Columbia University Press

Oil is an unusual commodity in that individual decisions can have an outsized effect on the market. OPEC+’s choice to increase production, for instance, might send prices falling, affecting both oil producers and consumers worldwide. What do the leading oil market players consider before making a fateful move?

Oil Leaders offers an unprecedented glimpse into the strategic thinking of top figures in the energy world from the 1980s through the recent past. Ibrahim AlMuhanna—a close adviser to four different Saudi oil ministers during that period—examines the role of individual and collective decision making in shaping market movements. He analyzes how powerful individuals made critical choices, tracking how they responded to the flow of information on pivotal market and political events and predicted reactions from allies and adversaries. AlMuhanna highlights how the media has played an increasingly important role as a conduit of information among multiple players in the oil market. Energy leaders have learned to manage the signals they send to the market and to other relevant players in order to avoid sending oil prices into a spiral.

AlMuhanna draws on personal familiarity with many of these individual decision makers as well as his participation in decades of closed-door sessions where crucial choices were made. Featuring revelatory behind-the-scenes perspective on pivotal oil market events and dynamics, this book is a must-read for practitioners and policy makers engaged with the global energy world.

Born just one year before the United Nations itself, Ban Ki-moon came of age with the world body. His earliest memories are haunted by the sound of bombs dropping on his Korean village and the sight of fires consuming what remained. The six-year-old boy fled with his family, trudging for miles in mud-soaked shoes, suffering from incessant hunger, and wondering how they would survive—until the United Nations rescued them. Young Ban Ki-moon grew up determined to repay this lifesaving generosity.

Resolved is Ban Ki-moon’s personal account of his decade at the helm of the organization during a period of historic turmoil and promise. Meeting challenges and resistance with a belief in the UN’s mission of peace, development, and human rights, he steered the United Nations through a volatile period that included the Arab Spring, nuclear pursuits in Iran and North Korea, the Ebola epidemic, and brutal new conflicts in Central Africa. As secretary-general, Ban also forged global agreements to fight extreme poverty and address the climate crisis.

Ban performed what has been called “the most impossible job on this earth” with a genuine belief in collective action and global transformation. Freed from the diplomatic constraints of a lifetime of public service, he offers a candid assessment of the people and events that shape our era and a bracing analysis of what lies ahead.

Why do poets write about animals? What can poetry do for animals and what can animals do for poetry? In some cases, poetry inscribes meaning on animals, turning them into symbols or caricatures and bringing them into the confines of human culture. It also reveals and revels in the complexity of animals. Poetry, through its great variety and its inherently experimental nature, has embraced the multifaceted nature of animals to cross, blur, and reimagine the boundaries between human and animal.

In Poetry and Animals, Onno Oerlemans explores a broad range of English-language poetry about animals from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world. He presents a taxonomy of kinds of animal poems, breaking down the categories and binary oppositions at the root of human thinking about animals. The book considers several different types of poetry: allegorical poems, poems about “the animal” broadly conceived, poems about species of animal, poems about individual animals or the animal as individual, and poems about hybrids and hybridity. Through careful readings of dozens of poems that reveal generous and often sympathetic approaches to recognizing and valuing animals’ difference and similarity, Oerlemans demonstrates how the forms and modes of poetry can sensitize us to the moral standing of animals and give us new ways to think through the problems of the human-animal divide.

The Tale of Cho Ung is one of the most widely read and beloved stories of Chosŏn Korea. The anonymously written tale recounts the adventures of protagonist Cho Ung as he fearlessly confronts and overcomes obstacles and grows into a heroic young man. As a child, Ung flees a wicked tyrant who wrongfully killed his father and took advantage of the emperor’s death to seize the throne from the young prince. Driven by his passion, righteousness, and sense of duty, he pursues retribution and restores justice. His journey, from its innocent beginnings to his final triumph, unfolds as a complex tapestry of loyalty, honor, retribution, and love interspersed with threads of romance and the supernatural.

This first translation into English of The Tale of Cho Ung offers a glimpse into the vernacular and popular literature of the late Chosŏn period, exemplifying the types of stories and heroes that were favored by its reading public. The tale emphasizes individual affections and ethics between child and parent, husband and wife, subject and ruler, pupil and teacher, yet explores human life in all its complexity, even subtly dissenting against traditional Korean social norms. This unabridged translation draws upon the many surviving editions of the novel, which vary in length and format. In her introduction, Sookja Cho addresses how the novel evolved and changed over time, while her annotations help to reveal the depths of a text that conveys the richness and complexity of premodern Korean literature and culture.

On the Chinese internet, alternate history is booming. Millions of writers and readers fantasize about going back in time and changing their country’s fate. One envisions saving the Southern Song Dynasty from the Mongols and turning China into a capitalist democracy. Another portrays a contemporary traveling to 1905 and sparking a communist revolution before the Chinese Communist Party was even founded. These stories and others like them share a theme of national revival that echoes both the official narrative of the “Chinese dream” and populist movements around the world. Why is alt-history so popular in China, and what does it reveal about politics and culture under authoritarianism?

Rongbin Han examines the production and consumption of online alt-history fiction in China, offering new insight into how authoritarian rule gains popular consent. Combining in-depth digital ethnography with analysis of dozens of alt-history novels, he explores how state intervention, market forces, and consumer preferences interact. Han argues that alt-history literature is a project of imagining an ideal China, which simultaneously legitimizes and contests state ideology. Tracing the popular resonance of the regime’s nationalist vision, he demonstrates how citizens play a crucial role in constructing and maintaining the state’s dominance. Because many see national revival as imminent under the party’s leadership, they are willing to tolerate authoritarian rule, in contrast to Western democracies, where discontent has fueled populist politics. Introducing readers to the uncanny world of alt-history, Make China Great Again underscores how aspirations for the rebirth of the nation can bolster undemocratic politics—in China and elsewhere.

As victory in World War II drew near, the Allies decided to hold a major trial of Nazi leaders, which began in Nuremberg in November 1945. Conflict soon broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union over not only how to assess German guilt but also how to depict the trial. The Americans saw it as a judicial and media spectacle that would convey “the greatest moral tale ever told,” illustrated with Hollywood techniques. The Soviets, for their part, drew on extensive experience filming show trials to craft their own narrative of the tribunal.

Sylvie Lindeperg offers a pioneering account of the cinematic stagecraft, storytelling, and imagery of the Nuremberg trials, revealing how film was used both as legal evidence and as a propaganda tool. She follows the American campaign to influence world opinion before, during, and after the trial, on stage and behind the scenes. Lindeberg chronicles how the hope of scripting a Hollywood-style courtroom drama crumbled amid rising geopolitical tensions and the mundane reality of the tribunal. The book interweaves in-depth reconstruction of the filming of the trial with portraits of the colorful characters who played leading or supporting roles. Drawing on American, British, Soviet, French, and German archives as well as analysis of films, newsreels, and photographs, Staging Nuremberg is a revelatory study of the theater of justice.

The Wagner Group emerged from Russia’s shadowy criminal underworld in 2014 and soon became one of the world’s most infamous private military companies. Led by the provocative oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner developed into a key instrument of Russian power projection, with deep and direct ties to the Kremlin. Its mercenaries fought on the front lines in Ukraine, propped up regimes in the Middle East and Africa, and exploited chaos to secure lucrative resource contracts before Prigozhin’s mutiny against Moscow in 2023 brought him down.

This book traces the Wagner Group’s violent ascent and descent, exposing how a shadow army built an empire that seemed to have no end in sight until it turned on its masters. Drawing on a wide range of sources and interviews, Moscow’s Mercenaries offers a comprehensive examination of Wagner’s inner workings: its hybrid structure, battlefield tactics, propaganda campaigns, and connections to the Russian military. From Ukraine to brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Syria, the Central African Republic, Mali, and beyond, the book shows how Wagner evolved into a global criminal syndicate and reveals why its ambitions led to a fatal collision with the Russian state.

Moscow’s Mercenaries explores what Wagner’s rise tells us about the future of modern warfare, the erosion of international norms, and how authoritarian regimes outsource violence. Anyone interested in the evolution of mercenary warfare, great power competition, and the dark underbelly of global security stands to learn important lessons from this well-timed and insightful book.

Traces of Herman Melville are everywhere. Works directly or loosely inspired by the nineteenth-century writer abound, from adaptations and artistic experiments to parodies and cheeky references. They are as distinct as Sena Jeter Naslund’s novel Ahab’s Wife, Laurie Anderson’s mixed-media spectacle Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick, Maurice Sendak’s queer illustrations of Pierre, and the collaborative Emoji Dick. Melville turns up in opera, concrete poetry, auteur cinema, monumental murals, and sperm whale–sized sculptures. Why are so many artists drawn to Melville? What does his continuing presence say about contemporary culture?

Charting how a vast variety of writers, filmmakers, and artists channel Melville, Joseph Allen Boone offers new insights into the author, his works, and his many legacies. He argues that contemporary artists are drawn to Melville’s patchwork aesthetics, especially his mingling of genres and media and his prolific borrowings from popular and high culture. Boone’s cases range from artists drawing on the use of whalebone in nineteenth-century fashion to critique gender roles to those obsessed, like Melville, with size and monumentality in ever-proliferating artworks. Other contemporary artists find Melville’s environmental themes strikingly prescient, turning to his work to examine waste, extinction, and planetary crisis. Tracing a once nearly forgotten author’s improbable contemporaneity, The Melville Effect sheds light on how artists turn to literary pasts to make sense of the present and create art for the future.

To socialize, your brain needs to see and hear other people, yet your brain is sealed inside a bony box: your skull. How does an internal mass of tissue comprehend the world outside? How does it form social relationships? This groundbreaking book answers those questions and reveals the perceptual underpinnings of society.

Charles and Daphne Maurer provide a clear explanation of how the brain interprets sensory inputs, showing how rudimentary sensations evolve into social interactions at every scale from nursery to nation. Their novel approach shows how sights, sounds, and smells build social and political worlds. They offer fresh insights into broad swaths of the social sciences.

The World Inside Your Head brings science to life, interweaving cutting-edge research with eye-opening examples across cultures and eras. Its style is lively and free of jargon, yet its argument is rigorous and scholarly. It is an accessible and iconoclastic rethinking of conventional psychology.

For thousands of years, people have believed that the configuration of stars and planets in the sky influences earthly events. Today, astrology is a lucrative global market, with newspaper columns, mobile apps, and professional counselors weighing in on everything from love life to health to the stock market. Yet scientific evidence shows indisputably that it is simply superstition. Why does astrology appeal to so many people? What makes its prognostications seem persuasive? Is there any harm to believing in astrology anyway?

This book aims a scientific lens at astrology, from its colorful history to experimental tests of its predictions through the social and psychological factors that explain its enduring popularity. Carlos Orsi explores the importance of astrology to the history of science and the reasons it has been categorized as a pseudoscience. He investigates its tenets, recounting how scientists debunked common claims. With both empathy and skepticism, Orsi illuminates the psychological, rhetorical, and emotional mechanisms that cause people to find astrological predictions convincing. He also addresses the dangers of irrational beliefs and the risks of applying astrology to serious decisions. Wide-ranging and entertaining, this book offers a critical look at the modern appeal of an ancient superstition.

The African allies of the United States are often depicted as mere pawns or clients seeking aid. Yet African leaders have deftly capitalized on security partnerships with the United States in ways that have been widely overlooked. Through skillful negotiating, hosting US military operations, and deploying their soldiers to support Washington’s strategic aims, they have advanced their own interests—sometimes at the expense of their citizens.

Treachery and Diplomacy shines a light on US-Africa security partnerships, revealing their simmering internal tensions, hidden racial politics, and consequences for peace and democracy. Sobukwe Odinga explores the contentious relations between the US and key African allies—Liberia, Ethiopia, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Uganda—from the Cold War to the War on Terror. He brings to life the diplomatic gambits of leaders such as William Tubman, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Yoweri Museveni, documenting how they prodded Washington to back them in regional conflicts, increase aid, and temper criticisms of their domestic policies. Odinga also considers the African American political elites who denounced and championed US-Africa security partnerships—in some moments undercutting the influence of African leaders, in others abetting their authoritarianism. Connecting American racial thought, Pan-Africanism, and Black transnationalism to US security policy toward Africa, Treachery and Diplomacy offers new insight into how African governments have pursued their own agendas.

In many emerging economies, impressive progress in reducing poverty has been overshadowed by persistent inequality and growing frustration with political elites. This widespread social discontent has driven governments to respond with short-term policies aimed at increasing equity that run the risk of jeopardizing long-term development. Is it possible to build fairer societies without undermining economic growth?

From Equity to Growth explores this dilemma, offering new perspectives on one of the defining challenges of the era. Combining economic theory, political analysis, and real-world case studies, the book contrasts two potential outcomes. In one, poorly designed redistributive policies distort markets, weaken institutions, and trap countries in middle-income stagnation. In the other, well-crafted equity strategies boost investment, strengthen institutional trust, and spur sustainable development.

Rejecting simplistic binaries between equity and growth, the authors argue that inclusive development is not only possible but essential. They highlight specific policy choices that can reconcile social demands with macroeconomic stability, providing a road map to escape the middle-income trap without sacrificing fairness. Clear, timely, and rigorous, From Equity to Growth offers both a diagnosis of many countries’ current predicament and a hopeful vision of how to move forward.

Song Jiaoren (1882–1913) was early-twentieth-century China’s greatest champion of constitutional democracy. Fleeing the police after a failed plot in 1904, the young revolutionary found refuge in Japan, where his eyes were opened to new political possibilities. Along with Sun Yatsen, he was one of the founders of the Nationalist Party, turning an underground organization into a nationwide force. After the 1911 revolution, Song campaigned for a truly democratic constitution guaranteeing a representative government. Following parliamentary elections in 1913, he was on the verge of becoming prime minister—but he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet on a Shanghai railway platform, and China began its descent into chaos and authoritarianism.

Don C. Price provides the definitive biography of Song Jiaoren, recounting his remarkable career and illuminating a period of epochal change. Drawing on a wide variety of sources—especially his revealing diary—this book chronicles Song’s life and times, interweaving his personal relationships with his revolutionary activities and intellectual development. From his early life in a rural interior province to his Japanese exile through his meteoric ascent and tragic death, it explores how Song became an unwavering advocate for democracy—and why antidemocratic forces sought to eliminate him. By detailing Song’s legacy, this book sheds light on the roots of democratic aspirations in China and on the path not taken in the country’s tumultuous history.

There is an enduring fascination with Joan of Arc, yet she is almost always seen alone, as a victim or martyr. A strikingly different person is heard in her letters and the testimony of her companions. To the king of England, she wrote, “I am a commander of war, and in whatever place I come upon your men in France, I will make them leave . . . And if they do not wish to obey, I will have them all killed.” She wrote to the people of the towns she defended, giving them news and seeking their support. Her companions spoke of her intelligence, bravery, and military competence. Hers was a collective mission to rescue the people from the depredations of war.

Focusing on her life rather than her death, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan offers an interpretation of Joan of Arc as a political thinker and actor who sought, during her meteoric presence in fifteenth-century France, to legitimate a king, channel God’s word, convene a coronation, and speak for the people in an alternative legal order. She assembled sacred kingship, mystical experience, and the press of political and economic chaos into a vernacular political theology that still speaks to our moment. Making a King illuminates Joan’s extraordinary life and vision—her conception of sovereignty from below, her form of female masculinity, and her power as kingmaker—and shows why she can help us find a deeper understanding of religion and politics today.

If someone posts a death threat or a violent manifesto online, will they cross over from words to deeds? Explicit threats, intimidation campaigns, and incitements to violence are no rarity among white nationalists, incels, and other racist and misogynist extremists. Yet it is often difficult to determine whether they pose genuine risks, since the boundaries between trolling and true violent intent can be blurry. How can we tell the difference between online bluster and terrorist threats?

Julia Ebner—an internationally acclaimed expert on online radicalization—offers a fresh approach, showing how language patterns reveal the potential for political violence. She investigates the psychological underpinnings of texts by terrorists such as Anders Breivik, Dylann Roof, Elliot Rodger, and Brenton Tarrant, offering statistical and qualitative contrasts with nonviolent political writing. Ebner finds striking similarities among their manifestos, including the fusion of personal identity with the group, visceral othering of outgroups, narratives of existential conflict, and the glorification of violence. Following these trails, she demonstrates that perpetrators of extremist violence inadvertently give away their intentions in what they say. Featuring vivid writing and actionable conclusions, The Language of Terrorists presents a new model of violent threat detection that can address pressing challenges faced by the international security and intelligence communities.

Religion is making itself unbelievable—scandal-ridden, antiscientific, authoritarian, and reactionary. Can religion be saved? Is it even worth saving? Can religion be saved not just from its critics but from itself?

John D. Caputo proposes a radical alternative—what he calls “religion’s last stand”—by turning to theopoetics. In the traditional account, theopoetics calls for approaching God poetically because God transcends human language. Caputo contests this view, arguing that in the radical account, God does not precede but is generated by the poetic imagination. Theopoetics is not adorning an already constituted God; it is constituting the very idea of God. A radical God, untethered from theological orthodoxy and confessional rivalries, is neither a real being nor an unreal illusion, neither the object of supernatural belief nor the reject of skeptical disbelief. By adopting a phenomenological suspension of both belief and disbelief, both theism and atheism, both the religious and the secular, Caputo demystifies the distinction between the natural and the supernatural and replaces it with the distinction between the prosaic and the poetic. A daring undertaking in radical theology, this lively and provocative book proposes a startlingly different future for religion.

What might religious practice learn from plants? Recent years have seen the emergence of critical plant studies, and philosophers have found a radical mode of thought in vegetal life. Ecologies of Ecstasy recasts religious contemplation as a form of vegetal being, arguing that spiritual practice is rooted in the generation of life on earth.

Simone Kotva explores the role of vegetal life in the history of Christian mysticism and the practice of contemplation, demonstrating its significance to the concept of mystical union, which rests on the loss of distinction between self and world. She shows that plants, animals, and other creatures were once understood to exist by virtue of contemplation and examines how religious orthodoxies suppressed this idea. Ecologies of Ecstasy provides fresh readings of texts by figures such as Plotinus, Evagrius of Pontus, Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite of Porete, the Helfta mystics, and Jeanne Guyon in light of contemporary philosophies of vegetal life and critical plant studies. It brings together feminist, queer, and ecocritical readings of Christian mysticism with continental philosophy and the works of Michael Marder, Emanuele Coccia, and Luce Irigaray. Entwining Christian contemplation with philosophies of vegetal life, this book offers new ways to understand mysticism and spiritual practice.

What if the most consequential alliance between the United States and Turkey was not signed—but screened? Beginning in 1930 and crystallizing during the Cold War, the two nations forged an alliance through film: American and Turkish institutions used educational films—short documentaries shown in schools, villages, theaters, and public spaces—not just to inform but to persuade. These films promoted cooperation, encouraged economic development, and modeled ideals of modern citizenship. Yet beneath their instructional surface, they also advanced a racialized vision of progress.

Film Diplomacy offers a powerful new account of how film shaped international relations and national identity. Drawing on previously unexamined and recently declassified archives in Turkey and the United States, Ayşehan Jülide Etem demonstrates how both countries used educational films to align institutional agendas and geopolitical interests. The United States built on missionaries’ earlier use of film programs while shifting from Christianization to modernization to promote free market capitalism and prevent the spread of communism. Turkish officials embraced film to promote a homogenous, secular, and Western-facing national identity that erased groups such as Armenians, Blacks, Greeks, Jews, and Kurds. In both contexts, whiteness operated as an invisible standard—shaping who belonged, who was excluded, and what counted as modern.

By tracing the transnational network of educational cinema, Etem uncovers how film functioned as infrastructure, circulating ideologies, organizing institutions, and training citizens. Moving beyond conventional accounts of propaganda and soft power, this book exposes how film was central to the making of modern Turkey and sheds new light on media’s role in global politics.

There is a long history of discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in the American military and intelligence services, from vice squad stings during World War I to the “Lavender Scare” of the early Cold War through “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the Trump administration’s transgender ban. How have the rationales for anti-LGBTQ+ policies changed over time? When and why did these policies shift? What does anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination reveal about the US military, American political institutions, and broader themes in queer history?

The Lavender Bans is a comprehensive account of the evolution of anti-LGBTQ+ policies from World War I to the present. Dorian Rhea Debussy—a leading expert on LGBTQ+ history in the US military—examines six distinct periods of exclusion over the course of a century, tracing continuities and changes alongside the growth of the national security state. Bringing together interdisciplinary scholarship and close analysis of archival documents, she offers new insights into the policies affecting LGBTQ+ people in the armed forces.

Meticulously researched and rich in detail, The Lavender Bans sheds light on a long and troubling history—with deep contemporary relevance as exclusion of transgender people continues. It is an engaging, important, and timely book for a range of readers, including scholars, students, policy makers, military personnel, and people affected by anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination.

Are there only five tastes, sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami? Why are some so appealing to us while others are what we call acquired tastes? Do other animals perceive tastes in the same way humans do? How did the sense of taste evolve? Should the hotness of chili peppers, the coolness of mint, and the pungency of garlic be considered tastes? What can taste teach us about our health and our environment?

In this book, two leading researchers take readers on a lively journey through the science of taste. Davide Risso and Gabriella Morini trace its evolution across millions of years, ranging from microbes to octopuses through birds and finally humans. They explain how taste receptors allow us to decode the chemical composition of food and distinguish between edible and toxic items. Evolution has given varied species different capabilities, so pandas lack the ability to taste umami and cats do not perceive sweetness. On Taste also reveals how mosquitoes choose their prey—and why they like some people more than others. Rigorous and accessible, this book shows how taste unlocks the connections between science and culture, letting us understand our foods and our world more richly.

In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town ignited a movement that would reverberate across the globe by demanding the removal of a statue of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. What began as a protest against a single monument became Rhodes Must Fall: a confrontation with colonial legacies at South African universities that inspired a movement at Oxford and beyond.

A. Kayum Ahmed tells the powerful story of Rhodes Must Fall, tracing the emergence of a new decolonial framework, Fallism, and its trajectory from Africa to empire. Drawing on archival research and interviews with activists, he interprets Fallism as both a critique of the university—rooted in patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism—and a broader decolonial theory. Ahmed reveals how students combined acts of defiance with deeper forms of intellectual insurgency to challenge Eurocentric curricula, linguistic hierarchies, and the silencing of Black epistemologies. In so doing, they transformed Black pain—the source of the uprising—into a collective struggle for Black liberation.

By following Fallism’s journey, this book demonstrates how student movements create new vocabularies of resistance that transcend geographies of power. It underscores why universities remain battlegrounds in global struggles, from conflicts over statues and curricula to pro-Palestinian protests. Both a history of a movement and a theoretical intervention, Theorizing Fallism illuminates the enduring influence of students to challenge entrenched structures of knowledge and power.

In 1901, Lizzie Black Kander put together a cookbook based on the classes she taught at the Milwaukee Jewish Mission. “I was trying to teach a group of young foreign girls in a crowded neighborhood how to cook simple and nutritious food, yet have it attractive and inexpensive as we prepare it in America,” she recalled. The Settlement Cook Book would go on to be the most successful charitable cookbook in American history, remaining a best-seller into the 1970s. Despite including nonkosher recipes, it became a mainstay in Jewish kitchens and an enduring touchstone of Jewish American culture.

Recipes for the Melting Pot tells the remarkable story of The Settlement Cook Book, demonstrating how it shaped Jewish American identity—and was in turn shaped by generations of Jewish women. Nora L. Rubel traces the cookbook’s evolution across forty editions over several decades, through waves of immigration, shifting gender roles, upward mobility, suburbanization, and rapid changes in Jewish life. She argues that the book celebrates pluralism, allowing it to serve at once as a tool for Americanization, a repository of tradition, and a platform for culinary innovation. Ultimately, The Settlement Cook Book is a record of American Jewish women’s history, told through the food they made and the lives they led. A cultural biography of an iconic cookbook, this lively and inviting book shares an inclusive vision of American cuisine.

Conventional “frequentist” methods that dominate the field of statistics are generally inconsistent and liable to catastrophic failure in some contexts. These weaknesses have become particularly concerning in relation to crises of replicability and credibility in science. Two alternatives have been proposed to address these flaws—classical Bayesian inference and the principle of maximum entropy—but the connections between them remain controversial.

Making Statistics Work presents a synthesis of information theory and Bayesian inference that addresses these fundamental problems. It provides a consistent, powerful, and flexible framework for data inference based on rigorous logic derived from first principles, allowing for new approaches to many of the unresolved questions of statistics. Duncan K. Foley and Ellis Scharfenaker illustrate the application of this framework and the reasoning behind it across a variety of important statistical problems, such as the inference underlying “gold standard” clinical trials, models of human behavior employed in behavioral finance and psychology, analysis of macroeconomic policy, the relationship of classical probability to quantum physics, and the limitations of linear regression analysis. Making Statistics Work offers new insight into contentious topics, from problems of causality and confounding variables in randomized experimental trials to the foundations of Bayesian and frequentist probability theory.

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.

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 midcentury 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.

There is an abiding tension in American religious history—and in how that history is told—between the pervasive ideology of white supremacy and the reality of a multicultural, multireligious North American landscape. Visiting this tension from the colonial era to the present, Catherine L. Albanese explores collisions between a white Protestant majority and the diversity of faiths flourishing beside it, offering timely insights into transformations in American religion.

Beginning with how Indigenous peoples felt the heavy hand of settler violence, Kaleidoscope examines coexistence and conflict across American history in a series of essays. Albanese considers a number of moments and movements in Anglo-American Protestant religiosity even as she looks to Native, Black, and Latinx spiritual traditions. She highlights the uncertain status of Catholics and Jews, following their quest for whiteness and acceptance, and shows how Mormons too asserted their place within the United States by extolling their whiteness.

Filled with rich detail and a varied cast of characters, Kaleidoscope offers a new lens on diversity within American religious history. Elegantly written and powerfully argued, this book calls for overturning frameworks that place whiteness at the center and for finding new ways to tell the story of American religions.

Around the world, journalism is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy. Public confidence in the news is declining; populist leaders attack the media; and journalists are routinely harassed and threatened. Many journalists and scholars believe that building trust with audiences would help weather these storms. But what do journalists risk in their pursuit of trust?

This book provides a fresh perspective by demonstrating how the desire to increase trust in the news can be weaponized against journalists. Based on in-depth interviews with nearly one hundred journalists, Does Trust Matter? challenges widely held assumptions about audience feedback that leave the media vulnerable to manipulation. Efrat Nechushtai shows how concerns over distrust have been used to increase favorable coverage of illiberal movements. She documents how the quest for public approval has led journalists to legitimize antiscience claims in the United States, racialize crime reporting in Germany, and produce “patriotic” stories in Hungary and Israel, among other cases.

Does Trust Matter? offers timely insights into how journalists can build resilience against increasingly sophisticated attempts to undermine their work, including AI-powered influence campaigns and online propaganda. Valuable for scholars and practitioners alike, this book presents practical strategies that reporters, editors, and publishers can use to navigate today’s challenging environment.

Syaman Rapongan is a chronicler of his people, the Tao, an Indigenous community who live on Orchid Island near the island of Taiwan. In Eyes of the Sky, he invites readers to learn the ways of this oceanic world—and to learn to see their own worlds anew through a Tao lens.

Employing oral storytelling conventions, Eyes of the Sky opens by recounting the history of the Tao, from their mythic origins to the present day. Its first chapter is narrated by a giant trevally, a fish common to the waters around Orchid Island. It then tells the stories of three generations of a single family—father, son, and grandson—exploring the transformation of Tao society through their encounters with Han-Taiwanese modernity.

Syaman Rapongan paints a vivid picture of his homeland—its mountains and seas, flora and fauna, climate and ecology—as well as local culture and customs. In describing fishing practices, canoe building, and conversations with friends from his village, he illustrates the Tao’s ecological worldview, lived experience, and struggle to preserve their culture. Written in conversational prose with evocative detail, this book is a powerful testament to how Indigenous people and stories persevere.

Current debates about gender identity are fraught with contradictions. Even as we increasingly recognize gender as an assigned category or social convention, we still see it as inherent to who we are, fundamental to our sense of self. But the quest to find one’s true self is unfulfillable. How can we find alternatives to the focus on getting our identity “right”?

This book offers a cultural critique of gender narratives, spanning traditional conformity to gender roles, the modern quest for individual authenticity beyond gender, and the recent social media–fueled concern with curating gendered profiles. Hans-Georg Moeller puts Daoist philosophy into conversation with present-day thinkers, showing why it helps us rethink common notions about identity. Discussing a wide range of cases, from Chinese foot binding to the politics around transgender issues today, he argues that we can defuse our anxieties by recognizing that gender—like all identities—is social, not individual, and changes at different times and in different places. Accessibly written and empathetic, The Enigma of Gender calls on us to be at ease with whoever we happen to be.

The Korean War was never formally declared, and no peace treaty ending the war was ever signed. The 1953 armistice did not stop the war but marked its extension and expansion into a warlike state of emergency. How did the new reality of life under armistice shape visions of the possible in North and South Korea? What meanings are attached to deaths in a so-called “limited war” that turned out to be limitless? What does the lack of an end to the Korean War reveal about the nature of war in the post-1945 era?

Theodore Hughes crosses borders to demonstrate how stories of dying and death—what he calls the thanatographic imagination—in North Korea, the US, and South Korea energize ideas about history, the present, and the future. Death Without End shows how literary texts, films, nonfiction, and other forms of cultural production from the late 1940s to the 1960s give rise to revolutionary belongings, gendered selfhoods, and anticommunist cosmopolitanisms as they address the incommensurate loss of life, violence, destruction, and suffering of the war. Hughes also traces how the Korean War entered US popular culture in unexpected but enduring ways. Bridging Korean studies, American studies, and the cultural turn in international relations, this book offers new ways to understand the unending Korean War and the global implications of its logic of limitlessness.

In recent years, increasingly sophisticated metrics have been created to measure sustainability. First devised to address environmental concerns such as greenhouse gas emissions, they now also assess organizational governance, community benefits, and hiring practices, among others. The field of sustainability management uses these metrics to track and advance progress on environmental, social, and business goals. How can an organization incorporate sustainability metrics into performance measurement and decision making? Which metrics should different organizations adopt, and why? What should sustainability management do to adapt in the face of political hostility, economic volatility, and technological change?

This book is a comprehensive guide to sustainability metrics and management, introducing readers to key concepts and techniques. It details the measurement process needed to produce reliable and verifiable sustainability metrics and discusses the relationship to financial performance. The authors show how to integrate sustainability into the core of organizational management and make it a routine part of administration. They also emphasize the importance of metrics for measuring, assessing, and managing risk. Written for practitioners, students, and managers of organizations of all sizes, this book gives readers the tools and understanding they need to lead the journey toward sustainability.

By the 1930s, filmmakers had access to a backlog of footage from around thirty years of motion pictures, allowing them to create a new kind of film stitched together from the raw material of older films. At around the same time, the transition to synchronous sound added a transformative new element to the grammar of cinema: the voiceover narration. Together, the film inventory and offscreen commentary gave rise to the archival documentary, the motion picture genre that preserves and rewinds history.

Thomas Doherty tells the story of the archival documentary, spotlighting the first films that set out deliberately to preserve history on screen. He shows how newsreels and documentaries challenged the era’s restrictive censorship and how film began to engage with the great political issues of the day. Doherty considers a range of films—some well-known, others obscure—including J. Stuart Blackton’s The Film Parade (1933), Laurence Stallings and Truman Talley’s The First World War (1934), Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.’s Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934), Max Eastman and Herbert Axelbank’s Tsar to Lenin (1937), and the March of Time screen magazine. Tracing the creation of the archival documentary, How Film Became History illuminates how motion pictures have come to shape our vision of the past.

Around the world, many reptile and amphibian species—from the iconic Komodo dragon to the unglamorous Telfair’s skink—are facing grave threats to their survival. For many, like the Belalanda chameleon of Madagascar and Mexico’s beloved axolotls, habitat destruction due to logging, agriculture, and development poses the greatest peril. Some, such as Galápagos giant tortoises, have been slaughtered wholesale by humans. Others, like Caribbean rock iguanas, have been driven to the brink of extinction by the introduction of new species to their island homes. Commercial exploitation is another risk to animals like the ploughshare tortoise, in high demand in the global black market pet trade, and the Cuban crocodile, prized for its skin. Still more, like Yosemite toads, face new threats as climate change accelerates.

In Cold-Blooded Murder, Craig Stanford tells the captivating stories of dozens of endangered reptiles and amphibians, depicting the ecological roles and unique characteristics of each species. He takes readers on a globe-spanning journey, revealing the diversity and beauty of the creatures with whom we share our world. Stanford considers the commonalities and differences in how these species came to be threatened with extinction, underscoring human culpability as well as the complexity of each situation. He also highlights conservation projects that are protecting critically endangered animals, sharing inspiring success stories while acknowledging the difficulty of saving species. This gripping and poignant book shows why we should be fascinated by reptiles and amphibians—and strive to prevent their extinction.

Society doesn’t always make it easy to tell stories about loss. Grief can make us feel that we have crossed over to another side, where people can’t reach us and we can’t reach others. We’re encouraged to move quickly through the often-misunderstood “stages of grief”; we fear that we are burdening others with our pain. But pain can feel more manageable when we find ways to describe it—and writing about grief can help us connect with others who have felt pain of their own.

Letting Grief Speak is a creative writing craft book on the art of telling our hardest stories. Based on a class called Grief Writing Sundays that Diane Zinna has led for several years, it provides ninety writing prompts with accompanying craft techniques to help people find language for their grief. By turns gentle, unexpected, rebellious, and wonderfully strange, these prompts open portals: entryways into spaces where difficult emotions can become meaningful narratives. Warm, sensitive, and honest, Letting Grief Speak is a memoir of the craft, interwoven with stories from the author’s own life. It also includes pieces from acclaimed writers and more than forty of her Grief Writing students, inviting readers to find their own ways to tell vulnerable stories. A tool for writers and a companion for grievers, this book meets writers of all levels where they are, no matter what kind of grief they hold.

From birth, our brains are shaped by other people—in our families, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, countries, and cultures. These social worlds make us who we are, but how this process works remains mysterious on a neural level.

In Socially Wired, Matthew W. Schelke uses the stories of patients with neurological illness to show how social and cultural environments transform the brain. In the neurology clinic, the experiences of patients with the same illness can vary tremendously depending on their backgrounds, providing a window onto the complex interactions between brain and culture. Through cases ranging from an amateur chef who suddenly stopped cooking to an art lover who was removed from a gallery for touching the art, Schelke explores what neurological injury can reveal about social and cultural behavior. He demonstrates how specific practices—shared emotion, apprenticeship learning, imagination, language, art, and collective memory—shape neural networks, the experiences of patients, and ultimately our encultured minds.

Going beyond neuroscience, Socially Wired integrates insights from anthropology to philosophy to ecological psychology. Highlighting patient stories, this book illuminates how the brain wires us to participate in culture and how, in turn, culture rewires the brain.

Recognition has become one of the key concepts of contemporary critical theory, heralded by thinkers such as Axel Honneth and Charles Taylor. It is widely claimed that a person must be recognized by others in order to realize their own identity and that the lack of recognition constitutes a form of oppression or injustice. Is recognition always a good thing?

In this ambitious and compelling book, Kristina Lepold challenges the common assumption that recognition is positive, emphasizing its ambivalent role in social life. She offers a systematic account of the complex nature of recognition, showing how it can implicate us in oppressive or otherwise problematic arrangements. Lepold engages with different approaches for thinking about recognition—including Axel Honneth’s influential theory, as well as arguments made by Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and Judith Butler—which she reconstructs in a nuanced and accessible fashion.

By one of the most original voices in the new generation of critical theorists, Ambivalent Recognition is a must-read for anyone interested in not only one of critical theory’s key concepts but also the larger question of why unjust social arrangements often prove so stubborn and difficult to change.

The Syrian regime endured the uprisings that began in 2011, aided by Russian military intervention in 2015 that changed the trajectory of the conflict and brought more territory under government control, until its eventual collapse in 2024. Over this period, how did the state attempt to manage the conflict away from the battlefield and reestablish control over the population?

Samer Abboud argues that the Syrian regime sought to entrench its rule during wartime through bifurcating society into “loyal” and “disloyal” subjects—and punishing those it deemed treacherous. The regime framed the conflict as a war on terror, portraying its opponents as traitors to the homeland. In the post-2015 period, it established new laws, courts, and legal categories that targeted “betrayal,” which could include anything from military desertion to absenteeism to critical social media posts. Disloyal subjects were subjected to various forms of punishment and denied reentry into the country if they had been displaced. Bringing together the regime’s narratives and rhetoric with the machinery of bureaucratic practices, Abboud traces how the state sculpted the divide between loyalty and disloyalty. Empirically rich and theoretically informed, Betrayal of the Homeland offers a panoramic view of the politics of punishment during the final decade of the Assad regime, with broader implications for understanding how authoritarian states manage conflicts.

How will future climates be different from today’s world—and what consequences will changes in climate have for societies? This book is a primer on the fundamental science of climate change and climate prediction, now updated to reflect the latest research. It is accessible for readers with little to no background in science, particularly geared toward those studying sustainable development.

John C. Mutter gives a just-the-facts overview of how the climate system functions and what we know about why changes occur. He details how human activity affects global climate, explaining consequences of rising temperatures such as sea level rise, hurricane behavior, and climate variability. The primer also discusses how climate predictions are made and examines the sources of uncertainty in forecasting.

This second edition incorporates updates to the science that have occurred since the book’s original publication, including the most recent IPCC Assessment Report. It adds discussion of attribution science—the ability to determine the extent to which extreme weather was the result of climate change. It also features a new chapter on geoengineering, exploring proposals to mitigate or even reverse climate change by reducing the amount of solar radiation that reaches Earth or directly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

For Alain Badiou, Friedrich Nietzsche is the “prince” of anti-philosophy. French leftist thinkers celebrated Nietzsche in the second half of the twentieth century, but when a backlash emerged in the 1990s, Badiou refused to join the attack. Instead, Badiou devoted his 1992–1993 seminar to an astonishingly original reading of Nietzsche—to whom he had previously shown indifference or scorn—in which he appears almost enamored with the author of The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo.

This book presents Badiou’s seminar on Nietzsche’s late works, which for the first time addresses what would become one of his central concepts: anti-philosophy and its adversarial yet intimate relationship with philosophy. For Badiou, Nietzsche is the key modern anti-philosopher, his antagonist—and occasional ally—in the battle to redefine the work of philosophy. Badiou takes for granted Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead,” yet he rejects Nietzsche’s assertion that philosophy too is past its expiration date. Badiou engages a century-long tradition of grappling with Nietzsche’s paradoxes, considering thinkers such as Heidegger, Deleuze, and Derrida. Examining Nietzsche’s impassioned writings on Wagner, he reflects on the nature of art and aesthetics. Provocative and profound, this seminar shows Badiou’s ongoing project of reasserting the value of philosophy from a new angle.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Black thinkers grappled with the material limits of freedom. They insisted that emancipation without economic self-determination would reproduce the inequalities of slavery, arguing that true freedom required not only civil rights and suffrage but also defending the rights of workers and curbing the power of capital. They concluded that free Black life could not flourish in conditions of labor exploitation and economic deprivation.

The Lowest Freedom is an intellectual history of how economic dispossession shaped the meaning of freedom in Black thought from antebellum abolitionism to the rise of Jim Crow. Justin Leroy argues that figures such as Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, Maria Stewart, David Walker, and Ida B. Wells developed a critique of racial capitalism that remains underappreciated. Their theories spanned the eras of slavery and freedom, connecting the North and the South, by illuminating the political economy of racial domination and the interwoven relationship between race and capitalism. By situating their work within broader debates about land, labor, and capital, Leroy provides a new framework for understanding how freedom was theorized, contested, and ultimately constrained in the aftermath of slavery. Bridging Black studies, intellectual history, and the history of capitalism, The Lowest Freedom offers a reinterpretation of African American political thought that places the struggle for economic justice at its core.

Side effects are common, but their origins and consequences remain unclear. Medications that target a disease can produce reactions far removed from it. Few side effects have been provably linked to a drug’s active ingredients. But side effects matter: Many people are reluctant to take vaccines and other pharmaceuticals because of side effects, even if these reactions are minor compared to the disease a medication prevents or treats. Because side effects do not fit comfortably within the framework of modern medicine, they continue to confound.

This book uncovers the social origins of side effects and their consequences for patients, physicians, and the health care system. Jason Schnittker and Duy Do argue that side effects emerge from the interaction of cultural, institutional, and psychological factors. Side effects reflect how manufacturers and regulators evaluate the effectiveness and safety of a drug, as well as how physicians consider the risks and benefits. They are also influenced by the beliefs, expectations, and experiences that patients use to interpret their treatment and symptoms. Drawing on pharmaceutical data, surveys, and public opinion polls, Schnittker and Do develop a framework for understanding the social ecology of side effects. A keen sociological analysis of how we grapple with medicine’s unintended consequences, this book shows how side effects are shaped by their social context.

The rate of interracial marriage in the United States has steadily increased: One in six new marriages now crosses racial or ethnic lines. Yet these partnerships are not always embraced or even accepted by families, friends, and society. Within families, issues ranging from food and holiday traditions to parenting approaches and beliefs about gender roles sometimes must be negotiated between cultures. In a time of national division, questions of race and identity have become deeply fraught. The way these couples navigate differences is a model for how Americans, despite their differences, can come together.

This book—based on interviews with and surveys of hundreds of people and informed by the authors’ many decades of experience as therapists and researchers—explores how intermarried couples build lives together. People of varied backgrounds describe how they navigate a world where others wonder about their relationship, question the parentage of their children, and treat them differently from their partner based on their appearance. Spouses relate their experiences forming fulfilling relationships in the face of potential disapproval, and they speak candidly about the joys and challenges of raising mixed-race children. Many of these couples have strengthened their relationships by learning to communicate across cultural barriers, and they share strategies for overcoming misunderstandings. At once large-scale and intimate, this book offers practical advice and timely insight into the triumphs and struggles of love across lines of difference.

During the 1980s, as global antiapartheid sentiment grew, an international coalition of far-right activists arose to preserve racial hierarchy in South Africa and beyond. This groundbreaking book tells the story of how a transatlantic pro-apartheid movement attempted to defend white rule in South Africa—and forged enduring links between global conservatism and white power.

By mapping an international network of white supremacist organizations, Augusta Dell’Omo reveals a fundamental shift in far-right organizing in response to changing geopolitical realities. The pro-apartheid movement brought together a range of figures who sought to influence the conservative Western governments they saw as allies. As antiapartheid activism grew, the South African regime crumbled, and the post–Cold War order took shape, apartheid’s defenders adapted their ideology for a colorblind, human rights–centric, and neoliberal world. Their successes and failures shaped the antistatist trajectory of white supremacist organizing in the 1990s and beyond, planting the seeds for a global resurgence of the far right.

Saving Apartheid ranges from Reagan’s Oval Office to South Africa’s bantustans and from white women’s grassroots organizing to evangelical broadcasting, illuminating how an unlikely coalition reimagined white supremacy. Uncovering the surprising influence of apartheid’s defenders, this book offers a prehistory of the present.

Technology gets a bad rap. It is accused of being a dehumanizing force, a chief culprit in everything from mass commercialization to environmental crisis through the potential collapse of civilization. In Connection, Dan Turello reflects on the origins and limitations of such views. He offers a philosophical and literary meditation on what technology is and can be, arguing that it provides surprising ways to strengthen and deepen what makes us human.

Putting medieval Italian poets and Renaissance artists in conversation with contemporary philosophers and pop culture, this book traces the roots of our fascination with—and aversion to—technology. Turello shows how the moments that shaped Western views of technology offer perspective on our current predicaments, as figures such as St. Francis of Assisi and Dante grappled with problems that are strikingly reminiscent of the ones we face today. Challenging nostalgia for preindustrial innocence, he demonstrates that historically technology has enabled us to develop art, philosophy, religion, and culture. Today, technology can safeguard human creativity—if we choose self-awareness and community over consumption and exploitation. Wide-ranging and inviting, Connection makes a timely case for embodied experience in the age of AI.

While the United States was building the world’s largest prison system, Americans were reading crime novels. What did it mean to read crime fiction in a “tough-on-crime” era? How were fictional stories about crime linked to cultural narratives about criminality, class, and race? What did novels have to do with the making of mass imprisonment in America?

Theodore Martin offers a groundbreaking account of the ways that reading habits and crime politics intersected in the age of mass incarceration. He shows how the War on Crime was waged on the page, arguing that fiction made the policies and ideologies of crime control legible to diverse readerships. American Literature’s War on Crime analyzes dozens of novels—from best-sellers and prize winners to cult classics and forgotten mass-market paperbacks—by authors including Mary Higgins Clark, James Ellroy, Ralph Ellison, Donald Goines, Sue Grafton, Patricia Highsmith, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Walter Mosley, and Sister Souljah.

Rewriting the history of one of the past century’s most popular genres, this ambitious book reveals how the rise of mass incarceration transformed American crime fiction—and how crime fiction became a key battleground in the War on Crime.

Indigenous activism against telescope construction on Maunakea involves the deity of volcanoes and fire. In India, a village goddess is visited at her place of residence. Across Asia, ancestors are venerated at family shrines. In many places around the world, spiritual matters and practices are local and contextual. Yet philosophy of religion often takes universalizing monotheism as the norm and overlooks other traditions, which it categorizes with oversimplified terms such as polytheism and animism.

Leah Kalmanson offers a new approach to understanding the world’s varied religious traditions: a philosophy of spiritual diversity. Drawing on perspectives from Asian, Pacific, Indigenous American, and African traditions on engaging gods, ghosts, ancestors, and other types of spiritual agents and forces, Local Gods reimagines philosophy of religion from standpoints it typically neglects. A philosophy of spiritual diversity foregrounds the numinous, subtle, and supernormal factors that pervade many aspects of everyday life but slip through the cracks of discourse on religion. Instead of relying on theological frameworks, it turns to theories and methods that are internal to the traditions it considers. This radically plural philosophy highlights creativity and imagination while opening pathways for critique and political engagement. Exploring a vast range of approaches to spiritual matters, this book asks us to find ethical relations with not only the gods we might call our own but also the gods of others.

Conventional journalistic norms discourage reporters from taking sides. They are supposed to remain neutral, impartial, and objective. Yet there is also a long tradition in journalism, dating back to the 1800s, that pursues truth by practicing solidarity for social justice.

Anita Varma offers a bold defense of reporting for social justice, showing what journalistic solidarity looks like in principle and in practice. She argues that solidarity is a longstanding yet unacknowledged journalistic norm that fosters truthful reporting when people’s basic dignity is at stake. Ethical journalism incorporates solidarity throughout the reporting process: deciding what is newsworthy, whom to include, how to approach them, what questions to ask, how to structure stories, and how to assess impact. Varma illustrates these practices through case studies of local and national reporting on homelessness, housing instability, and the cost of living.

Based on analysis of published journalism, in-depth interviews with journalists, and public engagement with people who aim to make journalism better, Solidarity in Journalism demonstrates how reporting can help society’s most vulnerable. Amid intense debate over the role of the media, this book makes an urgent case for solidarity in journalism as crucial for representing and addressing social division.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, prominent figures in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) converted to Islam and took new names. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad Touré, and Marvin X incorporated Islamic words and expressions, references to the Qur’an, and Arabic script, as well as symbols like the crescent star and depictions of Islamic architecture and clothing. They connected places like Harlem, Chicago, Newark, and Oakland to locales in the Muslim world such as Timbuktu, Songhai, and Mecca. These artists also played a pivotal role in developing Black studies and creating alternatives to the Eurocentrism of the American educational system.

Ellen McLarney explores how BAM writers identified with Islam as integral to the African American cultural, spiritual, and intellectual heritage. Examining poetry, visual art, music, drama, and mixed-media collaborations, she traces the emergence of a new kind of Islamic art rooted in the African American experience. Their works protested scientific racism, police brutality, colonial domination, and economic oppression while resurrecting a suppressed Islamic past and sharing spiritual visions of a new kind of future. Based on interviews, fieldwork, archival research, and close analysis of key works, this book reveals how BAM redefined Black art, Islamic poetics, and Black Muslim aesthetics in the struggle for racial justice.

It is widely thought that confessions from perpetrators of state violence promote accountability, reconciliation, and justice. Performing Public Confessions offers a challenge to this view through a critical examination of perpetrators’ narratives, analyzing them as performances that shape public perceptions of state violence and responsibility. With a focus on Turkey, this book develops new insights into the performative aspects of confessions and what they reveal about the dominant social, moral, and political order.

Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız explores public confessions by Turkish state actors implicated in atrocities against Kurds during the 1990s, showing that their accounts often function to obscure rather than clarify responsibility. Through close readings of perpetrators’ rhetorical strategies, audience reactions, and media representations, she demonstrates that confessions are rarely straightforward admissions of guilt. Instead, they frequently perpetuate mechanisms of denial, silence, evasion, and disavowal, normalizing atrocities, reinforcing impunity, and masking the structural nature of state violence. Yıldız argues that perpetrators’ narratives, when placed in their social contexts, illuminate the underlying moral and political frameworks that govern Turkish society. Bringing together theoretical reflections with rich analysis of case studies, this book uncovers the political and ethical limitations of public confessions.

In postwar Japan, a writer meets a small-town innkeeper who is obsessed with a tale from the nineteenth century. He relates the saga of Enomoto Takeaki, an admiral in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate who regained authority under the Meiji government. A former member of imperial Japan’s military police, the innkeeper dwells on the question of loyalty even as he struggles with his responsibility for the arrest and murder of his brother-in-law during the war. Later, he sends the writer a mysterious manuscript purporting to be the account of a peddler turned samurai whom Enomoto betrayed.

Part historical fiction, part detective story, The Traitor is a remarkable novel about navigating changing political landscapes by one of the most significant modern Japanese writers. In his only historical novel, Abe Kōbō turns to a pivotal moment in Japan’s past to explore profound questions about the nature of loyalty and the choices that people must make when they encounter forces beyond their control or understanding. Published in 1964, when a new generation had begun asking their parents about the war, Abe’s tale of betrayal sparked controversy across the political spectrum. The great writer’s most important previously untranslated novel, The Traitor displays Abe’s literary mastery from a new angle.

Does the lack of evidence mean that aliens don’t exist? Why does an unproven mathematical hypothesis have profound consequences? Are humans capable of grasping the nature of divinity? Is it ethical to give a patient a placebo? Why do people persist in demonstrably false beliefs like flat earth theory? Should someone want to know when they will die?

George G. Szpiro examines these questions and many others, offering an engaging and witty tour of what we can learn from ignorance. In a series of fast-paced chapters, he unravels problems ranging across science, mathematics, law, economics, politics, religion, psychology, and philosophy—some esoteric, others drawn from everyday life. Ignorance comes in many forms, Szpiro shows. Some questions are only temporarily unsolved; others are inherently answerable. Sometimes authorities keep answers from us, for good or ill. Often our assumptions and biases keep us from overcoming our ignorance, and occasionally we choose to remain ignorant—for surprisingly rational reasons.

Ultimately, Szpiro argues, ignorance is not purely negative. It can motivate the pursuit of learning and wisdom—as long as we acknowledge it. Presenting sophisticated topics in an accessible way, this book shows how ignorance sheds light on the nature of knowledge.

Around the 1960s, a musical revolution took place in the industrial landscapes of Cleveland and Detroit. Disenchanted with the strictures of bebop, musicians forged a new style—free jazz—that took inspiration from a vast range of sources, including figures such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane; African and Middle Eastern music; avant-garde modernism; and the politics and aesthetics of Black Power. How did this radical movement come about, and what explains its creativity and vitality?

Based on interviews with dozens of musicians, I Hear Freedom tells the story of free jazz and its connection to the broader Black experience. Cisco Bradley demonstrates that although this part of the free jazz movement arose in the Midwest, it is deeply rooted in the musical traditions and aesthetics that the Great Migration brought from the South. As postwar urban renewal projects fractured Black communities, musicians drew on this heritage to create new forms of expression. Figures such as Albert Ayler, Donald Ayler, Charles Tyler, Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Charles Moore, and Faruq Z. Bey developed distinct artistic visions, often influenced by their involvement in Black liberation movements. I Hear Freedom chronicles the Cleveland and Detroit free jazz scenes, and it follows musicians to New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and beyond. A revelatory oral history, this book shows that free jazz is a uniquely Black style shaped by mobility, community, and the struggle for freedom.

Stories about people and dogs saving one another are everywhere in US culture—on TV, in Hollywood movies, on social media, and even on bumper stickers. Yet these seemingly heartwarming stories of mutual rescue revolve around redemption through suffering, a narrative profoundly interwoven with Christian beliefs, white racial anxieties, and US national myths.

Katharine Mershon examines the unacknowledged religious underpinnings of stories about dogs, revealing deeply rooted cultural assumptions about who can be saved and how redemption ought to occur. She identifies the “canine redemption narrative” as the defining cultural script for the stories people in the United States tell about dogs and, in turn, the nation. Exposing unexamined assumptions about the relationships between people and dogs, Mershon sheds light on the central place of animals and religion in defining racial boundaries.

Dogs Save considers examples including the Michael Vick dogfighting case; Samuel Fuller’s controversial B-movie White Dog; the TV show The Dog Whisperer, from the celebrity dog trainer Cesar Millan; Laurie Anderson’s film Heart of a Dog; and Eileen Myles’s Afterglow (a dog memoir). Bringing together religious studies and animal studies, this book shows that redemption narratives shape who is allowed to survive and thrive in US society.

The field of palliative care promises support for a dying person’s physical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs, as well as the needs of family and community. Has this powerful vision been achieved? This state-of-the-field book argues that palliative care has drifted away from its transformative goals—and shows what to do about it.

Bringing together leading international scholars and practitioners, Well-Being at the End of Life demonstrates how contemporary palliative care has slowly but surely strayed from its original values and practices. The provision of palliative care now reflects institutional, medicalized, and health-service priorities. Increasingly, it has become solely clinical, confined and constrained by clinical service considerations and limitations. Those at the end of life are all too often viewed as patients to be treated instead of people with whom care providers must create collaboration, participation, and partnerships.

Contributors call for a paradigm shift in the values and priorities of palliative care to emphasize the importance of community to personal well-being. Drawing on the concept of health promotion, they advance a shared vision that merges the principles of public health with those of palliative care. Reimagining the field to foreground compassion and interdependence, Well-Being at the End of Life offers a new approach that puts community and professional partnerships at the heart of its practice.

Over the past decade, social and political movements transformed the arts. From the streets of Chile and Iran to museums in Europe and the United States, and from questions of representation and repatriation to demands for equity and justice, protest and activism affected the creation, presentation, and interpretation of visual arts around the world.

Bringing together artists, scholars, activists, and museum professionals from varied fields and backgrounds, this book explores the intersections between visual art and social movements during the last tumultuous decade. Spanning themes of protest art, museum ethics, restitution, and institutional transformation, the collection considers how visual arts have both responded to and shaped politics and society. Contributors highlight the role of artists as catalysts for change and delve into how institutions grapple with their colonial pasts.

Featuring essays, case studies, and artist spotlights, this book not only documents a critical moment in the art world but also raises thought-provoking questions about its future. In the current moment of heightened global unrest and existential threats to the future of art institutions, it offers vital insight into art’s place in the politics of representation, memory, and resistance.

Between the Civil War and the Cold War, American literary modernism and philosophy both grappled with the challenge of novelty and the chance to make it new. Bringing together modern poetry’s aesthetic experimentation and modern philosophy’s attention to the problem of induction, Lyric Logic argues that poems use logical form as literary form. The modern poem can be characterized by its logic: details that appear fragmentary add up to sense-making.

Johanna Winant recasts the poetics of central figures as modeling and defending inductive reasoning: Walt Whitman makes lists, Emily Dickinson constructs analogies, Gertrude Stein presents facts, Marianne Moore investigates predictions, Elizabeth Bishop draws inferences, and Gwendolyn Brooks tests the limits of deduction. Winant offers in-depth close readings of canonical poems that show the sophistication of their philosophic logic. Although philosophers tend to see induction as flawed and unreliable, these poets display its strengths. Their work demonstrates how to make sense of the unpredictable modern world.

Jürgen Habermas is Germany’s most important postwar philosopher, the leading figure of the Frankfurt School in this period. He is best known for the concept of the public sphere, which forms the basis of his communicative understanding of democratic politics. Habermas has not only theorized the public sphere—he has also taken part in it through frequent commentary on current social, political, and cultural issues. Yet since Habermas’s extensive public-facing writings have been overlooked, his philosophy has often been criticized as apolitical.

This book transforms our understanding of Habermas by focusing on his work as a public intellectual, showing how he has shaped debates far beyond the ivory tower. Peter J. Verovšek argues that while Habermas maintains a strict separation between his academic and his public-facing writings, he has also ensured that these two aspects of his work are part of a consistent whole. The book highlights the development of Habermas’s views over time and the changing nature of his public interventions. His early political writings focused on questions tied to the particular situation of postwar West Germany, but since 1989 he has increasingly turned his attention to the future of Europe and global politics more broadly. Verovšek sheds light on the interrelationship between Habermas’s participation in the public sphere and his theoretical work, demonstrating that his political engagement is crucial to understanding his philosophy. In a moment when public debate is under threat, this book offers timely new insight into Habermas’s lifelong project of defending the public sphere—both in theory and in practice.

In the late 1970s, with relations between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China strained, the Carter administration saw an opening. The United States and its allies embarked on military and dual-use technology transfers to China as a counterweight to the USSR, transforming rapprochement into full-blown cooperation. Carter’s decision to pivot away from the United States’s traditional ally, the Republic of China on Taiwan, and embrace the People’s Republic redefined the Cold War from a struggle against communism to one against the Soviet Union. It not only complicated a variety of American objectives—from the security of Taiwan to US-Soviet détente—but also sowed the seeds of future tensions between China and the West.

This book is an international history of the Carter administration’s intricate relations with the two competing Chinese regimes, emphasizing the geopolitical significance and lasting implications of this crucial moment. Drawing extensively from previously untapped archives in several countries and languages, Sheng Peng uncovers the internal governmental debates across world capitals that affected Carter’s China policy. He examines how the Carter administration attempted to balance relations with both Chinese governments as well as how Chinese and Taiwanese leaders navigated global rivalries. Revealing how the Carter years profoundly reshaped the course of the Cold War, this book sheds new light on the strategic, technological, and ideological competition that continues today.

In one common view, the mind is immaterial, internal, and invisible. From this perspective, the mind is inherently individual and isolated: It is unknowable from the outside, separated from the world and from other minds. Anthony Chemero—both a philosopher and a cognitive scientist—offers a powerful challenge to this theory of mind. Bringing together philosophical insight and empirical data, he develops a new understanding of the mind that centers embodiment and social interaction.

According to Chemero, the mind is intertwined with the world: It depends on the body, the surrounding environment, and the people with whom an individual interacts. He shows that cutting-edge research in cognitive science provides striking experimental evidence for this concept of the intertwined self. Chemero explores the philosophical, moral, and political implications of the claim that the self is necessarily interwoven with the world and with others, drawing connections to phenomenology, critical theory, and feminist political theory. Deeply interdisciplinary and engagingly written, Intertwined Creatures makes an urgent case for seeing the self as social—especially in the age of AI—with radical consequences for ethics and politics.

One of the most pressing issues in development today is the employment challenge in low- and middle-income countries. As more young people enter the labor force—and as structural transformation unfolds amid deindustrialization, technological disruption, and global competition—the question of how to create sufficient decent jobs has become central to the economic future of the Global South. Although this is a shared challenge across developing regions, it is particularly acute in Africa, where rapid demographic change and urbanization are colliding with limited industrial expansion.

Bringing together leading international scholars, The Future of Work in Developing Countries examines the employment problem from multiple perspectives. Early chapters develop conceptual frameworks around corporations and the global hierarchy of production. Subsequent contributions investigate the dynamics of structural transformation, the role of firms in linking production and labor to surplus, and the design of industrial and technology policies. Later chapters turn to detailed case studies—especially from Africa—that illustrate the possibilities and limits of different growth paths, and comparative insights from Asia and Latin America provide further perspective.

By combining rigorous theoretical analysis with grounded empirical research, this book demonstrates that employment creation is not an automatic byproduct of growth but a political and institutional project. It offers fresh insights for scholars of development, political economy, and economic history, as well as for policy makers seeking strategies to promote inclusive transformation in Africa and beyond.

Our ideas about Confucius come from the stories told about him. He often appears as the great sage of ancient China, handing down timeless moral precepts to his disciples and to posterity. Yet over the course of twenty-five centuries, Confucius has meant many different things to different people, representing varied views on political order, ethical behavior, and personal well-being.

This book explores enduring narratives about Confucius, shedding light on his role as a symbol of cultural ideals and a fulcrum of ideological debates across eras. Wai-yee Li translates and provides commentary on a wide range of key texts, examining how Confucius’s legacy was interpreted in different historical moments. Beginning with the canonical account by the historian Sima Qian, she canvasses Daoist and Legalist writings from the Warring States, a ballad about a homicidal Confucius from the Tang dynasty, an eighteenth-century anthology of jokes, modern writers such as Lu Xun, and contemporary rap music, among others. Focusing on how these stories are told, Li identifies continuities, ruptures, and unexpected connections in the representations of Confucius and considers the questions they raise. Suitable for a range of courses, this book offers new ways to understand Chinese cultural and intellectual history through Confucius and his transformations.

Climate change is not only an environmental crisis but also a catalyst for worsening socioeconomic inequalities, leading to widespread calls for “climate justice.” Even though this term has become increasingly common, there remains no universally accepted definition. This challenge is compounded by the limitations of traditional scholarly frameworks, which struggle to encompass the dynamic and pervasive impact of the climate crisis across global, national, and local levels. The scope of the crisis requires ethical, social, and political considerations alongside scientific and environmental insights in order to shape equitable responses by states and societies.

This multidisciplinary book offers a comprehensive exploration of debates on climate justice across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Synthesizing these divergent approaches, it develops a new conceptual framework that transcends disciplinary divides, providing a deeper and richer understanding of climate justice. Contributors make an urgent case that climate justice must be centered within and across disciplines, creating a roadmap for multidisciplinary research and pedagogy on the climate crisis. Featuring a wide range of voices and actionable recommendations, this timely book illuminates how scholarship on climate change can become a call to action.

Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.

Ainehi Edoro argues that forests in African fiction are laboratories for unmaking and remaking the world, where writers break apart familiar forms to test alternate forms of life, knowledge, and power. Instead of treating the forest as a backdrop, these writers imagine it as a living structure: a space where politics, history, myth, violence, technology, the magical, and creativity animate fictional worlds. Spanning indigenous African narratives and contemporary science fiction, Forest Imaginaries traces the lineage of forest worlds in African literature: Chinua Achebe’s evil forest, the cosmic forest in Wọle Ṣóyínká’s mythic imagination, Thomas Mofolo’s forest of imperial dreams, Amos Tutuola’s endless fractal forest, and Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic forest of new ecological futures. This book rethinks African literary history by showing how African writers draw on the forest—and the wealth of Indigenous ideas about time, space, and storytelling it conjures—to transform the novel’s aesthetic, political, and philosophical horizons.

An Indigenous hunter laments the decline in the flying squirrel population and reflects on how animals perceive the world. In a drought-stricken cyberpunk anytown, kids revolt against the grown-ups only to face off with stray dogs over water. During late-night diving sessions, a researcher encounters a mysterious group of ocean-dwelling people with gills. In an overpopulated future, marrying an AI spouse will raise a human’s credit score. A man follows the trail of an extinct leopard, seeking to unravel a metafictional mystery left behind by his late wife.

This anthology showcases cutting-edge works on ecological themes by essential and emerging Taiwanese authors, revealing the vitality of their engagements with environmental crises. Taiwan is a biodiversity hotspot and geopolitical flashpoint, home to both Indigenous peoples and settlers. The pieces collected in A Taiwanese Ecoliterature Reader give voice to this human and more-than-human diversity, telling tales that are disturbing yet hopeful, serious yet sensuous, speculative yet grounded, down to earth yet spanning the seas. They span Indigenous eco-writing, oceanic hybrid narratives, ecological sci-fi, and speculative Indigenous fiction. Together, these stories navigate the landscapes of Taiwanese ecoliterature, illuminating its past and pointing toward its future.

Healthcare is broken—but we can fix it. Our current system is plagued by staggering costs, inadequate outcomes, and pervasive inequities. How can we deliver long-overdue change and make this system work for everyone?

In this groundbreaking book, Halle Tecco provides an insider’s guide to transforming our healthcare system through innovation. Drawing from her extensive experience as an entrepreneur, investor, and professor, she delivers a practical roadmap for addressing the most pressing challenges. Combining personal narratives, compelling case studies, and actionable frameworks, Tecco explores how to identify opportunities for meaningful change and build sustainable, scalable solutions that align profit with purpose. She acknowledges the difficulties—such as regulatory hurdles, misaligned incentives, and resistance to change—but shows how entrepreneurs can turn obstacles into their competitive advantage.

Bridging the gap between Silicon Valley dynamism and healthcare’s evidence-based approach, Massively Better Healthcare offers a realistic yet optimistic view of what’s possible. Written for everyone from seasoned professionals to aspiring innovators, this book shares an inspiring and attainable vision of a better healthcare system and equips readers with the essential tools to succeed.

Throughout 1905, an amateur photographer dedicated himself to capturing Broadway, from the bottom of Manhattan to the top. In sun, rain, and snow, at dawn and late at night, C. G. Hine depicted buildings that were threatened by rapid development: outmoded stores, hotels, and theaters, as well as workshops and shanties. His survey also foregrounded the street’s other holdouts against change, such as sex workers, pushcart vendors, horses, and the trees and wildflowers of upper Manhattan. Hine ultimately assembled more than three hundred photographs, along with numerous newspaper clippings and a typed essay, into a three-volume album, titled “From the Sky Scraper to the Wild Flower.”

Presenting striking images from Hine’s album, this book offers a rare glimpse into the transformation of New York’s built environment at the turn of the twentieth century. Nick Yablon explores Hine’s connections to—and divergences from—movements and trends of the time, such as historic preservation, Pictorialist photography, botany, and bicycling. He curates a selection of Hine’s photographs and investigates how they reveal deeper conflicts and tensions about urban development. From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower guides readers up Broadway block by block, casting light on New York’s changing landscape, where signs of the modern clashed with vestiges of earlier eras.

Since the earliest days of the United States, some parents have felt moved to capture their political moment in their children’s names. A Massachusetts child received the name Federal Constitution in 1790. The nineteenth century saw the name States Rights crop up across the South. A younger brother of a boy called McKinley in the early twentieth century was disproportionately likely to be named Roosevelt. Residents of areas that supported Reagan were prone to choose the spelling “Meagan” over “Megan.” The name Hillary surged in popularity after the Clintons emerged on the political scene—then crashed just as dramatically. What do trends like these tell us about political identities and enthusiasms in the United States?

R. Urbatsch explores the politics of naming across American history, revealing the surprising ways parents’ choices shed light on public opinion past and present. He argues that naming is a weathervane for political attitudes: Names touch on every sort of identity, from race and gender to nationalism and religion. Tracing the rise and fall of names that evoked the leaders, ideas, and issues that fired political imaginations of their times, Urbatsch opens new windows onto a wide range of historical questions. By analyzing when politics-tinged names gained or lost popularity, this book offers an unconventional and illuminating new perspective on identity, public sentiment, and political behavior in the United States.

Since the Middle Passage, the intellectual and physical freedom of Black women in the United States and the Caribbean has been constrained. Yet Black women writers, artists, choreographers, and performers have contested pervasive political, cultural, and discursive silencing by drawing on the traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths: the Southern United States and the Caribbean, as well as Africa.

In The Souths in Her—a phrase borrowed from Ntozake Shange—Nicole M. Morris Johnson shows how key Black women artists transformed the enclosing narrative frames imposed on them, developing new forms of creative expression informed by the lived experiences and submerged histories of women across the Africana southern world. She analyzes the intertwined relationship between movement and writing in the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Dianne McIntyre, Maryse Condé, and Shange, among others. Morris Johnson demonstrates that although the central role of motion reinforced perceptions of primitivity that relegated Black women and the South to a space outside modernity, it was in fact crucial to their formal innovations. For these writers and choreographers, unexpected encounters with unfamiliar traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths catalyzed formal experimentation and movements for liberation. Considering the violence routinely inflicted on Black women alongside their artistic innovations, this book reveals a transmuted South that is rich in techniques for weaving liberatory works. Illuminating Black women’s singular contributions to Black modernity, The Souths in Her offers new frames for understanding their embodied and textual creative expression.

Building an effective civil service is crucial for public service delivery and good governance, but reforming bureaucratic institutions is notoriously difficult. This book takes a fresh perspective on this challenge by documenting and analyzing the implementation of more than one hundred reforms initiated by six African countries over the last thirty years.

Martin J. Williams shows that these efforts largely fell short of their goals because they typically approached organizational change as a matter of changing formal structures and processes through one-off projects. Some did yield positive changes, however, when they were able to create opportunities for civil servants to discuss performance and how to improve it. Drawing on this evidence, Williams develops a new theory of how systemic reforms can lead to meaningful change—not by trying to force it through top-down interventions but by catalyzing an ongoing and decentralized process of continuous improvement.

Reform as Process makes theoretical and empirical contributions to research on organizational performance, civil service reform, and public service delivery, and it shares practical insights and strategies to help reformers around the world achieve meaningful change in their organizations.

In recent decades, self-proclaimed “independent bookstores” have arisen across China. In the West, such retailers represent an alternative to corporations and chains. In China, by contrast, they differentiate themselves from not only the state-owned Xinhua Bookstore but also other privately owned shops through an emphasis on intellectual independence and the free exchange of ideas.

Cultural Mavericks takes readers inside the world of independent bookselling in China, showing how a wide range of figures navigate the challenges of book retailing in the digital age amid rapidly shifting social, political, and economic dynamics. Drawing on more than a decade of immersive research—including interviews, observations, and extensive documentary analysis—Zheng Liu unveils how these bookstores carve out a unique identity and market position. She develops the concept of “culturally adapted strategy” to explain how independent bookstores—as both dedicated cultural institutions and resilient business enterprises—balance economic imperatives with a deep commitment to intellectual autonomy. Liu challenges the tendency to understand nonstate cultural institutions in China in terms of resistance, arguing that independent bookstores engage with politics as a strategic means of differentiation from the competition.

Richly detailed and compellingly written, Cultural Mavericks sheds new light on the interplay among culture, commerce, and politics in China, offering timely insights into the evolving dynamics of China’s book industry and wider cultural economy.

As national governments and global institutions fail to address climate change, an increasing number of cities have committed to major sustainability and climate strategies. Why do some cities take bold action while others remain on the sidelines?

Christof Brandtner shows that city climate action is not simply a matter of political will: It is an organizational problem. Cities do not act alone. They are embedded within both a broad institutional superstructure of professional networks and peer cities as well as a deep organizational infrastructure of civil society organizations, public agencies, and socially responsible firms. This dual embeddedness shapes cities’ capacity to plan, learn, lead, and scale sustainability solutions. Drawing on comparative research spanning fifteen years and thousands of cities around the world, Brandtner traces how environmental strategies, sustainability practices, and green building initiatives emerge, diffuse, and take hold. He uncovers the structural conditions that enable and inhibit meaningful climate action, revealing why it varies so widely across cities.

By combining lenses from urban theory and organizational sociology, Cities in Action sheds light on how cities navigate their social and institutional environments to meet the climate challenge. This book offers a novel perspective for scholars, policy makers, and practitioners seeking not just to explain but also to empower city action.

The United States’s superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program.

Through the lens of food and agriculture, this book offers new ways to understand the roots of the post–Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development.

Over the centuries, from the transatlantic slave trade to voluntary mass migrations through the digital era, African cultural practices have taken root and transformed in the Americas. Even though Afro-Brazilians make up a large share of the global Black diaspora, and Brazilian culture in turn has been deeply shaped by African influences, their particular contributions remain overlooked.

Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future investigates the interlinked art, history, religion, philosophy, and cosmology of oral traditions across the Afro-Brazilian diaspora, arguing that these varied cultural expressions together constitute distinctive forms of knowledge. Through case studies of sacred and secular performances, Isis Barra Costa shows how Afro-Brazilian concepts and practices preserve and renew an ever-changing diasporic philosophy. Ranging across parades of Black royal courts, Carnaval performing groups, oracular literature, “spirit-dictated” novels, and many other forms, she illuminates the survival and transformation of African cosmologies, epistemologies, and poetics in the Americas. Foregrounding oral narratives, Barra Costa sheds light on the nonhegemonic protagonists and canons of the Black Atlantic: the spaces and beings, kingdoms and heroes, philosophers and historians that orient Afro-Brazilian memory and imagination. By tracing forms of knowledge across the global African diaspora, this deeply interdisciplinary book reveals the transformative potential of Afro-Brazilian philosophical paradigms.

The early sixteenth century saw the rise of two Mediterranean empires—the Christian Habsburgs, based in Spain and Austria, and the Muslim Ottomans, centered in the Balkans and Anatolia—with strikingly similar ambitions. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500–1558) and Sultan Süleyman (1495–1566) each pursued grand universalist visions, seeking to unite Islam and Christendom under a universal monarchy that would resolve wars and conflicts, dissolve religious divisions, and usher in an age of peace, unity, and justice.

Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and European sources, Ebru Turan explores the emergence of these empires and the early phase of their rivalry within the broader Mediterranean world. She argues that the late medieval crusading movement, which aimed to conquer Islamic lands and convert Muslims to Christianity, was infused with apocalyptic and messianic expectations in both the Latin West and the Ottoman Empire. While Charles V was hailed as a prophesied figure destined to conquer the Islamic East and restore the ancient Roman Empire, Süleyman contested these claims by positioning himself as the rightful heir to the Roman Caesars. Like his rival, he embraced a messianic identity, aspiring to conquer Christendom and unite the world under Islamic rule.

Innovative in its approach and provocative in its conclusions, The Race for Universal Monarchy transcends traditional East and West dichotomies, highlighting both empires’ efforts to build a global community of peace and harmony.

In a deeply unequal world, numerous categories of people have been consigned to disadvantaged positions. Are those on society’s fringes doomed to remain there, or might marginality offer potential pathways toward a more equitable future?

This groundbreaking book reimagines marginality as a transformative force, interweaving personal narratives with cultural, literary, and philosophical analysis to reveal how perspectives from the margins can catalyze social change. Drawing on her own experiences as an Asian American female philosopher specializing in non-Western thought within an academic world dominated by white male–centered Western traditions, Jin Y. Park argues that personal stories are essential to philosophical inquiry. Ranging across non-Western philosophy, South Korean literature, and Asian American and African American voices as well as Western philosophy, she invites readers to examine their own feelings of marginality, reflecting on how lived experiences shape the search for meaning and values.

Bridging theoretical insights and real-world issues, Marginality offers fresh perspective on contemporary challenges such as violence, social discrimination, and economic inequality. Urging a radical rethinking of how we understand power, community, and social justice, this book calls on readers to embrace the solidarity of the margins to drive positive change.

The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities differs markedly from other forms of international human rights law: it not only protects the rights of individuals but also addresses interpersonal relations and social structures. How did the convention attain this broad reach, and what does it tell us about the histories of human rights and disability law?

Progress from the Margins is an international history of the struggle for recognition of disability rights at the global level. Paul van Trigt chronicles how people with disabilities and their allies developed their own understanding of human rights, from the emergence of disability activism in the late 1960s through the negotiation of the convention. He traces the unexpected paths by which international recognition of disability human rights emerged, showing that it is not a story of linear progress but rather one of a decades-long series of discontinuous advances. Challenging accounts that criticize the limited scope of human rights in recent decades, van Trigt highlights how disabled people and their allies transformed human rights law by emphasizing social dimensions. He foregrounds the agency of disabled people from the Global South as well as the Global North, demonstrating how they shaped their own human rights. A groundbreaking account of disability internationalism, Progress from the Margins also reflects on the prospects for a world that embraces disability.

Gianni Vattimo (1936–2023) was among the most significant Italian philosophers of the last fifty years. A controversial figure both at home and abroad, he sometimes described himself paradoxically as a “nihilist” and as a “communist Catholic.” Despite his provocations—and unusually for an academic philosopher—he served two terms in the European Parliament. For decades, Vattimo was at the forefront of developments in continental philosophy, spanning hermeneutics, postmodernity, and the “return to religion.” Drawing on the work of figures such as Heidegger, Marx, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Rorty, and Kuhn, Vattimo constructed his signature concept of “weak thought,” a way of approaching the persistent problems of ideology, violence, and social division after the so-called end of metaphysics.

In this book, Thomas Jared Farmer provides a groundbreaking examination of Vattimo’s life and work. He considers the distinctive contributions that Vattimo made to postmodern thought as well as to recent debates in political philosophy and religion. This book provides an accessible introduction to Vattimo’s overall philosophical project while also contextualizing it through discussions of important intellectual figures, key events in Italian history, and details about his personal trajectory. Authoritative and comprehensive, it is an indispensable companion to the works of one of the most original thinkers to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century.

In recent years, China and the United States have each turned economic interdependence into an instrument of coercion, using their dominant positions in international trade to push states and firms to comply with their political goals. What is distinctive about this form of economic pressure, and how can other countries fight back?

This groundbreaking book explores the weaponization of economic interdependence and its implications for the international order through a wealth of new and original data on China’s economic statecraft. Victor D. Cha, Ellen Kim, and Andy Lim examine how and in what ways the United States and China have deployed economic coercion, focusing on China’s extensive use of this tactic over the past three decades. They analyze a vast data set that includes more than 600 cases of China’s economic bullying of states, companies, and individuals in North America, Asia, and Europe. Cha, Kim, and Lim propose a multilateral strategy of “collective resilience” to counter intimidation, showing how targeted states can band together, leverage trading relationships, and threaten retaliation.

Synthesizing new insights from unique trade data with international security expertise, this timely book sheds new light on how China exercises economic power—and it provides a playbook to deter bullies and rebalance the global order.

In recent years, China has played an increasingly significant role in international affairs, wielding its economic and political strength to solidify its position as a global power. Within its immediate neighborhood, however, Chinese influence is not new. Chinese actions have affected how the Indian and Pakistani states have perceived and responded to domestic governance and security challenges since the early days of independence.

Connecting international politics with domestic security, Harrison Akins shows how India and Pakistan’s engagement with China has shaped the two governments’ policies toward their strategic frontiers over the past seventy years. He focuses on northeastern India and Pakistan’s Balochistan Province, peripheries that have been at the center of both countries’ relationships with China and that continue to present pressing security and development challenges. In contrast to the conventional focus on state-to-state relations, Akins emphasizes frontiers and their ties to central governments. He demonstrates that China’s presence spurred the Indian and Pakistani governments to assert their sovereignty over these border regions, exacerbating conditions that led to the outbreak of antistate violence. Featuring comprehensive research and keen analysis, Adversary and Ally offers new insights into the pressures confronting South Asian governments and the limits of China’s reach.

Classical Indian poetics prized the skillful use of alaṅkāras, or “ornaments”—literary figures of speech. Across more than a millennium, Sanskrit writers developed and elaborated an account of literary embellishment that is perhaps the world’s most complex and long-standing theory of figuration. Yet it remains the least studied of India’s major classical systems of thought.

An Alaṅkāra Reader is a groundbreaking panoramic overview of this tradition, presenting extensive and accessible translations of key works that span its history, from the sixth century CE to the eighteenth. These texts vividly show how Indian theorists analyzed simile, metaphor, allegory, and dozens of other figures that are distinctive to their world. Yigal Bronner’s commentary makes Sanskrit concepts of ornamentation approachable while placing them in historical context. He provides a new account of the history of Sanskrit poetics, showing how it underwent successive waves of theoretical revolutions and emerged as a prestigious field that attracted a variety of scholars in the early modern era.

Featuring many previously untranslated texts, An Alaṅkāra Reader is an essential resource for the study of classical Indian thought, the intellectual history of South Asia, and comparative literature. It reveals the depth and nuance of Sanskrit’s “science of ornaments” for anyone interested in poetic theory, figuration, and aesthetics across world traditions.

Increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics is one of today’s greatest threats to public health. Yet a possible solution has emerged from a surprising source. Phage therapy deploys viruses called bacteriophages, “bacteria eaters,” to treat bacterial infections. What concerns—both biological and social—arise from using viruses in this way? What does phage therapy reveal about the links between humans and microbes?

In Our Viral Futures, Charlotte Brives examines the development and implications of this therapy, providing new ways to understand our interconnections with the microbial world. Considering patients seeking treatment for chronic infections, the establishment of new regulatory frameworks, and the complex processes of laboratory research and clinical trials, she highlights the complexity and variety of the relationships among humans, phages, and bacteria. Brives places phage therapy in the context of the widespread use of antibiotics under industrial capitalism, which has deployed these treatments in order to enable ecologically devastating forms of mass production and consumption. She argues that the connections between human societies and microbial communities defy the usual categories through which science and medicine understand the world, giving rise to new moral and political questions. Interdisciplinary and nuanced, Our Viral Futures poses a provocative challenge: Instead of continuing to assert that we can control and master microbes, we must learn to coexist with them.

For nearly two thousand years, Hebrew belonged to the realm of the sacred. A written liturgical language used primarily by rabbis and scholars, it was not spoken in everyday contexts. A revival process in the late nineteenth century brought Hebrew back into daily use, adapting sacred texts as the foundations for a new vernacular. A “mother tongue” emerged.

Keren Mock provides a strikingly original multidisciplinary account of this transformation of Hebrew from an ancient sacred tongue to a secular spoken language. Bringing together psychoanalytic, semiotic, and comparative-literature perspectives, she provides deep insight into key moments in this history. Drawing on extensive, revealing interviews, Mock offers critical readings of two major Israeli authors, Aharon Appelfeld and Sami Michael, focusing on their struggles to write in Hebrew as immigrants. She delves into the archives of the lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the creator of an all-embracing dictionary of ancient and modern Hebrew, and considers Baruch Spinoza’s little-known Hebrew grammar in light of his philosophical works. In reflecting on the making and meaning of a mother tongue, Mock addresses questions of memory and forgetting, mourning and restitution, and the sacred and the secular. Through the exceptional history of Hebrew, this book uncovers the workings of language in the social and psychological realms.

Hebrew features forewords by Pierre-Marc de Biasi, an artist and scholar of literature, and Julia Kristeva, a renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, speaking to the significance of the book.

Google is typically thought of as a tech giant and the world’s largest search engine, but it was also among the first tech companies to invest in news. After 9/11, the company recognized the economic and social value of up-to-the-minute information and began to incorporate news into its business. Google News—built on automation, algorithms, aggregation, and the unbundling and rebundling of news—and Google’s other news-related initiatives went on to play a major role in shaping the information ecosystem of the twenty-first century.

In The Tech-Media Hybrid, Qun Wang examines Google’s engagement with news across more than two decades, tracing the company’s complicated relationship with the news industry. She shows how Google developed a push-and-pull relationship with the media sector, boosting its visibility while also competing against it and establishing new norms. What the company calls the “Google way” of experiencing news has exerted a profound influence on traditional media; Google’s news ambitions, in turn, have been shaped by the global news industry’s actions and reactions at every step. Shedding new light on the vast transformations of the past quarter century, this multimethod interdisciplinary book also offers insight into how the news environment might evolve in the era of AI.

In the late seventeenth century, Japan’s cities were sites of vast diversity and dynamism. Following decades of explosive urbanization, individuals of different occupations and economic strata came to rethink their relationships with other members of the urban community and old modes of local affiliation gave way to newly capacious forms of urban identity. These emergent social imaginaries were inextricably intertwined with the commercial circulation of woodblock-printed texts. This interplay of the social, the spatial, and the textual gave shape to a new social type: the Tokugawa townsman.

In this innovative and interdisciplinary book, Thomas Gaubatz offers a fresh approach to understanding the literature of the Tokugawa townspeople. Ranging across history, literature, and print culture—including richly contextualized close readings of the works of Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki—he shows that popular fiction made sense of the urban world by modeling how individuals could refashion themselves through the performance of shared norms. Challenging the assumption that townsman literature was a voice of resistance to official ideology and warrior authority, Gaubatz argues that print fiction functioned to articulate new identities, legitimate emerging forms of social power, and symbolically contain the tensions and hierarchies within the urban community—and the contradictions within the townsman self. Through this vision of textual self-fashioning, The Textual Townsman develops a radically new account of the politics of popular fiction in Tokugawa status society.

Today, macaroni and cheese is the ultimate comfort food, a staple of weeknight dinners, family gatherings, and Soul Food restaurants. Humble though the dish may seem, its history is filled with surprising twists and turns. Renaissance cardinals and popes dined on elaborate pasta-and-cheese concoctions laced with costly spices. In the eighteenth century, wealthy young Englishmen made macaroni a symbol of continental sophistication. Black women, whose contribution has long been overshadowed, played a crucial role in establishing the dish as an American tradition from the nation’s founding through the Civil Rights Movement.

This book is a delectable history of macaroni and cheese, tracing an extraordinary journey of cultural exchange and social change. Karima Moyer-Nocchi reveals the religious, political, and industrial forces that shaped its evolution alongside stories of the unsung figures who crafted the dish as we know it today: enslaved cooks who preserved and adapted traditions, immigrant chefs who introduced new variations, and practical homemakers looking to nourish their families with an affordable meal. She emphasizes the adaptability of macaroni and cheese, which in different times has served as both an indulgence on the elite table and sustenance to those struggling to survive, crossing borders, social classes, and cultural divides. Deeply researched and rich with enticing details, this book uncovers the creativity and resilience that brought a beloved food to our tables. The Epic History of Macaroni and Cheese also shares centuries of recipes—from ancient Roman authors to celebrity chefs, reworked for modern kitchens—that provide a hands-on way to experience the evolution of this iconic dish.

Women’s songs of the grind mill are among the oldest oral traditions in South Asia. They have been sung to accompany a daily household labor, making flour using a stone hand mill, for many centuries. Even today, grind mill songs are still well known in Maharashtra, testifying to the endurance of a remarkable genre. Yet these songs have long been understood through sociological or anthropological lenses, treated as entirely separate from literary culture.

This groundbreaking book shows that women’s songs of the grind mill played a foundational role in the vernacular turn to making literature in Marathi between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Madhuri Deshmukh demonstrates that women’s songs developed alongside and in intimate conversation with Marathi written literature, shaping the poetic structures and motifs of the bhakti tradition. Drawing on aesthetic categories from the songs themselves, she calls for understanding these artfully crafted compositions as oral poetry in a lyric mode, underscoring that women describe their songs as an “unraveling of the heart” while they compare written poetry to weaving. Deshmukh argues that women poets, Mahadaise and Janabai, were at the forefront of vernacularization, challenging common literary-historical narratives that neglect the role of communities excluded by elite regimes of writing. Considering what songs say about texts and what texts say about songs, The Unraveling Heart offers new insight into the importance of labor and gender to aesthetics and develops a novel approach to the concept of the literary.

The nineteenth century in the United States witnessed the end of slavery and the expansion of another form of confinement: the asylum. How did enslaved and free Black people encounter psychiatric institutions? How were notions of mental disability used to reinforce slavery and Jim Crow? And how did Black people express alternative ideas about individual and communal mental health?

Diana Martha Louis explores Black experiences and views of mental disability in the nineteenth century, shedding light on the lives and struggles of the “colored insane.” She demonstrates how psychiatric discourses made Blacks “mad” both by inflicting real psychological harm within asylums, plantations, jails, and society writ large and by constructing mental disorders according to prevailing notions of race, class, gender, and sanity. Yet even as white medical professionals pathologized the enslaved as suffering from “drapetomania” (runaway slave syndrome), portrayed slavery as beneficial to Black mental health, or cast African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices as signs of madness, Black people developed their own complex perspectives on mental disability.

Louis considers the lives and writings of Black intellectuals and cultural figures including James McCune Smith, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, and Charles Chesnutt, as well as a group of Black women who were incarcerated in Georgia Lunatic Asylum, showing how mental disability was entangled with questions of freedom, spirituality, and self-determination. Combining literary and historical analysis, Colored Insane is a rich account of nineteenth-century Black Americans’ experiences of mental illness and wellness.

For many years, Diane Ravitch was among the country’s leading conservative thinkers on education. The cure for what ailed the school system was clear, she believed: high-stakes standardized testing, national standards, accountability, competition, charters, and vouchers. Then Ravitch saw what happened when these ideas were put into practice and recanted her long-held views. The problem was not bad teachers or failing schools, as conservatives claimed, but poverty. She denounced privatization as a hoax that did not help students and that harmed the public school system. She urged action to address the root causes of inequality.

In this intimate and timely memoir of her life’s work as a historian and advocate, Ravitch traces her ideological evolution. She recounts her personal and intellectual journey: her childhood in Houston, her years among the New York intelligentsia, her service in government, and her leftward turn. Ravitch shares how she came to hold conservative views and why she eventually abandoned them, exploring her switch from championing standards-based curriculum and standardized testing to arguing for greater investment in professional teachers and in public schools. Bringing together candid reflections with decades of research on education, Ravitch makes a powerful case for becoming, as she calls herself, “an activist on behalf of public schools.”

John Dewey is among history’s most celebrated thinkers on democracy and education, yet he has often been underappreciated and misunderstood as a philosopher. This book paints a fresh portrait of Dewey as not only a reformer of schooling but also a profound theorist of human development, whose vision of the centrality of education to democracy, philosophy, and flourishing can still inspire us today.

What can we learn from this great thinker as we face challenges such as widespread drudgery and disaffection, estrangement among individuals and groups, and a crisis of democracy? This book supplies the answers, offering a bold new account of Dewey as an educational theorist who is essential for our troubled times.

Revealing the true scope of Dewey’s educational vision, this book provides a new perspective on a neglected aspect of the philosophical tradition. Growing People presents an alternative canon—running from Plato to Rousseau to Du Bois—that recasts philosophy in terms of education and, in so doing, opens new pathways for social critique and the liberation of human potential.

What does it mean to write a literature of the present? In the early twentieth century, Arabic and Hebrew writers faced a parallel predicament. Modern literature aspired to reflect the contemporary moment, yet the Middle Eastern present seemed incompatible with dominant literary forms, especially the novel. Projects of “cultural awakening” implied that Arabs and Jews were somehow inhabiting the present wrongly. Arabic and Hebrew writers found themselves grappling with the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of narrating the present—and achieved strikingly similar literary solutions to this challenge.

This book develops a new theory of the emergence of modernist literary forms through a series of parallel readings of Arabic and Hebrew prose. Situating literary production in projects of modernization, settler colonialism, and state building, Shir Alon traces the proliferation of what she calls “static forms.” These literary forms articulate a modern present experienced as stuck, suspended, or absent, embodying the lived temporalities of Orientalist fantasies of origin, regimes of productive and reproductive labor, and the routine violence of occupation. Static Forms positions writers such as Mahmud al-Masʿadi, Sonallah Ibrahim, Elias Khoury, Adania Shibli, S. Y. Agnon, Y. H. Brenner, and Yeshayahu Koren as innovators and theorists of global modernism, writing the present as a series of suspensions of modernity’s narrative of progress.

What does it mean to trust in a world shaped by violence and inequality? This book investigates the fraught pursuit of democratic policing in Brazil, where trust is both a necessity and a precarious gamble. Marta-Laura Haynes follows police officers and favela residents through patrols, crime scenes, fishing trips, drumming circles, and neighborhood gatherings to reveal how trust is not simply given or earned—but actively performed, negotiated, and also refused. These stories show how trust intersects with local ideas of citizenship, legitimacy, race, and power while also exposing the pervasive and often generative role of mistrust.

Far from being a stable foundation for democracy, trust in this context is a high-stakes wager, shaped by local hierarchies of race, gender, and class. In response, communities develop what Haynes calls “untrusting”: a mode of engagement that refuses blind faith in the state and instead turns mistrust into a form of care, resistance, and survival. By illuminating the contradictions and complexities of trust in Brazil, Untrusting challenges reductive narratives of policing and offers a nuanced perspective on how democratic ideals are contested and reimagined by people on the ground. Challenging the idea that distrust is merely a barrier to progress, Haynes shows how it can be a resource for agency, dignity, and alternative visions of justice.

Robert Jervis (1940–2021) was a titan in the field of international relations. Part political scientist, part psychologist, part historian, and part policy analyst, he drew on a vast array of theoretical approaches and empirical methods to develop keen and distinctive insights on a wide range of topics. From academic political science to the policy world, the scope of Jervis’s influence is astonishing.

Bringing together top scholars in political science, international relations, and history, this book offers a deep dive into Jervis’s pathbreaking scholarship and its legacy across disciplines. The authors consider how his work reshaped subjects such as nuclear strategy, arms control, deterrence theory, structural realism, diplomatic history, intelligence analysis, and the causes of war. They further discuss Jervis’s leadership on the CIA’s declassification board, which provided a bridge between academics and the intelligence community, and his influence as a public intellectual. The contributors also pay tribute to Jervis as a mentor, colleague, and friend who worked to build and sustain a broad intellectual community. Offering a wide-ranging overview of Jervis’s most important contributions to many fields, this book provides a deep understanding of Jervis’s scholarly work, which continues to inspire new generations of scholars who seek to follow in his footsteps.

Political theology is widely discussed but little understood. Across the humanities and critical social sciences, even in popular discussion of current events, it has become a buzzword. Yet there is no consensus about its very definition.

This field-changing interdisciplinary book brings together three of the leading voices in political theology—a Christian theologian, a critical theorist, and an anthropologist—to offer new entry points to understand religion and politics. They explore similarities and differences in their approaches, guiding readers through scholarship in their own fields while also advancing a shared vision that speaks to crucial questions of justice in the contemporary world.

Rejecting the notion that political theology is a closed field with an established canon, the authors show it to be an open-ended, lively conversation that welcomes new participants. They demonstrate how voices and approaches from decolonial theory, Black studies, feminist and queer theory, new materialism, and ethnography, both in the Global North and in the Global South, are transforming the field.

This book addresses concerns about political theology’s ties to authoritarian and antidemocratic movements, demonstrating that an engaged political theology sheds critical light on volatile topics such as populism, racism, and ethnoreligious nationalism. At once accessible to students and groundbreaking for scholars, What Is Political Theology? provides a state-of-the-art global understanding.

Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global politics? How do practitioners from the so-called non-Western world differ in their use and performance of rhetoric, and in what ways do they shape international order?

Sasikumar Sundaram provides a bold new theory of rhetoric as power politics, demonstrating how non-Western states challenge their silencing within the Western-led international order. He argues that, in the deeply hierarchical international system, states in the lower rungs resort to rhetorical performances in order to be heard. Through anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetorical statecraft, states such as India, Brazil, and China seek to expose and exploit the contradictions in the legitimating principles, norms, and rules of the international system—and, in so doing, pursue and exercise power. Today, as Russia, Europe, and even the United States engage in anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric, Sundaram shows why lessons from the non-Western world are crucial to recognizing the dynamics of power politics and global disorder. A bracing challenge to established theories of power in international relations, Rhetorical Powers underscores the need to address enduring forms of silencing within the international order.

What’s the secret to keeping your balance? The ear does more than hear: it helps us stay stable by perceiving movements and gravity. Elegant sensors deep within the skull detect every twist, turn, and tumble, powering swift reflexes that keep vision and balance steady. This is the vestibular system. It’s primordial and ubiquitous: every animal has one, and even plants have a rudimentary version. It works so well that we take it for granted—until it fails. How does this remarkable system function? What happens when it goes haywire? How can modern medicine treat vestibular disease?

The Great Balancing Act tells the story of the vestibular system, from T. rex hearing organs to cochlear implants, and from the unsung power of hair cells to inner-ear problems in outer space. Combining neuroscience, history, and medicine, Jeffrey D. Sharon—a vestibular doctor and researcher—explains the sense of balance using accessible language and wry humor. He recounts how pioneering scientists solved the mysteries of the vestibular system and shows why it is necessary for spatial reasoning and abstract thought. Sharon explores the devastating consequences of vestibular problems such as vertigo, dizziness, and imbalance, offering an expert, patient-friendly look at emerging and future treatments. Engaging and entertaining, this book invites readers to discover a little-known yet vital part of ourselves.

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about almost everything. The story of a single day in London after the First World War, it travels backward and forward in time and consciousness, venturing beyond the ordinary world into epic, mythic, and mystical modes. The novel is a work of extraordinary richness, as much for its interwoven webs of meaning as for its moral and psychological vision.

Edward Mendelson explores the novel’s deepest questions, focusing on the core themes of medicine, empire, and love. He traces how Virginia Woolf thought and wrote, considering the complexities and resonances of her works. Mendelson casts Mrs. Dalloway as an extended protest against authorities that wield power over others and a defense of the equality of inner lives. He also examines the place of the book in literary history going back to Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare as well as its influence on later writers from Erich Auerbach through Zadie Smith. Both incisive and passionate, this book is at once a wide-ranging critical study of Virginia Woolf’s writing and a love letter to a great novel.

For years, 20 to 40 percent of the runaway and homeless youth (RHY) population have identified as LGBTQ+, a vastly disproportionate share relative to the general population. These youths experience lower rates of family reunification compared with their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts, and there are few LGBTQ+-affirming programs and services to which they can turn.

This book offers a comprehensive review of best practices, current policies, and the latest research regarding LGBTQ+ runaway and homeless youth. Elaine M. Maccio and Kristin Ferguson describe the prevalence and demographics of LGBTQ+ youth in the context of the larger RHY population, sharing current understandings of sexual orientation and gender identity. Combining empirical data with vivid case vignettes, they delve into the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ RHY, considering a range of issues, including physical and mental health, risk and protective factors, and parents and families. Maccio and Ferguson identify available and ideal support mechanisms, providing a detailed look at practice, programs, policies, and advocacy. The book concludes with practical recommendations to improve well-being and promote positive outcomes.

LGBTQ+ Runaway and Homeless Youth is the preeminent reference and resource for students, instructors, practitioners, service providers, researchers, policy makers, and other community partners who are invested in improving the lives of this vulnerable population.

Conservatives have disagreed about many things, but they have long been united by the belief that the mainstream—or “liberal”—media is biased against them. Why did conflict with the press become so central to conservative identity, and how has antipathy toward the media shaped the modern conservative movement? A. J. Bauer traces how decades of right-wing criticism of the “liberal media” reshaped US news culture and came to define conservative politics.

In the 1940s, progressives saw the newspaper industry as a reactionary bastion and supported regulations such as the Fairness Doctrine to ensure a wider range of viewpoints over the airwaves. Anticommunist campaigners soon borrowed tactics from their foes, adapting claims of structural media bias and fostering skepticism toward mainstream outlets. Bauer tracks the conservative turn to media activism, demonstrating how allegations of bias bridged the gap between relatively mainstream figures such as William F. Buckley and more extreme groups like the John Birch Society. Bauer considers key moments from Texas oilman H. L. Hunt’s bankrolling of the supposedly nonpartisan Facts Forum in the 1950s to Spiro Agnew’s tirades against the media elite and the rise of watchdog groups such as Accuracy in Media in the 1970s. By cultivating grassroots hostility toward the press, conservatives built an audience base for the right-wing media sector that emerged after the Reagan administration lifted the Fairness Doctrine. From Rush Limbaugh to Fox News to today’s right-wing podcasts and influencers, this book shows why conservative media ultimately eclipsed the movement that enabled it. In recounting the long history of conflict between conservatives and the press, Bauer offers a compelling new origin story for today’s polarized media environment.

For more than a decade, Al Filreis has taught a free online course about experimental poetry, known as “ModPo,” that has drawn some 435,000 students from 179 countries. Online classes even a fraction of ModPo’s size have been criticized as impersonal and unengaging. But the citizens of ModPo have formed a generous and enduring intellectual community as together they read poems typically dismissed as difficult and inaccessible.

In The Classroom and the Crowd, Filreis reflects on his decades of experience as a founder of participatory literary communities and teacher of online courses, demonstrating that student-centered education offers new possibilities for humane social networking. Introducing readers to ModPo participants and their open-ended, round-the-clock conversations, he shows how online learning can not only be accessible and educational but also deepen our commitment to democracy. Filreis argues that the emphasis on collaborative learning, space for discussion, and the inherent openness of poetry allows for a sense of community, continuity, and even intimacy that often eludes other online educational endeavors. ModPo embodies principles underlying both modern poetics and cooperative education: Writers and readers, like teachers and learners, create meaning together; many voices are clearer than one; and democracy is a creative practice. Proposing an optimistic vision of mass learning, this book contends that asynchronous education has surprising advantages over the traditional classroom, that panics about a crisis of attention and the death of reading are overblown—and that instead of logging off, we should all start reading with a crowd.

From social science and biomedical research to government and media reporting, statistics on racial and ethnic disparities are everywhere. The numbers we typically encounter, however, are not straightforward comparisons. Researchers analyze data using adjustments such as regression models that are intended to address bias and confounding factors. Yet many common statistical practices produce misleading results, and some have flawed assumptions that inadvertently misrepresent the inequalities between groups.

Jay S. Kaufman offers a clear and accessible guide to understanding the use and abuse of statistics on racial and ethnic disparities. Examining dozens of real-world examples spanning medicine, economics, education, and criminal justice, he shows how typical statistical practices—no matter how well-intentioned—have obscured the realities of injustice, with significant consequences for public policy. Kaufman considers how to select and apply statistical adjustments responsibly and systematically, and he proposes ways to improve the explanation and analysis of racial and ethnic inequalities.

Written for readers without a background in statistics, this book provides an essential introduction to quantitative reasoning in terms of social justice. The Race Variable is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate courses across the medical and social sciences—including sociology, demography, public health, epidemiology, medicine, and public policy—that focus on racial and ethnic disparities, and for all readers interested in the statistical foundations of our understanding of inequality.

After the Chinese Civil War, the Kuomintang imposed authoritarian rule on Taiwan in the name of anticommunism. The White Terror, as martial law and state repression were known, would last for decades, casting a pall of uncertainty and fear over Taiwanese society—and its legacies still haunt Taiwan today. Kaori Lai’s Portraits in White explores everyday life under the White Terror, illuminating how the violence of martial law pervades even the most mundane moments.

The book is composed of three novellas, each telling the story of an ordinary person. Mr. Ch’ing-chih, a schoolteacher, keeps his head down and avoids harming others despite pressure to do intelligence work. Ms. Wen-hui, an old woman who had served as a housekeeper for elites of different backgrounds since the Japanese occupation, faces death alone in the digital age. Ms. Casey, discriminated against for not being of mainlander descent, moves to Europe and must navigate the politics of diaspora. Even if only alluded to obliquely, the White Terror always hovers in the background, shaping the characters’ experiences and inner worlds. Elegantly written and keenly observed, Portraits in White provides a panoramic view of the ways authoritarianism seeps into daily life.