No! The Art and Activism of Complaining

Elizabeth Rodini joins Jana Byars to talk about her new forthcoming book, On the Street of Hidden Shops: One City Block, Two Thousand Years, and a Walk Through the Layered Lives of Rome (U Chicago Press, 2026). Delve into Rome's lost history through the stories of a single city block. Cutting through the heart of Rome is Via delle Botteghe Oscure, a time-worn street named for the mysterious "shops" said to run beneath it. History lies thick here, a museum atop a convent atop ancient ruins; layered in are the traces of artisans and poets, pilgrims and saints, a Fascist deportation, a communist coffee bar, a political assassination, and shopkeepers, too. These stories all rest upon a single city block, the same place where, in 13 BCE, the triumphal Roman general Lucius Cornelius Balbus built a monumental theater complex in his own honor. Elizabeth Rodini's On the Street of the Hidden Shops digs deep into this corner of the city, uncovering a set of surprising, often poignant narratives that range across two thousand years. For as the walls of Balbus's compound decayed and the neighborhood was rebuilt, this block would come to shelter Romans from all walks of life: the daughters of local prostitutes, an earnest young man in search of a bride, an entrepreneur determined to preserve the city's colorful dialect, a Jewish family recently liberated from the nearby Ghetto, a band of idealistic archaeologists unearthing a long-forgotten past, as well as a gifted baker, a medieval donkey, and a Renaissance ghost. Their stories survive in archives and artifacts, but also in the enduring power of rumor and legend. On the Street of the Hidden Shops invites us on a captivating journey to one place across many centuries. Its tight urban focus reveals a Rome most visitors miss, while uncovering some of the many Romes that have been largely lost to history.

Selling the Word of God: The Early Commercial History of the English Bible (Bodleian, 2026) by Dr. Harry Spillane is a history of the English Bible as a book. A book that in order to be read had first to be sold.

In Traveling the Yellow Brick Road: What We Learn from The Wizard of Oz and Wicked (McFarland, 2026) Steven Keslowitz explores how The Wizard of Oz and Wicked can represent the promises and contradictions of the American dream. They engage the American spirit as separate works that share a distinct universe. By reimagining the moral framework of the 1939 Oz film, Wicked challenges long-held beliefs about the nature of heroism, villainy, and truth. Together, the films offer a complex portrait of American motivations and obstacles.

The 2011 Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear disaster was the worst industrial nuclear catastrophe to hit Japan. It was a major event, rated at the highest severity, which released radioactive elements into the power plant’s surrounding environment when back-up systems failed and could not sufficiently cool the nuclear reactors. At least 164,000 people were permanently or temporarily displaced.

In Revolutionary Ink: New York Printers and the Promise of Democracy, 1693-1804 (Cambridge UP, 2026), my guest Mark J. Noonan explores the careers of New York printers whose presses disseminated Enlightenment ideals that fueled the American Revolution and framed the political debates of the early republic. Long overshadowed by the celebrated authors whose works they produced, printers William Bradford, John Peter Zenger, James Parker, Thomas Greenleaf and others helmed presses that provoked civic engagement, cultivated an appreciation for the arts and sciences, and defended press liberty. The book also examines the equally revolutionary work of their wives, who assisted with and sometimes ran their husband's presses. Throughout the narrative, Noonan addresses the discrepancy between revolutionary rhetoric and practice, and argues that to grasp New York's early print history is to confront the paradox of the Anglo-American Enlightenment: its profound advancements alongside the denial of universal human rights.