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With scorching temperatures soaring to 35 degrees, severe water shortages and a sunburned population queuing at the street standpipes, the summer of 1976 will always be remembered as Britain's hottest on record. But the wave that hit the UK that year was also cultural and political, with upheaval on the streets, in parliament, on the cricket pitch and on the radios and TV sets of a nation at a crossroads.

An inhumane math pervades this country: even as our government extracts labor and often taxes from undocumented workers, it excludes these same workers from its social safety net. As a result, these essential workers struggle to get their own basic needs met, from healthcare to education, from freedom of association to the ability to drive to work without looking for ICE in the rearview mirror. An undocumented activist and a social scientist come together to tally of the structural costs of undocumented life.

For so long, Ruthie Ackerman believed that the decision not to have children was a radical act. She'd grown up being told that she came from a long line of women who had abandoned theirs. Plus, Ruthie feared she would pass on her half-brother’s rare genetic disorder. Haunted by this generational inheritance, she goes searching in the twists and turns of her DNA to decide once and for all whether she should become a mother. When a geneticist leaves her at a dead end, she chooses to marry a man who doesn’t want children—only to realize that, despite everything, she desperately does.

On a warm day in September 2000, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Zanhua gave birth to twin girls in a small hut nestled in bamboo behind her brother's rural home in China's Hunan province. The twins, Fangfang and Shuangjie, were welcome additions to her young family but also not her first children. Hidden in the hut, they were born under the shadow of China's notorious one-child policy. Fearing the ire of family planning officials, Zanhua and her husband decided to leave one twin in the care of relatives, hoping each toddler on their own might stay under the radar.

The almost unfathomable courage and the undying faith that propelled the Civil Rights Movement are brilliantly captured in these moving personal recollections. Here are the voices of leaders and followers, of ordinary people who became extraordinary in the face of turmoil and violence.

On October 28, 2015, a boat meant for only a few dozen passengers capsized off the coast of the Greek island of Lesvos. Hundreds of refugees, forced in desperation onto the overloaded boat manned by armed smugglers, were tossed into a roiling sea. The resulting loss of life, the largest in a single day during the crisis in the Aegean, shocked the world. Now, after nearly a decade of research, interviews, and investigation, reporter Jeanne Carstensen has captured the dramatic twenty-four hours.

In using intimate experiences to examine larger cultural topics, this singular work breaks new ground in its consideration of K-pop. I’ll Love You Forever blends the critical with the personal while spanning the history of K-pop from the perspective of a bilingual and bicultural Korean American.

Women artists face particular pressure to give up their artistic goals in favor of motherhood, supporting a partner, or finding economic stability. Throughout her 20s and 30s, Stephanie Elizondo Griest could not help worrying if constantly prioritizing her writing over everything else—from postponing children to living nomadically to save on rent—was leading her to fulfillment or regret. The year she turned 40, she turned to other women artists around the globe for answers.

In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are brilliantly cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.

Mirta Ojito was one teenager among more than a hundred thousand fellow refugees who traveled to Miami during the unprecedented events of the Mariel boatlift. Growing up, Ojito was eager to fit in and join Castro’s Young Pioneers, but as she grew older and began to understand the darker side of the Cuban revolution, she and her family began to aspire to a safer, happier life. When Castro opened Cuba’s borders for those who wanted to leave, her family was more than ready to go: they had been waiting for the opportunity for twenty years.

In When It All Burns, wildland firefighter and anthropologist Jordan Thomas recounts a single, brutal six-month fire season with the Los Padres Hotshots—the special forces of America’s firefighters. Being a hotshot is among the most difficult jobs on earth. Thomas viscerally renders his crew’s attempts to battle flames that are often too destructive to contain. He uncovers the hidden cultural history of megafires, revealing how humanity’s symbiotic relationship with wildfire became a war—and what can be done to change it back.

In Rad Future, Boemeke proves that nuclear is not just the most effective form of energy production, it’s also the key to unlocking even more important and revolutionary technology. What's more, she shows why nuclear energy is actually safe, and how a negative public image paired with a few highly preventable disasters have led us to fumble the bag on the cleanest, most environmentally friendly and powerful form of energy available to us.

The recent anti-trans commentary around the 2024 Summer Olympics and the wave of anti-trans sports law around the world often includes disturbing provisions and biases that perpetuate harmful stigmas that even amount to abuse. In Let Them Play, trans athlete Harrison Browne and investigative journalist Rachel Browne weave together the narratives and distorted facts behind the headlines, revealing that the opposition towards gender diverse athletes is fueled by fear and a moral panic as opposed to facts around what makes “a level playing field.”

In sixteen wholly original essays that blend memoir, cultural criticism, investigative journalism, and a dash of fanfiction, Walker places her own experiences within the larger context of the pressing and underdiscussed aspects of contemporary American womanhood that make up daily life. She explores the allure and violence of assimilating into white womanhood in all its hegemonic glory, exposes the ways in which the truth of trans women's reproductive healthcare is erased in favor of reactionary narratives, and considers how our agency is stripped from us—purely on account of our bodies.

Throughout history, women's pain and health issues have often been dismissed and viewed simply as an innate part of being female. Whether blamed on a wandering womb, witchcraft or still, to this day, being 'all in our heads' – women's health has been consistently misunderstood. As a result women have, and still are, missing out on receiving the healthcare they deserve. In ‘It’s Probably Nothing’, Naga Munchetty explores the difficulties of being heard, diagnosed and treated.

America, 2003: A country at war, its shiny veneer beginning to crack. Von Dutch and The Simple Life dominate. And on the cover of every magazine, a twenty-one-year-old pop star named Britney Spears. Tracking her every move for a third-tier gossip rag in Los Angeles is a young writer who for all practical purposes let's call Jeff Weiss, who took whatever job he could to pursue his dream of being a “serious” writer. He'd instead become a firsthand witness to the slow tragedy of a changing nation, represented in spirit by “the coy it-girl at the end of history.”

Gripping and illuminating, Miracle Children argues that the lesson of T.M. Landry is not that the school gamed the system, but that it played by the rules, enabled by segregated schools, inequitable education and belief that elite colleges are the nation’s last path to life-changing economic opportunity.

An invaluable guide to how to think—and not to think—about the future, by one of the premier futurists of our time.

In 2017, sociologist Ranita Ray stepped inside a fourth-grade classroom in one of the nation’s largest majority-minority districts in Las Vegas, Nevada. She was there to conduct research on the lack of resources and budget cuts that regularly face public schools. However, a few months into her immersion, a disturbed Ray recognized that that greatest impediment to students was the “slow violence” that preys on their minds, bodies, and spirits at the hands of teachers and administrators who are charged with their care.

Across the world, patriarchy has oppressed women and denied their contributions, but every nation has its own unique gendered hierarchy. Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs applies her signature approachable yet rigorous analysis to define American patriarchy in this definitive and groundbreaking history. Humanity in the United States is determined by gender in a limited and flawed binary logic that is also always tied to whiteness. Tubbs shows how a fabricated hierarchy became so deeply ingrained in the country over time that it now goes unnoticed, along with everything it intentionally conceals.