In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

Ctrl+Alt+Doubt: Decoding the Language of Online Conspiracy Talk (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a new way to understand why conspiracy theories grow and persist. Rather than treating them as cognitive errors, psychological pathologies, or products of echo chambers, Rao and Greve analyze conspiracy theories as linguistic constructions, that is as stories built from recognizable semantic patterns. Drawing on cases from COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests, Rao and Greve show that conspiracy theorizing is a form of bricolage. People tinker with cultural fragments to craft explanations that reduce uncertainty and threat. New conspiracy beliefs are most likely to take hold when they are linguistically close to beliefs people already hold. The book traces how conspiracy theories spread through superspreaders, fear-laden language, bots, and shared hashtags, revealing conspiracy theorizing as a form of proto-coordination that generates community, amplifies outrage, and enables collective sensemaking among opponents of social movements.

Once
dominant and institutionalised, the Yakuza, one of Japan's best known
criminal organisations, is now shrinking under the combined pressure of
legal exclusion, social stigmatisation, and market regulation. Their
membership has dropped from more than 80,000 in 2009 to fewer than
20,000 in 2025. Yet their disappearance is far from complete. Based on
extensive fieldwork with active and former members, police officers,
lawyers, and journalists, in 21st Century Yakuza: Death of Japanese Organised Crime
(Oxford University Press, 2026), Dr. Martina Baradel examines how these
organisations adapt to repression and explores what happens when a
mafia begins to die.

21st Century Yakuza
illuminates how Japan's model of regulatory saturation has dismantled
the Yakuza's organisational capacity but left behind governance vacuums
in markets the state struggles to control. This book demonstrates
how the Yakuza persist through symbolic and residual forms of authority
even as their formal power erodes, and how their decline has fragmented
the criminal underworld. It traces the transformation of the Yakuza
from territorially embedded brokers of governance to marginal actors in a
more decentralised criminal landscape, including the delegation of
trading activities to non-affiliated networks.

Through a sharp lens on criminal decline and adaptation, 21st Century Yakuza offers a compelling portrait of a fading underworld and the new forms of disorder emerging
in its wake. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the
shifting boundaries of law, authority, and illicit power in contemporary
Japan.

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.

Tamil Buddhism and Brahminism in Modern India: Deep Resistance Against Caste (Oxford University Press, 2026) explores
Tamil Buddhism in modern India, focusing on its emergence
as a response to caste-based oppression during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Central to this movement was Pandit Iyothee
Thass (1845–1914), a pioneering intellectual who reinterpreted India’s
Buddhist past to challenge brahminical dominance. Thass reasoned that it
was because many Indians followed Buddhist cultural and material
traditions in ancient times, that they were oppressed as untouchables
and lower castes by self-privileging-caste groups, such as brahmins.
Thus, Thass challenged brahminism/casteism
in India by reconstructing and mobilizing a reading public about the
casteless Buddhist history of Indians who were prone to caste
oppression. His writings, petitions, and archives reveal the
castelessness of Tamil Buddhists and their commitment to
a radical political transformation in modern India. Key aspects of the
Tamil Buddhist movement include public mobilization for caste-free
societies, self-representation of oppressed communities, economic
redistribution through affirmative action, and a feminist critique of
caste and patriarchy. Through interdisciplinary methods drawn
from Critical Caste Studies, this monograph uncovers the intellectual
history of Tamil Buddhism and its radical call for vernacular
emancipation. It highlights how Indigenous, Tamil/Indian communities
used Buddhist foundations to resist caste and envision a modern,
casteless future.

In May, 1926, nearly three million British workers downed tools to support nearly one million of their countrymen, miners whose employers meant to lengthen their working day and cut their pay. This General Strike brought the country to a grinding halt - which, according to Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, represented a threat not merely to the nation but to the parliamentary system itself. For nine days, the world's best organized working class confronted the world's most powerful, and self-confident, government. And yet the outcome was never in doubt, for Britain's most important trade-union leaders thought as Baldwin did, although they kept saying they were engaged in a wages dispute only. Really, they feared winning even more than they feared losing.

In Nine Days in May: The General Strike of 1926 (Oxford University Press, 2026), award-winning author and historian Jonathan Schneer mines hitherto untapped archival sources to explain why and how the Strike came about, why and how it was waged and countered, why and how it ended. In addition to government reports and TUC reports, he uses reports of undercover agents and spies, "special" constables sworn in for the duration of the Strike, volunteer strike-breakers, Communist agitators, trade-union leaders and rank-and-file members of trade unions; also, of course, the papers of politicians of all parties.

This is a tale of Shakespearian dimensions, replete with tragic heroes and villains and buffoons and opportunists and double-dealers, and contending, evenly matched, forces - both of which meant to do their duty whatever the cost. There may never be another general strike in Britain, but the General Strike of 1926 was one for the ages, illuminating the human condition.

Jonathan Schneer is Professor Emeritus of History at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of New Books Network.

British
daily newspapers transformed rapidly at the turn of the nineteenth
century, ballooning in size and radically reorganizing staffing and
production decade by decade. By mid-century, newspapers had grown from
the folded single sheets of the previous century to large multi-page
broadsheets, so impressive in the quantity of print they held and their
speed of production that one of their nicknames was 'the daily miracle'.

Traditional
news history has overlooked a key fact for understanding this era of
news: that Victorian daily newspapers were high-pressure systems. As
demand for newspapers outpaced their original production capacity,
newspaper organizations began to build complex technical and production
mechanisms to continue to grow and compete. As these systems expanded,
newspapers became dependent on them, and decisions about how daily
journalism should develop began to pass from editorial choice to
systemic necessity. The previously untold story of Victorian daily news
is that the personalities of editors and owners and the larger social
forces at work in that era were not the only (or even primary) drivers
of its history. Once set in motion, the systems of Victorian news gained
major shaping agency over their own development.

Combining deep archival research and traditional historical analysis with modern data mining methods, News Machines: The Systems of Daily Journalism in Britain, 1785–1885
(Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Dallas Liddle reconstructs the
systemic workings of Victorian daily news in unprecedented detail,
offering new and counterintuitive accounts of when and why daily papers
expanded, how and why steam-powered printing machines developed, how
specialized news discourses evolved, and how newspaper leadership was
organized.

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.