Marshall Tillbrook Poe (born December 29, 1961) is an American historian, writer, editor and founder of the New Books Network, an online collection of podcast interviews with a wide range of non-fiction authors.
[4] There he contributed numerous personal accounts of his own, from playing basketball with Barack Obama,[5] to stumbling onto a crime scene of Dennis Rader's, the BTK serial killer.
In 2006, Poe wrote an influential commentary on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, while serving as a writer, researcher and editor at The Atlantic magazine.
The name of the band is taken from what mathematicians write under their long theorems and proofs on chalk boards, so that janitors won't erase them, especially if their equations have discovered something new.
[8] Marshall Poe's writing ranges from academic articles and books to magazine and Internet pieces intended for wider audiences.
Rather, he contends that the Communist Party lost faith in the traditional path that had not only preserved Russian independence for almost five centuries, but had also enabled the country to build a huge empire.
That path included a reliance on autocratic leadership, a command economy, tight controls on debate in the public sphere and a state-engineered military.
"Using these means," Poe writes, "the Russian elite was able to take a primitive, premodern state and transform it in the course of two centuries into one of the most powerful enterprises on earth.
"[9] Poe's work on Russian history has brought back from obscurity the writings of the 16th-century Austrian diplomat Sigismund von Herberstein, who was one of the first European ethnographers of Russia.
For example, it included a study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences warning about the security risks posed by pools of spent fuel from nuclear power plants; a report from a Brussels-based think tank noting that in spite of fears expressed by U.S. officials, Iran did not appear to be much of a threat to Iraq and a report from the Pew Hispanic Centre showing that increased security measures since 9/11 had not stopped the flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S.[11] Poe has also written a number of articles for The Atlantic including "Life on Mars" (2004);[12] "How to Beat a Drug Test" (2005);[13] and "Colleges Should Teach Religion to Their Students" (2014).
[1] Poe explains in the book's introduction that he is seeking to expand and refine the communications theories of the late Canadian scholar Harold Innis.
[17] Poe advances the idea that new media are developed by inventors and tinkerers, but are not "pulled" into broad use until "organized interests" recognize their need for these new communications tools.
He argues, for example, that audiovisual media such as radio, telephone, television and film were developed well before they were taken up by industrial capitalists who needed more effective ways to market the goods they produced.
Audiovisual media also served the interests of bureaucrats and politicians who gained popularity by giving citizens access to modern conveniences.
And, since evolutionary psychology suggests that human beings find it easier to listen and watch than to read and write, audiovisual media caught on rapidly.
Volume and range were also low because the unaided human voice can't carry very far or to many people, but velocity was high because speech travels at the speed of sound.
[7] The network describes itself as "a consortium of podcasts dedicated to raising the level of public discourse by introducing serious authors to serious audiences.
In 2022 The New Books Network announced that was going to start paying its hosts, and engaged former BBC World Service journalist Owen Bennett-Jones to produce a series called "The Future of".
A new website was launched February 2024 with listener account features, also showing the number of podcasts published on the home page.