Pulitzer-Prize winning author Paul Starr discusses his new book, American Contradiction: REVOLUTION and REVENGE from the 1950s to NOW

Paul Starr. Paul Starr is professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and Stuart Professor of communications and public affairs at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. He also serves as founding co-editor of The American Prospect, a liberal magazine that he co-founded in 1990 with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich. Starr’s work addresses a wide range of questions in politics, history, public policy, and social theory. His book, American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now, published October 14, 2025, is a new social and political history of contemporary America. His previous book, Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies (2019) is a comparative and historical analysis of resistance to change and the pursuit of irreversibility. Starr has written three books about health care institutions and policies. The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1983; updated ed. 2017) won the Bancroft Prize (American History), C. Wright Mills Award (Sociology), and Pulitzer Prize (General Nonfiction). The Logic of Health Care Reform (1992) laid out the case for a system of universal health insurance provided through a choice of private plans in what are now called insurance exchanges. Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health-Care Reform (2011, revised ed. 2013) is an analysis of the history and philosophy of health-care reform. During 1993 Starr served as a senior health policy advisor at the White House. Starr has also written extensively on media, the public, and liberalism. His 2004 book The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications received the Goldsmith Book Prize. Freedom’s Power (2007) is an account of both the philosophical and institutional development of liberalism from its classical to modern phases.

Randall L. Kennedy. Randall L. Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. He was born in Columbia, South Carolina. For his education he attended St. Albans School, Princeton University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia and the Supreme Court of the United States. Awarded the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Race, Crime, and the Law, Mr Kennedy writes for a wide range of scholarly and general interest publications. His other books are For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (2013), The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (2011), Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (2008), Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (2003), and Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (2002). A member of the American Law Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, Mr. Kennedy is also a Trustee emeritus of Princeton University.