Building the Worlds That Kill Us

It is widely believed that Congress has broken down. Media accounts present the storied legislature as thoroughly gridlocked, paralyzed by partisan rancor. Political scientists find that Congress is passing fewer laws and spending less time on legislative work. Which parts of a supposedly dysfunctional legislature continue to function?

Maya L. Kornberg examines the legislative process beyond voting patterns, emphasizing the crucial role of congressional committee hearings. In committees, lawmakers hear from expert witnesses, legislators revise and discuss bills before bringing them to a vote, and the public has an opportunity to engage with Congress. Kornberg scrutinizes the inner workings of committees—the different types of witnesses who testify, the varied hearings Congress holds, and the distinct effects that committee work has on congresspeople. She deploys original mixed-methods datasets that span from insider interviews to sentiment analysis examining the language used in hearings. Kornberg evaluates how committees operate and the conditions affecting their performance, finding that committee work can be more deliberative and productive than the politics of the Congress floor.

Through a comprehensive exploration of who committees hear from and how they listen, this book demonstrates that Congress is not as dysfunctional as is often claimed. Inside Congressional Committees also suggests timely reforms based on these findings that can strengthen Congress.

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.

In recent years, attitudes in the United States toward the Palestinian cause have shifted dramatically. Although Palestinians have long been demonized in U.S. media and politics, their struggle portrayed as illegitimate, emergent progressive voices increasingly challenge the status quo on Israel and Palestine and express solidarity with Palestinian resistance. What accounts for this change and its evolution?

This book provides a new lens on activism around Palestinian issues, demonstrating how the global Palestinian diaspora has driven transnational political movements. Karam Dana explores the ways that exile has shaped Palestinian identity and allowed for new forms of global activism. He examines the social, political, economic, and technological forces that have created space for Palestinian voices to be heard by wider audiences worldwide. Drawing on interviews with scholars and advocates—including members of the Palestinian diaspora and Jewish American activists—as well as public opinion data and media analysis, Dana traces how global Palestinian communities have influenced American views. He addresses the backlash against pro-Palestinian advocacy but argues that solidarity with Palestinians—both in the United States and globally—will continue to strengthen. Timely and insightful, To Stand with Palestine offers an inside look at how Palestinians have shared their story with the world and why sympathy for their plight is growing, with significant implications for the global political landscape.

Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. They are eager to learn local languages. Immigration is not a burden on social services. Border walls do not work. There is no unmanageable refugee crisis. Yet many such misinformed assumptions and harmful misconceptions pervade conversations about immigration.

This timely book is a practical, evidence-based primer on immigrants and immigration. Each chapter debunks a frequently encountered claim and answers common questions. Presenting the latest findings and decades of interdisciplinary research in an accessible way, Ernesto Castañeda and Carina Cione emphasize the expert consensus that immigration is vital to the United States and many other countries around the world. Featuring original insights from research conducted in El Paso, Texas, Immigration Realities considers a wide range of places, ethnic groups, and historical eras. It provides the key data and context to understand how immigration affects economies, crime rates, and social welfare systems, and it sheds light on contentious issues such as the safety of the U.S.-Mexico border and the consequences of Brexit. This book is an indispensable guide for all readers who want to counter false claims about immigration and are interested in what the research shows.

Now in paperback—the definitive history of how the"Big Book" of Alcoholics Anonymous was written, edited, and finally brought to press.

It has been over forty years since Ernie Kurtz wrote Not-God, the last truly professional treatment of the history of Alcoholics Anonymous. While many books dealing with A.A. history have been written since then, Writing the Big Book is the first to bring that same kind of exhaustive research, scholarly discipline, and informed insight to the subject.

Schaberg’s book—telling a detailed story that begins in October of 1937 (when a book was first proposed) and ends in April of 1939 (when Alcoholics Anonymous was published)—is based primarily on the wealth of 1930s documents currently preserved in several A.A. archives. Woven together into an exciting narrative, these real-time documents provide an almost week-by-week account of how the book was slowly put together. It is a story that unfolds with many unexpected turns and more than a few revealing departures from the hallowed stories so widely circulated by A.A. members in the past.

Writing the Big Book presents a robust and vivid picture of how Alcoholics Anonymous operated and grew in its earliest days along with a vast amount of previously unreported details about the cast of colorful characters who made that group so successful. Most surprising is the emergence of Bill Wilson’s right-hand man, Hank Parkhurst, as the unsung hero in this story. Without Hank there would have been no book, but his unfortunate slip back into drinking just months after it was published resulted in him being almost completely written out of the supposedly factual stories told later.

Fast paced, engaging, and contrary, Writing the Big Book will decisively change whatever you think you know about early A.A. history and the ways in which this book—so central to the worldwide growth of this important twentieth century movement of spiritual recovery—actually came into being.