As overdose deaths continue to mount and debates rage over harm reduction, drug policy, and homelessness, Hit Doctors: Care, Harm, and the Art of Survival (U California Press, 2026) offers a crucial on-the-ground perspective pointing to a humane future.

Finding a vein is difficult. As veins collapse and scar over, it becomes almost impossible. For millions of Americans who inject drugs and can’t do it alone, the solution is to find someone who can. Enter the “hit doctor.” Though uncredentialed, hit doctors develop expertise through necessity, providing injection assistance and addressing needs that dominant medical systems exclude or criminalize. They share the same conditions as the people they serve: sleeping in encampments and alleys, living in cramped single-room-occupancy hotels, suffering from untreated illness and trauma, and grieving friends who keep dying. Sarah Brothers spent more than seven years observing and interviewing hit doctors and their clients across San Francisco. Hit Doctors is an intimate portrait of the daily lives, relationships, and ethical worlds of people managing extraordinary hardship at a pivotal moment, when fentanyl arrived and thousands began dying annually. Brothers’s long-term ethnography yields critical insights. People seeking help strongly prefer women hit doctors, perceived as more careful and less likely to turn violent. But even as their expertise is valued, hit doctors are targets for abuse, and they suffer as the people they care for decline and die. That is the cost of trying to keep each other alive when formal systems of support have failed.

Brothers joins host Emily Dufton to discuss the years of work behind her new book, the people she studied and the relationships she built with them.

Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). Her new book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, was released in 2026.

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The Bund's grand facades and the leafy streets of the former French Concession are usually read as monuments to Western enterprise in China. But those buildings were raised by Chinese labor, and the concessions that defined old Shanghai could not have run without the Chinese who served, traded, and lived inside them. In Shanghai: The Story of China's Most Dynamic City (Yale University Press: 2026), Michael Dillon sets out to tell the city's story from the Chinese side.

Michael's new book follows the city from a small fishing town on the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtze, through the Opium War and the treaty ports, the foreign concessions, the Japanese occupation, and the Communist takeover, to its place today as the most representative city of China's forward-looking, economy-driven modernization. Drawing on Chinese-language sources, Michael argues that Shanghai's history has been told for too long through Western eyes.

Michael joins the show today to talk about Shanghai's long rivalry with Beijing, the 1927 Shanghai Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and Deng Xiaoping's later admission that leaving Shanghai out of the first special economic zones was a mistake.

Michael Dillon is professor of history and an affiliate of King’s College London’s Lau China Institute. An expert on modern Chinese history, politics, and society, he is the author of numerous books, including We Need to Talk About Xi, a history of modern China, and biographies of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shanghai. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Despite the abundance of retirement communities in the US, none compare to The Villages in Central Florida. Home to nearly 150,000 residents and spanning an area larger than Manhattan, it is the world's largest retirement community and the only one that can be considered a city for older adults. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 residents and two months of participant observations, this captivating and insightful book Seniorland: Aging In A Retirement Metropolis (Cambridge UP, 2025) delves into the aging experience in The Villages. It explores why people move there, their perceptions of its rapid growth, changes in their daily activities upon moving and over time, social involvement and leisure constraints, and their sense of identity and community. In doing so, this book unveils how The Villages' unique characteristics profoundly impact residents' well-being and offers a glance into the future of old age.

Host: Renee Garfinkel

Guest: Galit Nimrod

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On May 3, 1887, an earthquake struck near the U.S.-Mexico border. Forty-three people died in Bavispe, Mexico; sixty miles north in Arizona, buildings swayed and a few collapsed, but no one was killed. Today, every person in southern Arizona lives with the underground aftermath of this earthquake: a drained aquifer.

The estimated 7.4 magnitude earthquake created a sixty-two-mile rupture, the longest known surface rupture by a normal fault. The Quake That Drained the Desert (University of Nebraska Press, 2026) by Mary Elizabeth Reynolds tells the story of the men who investigated the earthquake: a doctor and photographer from Tombstone and an engineer from Mexico. Reynolds retells the terror of the survivors while exploring the ways the earthquake continues to shape water use and legacies in the greater Southwest.

In this rigorous and gripping narrative, Reynolds unearths the aftermath of the quake, showing how it dramatically altered aquifers in southern Arizona and changed rivers that ensured the prosperity of two Mormon communities in southern Arizona and Mexico. With an eye to the present, this book asks us to consider how this underexamined quake marked the beginning of the water crisis in the region today, compacted by a century of groundwater pumping for agriculture, mining, and urban uses. As local governments and nonprofit organizations on both sides of the border now work to restore streams for wildlife habitat and flood control, they also hope to preserve water supplies for future generations.

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.

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Joel Dinerstein's The Last of the Ellis Island Jews (SUNY Press, 2026) is a tragicomic memoir of a dysfunctional, working-class Brooklyn Jewish family that illuminates both the vitality of urban life in the twentieth century and the social turmoil of white flight. As a child of immigrants born to older parents, Dinerstein has a unique perspective on four generations--from his grandparents escaping Russia's pogroms to his parents' embattled marriage to his older Boomer siblings (split between feminist and Republican politics) to his own hippie hopes. As a white teenager in majority Black public schools, Dinerstein's firsthand experience led to his academic career as a scholar of race and music. Yet his family fits no paradigm of Jewish success due to a father with rage and gambling problems, resulting in the four siblings escaping early to the Brooklyn streets. As a family growing up with a diasporic identity, the Dinersteins provide a primer of ethnic Jewish culture through iconic scenes: a selfish Seder, a chaotic Bar Mitzvah, a videotaped bris, an allergy attack at Dachau, a staring contest with the Rebbe. Most of all, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews is a chronicle of lost worlds.

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For those concerned with how city hall can shape the look and feel of a neighborhood, the mere mention of zoning may invite denunciation of zoning practices that contributed substantially to the housing crisis and so limited neighborhood development that you have to get in your car to pick up a quart of milk.

In her readable Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World (Norton, 2024), Sara Bronin, the Freda Alverson Professor of Law at George Washington University, points out if you want to put up a single-family house of around 2,500 square feet, then at a minimum you may be required to purchase a 43,350 square foot (one acre) lot on which you but nobody else can build. No wonder we have a housing shortage. And after you move in, you will likely find yourself living in a neighborhood zoned “residential,” that is without stores or businesses within walking distance. So it will be necessary to own a car for shopping and just about everything else.

In this conversation and in Key to the City, Professor Bronin suggests addressing the housing shortage by amending local zoning to make it possible to build several houses per acre. Then too neighborhoods currently zoned “residential” might re-designated for “mixed uses” so that one might walk to stores and restaurants. But Bronin cautions that however inviting the notion of strolling over to the grocery, café or bookstore, how would you feel if a gas station, used car lot or strip joint opened in your neighborhood?

By no means confined to the ivory tower, Professor Bronin, who served for seven years on Hartford’s Planning and Zoning Commission, recognizes that the underlying purpose of zoning––to protect the homeowner from unwanted intrusions––remains valid. And after showing how Hartford, Minneapolis, Tucson, and Baltimore went about revising their zoning ordinances, she concludes that zoning remains an essential tool for developing decent neighborhoods. She then implicitly invites us to take a walk around the block to consider what might be done to make our neighborhood all the better. 

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As affordability crises once limited to coastal cities have spread across the broader United States, the history of home and land ownership has never been more relevant. In Property Values: The Rise and Fall of the American Homeowner (Princeton University Press, September 2026), Dr. Joshua Specht traces how ownership has challenged the nation’s politics and promise from the founding to the present day.

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The twenty-first century has seen major transformations in the US electricity sector—but while the use of coal power wanes and the need for renewable energy becomes more urgent, financial actors maintain a complicating influence on the trajectory of energy transition. Brokers of Power: The Financialization of the US Electricity System (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) identifies changing patterns of investment intertwined with the shift from state-regulated electricity monopolies to a market-driven price model and the embrace of wind and solar hookups to the grid.

Drawing from case studies such as catastrophic Winter Storm Uri that hit Texas in 2021 and in-depth interviews with people working in the electricity and financial sectors, Dr. Conor Harrison reveals how the various entanglements of private equity, investment banking, and financial modeling are shaping the future and raising the costs of this vital infrastructure. Today’s financial firms, he shows, are engaged in the electricity industry beyond matters of investment: they own electricity generation infrastructure, trade electricity on markets, capture federal renewable energy tax credits, and advise on electricity firm operating strategy.

Looking beyond technology and policy, Dr. Harrison interrogates what it means to have powerful financial institutions as the primary agents of change in the fraught and ongoing energy transition. A timely and invaluable contribution to the fields of geography, environmental studies, and the energy social sciences, Brokers of Power is a cautionary account delving into the complexities surrounding the push for decarbonization.

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.

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