Political Study

Almost forty years ago, Neil Postman argued that television had brought about a fundamental transformation to democracy. By turning entertainment into our supreme ideology, television had recreated public discourse in its image and converted democracy into show business. In Trolling Ourselves to Death, Jason Hannan builds on Postman's classic thesis, arguing that we are now not so much amusing, as trolling ourselves to death. Contrary to the popular view of the troll as an exclusively anonymous online prankster, Hannan asserts that trolls have emerged from the cave, so to speak.

A prominent conservative scholar traces the post-1960s divisions between the Right and the Left, taking aim at liberals' victimization of African Americans and their failure to offer a viable way forward for American society. The United States today is hopelessly polarized; the political Right and Left have hardened into rigid and deeply antagonistic camps, preventing any sort of progress.

When 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump's America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward. Nasty Women features essays by Rebecca Solnit, Cheryl Strayed, Sarah Hepola, Nicole Chung, Katha Pollitt, Jill Filipovic, Samantha Irby, Randa Jarrar, Sarah Hollenbeck, Meredith Talusan, and Sarah Jaffe, among others.

Half a dozen years ago, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman set out to study the rise of this global phenomenon just as some of its members were turning to political protest and dangerous disruption. She ended up becoming so closely connected to Anonymous that the tricky story of her inside-outside status as Anon confidante, interpreter, and erstwhile mouthpiece forms one of the themes of this witty and entirely engrossing book.

A decade after The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, which Politico called "Moneyball for politics," journalist Sasha Issenberg returns to the cutting edge of political innovation to reveal how campaigns are navigating the era's most pressing challenge: how to win in a world awash in lies. The Lie Detectives is a lively and deep secret history of Democratic politics in the Trump years.

War, violence, and the disruption of social orders are critical areas of focus in mimetic theory, and a mimetic perspective applied to the study of politics illuminates social processes and phenomena over and beyond typical explanations offered by mainstream political science. Unlike traditional political science ontology, the mimetic perspective highlights neither individuals nor groups, but “doubles,” or “mimetic twins.”

Alex Marlow was just a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student when renowned media mogul Andrew Breitbart hired him as his first employee. Breitbart began mentoring Marlow on how to fight the culture war one headline at a time and to remain resilient in the face of personal attacks. Now, in this eye-opening and timely book, Marlow explains how the establishment press destroyed its own credibility with a relentless stream of “fake news” designed to smear Donald Trump and his supporters while advancing a leftist agenda.

In a remote pocket of Nazi-held France, ordinary people risked their lives to rescue many hundreds of strangers, mostly Jewish children. Was this a fluke of history, or something more? Anthropologist Maggie Paxson, certainties shaken by years of studying strife, arrives on the Plateau to explore this phenomenon: What are the traits that make a group choose selflessness?

First published in 1962, this wonderfully provocative book introduced the notion of "pseudo-events" - events such as press conferences and presidential debates, which are manufactured solely in order to be reported - and the contemporary definition of celebrity as "a person who is known for his well-knownness". Since then Daniel J. Boorstin's prophetic vision of an America inundated by its own illusions has become an essential resource for any listeners who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths.

Who gets to control the media we consume? Can we intervene, or at least mitigate the influence of constant content? Mixing personal anecdotes with historical and political criticism, Image Control explores art, social media, photography, and other visual mediums to understand how our culture and our actions are manipulated, all the while building toward the idea that if fascism emerges as aesthetics, then so too can anti-fascism.

Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a caricature of misandrist extremism in the popular imagination and a polarizing figure within the women's movement, infamous for her antipornography stance and her role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. Last Days at Hot Slit brings together selections from Dworkin's work, both fiction and nonfiction, with the aim of putting the contentious positions she's best known for in dialogue with her literary oeuvre. It includes “Goodbye to All This” (1983), a scathing chapter from an unpublished manuscript.

In The End of Power, award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world.

Critics of contemporary economics complain that belief in free markets - among economists as well as many ordinary citizens - is a form of religion. And, it turns out, that in a deeper, more historically grounded sense there is something to that idea. Contrary to the conventional historical view of economics as an entirely secular product of the Enlightenment, Benjamin M. Friedman demonstrates that religion exerted a powerful influence from the outset.

Véritable petit guide pratique écrit en 1928 par le neveu américain de Sigmund Freud, ce livre expose cyniquement et sans détour les grands principes de la manipulation mentale de masse ou de ce que Bernays appelait la "fabrique du consentement". Comment imposer une nouvelle marque de lessive ? Comment faire élire un président ? Dans la logique des "démocraties de marché", ces questions se confondent. Bernays assume pleinement ce constat : les choix des masses étant déterminants, ceux qui parviendront à les influencer détiendront réellement le pouvoir.

In Life's Work, an outspoken Christian reproductive justice advocate and abortion provider (one of the few doctors to provide such services to women in Mississippi and Alabama) pulls from his personal and professional journeys as well as the scientific training he received as a doctor to reveal how he came to believe, unequivocally, that helping women in need, without judgment, is precisely the Christian thing to do.

There is a movement on the rise, one that brings the worlds of social justice and political activism together with the practice of witchcraft. Activists wish to add magical methods to their arsenal, while spell casters seek to use their powers to resist oppression. Written by an experienced witch-activist and with the current political climate in full view, the book shows listeners how to learn spells for self-protection and body shielding, as well as methods of developing enhanced psychic intuition and situational awareness.

A riveting audiobook about the dramatic changes that will transform the world as we know it. Americans are anxious about the future - the world's and their own. Rosenberg explains the enormous political, economic, and spiritual changes that are underway in the world's most important countries. He answers why these changes are happening, what they mean, and provides insights from exclusive interviews with world leaders.

Mit Barack Obama sollte die amerikanische Gesellschaft ihren jahrhundertealten Rassismus überwinden. Am Ende seiner Amtszeit zerschlugen sich die Reste dieser Hoffnung mit der Machtübernahme Donald Trumps, den Ta-Nehisi Coates als "Amerikas ersten weißen Präsidenten" bezeichnet: ein Mann, dessen politische Existenz in der Abgrenzung zu Obama besteht. Coates zeichnet ein bestechend kluges und leidenschaftliches Porträt der Obama-Ära und ihres Vermächtnisses.

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind is a seminal work on crowd psychology by Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), a French social psychologist. He observes that a crowd forms when an influential idea unites a number of individuals and prompts them to act towards a common goal. In a crowd, the conscious personality of the individual is submerged and dominated by the collective mind. Furthermore, every sentiment becomes contagious to a degree that individuals readily sacrifice their personal interest to the collective.

ISIS - the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria - has taken on the mantle of being the single most dangerous terrorist threat to global security since al-Qaeda. In Defeating ISIS, internationally renowned intelligence veteran, author, and counterterrorism expert Malcolm Nance gives an insider's view to explain the origins of this occult group, its violent propaganda, and how it spreads its ideology throughout the Middle East and to disaffected youth deep in the heart of the Western world.