Norton Short – serie

When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described “hard-of-hearing chemo-brained amputee with Crohn’s disease and tinnitus,” there was no returning to “normal.” Suddenly well-meaning people called her an “inspiration” while grocery shopping, or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don’t want what the abled assume they want—nor are they generally asked. Why do abled people frame disability as an individual problem that calls for technological solutions, rather than a social one?In a warm, feisty, opinionated voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. For the future is surely disabled—whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It’s time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world.

This engrossing deep dive exposes how the shadowy global system of offshore finance fuels economic crises and austerity while also undermining democracy and the rule of law. Sociologist Brooke Harrington trained as an offshore wealth manager then spent years immersed in tax havens around the world, observing and interviewing the experts who keep the secrets and protect the fortunes of the global ultra-rich. In Offshore, she shows what offshore finance costs all of us and how it has colonised the world—not on behalf of any one country but to benefit a largely invisible empire of a few thousand billionaires who help themselves to the best society has to offer while sticking us with the bill. As politicians struggle to address the deepening economic and political inequality destabilising the world, Harrington’s exposé of the offshore system is a vital resource for understanding the most pressing crises of our time.

Why has the racial wealth gap between the median white households and median Black households in America remained stagnant over the past century, never narrowing below six to one? Mehrsa Baradaran attempts to answer this question in this sweeping yet accessible history. She shows how decades of the laws rooted in white supremacy–from slavery and the broken Reconstruction-era promise of “40 acres and a mule”, to the racist policies of the Jim Crow and New Deal eras–have restricted Black access to capital, credit, homeownership and other mechanisms of wealth creation while subsidising the rising economic fortunes of white families.An infuriating and compelling read, The Racial Wealth Gap offers a devastating analysis of one of America’s most pressing systemic issues.A Norton Short

Chatbots are sure to have a significant impact on the way we read, write and think. For better or worse, they are being used to find information, influence public opinion, diagnose illness and shape political discussion online. How did we get to this point and what can we do to prepare?Literary Theory for Robots reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defence systems trained on Russian folktales. In this provocative reflection on the shared pasts of literature and computer science, former Microsoft engineer and professor of comparative literature Dennis Yi Tenen provides crucial context for recent developments in AI, which holds important lessons for the future of human living with smart technology.

The phrase “human trafficking” often conjures nightmarish images of sexual exploitation but Rhacel Salazar Parreñas reveals that the majority of trafficking victims are domestic workers—who suffer abuse at the hands of “ordinary” family employers. Drawing on twenty years of research across three continents, Parreñas exposes the grim realities faced by migrant workers ensnared in forced labour due to poverty and debt bondage. She uncovers how entrenched social and legal norms, coupled with a patronising “employer saviour complex”, foster a troubling sense of ownership among employers over “their” domestic workers.Through powerful firsthand accounts, Parreñas illustrates migrants’ desperation and the power dynamics that often lead to modern-day slavery. Parreñas’s urgent narrative challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about everyday household arrangements and calls for justice and fair treatment for all workers.

Harriet Tubman, forced to labour outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in New England. The Indigenous women’s basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, recaptured a sense of pride in physical prowess as they trounced the white teams of the 1904 World’s Fair. Celebrating women like these who acted on their confidence outdoors, Wild Girls also brings new context to misunderstood icons like Sakakawea and Pocahontas, and to under-appreciated figures like Gertrude Bonin, Dolores Huerta and Grace Lee Boggs.For the girls at the centre of this book, woods, rivers, ball courts and streets provided not just escape from degrees of servitude but also space to envision new spheres of action. Lyrically written and full of archival discoveries, this book evokes landscapes as richly as the girls who roamed in them—and argues for equal access to outdoor spaces for girls of every race and class today.

A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Princeton professor Ruha Benjamin believes in the liberating power of the imagination. Deadly systems shaped by mass incarceration, ableism, digital surveillance and eugenics emerged from the human imagination but they have real-world impacts. To fight these systems and create a world that works for all of us, we will have to imagine things differently. As Benjamin shows, educators, artists, technologists and more are experimenting with new ways of thinking and tackling seemingly intractable problems. Drawing from the work of these visionaries—including Black feminists, climate activists, Afrofuturists and troublemakers of all sorts—Imagination: A Manifesto explores the possibility and practices required to imagine and create more just and habitable worlds.

Biologically, race does not exist. But in our social world, it remains decidedly important. Mainstream scientists embrace these truths, yet misinformation about human variation and genetics persists in our society. What is the true relationship between the two? And how should we talk about identity in science and medicine?In deeply researched, masterful prose, sociologist Rina Bliss guides us through the invention and evolution of the concept. She reveals how the myth of distinct, biological races endures in medicine, science, and social policy—warping our understanding of complex topics like intelligence, disease susceptibility and behaviour. Even well-intentioned researchers add to the confusion by introducing racial analysis in contexts where it doesn’t belong, resulting in misleading reports that amplify harmful assumptions and ignore the social forces at work. At a time when misinformation about our bodies and identities is dangerously prevalent, Bliss unmasks what’s truly real about race: namely, racism’s impact on our bodies and lives.

Drawing on deep passion and personal experience, former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith demystifies the art form that has too often been mischaracterised as “inaccessible”, “irrelevant” or “intimidating”. She argues that poetry is rooted in fundamentally human qualities innate to our capacities to love, dream, question and engage across diverse cultures and backgrounds. Lifting the veil on her own creative process, Smith shows us how reading and writing poetry allows us to confront life’s many uncertainties and losses, to build camaraderie with strangers and to understand ourselves. She grounds readers in the technical elements of the craft and provides close readings of the works of contemporary poets, alongside classic poems. By reimagining and re-examining the age-old art form, Fear Less is a warm invitation to find meaning, consolation and hope through poetry.A Norton Short

Wherever there’s a rule, there is someone with the power to apply or ignore it—or add to it, in the interest of justice. From enforcing chores to issuing life sentences, decision-makers deliver flawed and sometimes arbitrary outcomes. But is their use of discretion good or bad overall? As a society, should we seek to minimise or maximise discretion, with all its potential for bias and other kinds of human error?Reframing our understanding of justice and ethics, philosopher Barry Lam argues that while use of discretion—whether by a sports referee, a parent, a police officer or a judge—can never be perfect, removing it has even more problematic effects. Mandatory arrests and sentencing laws have not eliminated bias, but have corrupted the courtroom, institutionalised lying and brought about even more unjust and arbitrary results. Fewer Rules, Better People is a bold, riveting treatise that sheds new light on political debates about law and justice while aiming to prepare us for the imminent threat of more “perfect”, discretion-less rule-enforcement by AI.

Today, human exceptionalism is the norm. Despite occasional nods to animal welfare, we prioritise humanity, often neglecting the welfare of a vast number of beings. As a result, we use hundreds of billions of vertebrates and trillions of invertebrates every year for a variety of purposes, often unnecessarily. We also plan to use animals, AI systems and other non-humans at even higher levels in the future. Yet as the dominant species, humanity has a responsibility to ask: Which non-humans matter, how much do they matter and what do we owe them in a world reshaped by human activity and technology?In The Moral Circle, philosopher Jeff Sebo challenges us to include all potentially significant beings in our moral community, with transformative implications for our lives and societies.This book explores provocative case studies such as lawsuits over captive elephants and debates over factory-farmed insects, and compels us to consider future ethical quandaries, such as whether to send microbes to new planets and whether to create virtual worlds filled with digital minds. Taking an expansive view of human responsibility, Sebo argues that building a positive future requires the shedding of human exceptionalism and radically rethinking our place in the world.

Today’s conversations about sex often focus on consent—who has given it, when one has it and how to get it. However, good, fulfilling sex requires more than securing a “yes” from a partner. It requires a variety of kinds of communication, as well as social circumstances that support sexual agency and pleasure. In Sex Beyond “Yes”, Quill R. Kukla explores what sexual agency is and how it can be enabled or hindered. Kukla reimagines pleasurable, ethical sex beyond the constraints of commodification, patriarchal and heterocentric social scripts, ableism, and puritanical and stigmatising attitudes toward sex.This book addresses the complexities of desire and the importance of creating an environment that prioritises respect, communication and joy. Centring pleasure and agency, it encourages conversations and social changes that can make good sex accessible to all.

This engrossing deep dive exposes how the shadowy global system of offshore finance fuels economic crises and austerity while also undermining democracy and the rule of law. Sociologist Brooke Harrington trained as an offshore wealth manager then spent years immersed in tax havens around the world, observing and interviewing the experts who keep the secrets and protect the fortunes of the global ultra-rich. She shows what offshore finance costs all of us and how it has colonised the world—not on behalf of any one country, but to benefit a largely invisible empire of a few thousand billionaires who help themselves to the best society has to offer while sticking us with the bill. As politicians struggle to address the deepening economic and political inequality destabilising the world, Harrington’s exposé of the offshore system is a vital resource for understanding the most pressing crises of our time.

The impulse to seek out new worlds is universal to humanity. In a truly inclusive account of exploration, historian Matthew Lockwood interweaves stories of famous figures—including Sacagawea, Pocahontas and Dr Livingstone—with tales of individuals who are usually denied the title “explorer.” Lockwood’s new cast of adventurers includes Rabban Bar Sawma, a Uighur monk who traversed the Middle East and Europe; Yatsuke, an East African traveller to Japan during the sixteenth century; and David Dorr, a man born in slavery whose travelogues reshaped Americans’ understanding of Africa. In lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection and exchange, these figures unfurl a human tapestry of discovery. Spanning forty centuries and six continents, this thrilling and concise history redefines what it means to discover, who counts as an explorer and what counts as exploration.

How can we create a world where everyone has enough? We can start by focusing less on lack and more on abundance. In Gather, anthropologist Ashanté M. Reese argues for a new vision of food justice that centres the resilience of Black communities and argues that community nourishment deserves as much consideration as individual health. Highlighting four spaces of gathering—gardens, family reunions, repasts and protests—Reese offers rich, on-the-ground studies of the places and people who make up the food justice movement. From Black church networks and community farms to student protests, these studies illuminate ways we can challenge structures of power and nourish ourselves, body and soul. In a world of social isolation and unequal food systems, Gather offers a compelling argument for the beauty and political power of togetherness.A Norton Short

Most histories of medicine centre doctors. Yet these narratives underplay the role that ordinary people have on medicine and public health. In colonial America, Black people’s knowledge led to smallpox inoculations, stymying that epidemic. Midwives, more plentiful than doctors, delivered babies more successfully. The Black community of the early 1900s educated the public on preventing tuberculosis. In the last half of the twentieth century, the Young Lords fought for better sanitation and increased medical infrastructure in their East Harlem neighbourhood and queer people’s activism pushed the federal government for HIV/AIDS research.Grassroots community care has always been a hidden tradition at the cutting edge of medicine.Medicine by the People reveals that the history of American healthcare is, at its heart, a struggle over who gets to tell the story of illness.

The impulse to seek out new worlds is universal to humanity. In a truly inclusive account of exploration, historian Matthew Lockwood interweaves stories of famous figures—including Sacagawea, Pocahontas and Dr Livingstone—with tales of individuals who are usually denied the title “explorer”. Lockwood’s new cast of adventurers includes Rabban Bar Sawma, a Uighur monk who traversed the Middle East and Europe; Yatsuke, an East African traveller to Japan during the sixteenth century; and David Dorr, a man born in slavery whose travelogues reshaped Americans’ understanding of Africa. In lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection and exchange, these figures unfurl a human tapestry of discovery. Spanning forty centuries and six continents, this thrilling and concise history redefines what it means to discover, who counts as an explorer and what counts as exploration.

Wherever there’s a rule, there is someone with the power to apply or ignore it—or add to it, in the interest of justice. From enforcing chores to issuing life sentences, decision-makers deliver flawed and sometimes arbitrary outcomes. But is their use of discretion good or bad overall? As a society, should we seek to minimise or maximise discretion, with all its potential for bias and other kinds of human error?Reframing our understanding of justice and ethics, Barry Lam argues that while use of discretion can never be perfect, removing it has more problematic effects. Mandatory arrests and sentencing laws do not eliminate bias but corrupt the courtroom, institutionalise lying and bring about unjust and arbitrary results. Fewer Rules, Better People sheds new light on political debates about law and justice while preparing us for the imminent threat of discretion-less rule-enforcement by AI.A Norton Short

Biologically, race does not exist. But in our social world, it remains decidedly important. Mainstream scientists embrace these truths, yet misinformation about human variation and genetics persists in our society. What is the true relationship between the two? And how should we talk about identity in science and medicine?In deeply researched, masterful prose, sociologist Rina Bliss guides us through the invention and evolution of the concept. She reveals how the myth of distinct, biological races endures in medicine, science and social policy—warping our understanding of complex topics like intelligence, disease susceptibility and behaviour. Even well-intentioned researchers add to the confusion by introducing racial analysis in contexts where it doesn’t belong, resulting in misleading reports that amplify harmful assumptions and ignore the social forces at work. At a time when misinformation about our bodies and identities is dangerously prevalent, Bliss unmasks what’s truly real about race: namely, racism’s impact on our bodies and lives.A Norton Short

Today, human exceptionalism is the norm. Despite occasional nods to animal welfare, we prioritise humanity, often neglecting the welfare of a vast number of beings. As a result, we use hundreds of billions of vertebrates and trillions of invertebrates every year for a variety of purposes, often unnecessarily. Yet as the dominant species, humanity has a responsibility to ask: Which non-humans matter, how much do they matter and what do we owe them in a world reshaped by human activity and technology?In The Moral Circle, philosopher Jeff Sebo challenges us to include all potentially significant beings in our moral community, with transformative implications for our lives and societies.This book explores provocative case studies such as lawsuits over captive elephants and debates over factory-farmed insects, and compels us to consider future ethical quandaries, such as whether to send microbes to new planets and whether to create virtual worlds filled with digital minds. Taking an expansive view of human responsibility, Sebo argues that building a positive future requires the shedding of human exceptionalism and radically rethinking our place in the world.A Norton Short

The phrase “human trafficking” often conjures nightmarish images of sexual exploitation but Rhacel Salazar Parreñas reveals that the majority of trafficking victims are domestic workers—who suffer abuse at the hands of “ordinary” family employers. Drawing on twenty years of research across three continents, Parreñas exposes the grim realities faced by migrant workers ensnared in forced labour due to poverty and debt bondage. She uncovers how entrenched social and legal norms, coupled with a patronising “employer saviour complex”, foster a troubling sense of ownership among employers over “their” domestic workers.Through powerful first-hand accounts, Parreñas illustrates migrants’ desperation and the power dynamics that often lead to modern-day slavery. Parreñas’s urgent narrative challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about everyday household arrangements and calls for justice and fair treatment for all workers.

Drawing on deep passion and personal experience, former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith demystifies the art form that has too often been mischaracterised as “inaccessible”, “irrelevant” or “intimidating”. She argues that poetry is rooted in fundamentally human qualities innate to our capacities to love, dream, question and engage across diverse cultures and backgrounds. Lifting the veil on her own creative process, Smith shows us how reading and writing poetry allows us to confront life’s many uncertainties and losses, to build camaraderie with strangers and to understand ourselves. She grounds readers in the technical elements of the craft and provides close readings of the works of contemporary poets, alongside classic poems. By reimagining and re-examining the age-old art form, Fear Less is a warm invitation to find meaning, consolation and hope through poetry.A Norton Short