desk, and a visual masterpiece was born. J. W. Rinzler and Lee Unkrich's book Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (Taschen, 2023) is the definitive compendium of the film that transformed the horror genre features hundreds of never-before-seen photographs, rare production ephemera from the Kubrick Archive, and extensive new interviews with the cast and crew. Nathan Abrams is a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales. His most recent work is on film director Stanley Kubrick. To discuss and propose a book for interview you can reach him at n.abrams@bangor.ac.uk. Twitter: @ndabrams Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Addressing the relationship between law and the visual, this book examines the importance of photography in Central, East, and Southeast European show trials. The dispensation of justice during communist rule in Albania, East Germany, and Poland was reliant on legal propaganda, making the visual a fundamental part of the legitimacy of the law. Analysing photographs of trials, Agata Fijalkowski's Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial (Routledge, 2023) examines how this message was conveyed to audiences watching and participating in the spectacle of show trials. The book traces how this use of the visual was exported from the Soviet Union and imposed upon its satellite states in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It shows how the legal actors and political authorities embraced new photographic technologies to advance their legal propaganda and legal photography. Drawing on contemporary theoretical work in the area, the book then challenges straightforward accounts of the relationship between law and the visual, critically engaging entrenched legal historical narratives, in relation to three different protagonists, to offer the possibility of reclaiming and rewriting past accounts. As its analysis demonstrates, the power of images can also be subversive; and, as such, the cases it addresses contribute to the discourse on visual epistemology and open onto contemporary questions about law and its inherent performativity. Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession in the School of Law at the University of Leeds, and a former barrister and UN war crimes prosecutor, with teaching and research interests in international criminal law, cause lawyering and the legal profession, and law and emotion. Twitter: @batesmith. LinkedIn.  His recent publications include: “‘Poetic Justice Products’: International Justice, Victim Counter-Aesthetics, and the Spectre of the Show Trial” in Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Rob Knox (eds) Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice (Counterpress, forthcoming 2023, ISBN 978-1-910761-17-5) "Lawyers who want to make the world a better place – Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering" in D. Newman (ed.) Leading Works on the Legal Profession (Routledge, July 2023), ISBN 978-1-032182-80-3) “International Prosecutors as Cause Lawyers" (2021) Journal of International Criminal Justice 19(4) 803-830 (ISSN 1478-1387) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of the best-loved films of Classical Hollywood cinema, a story of despair and redemption in the aftermath of war that is one of the central movies of the 1940s, and a key text in America's understanding of itself. This is a film that remains relevant to our own anxieties and yearnings, to all the contradictions of ordinary life, while also enacting for us the quintessence of the classic Hollywood aesthetic. Nostalgia, humour, and a tough resilience weave themselves through this movie, intertwining it with the fraught cultural moment of the end of World War II that saw its birth. It offers a still compelling merging of fantasy and realism that was utterly unique when it was first released, and has rarely been matched since. Michael Newton's study of the film, It's a Wonderful Life (British Film Institute, 2023), investigates the source of its extraordinary power and its long-lasting impact. He begins by introducing the key figures in the movie's production - notably director Frank Capra and star James Stewart - and traces the making of the film, and then provides a brief synopsis of the film, considering its aesthetic processes and procedures, touching on all those things that make it such an astonishing film. Newton's careful analysis explores all those aspects of the film that are fundamental to our understanding of it, particularly the way in which the film brings tragedy and comedy together. Finally, Newton tells the story of the film's reception and afterlife, accounting for its initial relative failure and its subsequent immense popularity. Michael Newton is Lecturer in English at Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002), Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981 (2012), and of Kind Hearts and Coronets (2003) and Rosemary's Baby (2020) in the BFI Film Classics series. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) has long been recognized as one of the seminal films of the sixties, with its revisionary mix of genres including neo-noir, New Wave, and spaghetti western. Its lasting influence can be traced throughout the decades in films like Mean Streets (1973), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Heat (1995), The Limey (1999) and Memento (2000). Eric Wilson's compelling study Point Blank (British Film Institute, 2023) examines its significance to New Hollywood cinema. He argues that Boorman revises traditional Hollywood crime films by probing a second connotation of “point blank.” On the one hand, it is a neo-noir that aptly depicts close range violence, but, it also points toward blankness, a nothingness that is the consequence of corporate America unchecked, where humans are reduced to commodities and stripped of agency and playfulness. He goes on to reimagine the film's experimental style as a representation of and possible remedy for trauma. Examining Boorman's formal innovations, including his favoring of gesture over language and blurring of boundaries between dream and reality, he also positions the film as a grimly comical exploration of toxic masculinity and gender fluidity. Wilson's close reading of Point Blank reveals it to be a film that innovatively inflects its own generation and speaks powerfully to our own, arguing that it is this amplitude, which encompasses the many major films it has influenced, that qualifies the film as a classic. Eric Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University, USA. His publications include Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film (2006) and The Strange World of David Lynch: Transcendental Irony from Eraserhead to Mulholland Dr (2007). His writing has featured in Psychology Today, L.A. Times, The New York Times and Huffington Post. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Sean Minogue about this play, Prodigals (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2025). When a big-city dreamer from a small northern Ontario city returns to his hometown to testify in a murder trial, he faces old uncovered wounds in his circle of friends and discovers that his missed opportunities are more than just regrets. Sean Minogue has written for film, television and theatre. His poems, stories and essays have been published in ARC Poetry Magazine, Maudlin House, Shift, THIS Magazine, Full Stop, Huffington Post and The Globe and Mail. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Wednesday, December 17—“The best play I’ve seen this season,” says New York Magazine’s Sara Holdren about Liberation, Bess Wohl’s moving exploration of the women’s movement through the story of an Ohio consciousness-raising group in the early 1970s and a daughter who yearns to understand her mother’s life and her own.To discuss this timely play and the movement’s powerful literary roots, Wohl joins memoirist Honor Moore, co-editor of Library of America’s Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution and Still Can, for a conversation about freedom, feminism, and visions for a better future, then and now.LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Max Rudin is President & Publisher of Library of America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

In 1981, David Bowie and Queen both happened to be in Switzerland: They met and made "Under Pressure." Recorded on a lark, the song broke the path for subsequent pop anthems. In Under Pressure (Duke University Press, 2025), Max Brzezinski tells the classic track's story, charting the relationship between pop music, collective politics, and dominant institutions of state, corporations, and civil society. Brzezinski shows that, like all great pop anthems, "Under Pressure" harnesses collective sentiments in order to model new ways of thinking and acting. As we continue to live under the sign of the global oppressive power the song names, analyzes, and attempts to move beyond, we remain, in Bowie and Freddie Mercury's phrase, under pressure. Max Brzezinski is the author of Vinyl Age: A Guide to Record Collecting Now. Max on Instragram Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

The media and creative industries thrive on passion, but that passion often comes at a cost. Behind the glamour of journalism, filmmaking, games, music, advertising, and online content creation lies a growing crisis-one of burnout, anxiety, substance abuse, and exhaustion. Why do so many creative professionals report feeling both deeply fulfilled and profoundly unwell? Mark Deuze investigates the systemic issues that make creative work both exhilarating and unsustainable. Drawing on extensive research and in-depth interviews with media professionals, he notes the hidden downsides of doing what you love and offers a candid analysis of how workplace structures, high workloads, and perceived injustices contribute to mental and physical distress. But this book is not just about what's broken; it's about what can be done. Deuze provides a roadmap for rethinking the culture of creative industries and offers strategies for balancing passion with sustainability. A practical resource for media scholars and those navigating the highs and lows of a creative career, this work challenges us to imagine a healthier future for our labour of love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

A spectacular graphic novel about the life and times of the legendary Fela Kuti—the Pan-African frontman, multi-instrumentalist, sociopolitical powerhouse, and father of Afrobeat. In Fela: Music Is the Weapon (Amistad, 2025), artist Jibola Fagbamiye and writer Conor McCreery team up to tell the remarkable origin story of one of Nigeria’s most famous sons, the King of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti, who rose to superstardom with his band Africa 70 in the 1970s, during a charged political period for his nation. A once-in-a-lifetime musical talent who innovated the musical genre Afrobeat, Fela was also an outspoken critic of the Nigerian military regime. Fela focuses on a pivotal moment in his life, when he and his mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, the renowned Nigerian suffrage activist, were ruthlessly attacked in their own home by soldiers who suffered no repercussions for their violence. It also explores Fela’s complex relationship with women, including his mother and Sandra Izsadore, the American singer and activist who revitalize and inspired him. Over the course of his life, Fela married 27 women, fathered numerous children, and founded the Kalakuta Republic commune, where he and his band lived, declaring themselves independent from military rule. As rich and original as its subject, Fela complements the historical with the surreal, featuring parallel dream world sequences, set between this realm and the next, in which Fela receives visions about his future and the dangerous path he will have to walk. Chronicling Fela’s perilous journey to capture his destiny—to become the King of Afrobeat, and to advocate for Pan-African unity in the face of European imperialism and white supremacy—this masterful biographical graphic novel celebrates this enduring legend and his legacy, offering inspiration for our own troubled time. Jibola Fagbamiye is a visual artist based in Toronto. His work draws inspiration from his two great loves: African history and North American pop culture. Jibola has exhibited in galleries in Toronto, Los Angeles, and Lagos, and his work has been featured on AfroPunk, Toronto Life, ByBlacks, and BlogTO. Jibola’s website and Bluesky. Conor McCreery is a former journalist turned comics scribe. He has written Assassin’s Creed, Sherlock Holmes vs Harry Houdini, Adventure Time, Regular Show, and has worked for many of the industry's top publishers including DC, IDW, BOOM!, Titan, and Dark Horse. He lives in Toronto with his wife and three children. Conor on Facebook and Bluesky. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. Bradley on Facebook and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Before Hacks and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, there was the comedienne who started it all. First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll (NYU Press, 2024) tells the story of Jean Carroll, the first Jewish woman to become a star in the field we now call stand-up comedy. Though rarely mentioned among the pantheon of early stand-up comics such as Henny Youngman and Lenny Bruce, Jean Carroll rivaled or even outshone the male counterparts of her heyday, playing more major theaters than any other comedian of her period. In addition to releasing a hit comedy album, Girl in a Hot Steam Bath, and briefly starring in her own sitcom on ABC, she also made twenty-nine appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.Carroll made enduring changes to the genre of stand-up comedy, carving space for women and modeling a new form of Jewish femininity with her glamorous, acculturated, but still recognizably Jewish persona. She innovated a newly conversational, intimate style of stand-up, which is now recognized in comics like Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman, and Tiffany Haddish. When Carroll was ninety-five she was honored at the Friars Club in New York City, where celebrities like Joy Behar and Lily Tomlin praised her influence on their craft. But her celebrated career began as an impoverished immigrant child, scrounging for talent show prize money to support her family.Drawing on archival footage, press clippings, and Jean Carroll’s personal scrapbook, First Lady of Laughs restores Jean Carroll’s remarkable story to its rightful place in the lineage of comedy history and Jewish American performance. Jane Scimeca, Professor of History at Brookdale Community College Website here @janescimeca.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

In Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense, Elliott Kalan (U Chicago Press, 2025) explains that it’s easier to write jokes when you have a dependable method for doing so. All jokes, he argues, are built from the same elements: structure, premise, voice, tone, wording, and audience—and these elements can be applied to any comedic genre, from stand-up to sitcoms to satire. Kalan analyzes examples from his own career—including jokes that he wrote (and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote . . . ) as head writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart—as well as material from a diverse array of comedians, writers, and filmmakers, highlighting the phrasing, rhythm, and precise details that make their work so dang funny.Drawing on his experiences in professional writers’ rooms as well as episodes from everyday life, Kalan’s guide to jokes will appeal to aspiring writers, their mentors, comedy fans, and anyone who has to speak at a wedding. Joke Farming points the way toward a writing process that lessens stress and agony and yields more reliable rewards: a surprising tagline, a hilarious word choice, and—most importantly—a bigger laugh from the audience, whoever they may be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Sarah Derbew’s new book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2022) asks how should articulations of blackness from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century be properly read and interpreted? This important and timely book is the first concerted treatment of black skin color in the Greek literature and visual culture of antiquity. In charting representations in the Hellenic world of black Egyptians, Aithiopians, Indians, and Greeks, Derbew dexterously disentangles the complex and varied ways in which blackness has been co-produced by ancient authors and artists; their readers, audiences, and viewers; and contemporary scholars. Exploring the precarious hold that race has on skin coloration, the author uncovers the many silences, suppressions, and misappropriations of blackness within modern studies of Greek antiquity. Shaped by performance studies and critical race theory alike, her book maps out an authoritative archaeology of blackness that reappraises its significance. It offers a committedly anti-racist approach to depictions of black people while rejecting simplistic conflations or explanations. Get 20% off a copy of Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity using promo code UBGA2022 at Cambridge University Press (valid until February 2023). Keep up with Sarah’s work on Twitter @BlackAntiquity and on her website. @amandajoycehall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Stefania Marghitu's Teen TV (Routledge, 2021)explores the history of television's relationship to teens as a desired, but elusive audience, and the ways in which television has embraced youth subcultures, tracing the shifts in American and global televisual and youth cultures. Organized chronologically, Teen TV starts with Baby Boomers and moves to Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z as a way to contextualize and discuss cultural and historical contexts of teen television and television audiences. The book examines a wide range of historical and contemporary programming: from the broadcast bottleneck, multi-channel era that included youth targeted spaces like MTV, the WB, and the CW, to the rise of streaming platforms and global crossovers. It covers the thematic concerns and narrative structure of the coming-of-age story, and the prevalent genres of teen TV, and milestones faced by teen characters. The book also includes interviews with creators and showrunners of hit network television teen series, including Degrassi's Linda Schulyer, and the costume designer that established a heightened turn in the significance of teen fashion on the small screen in Gossip Girl, Eric Daman.  Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

One of the oldest and most recognizable studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. is considered a juggernaut of the entertainment industry. Since its formation in the early twentieth century, the studio has been a constant presence in cinema history, responsible for the creation of acclaimed films, blockbuster brands, and iconic superstars. In The Warner Brothers (UP of Kentucky, 2023), Chris Yogerst follows the siblings from their family's humble origins in Poland, through their young adulthood in the American Midwest, to the height of fame and fortune in Hollywood. With unwavering resolve, the brothers soldiered on against the backdrop of an America reeling from the aftereffects of domestic and global conflict. The Great Depression would not sink the brothers, who churned out competitive films that engaged audiences and kept their operations afloat―and even expanding. During World War II, they used their platform to push beyond the limits of the Production Code and create important films about real-world issues, openly criticizing radicalism and the evils of the Nazi regime. At every major cultural turning point in their lifetime, the Warners held a front-row seat. These days, the studio is best known as a media conglomerate with a broad range of intellectual property, spanning movies, TV shows, and streaming content. Despite popular interest in the origins of this empire, the core of the Warner Bros. saga cannot be found in its commercial successes. It is the story of four brothers―Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack―whose vision for Hollywood helped shape the world of entertainment as we know it. Paying close attention to the brothers' identities as cultural and economic outsiders, Yogerst chronicles how the Warners built a global filmmaking powerhouse. Equal parts family history and cinematic journey, The Warner Brothers is an empowering story of the American dream and the legacy four brothers left behind for generations of filmmakers and film lovers to come. Chris Yogerst is the author of Hollywood Hates Hitler! Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures and From the Headlines to Hollywood: The Birth and Boom of Warner Bros. He appeared on the New Books Network to discuss the book in 2020. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of American Culture, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, and the Hollywood Reporter. He currently serves as an associate professor of communication in the Department of Arts and Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University and an Associate Faculty member at University of Arizona Global Campus. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edges of it. He performed alongside the brightest stars, wrote scores of plays, and toured the United States and England, but he never became a household name. Inspired by this average performer’s life and labor, An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Amy Hughes offers an alternative history of nineteenth-century theater, focusing on the daily rhythms and routines of theatrical life rather than the celebrated people, plays, and exceptional events that tend to dominate histories of US theater and performance. In the process, Dr. Hughes asks uncomfortable questions about the existence, predominance, and erasure of White male mediocrity in US culture, both in the past and present. When historians focus only on performers and plays with artistic “merit,” what communities, perspectives, and cultural trends remain invisible? How did men like Watkins advance themselves professionally, despite their mediocrity? Why did men like Watkins embrace and perpetuate myths like the American Dream, the “self-made man,” and meritocracy, and how have these ideals shaped casting, producing, and celebrity worship in today’s US entertainment industry? Ultimately, Dr. Hughes reveals how this actor’s tale illuminates the widespread tendency to ignore, deny, and forgive White male mediocrity in US culture, and how a deeper understanding of people like Watkins can transform our understanding of the past—and our understanding of ourselves. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of Spielberg as a Barnumesque purveyor of spectacle, Lester D. Friedman presents the filmmaker as a major artist who pairs an ongoing willingness to challenge himself with a widely recognized technical mastery. This new edition of Citizen Spielberg (University of Illinois Press, 2022) expands Friedman’s original analysis to include films of the 2010s like Lincoln and Ready Player One. Breaking down the works by genre, Friedman looks at essential aspects of Spielberg’s art, from his storytelling concerns and worldview to the uncanny connection with audiences that has powered his longtime influence as a cultural force. Friedman's examination reveals a sustained artistic vision--a vision that shows no sign of exhausting itself or audiences after Spielberg's nearly fifty years as a high-profile filmmaker. Incisive and discerning, Citizen Spielberg, Second Edition, offers a career-spanning appraisal of a moviemaking icon. Nathan Abrams is a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales [https://research.bangor.ac.uk/...(b8c6d91f-14c5-4862-8745-0f5d0e938a28).html]. His most recent work is on film director Stanley Kubrick [https://oxford.universitypress...]. To discuss and propose a book for interview you can reach him at n.abrams@bangor.ac.uk. Twitter: @ndabrams Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts