Showing results by narrator "Adam Barr" in All Categories

Visions of Inequality takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today.

The idea and practice of civility has always been wielded to silence dissent, repress political participation, and justify violence upon people of color. Although many progressives today are told that we need to be more polite and thoughtful, less rancorous and angry when we talk about race in America, civility maintains rather than disrupts racial injustice.

Paul is a recently demoted adjunct instructor of freshman comp, a divorced but doting Brooklyn father, and a self-desc­ribed “curmudgeonly crank” cataloging his resentment of the priorities of modern life in a book called The Luddite Manifesto. Outraged by the authoritarian creeps ruining the country, he is determined to better the future for his young daughter, one aggrieved lecture at a time.

In 1913, a Russian ballet incited a riot in Paris at the new Theâtre de Champs-Elysees. A century later, in November 2013, thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered at Independence Square in Kyiv to protest then-President Yanukovych's failure to sign a referendum with the European Union, opting instead to forge a closer alliance with President Vladimir Putin and Russia. The peaceful protests turned violent when military police shot live ammunition into the crowd, killing over a hundred civilians.

Inspired by the abundance of unique personalities available on dating websites, a renowned neuroscientist examines the science of what makes you, you.

The vivid, behind-the-scenes story of perhaps the most consequential political moment in American history—Abraham Lincoln’s history-changing nomination to lead the Republican Party in the 1860 presidential election.

Nuclear power once promised to be the solution to the world's energy crisis, but that all changed in the late twentieth century after multiple high-profile accidents and meltdowns. Power plant workers, finding themselves the subject of public opposition, became leery of reporters. But one plant in Zion, Illinois, allowed unrestricted access to one journalist: the Chicago Tribune's Casey Bukro. Bukro spent two years inside the Zion nuclear plant, interviewing employees, witnessing high-risk maintenance procedures, and watching the radiation exposure counter on his own dosimeter tick up and up.

When FBI agent Jack Shannon arrives in Corpus Christi, Texas, he is focused on one thing: finding the man who has been selling encrypted government secrets to the Chinese through online birding chat rooms. But when a senator is shot during a hunting trip and the woman he was with is abducted, Jack agrees to join the search - especially when he discovers that the kidnapping victim is Aubrey Grayson, a woman he was once in love with. As the search continues, it becomes clear the senator may not have been the intended victim....

The Monastery of the Holy Face, nicknamed "Hard Cider Abbey" for the brew its monks produce from their own orchard, sits on an Appalachian mountaintop in West Virginia, just outside the old mining town of Skerritville. Brother Odo, just 20 years old and mute from childhood trauma, transfers into the abbey from a dissolved monastery in Quebec, and almost immediately comes upon the body of the abbey librarian, Father Lucian.

Marshall Karp, coauthor of the number-one best-selling NYPD Red series, sets his latest thriller in LA, where someone is recruiting terminally ill patients to commit one final act before they die: murder. Laced with twists, turns, and Karp's trademark biting cop humor, you may find yourself rooting for the killers-law-abiding citizens who have abandoned their values to earn a half million dollars for the loved ones they will leave behind.

Most ambitious people struggle in at least one of these areas, yet they feel they don’t have the tools to improve their situation. Return on Ambition is the culmination of an ambitious effort to harness insights from recent research in psychology and neuroscience to help people pursue their ambitions more fruitfully. The result is a radical and holistic approach to achievement, growth, and well-being.

Democracy is in trouble. Populism is a common scapegoat, but not the root cause. More basic are social and economic transformations eroding the foundations of democracy, ruling elites trying to lock in their own privilege, and cultural perversions like making individualistic freedom the enemy of democracy's other crucial ideals of equality and solidarity. In Degenerations of Democracy, three of our most prominent intellectuals investigate democracy gone awry, locate our points of fracture, and suggest paths to democratic renewal.

Daphne survived a megaquake, escaped flood waters rushing through the city, and walked away from a horrific bus crash. With confirmation her family is alive and searching for her at a refugee facility, she's determined to reach them. But the facility isn't all it's cracked up to be, and Daphne will face her greatest obstacles yet in the fight to find her family.

Set primarily amid the racial turmoil following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968 The Last Ride traces the circumstances leading up to the killing of Haynie Gourley—the popular, self-made millionaire Chevrolet dealer—the extensive manhunt and police investigation, and the improbable grand jury indictment of a popular former college football star.

Decades ago, six children from across the United States disappeared on the same afternoon. Now the only one who can stop it from happening again is the boy who managed to escape. Eric Partin doesn’t understand what happened 30 years ago. All he knows is that he was taken by strangers and locked in a small room for weeks before he escaped his captors.

In 1865, the Confederacy was comprehensively defeated, its economy shattered, its leaders in exile or in jail. Yet in the years that followed, Lincoln's vision of a genuinely united country never took root. Apart from a few brief months, when the presence of the Union army in the South proved liberating for newly freed Black Americans, the military victory was squandered. Old white supremacist efforts returned, more ferocious than before. In Civil War by Other Means, Jeremi Suri shows how resistance to a more equal Union began immediately.

Like sharks to blood in the water, the mob arrived in Hollywood greedy and ready to tear away huge chunks of cash. Opportunistic mobsters saw labor unions as the means for muscling into the movie industry and extorting millions of dollars from studio bosses. Control the unions to which projectionists, art directors, cinematographers, electricians, scene designers, stagehands, extras belong, and you control the whole industry.

The United States spends enormous sums on helping people—$3.8 trillion on healthcare, $182 billion on prisons, and $604 billion on higher education—and yet these systems routinely fail us. When we seek to improve how they function, our efforts focus on policy debates, technical solutions, funding, and data. But if these systems are to truly improve, we have to start with the human values behind them. Broken explores the deeply human dimensions we must consider if we want to rebuild the policies, technologies, processes, and most importantly, the heart we use to serve people.

Eddie Sabella is the city columnist at a New York tabloid, a 37-year-old hotshot who is a ferocious reporter and competitor and hard to beat on a story. And now he’s stumbled upon the biggest story of his career: a statue that’s been stolen. And it’s not just any statue: It’s one that seemingly wept real tears only the day before, an event that made headlines.

When Dwight Eisenhower graduated from West Point in 1915, few would have predicted he was destined for greatness. Yet the young officer made the most of the opportunities he was given, made a lasting impression on superiors, and eventually gained a reputation as an excellent staff officer.