Social Science Power

A gripping portrait of modern Tibet told through the lives of its people, from the best-selling author of Nothing to Envy.

In Invisible Strings, poet, professor, and dedicated Swiftie Kristie Frederick Daugherty has brought together 113 contemporary poets, each contributing an original poem that responds to a specific Taylor Swift song.

In this perceptive and often hilarious essay, Lech Blaine dissects some top blokes, with particular focus on Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese, but stretching back to Bob Hawke and Kerry Packer. This is a riveting narrative of how image conquered politics, just as globalisation engulfed the Australian economy. While many got rich and entertained, look where we ended up.

In 2015, Bloomberg News named Steve Bannon "the most dangerous political operative in America." Since then, he has grown exponentially more powerful - and not only in the United States. In this groundbreaking and urgent account, award-winning scholar of the radical right Benjamin Teitelbaum takes listeners behind the scenes of Bannon's global campaign against modernity.

More than just a slogan on a t-shirt, feminism is a radical tool for fighting back against structural violence and injustice. Feminism, Interrupted is a bold call to seize feminism back from the cultural gatekeepers and return it to its radical roots. Lola Olufemi explores state violence against women, the fight for reproductive justice, transmisogyny, gendered Islamophobia, and solidarity with global struggles, showing that the fight for gendered liberation can change the world for everybody when we refuse to think of it solely as women's work.

Forty years ago, following the appointment of their professors to the federal bench, a tiny group of conservative law students at Yale Law School worried that their ideas might disappear from intellectual discourse in this bastion of liberal thought. They set out to fill that void. But they ended up achieving way more than that. Over the next few decades, the Federalist Society became an integral tool in the larger conservative movement, with political, judicial, and social repercussions ending in the conservative capture of the Supreme Court and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency.

Americans have been leaving their churches. Some drift away. Some stay home. And some have been searching for—and finding—more authentic ways to find and follow Jesus. This is the story of one such “radical outpost of Jesus followers” dedicated to service, the Sermon on the Mount, and working toward justice for all in this life, not just salvation for some in the next. Part of a little-known yet influential movement at the edge of American evangelicalism, Philadelphia’s Circle of Hope grew for forty years, planted four congregations, and then found itself in crisis.

Global demand for power is doubling every two decades, but electricity remains one of the most difficult forms of energy to supply and do so reliably. Today, some three billion people live in places where per-capita electricity use is less than what's used by an average American refrigerator. How we close the colossal gap between the electricity rich and the electricity poor will determine our success in addressing issues like women's rights, inequality, and climate change.

Brilliant, listenable, and raw. Maj. (ret.) Danny Sjursen, who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at West Point, delivers a true epic and the perfect companion to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

The revolutions sweeping the Middle East in 2011 were unlike any the world had ever seen. Brutal regimes that had been in power for many decades were suddenly swarmed by unstoppable mobs of freedom seekers. Now, one of the key figures behind the Egyptian uprising tells the riveting inside story of what happened and presents lessons for all of us on how to unleash the power of crowds. Wael Ghonim was a little-known 30-year-old Google executive in the fall of 2010 when he anonymously launched a Facebook page to protest the death of an Egyptian man at the hands of security forces....

Forty years ago in China, marriage was universal, compulsory, and a woman's only means to a livelihood. Enter the one-child policy, which despite its horrors, resulted in China's first generations of urban only-daughters - girls who were raised without brothers and pushed to study, achieve, and succeed as if they were sons. Fast forward to the present, where in an urbanized economic powerhouse, enough of these women have decided to postpone marriage - or not marry at all - to spawn a label: "leftovers". Unprecedentedly well-educated and goal-oriented, they struggle to find partners.

After more than a century of recurring conflict, the countries of the Asia-Pacific region have managed something remarkable: avoiding war among nations. Since 1979, Asia has endured threats, near-miss crises, and nuclear proliferation but no interstate war. How fragile is this “Asian peace,” and what is America’s role in it? Van Jackson argues that because Washington takes for granted that the United States is a force for good, successive presidencies have failed to see how their statecraft impedes more durable forms of security and inadvertently embrittles peace.

Barack Obama campaigned on a promise of change from George W. Bush's "global war on terror". Yet from indefinite detention and drone strikes to surveillance and military tribunals, Obama ended up continuing - and in some cases expanding - many policies he inherited. What happened? In Power Wars, Charlie Savage looks inside the Obama administration's national security legal and policy team in a way that no one has before.

Over the past two generations, U.S. leaders deregulated big business on the faith that it would yield a better economy and a freer society. But the opposite happened. Americans lost stable, well-paying jobs, Wall Street dominated industry to the detriment of the middle class and local communities, and corporations began to subject us to total surveillance, even dictating what we are, and aren’t, allowed to think. The corporate titans and mega-donors who aligned themselves with this vision knew exactly what they were getting: perfect conditions for what Sohrab Ahmari calls “private tyranny”.

Moisés Naím turns to the trends, conditions, and behaviors that are contributing to the concentration of power, and to the clash between those forces that weaken power and those that strengthen it. He concentrates on the three “P”s - populism, polarization, and post-truths. All of which are as old as time, but are combined by today’s autocrats to undermine democratic life in new and frightening ways. Power has not changed. But the way people go about gaining it and using it has been transformed.

In 2021, when the gavel fell at Christie’s on the sale of Mike Winkelmann’s Everydays series—a compilation of 5,000 digital artworks—it made a thunderous announcement: Non-fungible tokens had arrived. The ludicrous world of CryptoKitties and Bored Apes had just produced a piece of art worth $69.3 million (at least according to the highest bidder). On that day, the traditional art market—the largest unregulated market in the world—put its stamp of approval on a very new and carnivalesque digital reality. But what did it mean for these two worlds to collide?

Los Angeles in the '60s was a hotbed of political and social upheaval. The city was a launchpad for Black Power - where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation. The city was home to the Chicano Blowouts and Chicano Moratorium, as well as being the birthplace of “Asian American” as a political identity. It was a locus of the antiwar movement, gay liberation movement, and women’s movement, and, of course, the capital of California counterculture.

In her 2019 CBC Massey Lectures, award-winning author, journalist, and human rights activist Sally Armstrong illustrates how the status of the female half of humanity is crucial to our collective surviving and thriving. Drawing on anthropology, social science, literature, politics, and economics, she examines the many beginnings of the role of women in society and the evolutionary revisions over millennia in the realms of sex, religion, custom, culture, politics, and economics. What ultimately comes to light is that gender inequality comes at too high a cost to us all.

Some books emerge from a lifetime of hard-won knowledge. Robert D. Kaplan has learned, from a career spent reporting on wars, revolutions, and international politics in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, that the essence of geopolitics is tragedy. In The Tragic Mind, he employs the works of ancient Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, German philosophers, and the modern classics to explore the central subjects of international politics: order, disorder, rebellion, ambition, loyalty to family and state, violence, and the mistakes of power.

Radical Volunteers tells the largely unknown story of southern student activism in Tennessee between the Brown decision in 1954 and the national backlash against the Kent State University shootings in May 1970. As one of the first statewide studies of student activism—and one of the few examinations of southern student activism—it broadens scholarly understanding of New Left and Black student radicalism from its traditionally defined hotbeds in the Northeast and on the West Coast.