New Books in Finance

The Grant Writing Guide: A Road Map for Scholars (Princeton UP, 2023) is an essential handbook for writing fundable grants. This easy-to-use guide features writing samples, a glossary of important terms, answers common questions, and explains pitfalls to avoid. Dr. Betty Lai focuses on skills that are universal to all grant writers, not just specific skills for one type of grant or funder. She explains how to craft phenomenal pitches and align them with your values, structure timelines and drafts, communicate clearly in prose and images, solicit feedback to strengthen your proposals, and much more. This incisive book walks you through every step along the way, from generating ideas to finding the right funder, determining which grants help you create the career you want, and writing in a way that excites reviewers and funders.

This episode explores: how to align your values and interests with a grant opportunity;

why most of us will end up needing a grant; things you can learn from a grant proposal that succeeded, and from one that didn’t; what your grant reviewer really needs from you and why; and how to use the funder’s guidelines and terminology to your advantage.

Guest: Dr. Betty S. Lai is an associate professor in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, among others. Her work has been recognized with awards from the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Foundation.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is the producer of the both Academic Life podcast and the show’s weekly newsletter. She is a writing coach and developmental editor for academics.

Listeners to this episode may be interested in:

Where Does Research Begin

Project Management For Researchers

Find Your Argument

The Book Proposal Book

The Dissertation To Book Workbook

The Top Ten Struggles in Writing A Book Manuscript and What To Do About It

Make A Meaningful Life

Dealing With Rejection

Mindfulness

Facing Failure

Subatomic Writing

Becoming The Writer You Already Are

Welcome 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 325+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

This episode was originally published on Feb 2, 2023.
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It is quite easy to find corruption within nonprofits. This is particularly the case in the subsector of not-for-profits that are incorporated as traditional 501(c)(3) entities. With the continuing erosion of public confidence in charities, these institutions must act now, both individually and collectively, to bolster trust and ensure public support for nonprofits that has been a hallmark of American democracy.

This book explores the causes of malfeasance in the nonprofit realm. It examines how the current inadequate regulatory environment—together with inherent “agency” problems―can lead organizations astray as they turn away from fulfilling donor wishes to instead act in their own self-interest. The book highlights the distinction between “soft corruption” in the nonprofit sector and “hard corruption.” The former includes the misuse of donor funds that do not cross the line into illegality and the latter covers explicitly illegal misappropriation of contributions.

In Foul Play in the Nonprofit Sector: Analyzing Corruption in US Charities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), economist Mark S. LeClair provides constructive overviews regarding charity evaluation. Is it truly fair to judge nonprofits on their financials? The financial figures so frequently dictate the value of a nonprofit, and this often isn’t the best way to judge a charity’s performance. The manuscript includes suggestions for internal sectoral changes and regulatory reforms that can deter corruption at nonprofits.
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Can philanthropy be an anti-racist, feminist, relational, and joyful
expression of solidarity? This book argues that it not only can be for
the future we seek and for philanthropy to achieve its greatest impact,
but it must be.

Nationally recognized philanthropic
leader Dimple Abichandani revolutionizes the precepts of modern
philanthropy. Offering 10 provocative practice shifts, A New Era of Philanthropy: Ten Practices to Transform Wealth into a More Just and Sustainable Future (North
Atlantic Books, 2025) engages readers with fresh answers to the
question of how philanthropy can meet this high-stakes moment. This book
picks up where key books like Decolonizing Wealth and Winners Take All
leave off, offering a guide for donors, foundations, and non-profit
leaders navigating philanthropy in urgent times. Clear-eyed, hopeful,
and responsive to the moment, this book helps us reimagine the purpose
and norms of modern philanthropy. It is an invitation to all of us who
believe these resources can contribute to a more just future: start here.
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Popular
history tells the story of how the tea boycott during the American
Revolution caused a transition in American taste from tea to coffee,
making the young country a coffee-drinking nation. In truth, Americans
did not give up their tea so easily, and the United States grew to be
the second-largest importer of tea from China. Diverging from British
black tea traditions, U.S. consumers preferred green tea, cultivated a
particular taste for Oolong tea, and invented the English Breakfast Tea
brand to market Chinese black tea.

This World in a Teacup: Credit, Taste, and Power in the U.S.-China Tea Trade, 1784–1911
(University of Nebraska Press, 2026) by Dr. Dan Du is the first book to
detail the American tea trade with China after the American Revolution
through the early twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources and
perspectives from both sides of the Pacific, Dr. Du offers new insights
to help understand fundamental developments in U.S.-China relations
within a global context. This World in a Teacup shows that, rather than
depending on hard-money transactions or a barter economy, a
sophisticated credit system buttressed American tea purchases in China:
Credit instruments such as promissory notes, bills of exchange, and
checks financed the transactions between Chinese and U.S. tea merchants,
crystallizing changing power dynamics in the global economy. This World in a Teacup
explains how the circulation of these credit instruments challenged the
conventional understanding of China’s economy as a primitive system and
how the power structure of American, British, and Chinese tea trade in
the credit economy reshaped American consumption patterns.

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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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated,
and how businesses became big. After World War II, military officials
and their partners in industry looked to the newly invented electronic
computer as they sought to cut costs, speed up labor,
manage supply chains, and—they hoped—bring stability to the postwar
economy. Their efforts would shape early computer science and the first
applications of computer technology in manufacturing and business, with
profound consequences for workers and managers alike. By the 1960s,
practices originally developed to improve industrial efficiency were
being used by Wall Street, influencing how markets worked and even how
traders thought. Digital technology became central to finance, tying
together far-flung trading floors and automating decision making—with
alarming consequences, including the 1987 Black Monday crash.

In Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy
(Columbia University Press, 2026), Dr. Devin Kennedy offers a new
history of the digital economy, showing how the computer emerged
from—and transformed—capitalism in the United States. He traces how
computer science and technology were made by industry, which molded
computation to manage factories, financial markets, and entire firms.
Drawing on the archives of businesses, computer researchers, regulators,
and financial institutions, Coding Capitalism retells the story of the postwar economy and the computer, revealing how mid-century
business laid the foundations of the digital world. Bridging business
and economic history with the history of science and technology, this
book uncovers the prehistory of big tech and demonstrates how capitalism has shaped computing since its invention.

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. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance