On Converting Customer Service to a Higher Calling

B. Joseph Pine II is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial startups, and cofounder of Strategic Horizons. Previous books include The Experience Economy, which is credited with introducing the concept of “experience” to the business world, Authenticity, and Mass Customization.Now, in The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations (Harvard Business Press, 2026), Pine brings his clarifying lens to the Rosetta stone of transformation, the customer service experience. What’s the percentage of CEOs who have made a real commitment to the front-line customer service workers who so often serve as the public face of a company in call-center and other interactions? By Joe Pine’s count, odds are merely 5% is an honest answer—and a shame, for the Virtuous Circle means that happy employees mean happier customers, too, inevitably. This episode explores Pine’s vision to inspire customer service departments whose true mission isn’t just resolving complaints but instead serving as guides who help customers achieve the best version of themselves. To do so requires understanding the customer in a way a chatbot never can. To do so means ensuring that the customer service staff isn’t merely a warm body, they’re warm-hearted and given the skills to be empathetic. Want an episode that rings with conviction, this is it.Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down sex discrimination, Dorothy Kenyon drew the legal blueprint. Justice Was Her Calling: The Fierce and Fascinating Life of Dorothy Kenyon (U California Press, 2026) by Jennifer Brinkley is the first full-length biography of the New York judge, lawyer, and civil liberties champion whose litigation strategies helped transform the Equal Protection Clause into a powerful tool for women’s rights. Across decades, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal and into the rise of second-wave feminism, Dorothy Kenyon stood at the forefront of reform.A longtime ACLU national board member, the only woman appointed by the League of Nations to study women’s legal status worldwide, and a US delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, Kenyon pushed equality onto the global stage long before it was widely embraced. Her career was nearly undone when Senator Joseph McCarthy named her first on his list of alleged communists, a spurious accusation that cast a lasting shadow.Drawing on letters, speeches, and fresh archival research, Brinkley restores Kenyon to her rightful status as a legal pioneer and reminds us that civil liberties endure only when defended.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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chris Pearl's Declarations of Independence: Indigenous Resilience, Colonial Rivalries, and the Cost of Revolution (U Virginia Press, 2024) is a fascinating exploration of the American Revolution's causes and consequences on the Pennsylvania frontier. The history of the Fairplay settlement on the West Branch of the Susquehanna River - which (allegedly) declared independence from Pennsylvania AND the British Empire on July 4, 1776 - reveals the complicated, intertwined nature of the Revolution in the backcountry. Pearl illuminates how many groups - Indigenous and colonial - vied for control in these woods from the 1740s through the 1790s, telling a fascinating story of settler colonialism and Native resilience. By intertwining the experiences of Indigenous Americans, rebellious colonial squatters, opportunistic land speculators, and imperial government agents, Pearl reveals how conflicts within and between them all set the terms and ultimately shaped the meaning of the American Revolution. In the crucible of this conflict, memories, histories, and animosities collided and converged with tremendous consequences. Declarations of Independence delves into the racial violence over land and sovereignty that suffused the Revolutionary Age and helps restore Indigenous peoples to their central position at the founding of the United States. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Offshore Oildom: America’s Energy Expansion into the Ocean (LSU Press, 2026) tells the riveting story of the United States’ quest to secure the oil riches of the sea. Drawing on a wealth of untapped sources, Tyler Priest reveals how the offshore oil industry emerged from an ambitious project to incorporate the ocean’s submerged lands into the territory of the United States. These lands were frontier spaces, beyond traditional jurisdiction and control. Efforts to commandeer them for oil and gas extraction thus required new institutions of governance. From the titanic struggle over the tidelands starting in the 1930s to Project Independence in the 1970s, the process of establishing an offshore dominion of oil provoked intractable conflicts over money, values, and power. It pitted coastal states against their land-locked counterparts and captains of industry against federal civil servants and coastal communities. It stoked partisan and internecine warfare. It set off an international race to annex offshore territory, complicating U.S. foreign-policy objectives. It weighed on the minds of Supreme Court justices and troubled every occupant of the White House from Franklin Roosevelt forward. The modern environmental movement was born in opposition to offshore oil just as the 1970s energy crisis compelled the acceleration of drilling in the ocean. Creating and governing an offshore oildom involved nothing less than redrawing the territorial borders of the nation, rebuilding the political foundations of the U.S. energy system, and testing the environmental limits of resource extraction. This history is essential to understanding the tension between energy security and environmental protection in modern America.Tyler Priest is associate professor of history at the University of Iowa. He is the author of the award-winning book The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil’s Search for Petroleum in Postwar America and has published in the Journal of American History, Environmental History, Enterprise & Society, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Science. In 2010 he served as a senior policy analyst on the President’s National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.Filippo De Chirico is a PhD candidate in History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy). His research focuses on the history of the natural gas sector in Italy. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

After Caesar's assassination, the triumvirs drew up a kill list; one such target, a man named Lucius Plotius Plancus, fled to a villa near Naples and tried hiding behind a curtain. The soldiers found him anyway–thanks to his heavy perfume.Pliny the Elder, writing a century later, used the perfume to suggest the killing was justified. Historians have often taken that at face value, as proof that Rome despised Eastern luxuries. Jeremy Simmons reads it as a joke—Pliny was calling the man a walking corpse. In Jeremy’s latest book Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade (Princeton, July 2026) he asks what happened when goods like pepper and perfume arrived at their destinations. The goods took on new lives: perfume became a way of talking about death, pepper a medicine prescribed for its heat, Roman coins turned pendants in South Asia—or how soldiers knew the price of spices even on remote Hadrian’s Wall. Jeremy is an assistant professor of history and the college at the University of Chicago.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Sea of Treasures. 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Agnes Heller loved being part of the Budapest School--and she hated being part of any school. In his 2019 In Memoriam piece, John explored her ambivalence about intellectual camaraderie, its virtues and its vices.This experiment in reading Public Books articles aloud--akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side--follows on from JP's earlier Hannah Arendt articles and 2026 article about the Pope and AI. You can consult the footnotes on Agnes Heller and read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original 2019 form here. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Fascists of the World, Unite?: A History of Fascist Internationalism in the 1930s (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) analyzes the ideas and forms of international cooperation between Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and fascist movements from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, and Britain. The study examines how fascists attempted to unite across borders by forming international organizations and networks, hosting conferences and exhibitions, disseminating multilingual publications, and exchanging propaganda. Their transnational cooperation was fuelled by shared ideas of ultranationalism, anti-liberalism, anti-communism, antisemitism, racism, white supremacism, and Europeanism. The book argues that fascist internationalism, marked by contradictions, limitations, and an Italo-German rivalry, emerged in the 1930s as a counter-reaction to liberal and communist internationalism. The epilogue discusses reverberations in the Second World War and the postwar period and outlines the relevance of this history for understanding contemporary forms of far-right internationalism. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our second episode on “The Literary Ecosystem” features scholars of contemporary literary culture Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette in conversation with host Aarthi Vadde. Like the good close readers we all are, we begin by thinking about how the metaphor of the “literary ecosystem” works. Sarah values the way it brings relationships between cultural institutions to the foreground but prefers the base-superstructure model of Marxian critique. Dan, too, moves away from “naturalizing” metaphors although he sees the ecosystem’s potential for pithily naming the interplay of literary production, circulation, and reception.From here the conversation ranges widely as we consider the economic and social forces shaping contemporary literature – be they the conglomeration of publishing houses (see Dan’s Big Fiction) or the impact of platform capitalism upon authorial labor (see Sarah’s Content Machinesand Aarthi’s We the Platform).  We acknowledge the hollowing out of institutions meant to cultivate appreciation for literature and ponder the viability of platforms like Substack for reconstituting a literary sphere. Finally, what would a discussion of the literary ecosystem be without addressing the elephant in the room: AI. We bracket the author scandals to address the supporting players under threat: the translators, the audiobook narrators, the humans who bring books to readers across languages and formats. Come for the literary sociology; stay for the inside scoop on “prompting” a dark romance novel.MentionsMarx – base-superstructure modelBruno Latour – actor-network theorySophie Bishop – Influencer CreepAndrew de Waard -  Derivative MediaPierre Bourdieu – The Rules of Art Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In No! The Art and Activism of Complaining, her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Sara Ahmed attunes her “feminist ear” to those who seek to challenge powerful institutions. She shows how complaints can unbury past complaints, getting them out of filing cabinets or from behind closed doors, allowing us to see institutions more clearly—how they work, and for whom they work.Where complaints live, how complaints are made, who receives them, who buries them and where—Sara Ahmed’s accessible, attentive writing brings to life the lessons learned from people knocking at closed doors, teaching us how to collectively resist the glacial weight of institutional power. This book inspires all of us to persist, to say “No!” and to build new collectivities that break down brick walls together.Guest: Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar. She has published eleven books, including The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. She lives in Cambridgeshire, England.Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast and newsletter. Playlist for listeners:How We Show UpIndigenous D.C.We Refuse:  A Forceful History of Black ResistanceWhat Might BeLiving ResistanceLeading Toward LiberationLeading From The MarginsThanks To LifeI Have Avenged AmericaBlack Boy Out Of TimeShoutin In The FireThe Names Of All the FlowersHands Up, Don't ShootThat LibrarianBook BanningWelcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Despite the long tradition of exploring the Tantric temple culture of Nampūtiri Brahmins within Tantric studies, the Śākta stream remains under-researched. The Cultural Heritage of Śākta Tantric Communities in India: Goddesses and Magicians in the Holy Groves of Kerala (Routledge, 2026) therefore enriches understanding of these largely neglected sampradāyas (spiritual traditions), bringing them to the attention of the wider academic community and ultimately shedding light on Śākta communities often marginalised in the discourses on mainstream Asian religions.Forming one of the richest surviving religious-philosophical traditions of South Asia, Kerala Śākta Tantra is a complex ritualistic system that evolved under the strong influence of various esoteric traditions, including Kashmirian Śaivism (Krama). Drawing on ethnographic data and anthropological research collected during fieldwork in Kerala, as well as interviews with practitioners of kaḷaripayaṯṯu and members of the Nāyar, Piṭārar, Panikkar, and Kalari Kurupp clans, this book explores the diversity of folk and Sanskritic traditions and highlights the importance of Śāktism, particularly Kālī Krama and Śrīvidyā traditions in Kerala. Chapters discuss sacred spaces in Kerala, introduce various Tantric communities, and examine the social changes in modern Kerala that instigated broader acceptance of those from so-called low castes to worship in Hindu temples. The book also offers a philological study of hitherto unexamined Sanskrit and Malayalam manuscripts (ritual manuals) from Kerala, which provide insights into the modes of worship of fierce and fearsome goddesses of the Tantric pantheon.Arguing that the Kerala Śāktism forms an intricate system preserved by so-called Śākteya clans in Kerala, this important volume will be of use to scholars, postgraduate students, and researchers in the fields of Asian religion, Tantric studies, South Asian religion, and South Asian studies. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.