Scholars, critics, and creators describe certain videogames as being “poetic,” yet what that means or why it matters is rarely discussed. In Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice (Amherst College Press, 2023), independent game designer Jordan Magnuson explores the convergences between game making and lyric poetry and makes the surprising proposition that videogames can operate as a kind of poetry apart from any reliance on linguistic signs or symbols. This rigorous and accessible short book first examines characteristics of lyric poetry and explores how certain videogames can be appreciated more fully when read in light of the lyric tradition—that is, when read as “game poems.” Magnuson then lays groundwork for those wishing to make game poems in practice, providing practical tips and pointers along with tools and resources. Rather than propose a monolithic framework or draw a sharp line between videogame poems and poets and their nonpoetic counterparts, Game Poems brings to light new insights for videogames and for poetry by promoting creative dialogue between disparate fields. The result is a lively account of poetic game-making praxis. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

If you enjoy video games as a pastime, you are certainly not alone—billions of people worldwide now play video games. However, you may still find yourself reluctant to tell others this fact about yourself. After all, we are routinely warned that video games have the potential to cause addiction and violence. And when we aren’t being warned of their outright harms, we are told we should be doing something better with our time, like going outside, socializing with others, or reading a book. Playing video games is thus often seen at best as a waste of time, and at worst a source of violent tragedy. Why It's Ok to Be a Gamer (Routledge, 2024) takes on the pervasive assumption that playing video games is a childish and time-wasting hobby, and a potentially addictive and dangerous one at that. It argues instead that there are many ways in which gaming can help us flourish, for example by: developing genuine friendships and other meaningful relationships with others, helping us cultivate a virtuous personal character, giving us a unique aesthetic experience, providing us with psychological benefits, and just plain helping us relax and enjoy ourselves. Video games are not just for those with no life; on the contrary, they can help contribute to a rich and meaningful life. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Batman and The Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2020), Chris Richardson presents a cultural analysis of the ways gender, identity, and sexuality are negotiated in the rivalry of Batman and The Joker. Richardson's queer reading of the text provides new understandings of Batman and The Joker and the transformations of the Gotham Universe throughout its 80-year existence. In particular, Richardson investigates how artists, writers, and fans engage with, challenge, and interpret gendered and sexual representations of this influential and popular rivalry. Fans of Batman and The Joker will find this work engaging and applicable across a range of scholarly fields and popular interests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

We are familiar with the idea of a formal representative, and perhaps the idea of a formal political representative readily comes to mind. Roughly, this is someone who has been selected by an official process to hold a political office where he or she is tasked with promoting, advocating, and speaking for a constituency. However, we are also familiar with informal representatives: those who speak for a constituency but are not appointed by formal processes. Once again, the idea of an informal political representative is probably familiar: rock stars and other celebrities commonly claim to “speak for” others with respect to distinctively political matters, and they are understood by the public to (informally) represent a constituency. Of course, there are lots of ways in which informal political representation can go wrong. Surprisingly, the topic has not been thoroughly theorized. Until now. In Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation (Harvard University Press 2024), Wendy Salkin develops an intricate framework for thinking about informal political representation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In their latest book, Fandom is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture (NYU Press, 2024), Mel Stafill highlights the importance of considering contemporary public culture through the lens of fan studies The Gamergate harassment campaign of women in video games, the “Unite the Right” rally where hundreds of Confederate monument supporters cried out racist and antisemitic slurs in Charlottesville, and the targeted racist and sexist harassment of Star Wars’ Asian American actress Kelly Marie Tran all have one thing in common: they demonstrate the collective power and underlying ugliness of fandoms. These fans might feel victimized or betrayed by the content they’ve intertwined with their own identities, or they may simply feel that they’re speaking truth to power. Regardless, by connecting via social media, they can unleash enormous amounts of hate, which often results in severe real-world consequences.  Fandom Is Ugly argues that reactionary politics and media fandoms go hand in hand, and to understand one, we need to understand the other. Stanfill pushes back on two mainstream assumptions: that media and the pleasure of consumption are frivolous and unworthy of study, and that fandoms are inherently progressive. Drawing on a corpus of angry social media posts, Fandom Is Ugly finds that ugly moments happen when deep emotional attachments collide with social structures and situations that have been misunderstood. By holistically examining the forms of ugly fandom in cases that touch upon race, gender, and sexuality, Fandom Is Ugly produces a comprehensive theory of the negative sides of fan attachments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

What is reading? In What Readers Do: Aesthetic and Moral Practices of a Post-Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2024) Beth Driscoll, an Associate Professor in Publishing, Communications and Arts Management at the University of Melbourne, explores this question by situating reading in a variety of contemporary social contexts. The book’s analysis engages with a range of academic fields to understand the study of reading, and offers a unique theoretical framework to understand the practices and meanings associated with reading in a variety of settings. The book also draws on a range of online and physical world case studies, from the aesthetics of ‘bookstagram’ through to behaviours and networks at book groups and literary festivals. The book is an essential read for a huge range of academics from the social sciences and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in reading! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Journalism has been in a state of disruption since the development of the Internet. The Metaverse, or what some describe as the future of the Internet, is likely to fuel even further disruption in journalism. Digital platforms and journalism enterprises are already investing substantial resources into the Metaverse, or its likely components of artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality. Although research shows most of the public has little knowledge of the Metaverse, many are keenly interested in what it or its components may bring. Journalism and the Metaverse (Anthem Press, 2024) by Dr. John Pavlik critically examines the nature of the Metaverse and its implications for journalism. In particular, the book will examine how the advance of a broadband, interactive and immersive Internet called the Metaverse may change the content and format of news, the nature of journalistic work, who or what is a journalist, the nature and structure of the new industry and how it is funded, as well as the fundamental role of journalism in a digital society. In particular, this book builds on a vision of the Metaverse as an immersive and interactive virtual world, a key development in the next generation of the broadband, publicly accessible Internet. Broadband means high-speed, high-bandwidth Internet connectivity, especially wirelessly. Immersive refers to enveloping, 3D forms of media and communication. Today, we often see immersive media in the form of augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) or other forms of what are labeled extended Reality (XR). Fueled by artificial intelligence, these forms are three dimensional (3D), they have depth and they surround the user in a 360 virtual world visually and aurally (and potentially via other senses, including the haptic). Interactive means both user-to-user engagement (e.g., social media) as well as an exchange between the user and the enveloping content experience of a virtual world. This book examines the implications of the Metaverse for journalism in four broad domains, including content, how journalists work, structural and systemic considerations, and user and public engagement with news. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Dr. Yerkebulan Sairambay’s New Media and Political Participation in Russia and Kazakhstan (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) confronts the sociological problem of the usage of new media (social media, the Internet, digital technologies, messaging applications) by young people in political participation. This book not only sheds light on the ways in which new media use contributes to the nature of political participation in Kazakhstan and Russia, but also explains why citizens use these tools in their civic engagement. Dr. Sairambay sets his sights on what occurs downstream, i.e., not in the minds of political leaders and/or well known oppositionists, but on the ground in specific contexts such as cities, towns, and villages by young people. For a similar interview in the Russian language, see Dr. Sairambay’s podcast episode with the University of Tartu’s Centre for Eurasian and Russian Studies. Cholpon Ramizova is a London-based writer and researcher. She holds a Master's in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS, University of London. Her thematic interests are in migration, displacement, identity, gender, and nationalism - and more specifically on how and which ways these intersect within the Central Asia context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. China needed a new script to survive in the modern world. Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2023) explores the global history of Chinese script reforms--efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system--from the 1890s to the 1980s. Examining the material conditions and political economy underlying attempts to modernize scripts, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu argues that these reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age. Faced with new communications technologies and infrastructures as well as industrial, educational, and bureaucratic pressures for information management, reformers engineered scripts as tools to increase labor efficiency and create alternate political futures. Kuzuoğlu considers dozens of proposed scripts, including phonetic alphabets, syllabaries, character simplification schemes, latinization, and pinyin. Situating them in a transnational framework, he stretches the geographical boundaries of Chinese script reforms to include American behavioral psychologists, Soviet revolutionaries, and Central Asian typographers, who were all devising new scripts in pursuit of informational efficiency. Codes of Modernity brings these experiments together to offer new ways to understand scripts and rethink the shared experiences of a global information age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Using a multidisciplinary and intersectional approach, Liberating Fat Bodies: Social Media Censorship and Body Size Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) by Dr. Wesley Bishop & Dr. Bessie Rigakos explores the social factors that influence the ways in which societal norms police fat bodies. Chapters examine the racist and colonial constructions of Western beauty norms as well as the evolution of anti-fat bias and fat liberation, before delving into the relationship between social media and body size activism, with a particular emphasis on social media companies censoring fat people. The authors draw on first-person narratives of artists, activists, and fat social media users to unpack how, these mostly women, have used their bodies to transform the negative social perceptions of fat people. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Teaching our students how to become flexible and accurate evaluators of information requires teaching them adaptable processes and not static heuristics. Our conventional information literacy teaching and learning tools are simply not up to tackling the life-long, real-world challenges and transferable applications required by today's evolving information landscape.  Information Literacy and Social Media: Empowered Student Engagement with the ACRL Framework (ACRL, 2024) by Michele Santamaria and A. Nicole Pfannenstiel (2024, ACRL) provides librarians and non-librarian practitioners with ways to teach and learn with social media. It addresses how to broadly conceptualize information literacy teaching with social media and allay any student reluctance to using social media for academic purposes. It proposes how to map some of the ACRL threshold concepts onto specific social media platforms, including Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, while providing general guidance for if and when those platforms change. There are eight concrete, cross-disciplinary lesson plans that factor in design, assessment, and student engagement. Finally, the book considers how up-and-coming platforms might empower students to be critical content creators and encourage librarians and faculty to support and create new information literacy initiatives on their campuses. Information Literacy and Social Media demonstrates how to engage students with and through social media platforms and teach them to embrace their role as information creators through engagement with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. This is the step that they must take to truly be metaliterate in the creative and ethical ways that make information literacy an essential college competency. New Books Network listener can receive 20% off this title through the ALA Store using the promo code: ACRL5456P. Michele Santamaría is the Learning Design Librarian at Millersville University. Nicole Pfannenstiel, PhD., is a student-centered faculty member of the English & World Languages department at Millersville University. Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us (NYU Press, 2023), Karen Tongson presents an irreverent look at the love-hate relationship between queer viewers and mainstream family TV shows like Gilmore Girls and This Is Us. After personal loss, political upheaval, and the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us craved a return to business as usual, the mundane, the middlebrow. We turned to TV to find these things. For nearly forty years, network television has produced a constant stream of “cry-along” sentimental-realist dramedies designed to appeal to liberal, heterosexual, white America. But what makes us keep watching, even though these TV series inevitably fail to reflect who we are? Revisiting soothing network dramedies like Parenthood, Gilmore Girls, This Is Us, and their late-80s precursor, thirtysomething, Normporn mines the nuanced pleasures and attraction-repulsion queer viewers experience watching liberal family-centric shows. Tongson reflects on how queer cultural observers work through repeated declarations of a “new normal” and flash lifestyle trends like “normcore,” even as the absurdity, aberrance, and violence of our culture intensifies. Normporn allows us to process how the intimate traumas of everyday life depicted on certain TV shows—of love, life, death, and loss—are linked to the collective and historical traumas of their contemporary moments, from financial recessions and political crises to the pandemic. Normporn asks, what are queers to do—what is anyone to do, really—when we are forced to confront the fact of our own normalcy, and our own privilege, inherited or attained? The fantasies, the utopian impulses, and (paradoxically) the unreality of sentimental realist TV drama creates a productive tension that queer spectators in particular take pleasure in, even as—or precisely because—it lulls us into a sense of boredom and stability that we never thought we could want or have.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Often assumed to be a self-evident good, Open Access has been subject to growing criticism for perpetuating global inequities and epistemic injustices. it has been seen as imposing exploitative business and publishing models and as exacerbating exclusionary research evaluation culture and practices. Achieving Global Open Access: The Need for Scientific, Epistemic, and Participatory Openness (Taylor & Francis, 2024) engages with these issues, recognizing that the global Open Access debate is now not just about publishing and business models or academic reward structures, but also about what constitutes valid and valuable knowledge, how we know and who gets to say. the book argues that, for Open Access to deliver its potential, it first needs to be associated with "epistemic openness", a wider and more inclusive understanding of what constitutes valid and valuable knowledge. it also needs to be accompanied by "participatory openness", enabling contributions to knowledge from more diverse communities. interacting with relevant theory and current practices, the book discusses the challenges in implementing these different forms of openness, the relationship between them and their limits. Stephen Pinfield is Professor of Information Services Management at the University of Sheffield, UK, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). Xiaoli Chen is project lead at DataCite, a non-profit organization that provides open scholarly infrastructure and supports the global research community to ensure the open availability and connectedness of research outputs. She has a background in Library and Information Science and worked with different disciplinary communities to create and integrate services and workflows for open and FAIR scholarship. She can be reached at xiaoli.chen@datacite.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Schuyler Bailar didn’t set out to be an activist, but his very public transition to the Harvard men’s swim team put him in the spotlight. His choice to be open about his journey and share his experience has evolved into tireless advocacy for inclusion and collective liberation. Today’s book is: He/She/They: How We Talk About Gender and Why it Matters (Hachette, 2023), by Schuyler Bailar, which gives readers the essential language and context of gender, paving the way for understanding, acceptance and connection. He/She/They compassionately addresses fundamental topics, from why being transgender is not a choice and why pronouns are important, to complex issues including how gender-affirming healthcare can be lifesaving. With a narrative rooted in science and history, Schuyler helps restore common sense and humanity to a discussion that continues to be divisively and deceptively politicized. In chapters both myth-busting and affirming, compassionate and fierce, Schulyer offers readers an urgent and lifesaving book to change the conversation about gender. Our guest is: Schuyler Bailar (he/him), who is an educator, author, and advocate. He is the first transgender athlete to compete in any sport on an NCAA Division 1 men’s team, and has earned numerous honors including the Harvard Varsity Director’s Award. He is one of the top LGBTQ+ educators and advocates, a leading DEI speaker and advisor, the creator of the LaneChanger.com gender literacy online learning series, and the author of the award-winning book He/She/They: How We Talk About Gender and Why it Matters. Schuyler holds a degree in Cognitive Neuroscience and Evolutionary Psychology from Harvard, and works in four research labs focusing in clinical psychology and public health. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. Listeners may enjoy this playlist: Raising Them Gender and the Brain Sex Matters Tomboy Belonging Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? Find them all here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages (Reaktion, 2024) by Sara J. Charles takes the reader on an immersive journey through mediaeval manuscript production in the Latin Christian world. Each chapter opens with a lively vignette by a mediaeval narrator – including a parchment-maker, scribe and illuminator – introducing various aspects of manuscript production. Charles poses the question ‘What actually is a scriptorium?’, and explores the development of the mediaeval scriptorium from its early Christian beginnings through to its eventual decline and the growth of the printing press. With the written word at the very heart of the Christian monastic movement, we see the immense amount of labour, planning and networks needed to produce each individual manuscript. By tapping into these processes and procedures, we can experience mediaeval life through the lens of a manuscript maker. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

For the first half of the twentieth century, no American industry boasted a more motley and prolific trade press than the movie business—a cutthroat landscape that set the stage for battle by ink. In 1930, Martin Quigley, publisher of Exhibitors Herald, conspired with Hollywood studios to eliminate all competing trade papers, yet this attempt and each one thereafter collapsed. Exploring the communities of exhibitors and creative workers that constituted key subscribers, Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Eric Hoyt tells the story of how a heterogeneous trade press triumphed by appealing to the foundational aspects of industry culture—taste, vanity, partisanship, and exclusivity. In captivating detail, Eric Hoyt chronicles the histories of well-known trade papers (Variety, Motion Picture Herald) alongside important yet forgotten publications (Film Spectator, Film Mercury, and Camera!), and challenges the canon of film periodicals, offering new interpretative frameworks for understanding print journalism’s relationship with the motion picture industry and its continued impact on creative industries today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Ella Houston's book Advertising Disability (Routledge, 2024) invites Cultural Disability Studies to consider how advertising, as one of the most ubiquitous forms of popular culture, shapes attitudes towards disability. The research presented in the book provides a much-needed examination of the ways in which disability and mental health issues are depicted in different types of advertising, including charity 'sadvertisements', direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements and 'pro-diversity' brand campaigns. Textual analyses of advertisements from the eighteenth century onwards reveal how advertising reinforces barriers facing disabled people, such as stigmatising attitudes, ableist beauty 'ideals', inclusionism and the unstable crutch of charity. As well as investigating how socio-cultural meanings associated with disability are influenced by multimodal forms of communication in advertising, insights from empirical research conducted with disabled women in the United Kingdom and the United States are provided. Moving beyond traditional textual approaches to analysing cultural representations, the book emphasises how disabled people and activists develop counternarratives informed by their personal experiences of disability, challenging ableist messages promoted by advertisements. From start to finish, activist concepts developed by the Disabled People's Movement and individuals' embodied knowledge surrounding disability, impairments and mental health issues inform critiques of advertisements. Its critically informed approach to analysing portrayals of disability is relevant to advertisers, scholars and students in advertising studies and media studies who are interested in portraying diversity in marketing and promotional materials as well as scholars and students of disability studies and sociology more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity (U Chicago Press, 2024), music scholar Gavin Steingo examines significant cases of attempted communication beyond the human--cases in which the dualistic relationship of human to non-human is dramatically challenged. From singing whales to Sun Ra to searching for alien life, Steingo charts the many ways we have attempted to think about, and indeed to reach, beings that are very unlike ourselves. Steingo focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, when scientists developed new ways of listening to oceans and cosmic space--two realms previously inaccessible to the senses and to empirical investigation. As quintessential frontiers of the postwar period, the outer space of the cosmos and the inner space of oceans were conceptualized as parallel realities, laid bare by newly technologized "ears." Deeply engaging, Interspecies Communication explores our attempts to cross the border between the human and non-human, to connect with non-humans in the depths of the oceans, the far reaches of the universe, or right under our own noses. Gavin Steingo is Professor in the Department of Music at Princeton University. He is also affiliated with the programs in Media and Modernity, African Studies, and Jazz Studies. Steingo’s research examines sound and music as fundamental features in the construction of global modernity, with research specializations in African music, sound studies, acoustic ecology, and music and philosophy. Methodologically, his work is united by a mode of inquiry where theory, history, and ethnography form part of a shared constellation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960-2022 (Oxford University Press, 2023) provides a more comprehensive and meaningful periodization of the commercialization of documentary film. Although the commercial ascension of documentary films might seem meteoric, it is the culmination of decades-long efforts that have developed and fortified the audience for documentary features. Author Nora Stone refines rough explanations of these efforts through a robust synoptic history of the market for documentary films, using knowledge of film economics and the norms of industry discourse to tell a richer story. This periodization will allow scholars to compare the commercialization of documentary film with other genres. Drawing on archival documents, industry trade journals and popular press, and interviews with filmmakers and film distributors, Stone illuminates how documentary features have become more plentiful, popular, and profitable than ever before. Ailin Zhou is a PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include transnational Chinese cinema, Asian diasporic visual culture, contemporary art, and feminist and queer theories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Twenty-five years ago, The West Wing premiered to great acclaim. This book is a behind-the-scenes look into the creation and legacy of the series, as told by cast members Melissa Fitzgerald and Mary McCormack. The authors help us step back inside the world of President Jed Bartlet’s Oval Office as they reunite the West Wing cast and crew, including series creator Aaron Sorkin and many others, in a lively and colorful “backstage pass” to the timeless series.  From cast member origin stories to the collective cathartic farewell on the show’s final night of filming, What's Next: A Backstage Pass to The West Wing, Its Cast and Crew, and Its Enduring Legacy of Service (Dutton, 2024). includes on-set and off-camera anecdotes that even West Wing superfans (Wingnuts) have never heard. Meanwhile, a deeper analysis of the show’s legacy through American culture, service, government, and civic life underscores how the series envisaged an American politics of decency and honor, creating an aspirational White House beyond the bounds of fictional television. Fitzgerald and McCormick revisit beloved episodes with fresh, untold commentary; compile poignant and hilarious stories from the show’s production; highlight initiatives supported by the cast, crew, and creators; and make a powerful case for competent, empathetic leadership, hope, and optimism for whatever lies ahead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications