Showing titles in Public Policy

NATIONAL BESTSELLER From the hosts of The War on Cars podcast, a searing indictment of how cars ruin everything—and what we can do to fight back When the very first cars rolled off production lines, they were a technological marvel, predicted to make life easier and better for all Americans...

The complete text of the landmark encyclical letter from Pope Francis that, as Time magazine reported, “rocked the international community” In the Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality, the beloved Pope exhorts the world to combat environmental degradation and its impact on the poor...

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER “One of the most important voices we have on the left right now.”—Brian Tyler Cohen, YouTuber and best-selling author of Shameless “A masterpiece that exposes the rot in corporate media.”—Ben Meiselas, cofounder, MeidasTouch Network...

"Copaganda" is a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media. It stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. As the United States incarcerates five times more people per capita than it did in 1970—despite record low crime rates—a sprawling and profitable punishment bureaucracy spends a lot of time and money to manipulate what we think that bureaucracy does and why.

A provocative exploration of the forces that keep us from getting things done, and how we can restore confidence in government. “Dunkelman summarizes the history perfectly.” —David Brooks, The New York Times Named a Best Book of the Year by Financial Times The Economist America was...

On Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees. The heat index, which measures how the temperature actually feels on the body, would hit 126 degrees by the time the day was over. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg takes us inside the anatomy of the metropolis to conduct what he calls a "social autopsy," examining the social, political, and institutional organs of the city that made this urban disaster so much worse than it ought to have been.

By following the struggle for survival of one small-town hospital, and the patients who walk, or are carried, through its doors, The Hospital takes listeners into the world of the American medical industry in a way no audiobook has done before. Americans are dying sooner, and living in poorer health. Alexander argues that no plan will solve America’s health crisis until the deeper causes of that crisis are addressed.

As revelatory as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, physician and award-winning author Louise Aronson’s Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. For more than 5,000 years, 'old' has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we’ve made old age into a disease.

Death and taxes come later; what seems inevitable for children is the idea that, after spending the day at school, they must then complete more academic assignments at home. The predictable results: stress and conflict, frustration and exhaustion. Parents respond by reassuring themselves that at...

Small Wars, Big Data provides groundbreaking perspectives for how small wars can be better strategized and favorably won to the benefit of the local population.

Long known as "the world's only private citizen with a foreign policy", George Soros combines his razor-sharp sense of economic trends with his passionate advocacy for open societies and decency in world politics to come up with a workable, and severely critical, analysis of the Bush administration's overreaching, militaristic foreign policy.

Eighteen years after the genocide that made Rwanda international news, yet left it all but abandoned by the West, the country has achieved a miraculous turnaround. Rising out of the complete devastation of a failed state, Rwanda has emerged on the world stage yet again - this time with a unique model for governance and economic development under the leadership of its strong and decisive president, Paul Kagame. Here, Patricia Crisafulli and Andrea Redmond look at Kagame’s leadership.

A #1 Sunday Times bestseller [UK] A titanic battle is being waged for Europe's integrity and soul, with the forces of reason and humanism losing out to growing irrationality, authoritarianism, and malice, promoting inequality and austerity. The whole world has a stake in a victory for...

In The Real Crash, New York Times best-selling author Peter D. Schiff argues that America is enjoying a government-inflated bubble, one that reality will explode... with disastrous consequences for the economy and for each of us. Schiff demonstrates how the infusion of billions of dollars of stimulus money has only dug a deeper hole: The United States government simply spends too much and does not collect enough money to pay its debts, and in the end, Americans from all walks of life will face a crushing consequence.

In his "remarkable" (Men's Journal) and "controversial" (Fortune) book -- written in a "wry, amusing style" (The Guardian) -- Bruce Cannon Gibney shows how America was hijacked by the Boomers, a generation whose reckless self-indulgence degraded the foundations of American prosperity. In A...

In Future Histories, public interest lawyer and digital specialist Lizzie O'Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and progressive social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O'Shea constructs a "usable past" that can help us determine our digital future. What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources - like the internet - in common?

Lee Johnson was a man with simple dreams. He never imagined that he would become the face of a David-and-Goliath showdown against one of the world's most powerful corporate giants. But a workplace accident left Lee doused in a toxic chemical and facing a deadly cancer that turned his life upside down. In 2018, the world watched as Lee was thrust to the forefront of one the most dramatic legal battles in recent history. The Monsanto Papers takes listeners behind the scenes of a grueling legal battle, pulling back the curtain on the frailties of the American court system.

In the US, there is a wide-ranging network of at least 370 food banks, and more than 60,000 hunger-relief organizations such as food pantries and meal programs. And yet hunger still affects one in nine Americans. What are we doing wrong? In Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries, Katie Martin argues that if handing out more and more food was the answer, we would have solved the problem of hunger decades ago. Martin instead presents a new model for charitable food, one where success is measured not by pounds of food distributed but by lives changed.

In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the convenience of Amazon, and the elegance of our Apple devices, but it’s a one-way, top-down process. We’re not asked for our input or our opinions - only for our data. The internet is brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China. Srinivasan argues that we must think in terms beyond the Valley.

Prominent military historian Victor Davis Hanson explores the nature of leadership with his usual depth and vivid prose in The Savior Generals, a set of brilliantly executed pocket biographies of five generals (Themistocles, Belisarius, William Tecumseh Sherman, Matthew Ridgway, and David Petraeus) who single-handedly saved their nations from defeat in war. War is rarely a predictable enterprise - it is a mess of luck, chance, and incalculable variables. Today's sure winner can easily become tomorrow's doomed loser.