Collection: Politics

Religious, economic, political and ethnic divisions around the world are dramatically illuminated using the world's most popular sport as a lens and metaphor. A groundbreaking work.

Soccer is much more than a game, or even a way of life. In fact, it's a perfect window into the cross-currents of today's world, with all of its joys and sorrows. Soccer clubs don't represent geographic areas; they stand for social classes and political ideologies. And unlike baseball or tennis, soccer is freighted with the weight of ancient hatreds and history. It's a sport with real stakes -- one that is capable of ruining regimes and launching liberation movements.In this remarkably insightful, wide-ranging work of reportage, Franklin Foer takes us on a surprising tour through the world of soccer, shattering the myths of our new global age. Instead of destroying local cultures, as the left predicted, globalization has revived tribalism. Far from the triumph of capitalism that the right predicted, it has entrenched corruption. From Brazil to Bosnia, and Italy to Iran, this is an eye-opening chronicle of how a beautiful sport and its fanatical followers can highlight the fault lines of a society, whether it's terrorism, poverty, anti-Semitism, or radical Islam -- issues that now have an impact on all of us. Filled with blazing intelligence, colourful characters, wry humour, and an equal passion for soccer and humanity, "How Soccer Explains the World" is an utterly original book that makes sense of our troubled times.

Rudy Giuliani emerged from the smoke of 9/11 as the unquestioned hero of the day: America's Mayor, the father figure we could all rely on to be tough, to be wise, to do the right thing. In that uncertain time, it was a comfort to know that he was on the scene and in control, making the best of a dire situation.

But was he really?

Grand Illusion is the definitive report on Rudy Giuliani's role in 9/11--the true story of what happened that day and the first clear-eyed evaluation of Giuliani's role before, during, and after the disaster.

While the pictures of a soot-covered Giuliani making his way through the streets became very much a part of his personal mythology, they were also a symbol of one of his greatest failures. The mayor's performance, though marked by personal courage and grace under fire, followed two terms in office pursuing an utterly wrongheaded approach to the city's security against terrorism. Turning the mythology on its head, Grand Illusion reveals how Giuliani has revised his own history, casting himself as prescient terror hawk when in fact he ran his administration as if terrorist threats simply did not exist, too distracted by pet projects and turf wars to attend to vital precautions.

Authors Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins also provide the first authoritative view of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, recounting the triumphs and missteps of the city's efforts to heal itself. With surprising new reporting about the victims, the villains, and the heroes, this is an eye-opening reassessment of one of the pivotal events—and politicians--of our time.

From erotic labor, to the rights of people who use psychoactive substances, to reproductive health and carcerality--we are living through a political moment when debates about bodily autonomy are at a fever pitch.

Body Autonomy: Decolonizing Sex Work and Drug Use is a bold and timely collection that confronts these charged issues at the intersection of social justice and public health. It reveals the histories behind the United State's ideological wars and illustrates their costs to all of us. It is a primer on healing-centered harm reduction, which presents a visionary framework and set of practical strategies to advance unity and care while working to transform conditions for communities that bear the brunt of interpersonal and systemic violence, overdose deaths, and health inequities. In the words of leading advocates, service providers, and the scholars whose lives and communities have been harmed by American neo-colonial policies, Body Autonomy offers promising, healing-centered interventions that represent a critical culture shift.

This collection features trusted voices on health and social policy reform, including Kate D'Adamo, Justice Rivera, Ismail Ali, Paula Kahn, and Sasanka Jinadasa, as well as respected healers like Richael Faithful, Amira Barakat Al-Baladi, and Mona Knotte. The articles, interviews, worksheets, and poems within are an offering to expand our collective understanding of survival, healing, and embodied freedom. Body Autonomy is a must read for anyone with a compassionate worldview, people seeking to know more about underground economies, and those who know that punishment doesn't lead to security. It is a liberatory design and a prayer for what's possible.

Zen, haiku, martial arts, sushi, anime, manga, film, video games . . . Japanese culture has long enriched our Western way of life. Yet from a Western perspective, Japan remains a remote island country that has long had a complicated relationship with the outside world.

Even at the nearest point, Japan--an archipelago strung like a necklace around the Asian mainland--is considerably farther from Asia than Britain is from Europe. The sea provides an effective barrier against invasion and has enabled the culture to develop in unique and distinctive ways. During the Edo period, the Tokugawa shoguns successfully closed the country to the West. After Japan opened, it swung in the opposite direction, adopting Western culture wholesale. Both these strategies enabled it to avoid colonization, one of the very few non-Western countries to do so, and to retain its traditions and way of life.

This delightfully readable history will be of interest to people who know nothing about Japan, but also full of insights for those who do, with an aha moment on every page. With a novelist's eye for color and character, Lesley Downer takes the reader through the great sweep of Japanese history, focusing on the dramatic stories of larger-than-life individuals--from emperors descended from the Sun Goddess to warlords, samurai, merchants, court ladies, women warriors, geisha, and businessmen who shaped this extraordinary modern society.

Searching reflections on the crisis in Israel and Gaza by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Holocaust

Diary of a Crisis explores the past tumultuous and traumatic year in Israel-Palestine. The eminent historian Saul Friedländer began a diary of Israeli politics in January 2023 as the country was convulsed by protests against Netanyahu's attempt to overhaul the judiciary.

Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demonstrate against this threat to democracy. But the protests said nothing about the Palestinian question-the elephant in the room, according to Friedländer, who resumed his diary on the eve of Hamas's October 7 assault on southern Israel. Israel was facing one of the worst crises in its history, he observes, under the worst possible internal conditions.

Diary of a Crisis weaves together profound reflections on the history of the country in the life of which Friedlander was an active participant. He memorably describes how Prime Minister Golda Meir once flatly declared to him, "there is no Palestinian people." For Friedländer, on the other hand, the fight for democracy is inseparable from equality of treatment for Arab and Jewish citizens and an end to Israeli domination over Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Despite the continuing bloodshed, Friedländer argues that a two-state solution remains only the long-term answer to this most intractable of conflicts.

How technology and the politics of attention changed the way we look at art

The ways we encounter contemporary art and performance has changed. How are we expectedto engage with today's diverse practice? Is the old model of close-looking still the ideal, or has itgiven way to browsing, skimming, and sampling?

Across four provocative and insightful essays, art historian and critic Claire Bishop identifies trends in contemporary practice. Charting a critical path through the last three decades, Bishop pinpoints how spectatorship and visual literacy are evolving under the pressures of digital technology.

She explores how researched-based exhibitions have proliferated turning the artist into an investigator or archivist with mixed results. Spatial performance can now involve the artist, dancers, or even the audience as participants, often framed with Instagram in mind. The political event is not longer activated without an understanding of the media that will record and distribute it. The proliferation of works that use modernist architecture is noticeable; but has this become a shorthand for something else?

Disordered Attention is a vital survey of 21st century art, from one of the leading art thinkers ofour times.

Voter suppression includes registration restrictions, in-person voting requirements, mass purges of voter rolls, eliminating polling locations, and redrawing district lines in unfair ways. Black voters in particular have faced growing challenges in trying to cast their ballots since 2008. But the issue of voter suppression is not new. Americans have fought for decades against laws that restrict their ability to vote. Learn about the history of voter suppression in the United States, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the ongoing fight to protect voting rights for all Americans.

What would happen if policing disappeared? Would we be safe? This book imagines a world without police.

Imagine a world where people don't have to worry about being killed by the police. Imagine instead of armed officers there are community groups who know you and your family and who work to protect you. Imagine these local organizers working alongside hospitals and other institutions to stop cycles of violence and retaliation in your city. This is a world where stopgap, temporary fixes for violence and harm are no more. A world where we're truly safe.

Distinguished scholar and writer Philip V. McHarris takes us on a far-reaching quest into a world without the current policing system. Originally from the Bronx and spending much of his formative years in Newark, New Jersey, McHarris offers a fresh route on crucial strategies that we can adopt to address safety. In a penetrating narrative, he traces the arc of policing in the United States, from its origins in slave patrols and labor control through its massive expansion in the 1900s and the epidemic of police violence today. In exposing a flawed system, he argues that body cameras, de-escalation training, diversity among police, and other popular reform tactics will never stop police violence. And the high emphasis on punishment in the United States has left many people feeling unsafe.

In this thought experiment, McHarris takes us on a journey into a future beyond police. The book is a deeply researched portrait of how we'd function as a police-free society, using an array of grassroots organizing examples and how these groups work as new models of accountability when someone has been wronged or hurt by another. He points us toward a future beyond the standstill of recurring debates around policing, outlining strategies for responding to conflict and harm in ways that will transform our society.

Forward thinking and steeped in evidence, Beyond Policing arms us with a clear vision for a brighter, safer world and a deeper understanding of what we all can do to bring that world to life.

With a foreword by E. Tendayi Achiume

A chilling exposé of the inhumane and lucrative sharpening of borders around the globe through experimental surveillance technology

In 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced it was training "robot dogs" to help secure the U.S.-Mexico border against migrants. Four-legged machines equipped with cameras and sensors would join a network of drones and automated surveillance towers--nicknamed the "smart wall." This is part of a worldwide trend: as more people are displaced by war, economic instability, and a warming planet, more countries are turning to A.I.-driven technology to "manage" the influx.

Based on years of researching borderlands across the world, lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar's The Walls Have Eyes is a truly global story--a dystopian vision turned reality, where your body is your passport and matters of life and death are determined by algorithm. Examining how technology is being deployed by governments on the world's most vulnerable with little regulation, Molnar also shows us how borders are now big business, with defense contractors and tech start-ups alike scrambling to capture this highly profitable market.

With a foreword by former U.N. Special Rapporteur E. Tendayi Achiume, The Walls Have Eyes reveals the profound human stakes, foregrounding the stories of people on the move and the daring forms of resistance that have emerged against the hubris and cruelty of those seeking to use technology to turn human beings into problems to be solved.

"Create a More Positive Rehoboth" was a decades-long goal for progress and inclusiveness in a charming beach town in southern Delaware. Rehoboth, which was established in the 19th century as a Methodist Church meeting camp, has, over time, become a thriving mecca for the LGBTQ+ community. In Queering Rehoboth Beach, historian and educator James Sears charts this significant evolution.

Sears draws upon extensive oral history accounts, archival material, and personal narratives to chronicle "the Battle for Rehoboth," which unfolded in the late 20th century, as conservative town leaders and homeowners opposed progressive entrepreneurs and gay activists. He recounts not just the emergence of the gay and lesbian bars, dance clubs, and organizations that drew the queer community to the region, but also the efforts of local politicians, homeowners and school boards, among other groups who fought to develop and protect the traditional identity of this beach town. Moreover, issues of race, class, and gender and sexuality informed opinions as residents and visitors struggled with the AIDS crisis and the legacy of Jim Crow.

Queering Rehoboth Beach is more than just an inspiring story about a community's resilience and determination to establish a safe space for itself in the wake of the era of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It is also a terrific beach read.

Imagine an American president who imprisoned critics, spread a culture of white supremacy, and tried to upend the law so that he could commit crimes with impunity. Constitutional law and political science professor Corey Brettschneider provides a thoroughly researched account of assaults on democracy by not one such president but by five--John Adams, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, and Richard Nixon. These presidents illuminated the trip wires that can erode or even destroy our democracy. But Brettschneider shows that these presidents didn't have the last word; citizen movements brought the United States back from the precipice by appealing to a democratic understanding of the Constitution and pressuring subsequent reform-minded presidents to realize the promise of "we the people." This is a book about citizens--Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Daniel Ellsberg, and more--who fought back against presidential abuse of power. Their examples give us hope about the possibilities of restoring a fragile democracy.

The first and definitive history of the use of food in United States law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control, a Fast Food Nation for the Black Lives Matter era

In 1779, to subjugate Indigenous nations, George Washington ordered his troops to "ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more." Destroying harvests is just one way that the United States has used food as a political tool. Trying to prevent enslaved people from rising up, enslavers restricted their consumption, providing only enough to fuel labor. Since the Great Depression, school lunches have served as dumping grounds for unwanted agricultural surpluses.

From frybread to government cheese, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground draws on over fifteen years of research to argue that U.S. food law and policy have created and maintained racial and social inequality. In an epic, sweeping account, Andrea Freeman, who pioneered the term "food oppression," moves from colonization to slavery to the Americanization of immigrant food culture, to the commodities supplied to Native reservations, to milk as a symbol of white supremacy. She traces the long-standing alliance between the government and food industries that have produced gaping racial health disparities, and she shows how these practices continue to this day, through the marketing of unhealthy goods that target marginalized communities, causing diabetes, high blood pressure, and premature death.

Ruin Their Crops on the Ground is a groundbreaking addition to the history and politics of food. It will permanently upend the notion that we freely and equally choose what we put on our plates.

How we can repair our democracy by rebuilding the mechanisms that power it

What's the best way to determine what most voters want when multiple candidates are running? What's the fairest way to allocate legislative seats to different constituencies? What's the least distorted way to draw voting districts? Not the way we do things now. Democracy is mathematical to its very foundations. Yet most of the methods in use are a historical grab bag of the shortsighted, the cynical, the innumerate, and the outright discriminatory. Making Democracy Count sheds new light on our electoral systems, revealing how a deeper understanding of their mathematics is the key to creating civic infrastructure that works for everyone.

In this timely guide, Ismar Volic empowers us to use mathematical thinking as an objective, nonpartisan framework that rises above the noise and rancor of today's divided public square. Examining our representative democracy using powerful clarifying concepts, Volic shows why our current voting system stifles political diversity, why the size of the House of Representatives contributes to its paralysis, why gerrymandering is a sinister instrument that entrenches partisanship and disenfranchisement, why the Electoral College must be rethought, and what can work better and why. Volic also discusses the legal and constitutional practicalities involved and proposes a road map for repairing the mathematical structures that undergird representative government.

Making Democracy Count gives us the concrete knowledge and the confidence to advocate for a more just, equitable, and inclusive democracy.

A sweeping history of how Union victory in the American Civil War inspired democratic reforms, revolutions, and emancipation movements in Europe and the Americas

The Age of Reconstruction looks beyond post-Civil War America to tell the story of how Union victory and Lincoln's assassination set off a dramatic international reaction that drove European empires out of the Americas, hastened the end of slavery in Latin America, and ignited a host of democratic reforms in Europe.

In this international history of Reconstruction, Don Doyle chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, Cubans rose against Spanish rule, France overthrew Napoleon III, and the kingdom of Pope Pius IX fell before the Italian Risorgimento. Some European liberals, including Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, even called for a "United States of Europe." Yet for all its achievements and optimism, this "new birth of freedom" was short-lived. By the 1890s, Reconstruction had been undone in the United States and abroad and America had become an exclusionary democracy based on white supremacy--and a very different kind of model to the world.

At home and abroad, America's Reconstruction was, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, "the greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world." The Age of Reconstruction is a bracing history of a remarkable period when democracy, having survived the great test of the Civil War, was ascendant around the Atlantic world.

"A fast-burning fuse of a book, every page bursting with revelatory detail."--ERIK LARSON

A sweeping account of the anarchists who terrorized the streets of New York and the detective duo who transformed policing to meet the threat--a tale of fanaticism, forensic science, and dynamite from the bestselling author of The Ghost Map

Steven Johnson's engrossing account of the epic struggle between the anarchist movement and the emerging surveillance state stretches around the world and between two centuries--from Alfred Nobel's invention of dynamite and the assassination of Czar Alexander II to New York City in the shadow of World War I.

April 1914. The NYPD is still largely the corrupt, low-tech organization of the Tammany Hall era. To the extent the police are stopping crime--as opposed to committing it--their role has been almost entirely defined by physical force: the brawn of the cop on the beat keeping criminals at bay with nightsticks and fists. The solving of crimes is largely outside their purview.

The new commissioner, Arthur Woods, is determined to change that, but he cannot anticipate the maelstrom of violence that will soon test his science-based approach to policing. Within weeks of his tenure, New York City is engulfed in the most concentrated terrorism campaign in the nation's history: a five-year period of relentless bombings, many of them perpetrated by the anarchist movement led by legendary radicals Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. Coming to Woods's aide are Inspector Joseph Faurot, a science-first detective who works closely with him in reforming the police force, and Amadeo Polignani, the young Italian undercover detective who infiltrates the notorious Bresci Circle.

Johnson reveals a mostly forgotten period of political conviction, scientific discovery, assassination plots, bombings, undercover operations, and innovative sleuthing. The Infernal Machine is the complex pre-history of our current moment, when decentralized anarchist networks have once again taken to the streets to protest law enforcement abuses, right-wing militia groups have attacked government buildings, and surveillance is almost ubiquitous.

Meet today's almost fascists and learn the warning signs to intercept them on the road from populism to dictatorship.

With The Wannabe Fascists, historian Federico Finchelstein offers a precise explanation of why Trumpism and similar movements across the world belong to a new political breed, the last outcome of the combined histories of fascism and populism: the wannabe fascists. This new type of populist politician is typically a legally elected leader who, unlike previous populists who were eager to distance themselves from fascism, turns to totalitarian lies, racism, and illegal means to destroy democracy from within.

Drawing on almost three decades of research on the histories of fascism and populism around the world, this book lays out in clear language what the author calls the "four pillars of fascism"--xenophobia, propaganda, political violence, and ultimately dictatorship. Finchelstein carefully explains how and why wannabe fascists like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Modi embrace the first three pillars but don't quite succeed in dictatorship and total suppression of the popular vote. The Wannabe Fascists stresses the importance of preventing despots from reaching this tipping point and offers a clear warning for what's at stake.