Bold Type Books – serie

2014 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Notable Book AwardIn Goliath , New York Times bestselling author Max Blumenthal takes us on a journey through the badlands and high roads of Israel-Palestine, painting a startling portrait of Israeli society under the siege of increasingly authoritarian politics as the occupation of the Palestinians deepens.Beginning with the national elections carried out during Israel's war on Gaza in 2008-09, which brought into power the country's most right-wing government to date, Blumenthal tells the story of Israel in the wake of the collapse of the Oslo peace process.As Blumenthal reveals, Israel has become a country where right-wing leaders like Avigdor Lieberman and Bibi Netanyahu are sacrificing democracy on the altar of their power politics where the loyal opposition largely and passively stands aside and watches the organized assault on civil liberties where state-funded Orthodox rabbis publish books that provide instructions on how and when to kill Gentiles where half of Jewish youth declare their refusal to sit in a classroom with an Arab and where mob violence targets Palestinians and African asylum seekers scapegoated by leading government officials as "demographic threats."Immersing himself like few other journalists inside the world of hardline political leaders and movements, Blumenthal interviews the demagogues and divas in their homes, in the Knesset, and in the watering holes where their young acolytes hang out, and speaks with those political leaders behind the organized assault on civil liberties. As his journey deepens, he painstakingly reports on the occupied Palestinians challenging schemes of demographic separation through unarmed protest. He talks at length to the leaders and youth of Palestinian society inside Israel now targeted by security service dragnets and legislation suppressing their speech, and provides in-depth reporting on the small band of Jewish Israeli dissidents who have shaken off a conformist mindset that permeates the media, schools, and the military.Through his far-ranging travels, Blumenthal illuminates the present by uncovering the ghosts of the past,the histories of Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages now gone and forgotten how that history has set the stage for the current crisis of Israeli society and how the Holocaust has been turned into justification for occupation.A brave and unflinching account of the real facts on the ground, Goliath is an unprecedented and compelling work of journalism.

From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos , investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe- the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism"- a political hardening of wealthy states- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.

We hear them on talk radio airwaves bellowing about minorities. We watch them organize anti-immigration demonstrations on the border. We read their opinions regarding the demise of white male privilege. And sometimes, tragically, we witness their aggression through vigilante violence, as in the cases of Wade Michael Page, James Eagan Holmes, Elliot Rodger, George Zimmerman, and many more. They are America's angry white men, including "men's rights" activists who think white men are the victims of discrimination, as well as members of the "white wing" of the rightward fringes of the American political spectrum. Why are they so angry?Sociologist Michael Kimmel, one of the leading writers on men and masculinity in the world today, has spent hundreds of hours in the company of America's angry white men in pursuit of an answer. Raised to expect unparalleled social and economic privilege, white men are suffering today from what Kimmel calls "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them. In Angry White Men, Kimmel presents a comprehensive diagnosis of their fears, anxieties, and rage.

From the author of Work Won't Love You Back, a stirring examination of how collective grief can ignite powerful change.Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, yet we barely have time to acknowledge it. The losses range from the personal grief of a single COVID death to the planetary disaster wrought by climate change, in an age of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated.This is capitalism's death phase. It has become clear that the cost of wealth creation for a few is enormous destruction for others, for the marginalized and the vulnerable but increasingly for all of us. At the same time, we are denied the means of mourning those futures that are being so brutally curtailed. At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a political act. Sarah Jaffe shows how the act of public memorialization has become a radical statement, a vibrant response to loss, and a path to imagining a better world. When we are able to grieve well the ones we have lost, the causes they fought for, or the examples they bequeathed us, we are better prepared to fight for a transformed future.

From a star theoretical physicist, a journey into the world of particle physics and the cosmos -- and a call for a more just practice of science.In The Disordered Cosmos, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter -- all with a new spin informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek.One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly non-traditional, and grounded in Black feminist traditions.Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, sexism, and other dehumanizing systems. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society that begins with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to experience and understand the wonders of the universe.

Over the past century, American demographics and social norms have shifted dramatically. If trends continue, we should expect to see more people living alone, later-in-life marriages, fewer (and smaller) new families, and a majority-minority population that skews older and older. Americans' daily life and preferences have also changed, whether by choice or by force, to become more virtual, more mobile, and less stable. But housing today largely looks the same as it did in 1950.In Brave New Home, Diana Lind shows why the government-subsidized suburbs full of single-family houses are bad for us and our planet, and details the new efforts underway that better reflect the way we live now, to ensure that the way we live next is both less lonely and more affordable. Lind takes readers into the homes and communities that are seeking alternatives to the American norm, from multi-generational living, in-law suites, and co-living to microapartments, tiny houses, and new rural communities. Drawing on Lind's expertise and the stories of Americans caught in or forging their on paths outside of our cookie-cutter housing trap, Brave New Home offers a diagnosis of the current crisis in American housing and a radical re-imagining of the possibilities of housing.

When Matt Ortile's family moved from Manila to Las Vegas, the locals couldn't pronounce his name. Bullied for his brown skin, accent, and femininity, he couldn't wait to move to New York, start over, and leave the past behind him - Filipino name included. In The Groom Will Keep His Name, Ortile traces his journey to an awakening of radical self-love.When we date and mate, we tell stories about ourselves, trying to put our 'best foot forward.' Dating apps and social media have encouraged us to further curate the face we show the world. Our personal myths, however true or false, reveal not just who we are, but who we want to be. The Groom Will Keep His Name explores the various fables Ortile has spun for himself: as a Vassar Girl, an American Boy, a card-carrying member of Gay Twitter, and a Filipino immigrant looking to build a home.With intelligence, wit, and his heart on his sleeve, Matt Ortile examines cruising and one-night stands, DMs and texts, relationships and whateverships that helped him interrogate his queer desire, race, complicity in white supremacy, and solidarity with other marginalized people.

Miami, Florida, is likely to be entirely underwater by the end of this century. Residents are already starting to see the effects of sea level rise today. From sunny day flooding caused by higher tides to a sewer system on the brink of total collapse, the city undeniably lives in a climate changed world. In Disposable City, Miami resident Mario Alejandro Ariza shows us not only what climate change looks like on the ground today, but also what Miami will look like 100 years from now, and how that future has been shaped by the city's racist past and present. As politicians continue to kick the can down the road and Miami becomes increasingly unlivable, real estate vultures and wealthy residents will be able to get out or move to higher ground, but the most vulnerable communities, disproportionately composed of people of color, will face flood damage, rising housing costs, dangerously higher temperatures, and stronger hurricanes that they can't afford to escape. Miami may be on the front lines of climate change, but the battle it's fighting today is coming for the rest of the U.S.--and the rest of the world--far sooner than we could have imagined even a decade ago. Disposable City is a thoughtful portrait of both a vibrant city with a unique culture and the social, economic, and psychic costs of climate change that call us to act before it's too late.

Josiah Sutton was convicted of rape. He was five inches shorter and 65 pounds lighter than the suspect described by the victim, but at trial a lab analyst testified that his DNA was found at the crime scene. His case looked like many others,arrest, swab, match, conviction. But there was just one problem,Sutton was innocent.We think of DNA forensics as an infallible science that catches the bad guys and exonerates the innocent. But when the science goes rogue, it can lead to a gross miscarriage of justice. Erin Murphy exposes the dark side of forensic DNA testing: crime labs that receive little oversight and produce inconsistent results prosecutors who push to test smaller and poorer-quality samples, inviting error and bias law-enforcement officers who compile massive, unregulated, and racially skewed DNA databases and industry lobbyists who push policies of stop and spit."DNA testing is rightly seen as a transformative technological breakthrough, but we should be wary of placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of the same broken criminal justice system that has produced mass incarceration, privileged government interests over personal privacy, and all too often enforced the law in a biased or unjust manner. Inside the Cell exposes the truth about forensic DNA, and shows us what it will take to harness the power of genetic identification in service of accuracy and fairness.

A #1 Sunday Times bestseller [UK] A titanic battle is being waged for Europe's integrity and soul, with the forces of reason and humanism losing out to growing irrationality, authoritarianism, and malice, promoting inequality and austerity. The whole world has a stake in a victory for rationality, liberty, democracy, and humanism. In January 2015, Yanis Varoufakis, an economics professor teaching in Austin, Texas, was elected to the Greek parliament with more votes than any other member of parliament. He was appointed finance minister and, in the whirlwind five months that followed, everything he had warned about,the perils of the euro's faulty design, the European Union's shortsighted austerity policies, financialized crony capitalism, American complicity and rising authoritarianism,was confirmed as the troika" (the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund, and European Commission) stonewalled his efforts to resolve Greece's economic crisis. Here, Varoufakis delivers a fresh look at the history of Europe's crisis and America's central role in it. He presents the ultimate case against austerity, proposing concrete policies for Europe that are necessary to address its crisis and avert contagion to America, China, and the rest of the world. With passionate, informative, and at times humorous prose, he warns that the implosion of an admittedly crisis-ridden and deeply irrational European monetary union should, and can, be avoided at all cost.

In the first week of June 2013, the American people discovered that for a decade, they had abjectly traded their individual privacy for the chimera of national security. The revelation that the federal government has full access to all phone records and the vast trove of presumably private personal data posted on the Internet has brought the threat of a surveillance society to the fore.But the erosion of privacy rights extends far beyond big government. Big business has long played a leading role in the hollowing out of personal freedoms. In this new book, Robert Scheer shows how our most intimate habits, from private correspondence, book pages read, and lists of friends and phone conversations have been seamlessly combined in order to create a detailed map of an individual's social and biological DNA.From wiretapping to lax social media security, from domestic spy drones to sophisticated biometrics, both the United States government and private corporate interests have dangerously undermined the delicate balance between national security and individual sovereignty. Without privacy, Scheer argues, there is neither freedom nor democracy. The freedom to be left alone embodies the most basic of human rights. Yet this freedom has been squandered in the name of national security and consumer convenience.The information revolution has exposed much of the world's population to a boundless world of universally shared information. But it has also stripped both passive and active participants of their every shred of privacy in ways most don't comprehend. No authoritarian regime ever could have hoped to gain the power to control the power and aspirations of their subjects that today's off-the-shelf information technology already provides. The technology of surveillance, Scheer warns, represents an existential threat to the liberation of the human spirit.

Why does a disease that killed only a handful of Americans like ebola provoke panic, but the flu-which kills tens of thousands each year-is dismissed with a yawn? Why is an unarmed young black woman who knocks on a stranger's front door to ask for help after her car breaks down perceived to be so threatening that the stranger shoots her dead? In Jumping at Shadows, Sasha Abramsky sets his sights on America's most dangerous epidemic: irrational fear.In this meditation on the paralyzing terror Americans feel when confronted with something they don't understand-from foreigners to tropical viruses to universal health care-Abramsky delivers an eye-opening analysis of our misconceptions about risk and threats, and how our brains interpret them, both at a neurological level and at a conscious one. What emerges is a journey through a political and cultural landscape that is defined by our fears, which are often misplaced. Ultimately, Abramsky shows that our fears can teach us a great deal about our society, exposing our deeply ingrained racism, classism, xenophobia, and susceptibility to the toxic messages of demagogues.

Humanity is on the verge of its darkest hour- or its greatest momentThe consequences of the technological revolution are about to hit hard: unemployment will spike as new technologies replace labour in the manufacturing, service, and professional sectors of an economy that is already struggling. The end of work as we know it will hit at the worst moment imaginable: as capitalism fosters permanent stagnation, when the labour market is in decrepit shape, with declining wages, expanding poverty, and scorching inequality. Only the dramatic democratization of our economy can address the existential challenges we now face. Yet, the US political process is so dominated by billionaires and corporate special interests, by corruption and monopoly, that it stymies not just democracy but progress.The great challenge of these times is to ensure that the tremendous benefits of technological progress are employed to serve the whole of humanity, rather than to enrich the wealthy few. Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols argue that the United States needs a new economy in which revolutionary technologies are applied to effectively address environmental and social problems and used to rejuvenate and extend democratic institutions. Based on intense reporting, rich historical analysis, and deep understanding of the technological and social changes that are unfolding, they propose a bold strategy for democratizing our digital destiny,before it's too late- and unleashing the real power of the Internet, and of humanity.

Cecily McMillan didn't come from much: she had a hardscrabble life bouncing between the members of a broken family scattered from Texas to Atlanta. Her relationship with her parents became increasingly strained, and at sixteen she was legally emancipated and taken in by a beloved teacher. She became politically active at a young age, leading walkouts against the Iraq War in high school and protesting against union busting in college. When she moved to New York for a masters degree at the New School, she found herself planning what would later become Occupy Wall Street.On St. Patrick's Day, 2012, her life changed forever. Cecily swung by Zuccotti Park to pick up friends on her way to meet others at a nearby Irish pub- but she never made it out. The celebration was cut short by a police raid that cleared the square. In the melee, she was grabbed from behind by a police officer. Two years later she faced a Kafkaesque trial and was sentenced to three months at Rikers Island.Inside Rikers, Cecily grew close to her fellow inmates, women with precarious lives who took her under their wings and taught her how to navigate life in prison. Through them, she remembered where she came from and who she was fighting for. And through them, she found her voice. The Emancipation of Cecily McMillan is an intimate, brave, bittersweet memoir of a remarkable young woman trying to make sense of her place in the world.

The police in America belong to the people,not the other way around. Yet millions of Americans experience their cops as racist, brutal, and trigger-happy: an overly aggressive, militarized enemy of the people. For their part, today's officers feel they are under siege,misunderstood, unfairly criticized, and scapegoated for society's ills. Is there a fix? Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper believes there is.Policing is in crisis. The last decade has witnessed a vast increase in police aggression, misconduct, and militarization, along with a corresponding reduction in transparency and accountability. It is not just noticeable in African American and other minority communities,where there have been a series of high-profile tragedies,but in towns and cities across the country. Racism,from raw, individualized versions to insidious systemic examples,appears to be on the rise in our police departments. Overall, our police officers have grown more and more alienated from the people they've been hired to serve.In To Protect and Serve , Stamper delivers a revolutionary new model for American law enforcement: the community-based police department. It calls for fundamental changes in the federal government's role in local policing as well as citizen participation in all aspects of police operations: policymaking, program development, crime fighting and service delivery, entry-level and ongoing education and training, oversight of police conduct, and- especially relevant to today's challenges- joint community-police crisis management. Nothing will ever change until the system itself is radically restructured, and here Stamper shows us how.

Prepárese para ser enfurecido. Una lectura obligada y reveladora." ,Robert Domínguez, New York Daily News En 1950, después de cincuenta años de ocupación militar y gobierno colonial, el Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico montó una fallida revolución armada contra Estados Unidos. La violencia arraso con la isla: comandos nacionalistas fueron enviados a Washington a ajusticiar al presidente Harry Truman, se desataron tiroteos en ocho municipios, se incendiaron cuarteles policiacos y oficinas de correo. Para sofocar esta insurrección, el Ejército de Estados Unidos desplegó miles de tropas y ametralló dos pueblos desde el aire, marcando la primera vez en su historia que el gobierno estadounidense atacó de esta forma a sus propios ciudadanos.Por medio de narraciones orales, entrevistas personales, relatos de testigos oculares, testimonios del Congreso de Estados Unidos y archivos recientemente liberados al público por el FBI, Guerra Contra Todos los Puertorriqueños nos relata la historia de una revolución olvidada y su contexto en la historia grande de Puerto Rico, desde la invasión estadounidense de 1898 hasta la lucha actual por la plena autodeterminación de los puertorriqueños.

In May 2015, Jeffrey Sterling was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. He was convicted of violating the Espionage Act by revealing details about Operation Merlin (a covert operation that aimed to frame Iran by leaking flawed nuclear blueprints) to journalist and author James Risen. He was released from prison in January 2018.Here, Sterling chronicles his story, from his youth in a poor, segregated neighbourhood in the Midwest, through law school and into the CIA. At the CIA, he rose through the ranks to become operations officer in the Iran task force and later a case officer. But then he hit a glass ceiling and was told that as a black man, he stood out too much and couldn't handle sensitive operations. In 2000, he filed a complaint with the CIA's Equal Employment Office and, a year later, the first racial discrimination lawsuit filed against the agency. But his claim was thrown out and he was terminated, even though he was one of few case officers who were fluent in Farsi, a skill that was in high demand at the time. In 2003, he raised concerns about Operation Merlin with the Senate Intelligence Committee, to no effect. Then, after years working as a health-care fraud investigator, he was arrested by FBI agents, his home was searched and he was charged with espionage. The verdict put him in prison.After serving three years in prison, Sterling is still proud of his work with the CIA and considers himself first and foremost a patriot. It is his patriotism that compelled him to blow the whistle on the systemic racism of the CIA and on the misguided operation in Iran and now to pursue justice.

In 1950, after over fifty years of military occupation and colonial rule, the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico staged an unsuccessful armed insurrection against the United States. Violence swept through the island: assassins were sent to kill President Harry Truman, gunfights roared in eight towns, police stations and post offices were burned down. In order to suppress this uprising, the US Army deployed thousands of troops and bombarded two towns, marking the first time in history that the US government bombed its own citizens.Nelson A. Denis tells this powerful story through the controversial life of Pedro Albizu Campos, who served as the president of the Nationalist Party. A lawyer, chemical engineer, and the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard Law School, Albizu Campos was imprisoned for twenty-five years and died under mysterious circumstances. By tracing his life and death, Denis shows how the journey of Albizu Campos is part of a larger story of Puerto Rico and US colonialism.Through oral histories, personal interviews, eyewitness accounts, congressional testimony, and recently declassified FBI files, War Against All Puerto Ricans tells the story of a forgotten revolution and its context in Puerto Rico's history, from the US invasion in 1898 to the modern-day struggle for self-determination. Denis provides an unflinching account of the gunfights, prison riots, political intrigue, FBI and CIA covert activity, and mass hysteria that accompanied this tumultuous period in Puerto Rican history.

On a hot and dusty December day in 1980, the bodies of four American women- three of them Catholic nuns- were pulled from a hastily dug grave in a field outside San Salvador. They had been murdered two nights before by the US-trained El Salvadoran military. News of the killing shocked the American public and set off a decade of debate over Cold War policy in Latin America. The women themselves became symbols and martyrs, shorn of context and background.In A Radical Faith , journalist Eileen Markey breathes life back into one of these women, Sister Maura Clarke. Who was this woman in the dirt? What led her to this vicious death so far from home? Maura was raised in a tight-knit Irish immigrant community in Queens, New York, during World War II. She became a missionary as a means to a life outside her small, orderly world and by the 1970s was organizing and marching for liberation alongside the poor of Nicaragua and El Salvador.Maura's story offers a window into the evolution of postwar Catholicism: from an inward-looking, protective institution in the 1950s to a community of people grappling with what it meant to live with purpose in a shockingly violent world. At its heart, A Radical Faith is an intimate portrait of one woman's spiritual and political transformation and her courageous devotion to justice.