We were pleased to tune-in yesterday afternoon to catch PUP author Philip Freeman discuss his new translated work by Quintus Tullius Cicero called HOW TO WIN AN ELECTION: An Ancient Guide for Modern Politicians on NPR’s All Things Considered. Host Robert Siegel even reads from the book!

Take a listen if you have a few minutes!

Wisława Szymborska, the noted poet and essayist, passed away this week at the age of 88. Szymborska published over 400 poems in her lifetime, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. The Nobel committee noted that she had been called ”the Mozart of poetry,” remarking that the title was “not without justice in view of her wealth of inspiration and the veritable ease with which her words seem to fall into place.”

In 1981, PUP published Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by Wislawa Szymborska with translators Magnus Krynski and Robert Maguire. Of her poetry, Krynski and Maguire said:

“Her verse is marked by high seriousness, delightful inventiveness, a prodigal imagination, and enormous technical skill. She writes of the diversity, plenitude, and richness of the world, taking delight in observing and naming its phenomena. She looks on with wonder, astonishment, and amusement, but almost never with despair.”

Read on for “Memory at Last,” a wonderful  Szymborska poem about remembrance and loss. 

Daniel A. Bell, co-author of The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age with Avner de-Shalit, visited Hub’s Davos Pavilion and spoke with Hub Culture’s Executive Editor Edie Lush during his recent trip to the World Economic Forum. Professor Bell uses “I Heart NY” as the best known example of “civicism,” the term for urban pride he and de-Shalit coined in their recent PUP book, but from the looks of it, perhaps “I Heart Davos” is next:

Think solar flares are going to wreak havoc now? Wait till you read what happened in the 19th century:

“In September of 1859, the entire Earth was engulfed in a gigantic cloud of seething gas, and a blood-red aurora erupted across the planet from the poles to the tropics. Around the world, telegraph systems crashed, machines burst into flames, and electric shocks rendered operators unconscious. Compasses and other sensitive instruments reeled as if struck by a massive magnetic fist….Nobody knew what could have released such strange forces upon the Earth–nobody, that is, except the amateur English astronomer Richard Carrington who had observed a mysterious explosion on the surface of the Sun…”

Read The Sun Kings to learn more about Carrington and the solar flares of 1859..

We were thrilled to read Jennifer Schuessler’s terrific story on the popular phenomenon of bar lecturing (and not in an intoxicated way, but a learned way!) Check out her story here. It looks like alcohol and science is a powerful (and successful) formula.

The Press is pleased to have had the pleasure of working with the Secret Science Club as they’ve hosted talks for a handful of our science authors. In particular, I was delighted to see friend-of-the-Press Dorian Devins at the SSC getting a mention!

We’re all more tuned in to the media than ever before, glued to our smart phones all day, reading newsfeeds, sending links and sharing articles. But while we rely on journalists to ask the questions we want answered, increasingly, we don’t just hate the answers, we hate the askers. Jonathan Ladd talks about this growing public antagonism toward the media in his new book, Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters. Recently I asked him to share some thoughts on how the press has gone from respected institution to one of the most readily disparaged, and what he thinks is the impact of this growing distrust. Read his thoughts after the jump:

Wow, what a lineup! We are so proud to see Carmen Reinhart, the co-author of our New York Times bestselling classic THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, discuss economic issues on a recent New York Times Opinion talk with Times journalists Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Joe Nocera. This brilliant and entertaining program streamed live on the internet and covered today’s economic issues such as the Eurozone crisis, deleveraging, inequality, Occupy Wall Street, and space aliens. Check out the video if you want to see what great minds have to say about our economic situation and what’s coming next.

Princeton Professor Sheldon Garon has done a few major interviews so far this week to discuss the big ideas in his new book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves.

His recent Q&A with NPR’s senior business editor Marilyn Geewax is the most popular post on the NPR site today: http://www.npr.org/2011/12/05/143149947/why-americans-spend-too-much

And Kimberly Blanton of the Squared Away Blog of the Financial Security Project at Boston College recently spoke with Prof. Garon about savings rates, “over-indebtedness,” and America’s “unusual” Christmas shopping season: http://fsp.bc.edu/united-states-of-credit/

You can also check out Prof. Garon’s interview yesterday with Marilyn Geewax and host Michel Martin on “Tell Me More” from NPR News: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=143141870

From themes adapted from his much-discussed new book THE DARWIN ECONOMY: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good, Robert H. Frank is discussing inequality in a three-part series for the online daily magazine Slate. The first piece, “Does Inequality Matter?” ran yesterday, and today’s terrific report “Why Has Inequality Been Growing?” has been receiving many comments. What do you think?

From “Does Inequality Matter?”
Republicans have never watned to talk about inequality, and many Democrats now seem afraid to. As a congressional Democratic adviser quoted by the New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes recently put it, the party is having difficulty articulating its position “in a way that doesn’t get us pegged as tax-and-spenders.”

Foreign Policy has just released a list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” for 2011, and four PUP authors have made the cut!

#25 Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, authors of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.

“They told us so. For years before the crash, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff presciently sketched out just how bad the global credit crunch could become based on their groundbreaking study of eight centuries of financial crises — the work that culminated in the publication of their bestselling 2009 book, This Time Is Different. In their study, the two found that in all the crises, “excessive debt accumulation … often poses greater systemic risks than it seems during a boom.”

#43 Saskia Sassen, author of The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.

“This year’s political upheavals have been as much about cities as countries. From Cairo’s Tahrir Square to London’s Tottenham, we’ve seen vivid illustrations of how urban spaces can shape social movements. Saskia Sassen, an academic guru who famously coined the term “global city,” has been very much part of the conversation, arguing that the same melting-pot factors that make cities drivers of capitalism can also make them highly unstable. “The poor in Britain, living next to enclaves of wealth and privilege, chose street riots to deliver their message,” she wrote.”

#44 David Scheffer, author of All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals. Foreign Policy applauds Scheffer for demanding that war criminals be held accountable.

Congratulations to these four authors, alongside the other great thinkers and writers on this list!

Earlier this week, Maurizio Viroli was invited to speak at the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. We arranged this event months and months ago, but recent events being what they are, this talk suddenly took on greater importance. Watch the video here to listen to Maurizio discuss Berlusconi’s Italy and the ideas that he further develops in his PUP book, The Liberty of Servants, about Berlusconi operating a pseudo-Royal Court of courtiers eager to please in return for economic and political favors.

Congratulations to Professor John M. Owen IV, whose book The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010 has been awarded the 2011 Lepgold Prize from the Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University.

The Lepgold Prize honors “exceptional contributions to the study of international relations” in memory of Professor Joseph S. Lepgold, a Georgetown University Government and School of Foreign Service professor who passed away in 2001. The award announcement praises The Clash of Ideas in World Politics for its wide scope in addressing the ideological struggles related to forcible regime promotion:

John Owen examines more than two hundred cases of forcible regime promotion over the past five centuries, offering the first systematic study of this common state practice. He looks at conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism between 1520 and the 1680s; republicanism and monarchy between 1770 and 1850; and communism, fascism, and liberal democracy from 1917 until the late 1980s. He shows how regime promotion can follow regime unrest in the eventual target state or a war involving a great power, and how this can provoke elites across states to polarize according to ideology. Owen traces how conflicts arise and ultimately fade as one ideology wins favor with more elites in more countries, and he demonstrates how the struggle between secularism and Islamism in Muslim countries today reflects broader transnational trends in world history.