New Books in Public Policy

What is the role of the state in supporting transitions and deeper transformations towards a more sustainable world?  Brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group. The role of the state in supporting shifts towards a more sustainable society is receiving increasing academic and policy attention from interest in green (new) deals to planet politics through to more crit...

“A lot of things become possible when [the nation state] is not the only framework,” Melissa Byrnes reminds us in this deeply intimate local history of North African migrants in France. In this conversation about her new book, Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon (U Nebraska Press, 2024) we learn about how questions Byrnes had about how we...

The City and the Hospital (Chicago 2023) focuses on an urban paradox: American hospitals are imagined as sites of healing and care, and yet the people who live and work in nearby neighborhoods have some of the worst health outcomes in the nation. One part urban sociology and one part policy analysis, this book reports insights from a collaborative research team that investigated three sites (Hartf...

In The State (Princeton University Press, 2023), the prominent political philosopher Philip Pettit embarks on a massive undertaking, offering a major new account of the foundations of the state and the nature of justice. In doing so, Pettit builds a new theory of what the state is and what it ought to be, addresses the normative question of how justice serves as a measure of the success of a state...

Thomas Princen explores issues of social and ecological sustainability at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. He works on principles for sustainability, overconsumption, the language and ethics of resource use, and the transition out of fossil fuels. His latest book is Fire and Flood: Extreme Events and Social Change Past, Present, Future (MIT Press, 202...

Policing is a source of perennial conflict and philosophical disagreement. Current political developments in the United States have only increased the urgency of this topic. Today we welcome philosopher Jake Monaghan to discuss his book, Just Policing (Oxford UP, 2023), which applies interdisciplinary insights to examine the morality of policing. Though the injustices of our world seemingly requir...

The aging of America will reshape how we live and will transform nearly every aspect of contemporary society. Renowned life course sociologist Deborah Carr provides a lively, nuanced, and timely portrait of aging in the United States. The US population is older than ever before, raising new challenges for families, caregivers, health care systems, and social programs like Social Security and Medic...

What happens when America loses its foreign-policy playbook? RBI acting director Eli Karetny talks with veteran diplomat and policy strategist Joel Rubin about the vacuum of strategic vision shaping U.S. decisions from Venezuela to Ukraine to Gaza. Rubin pulls back the curtain on factional battles inside both parties, the dangers of politicizing diplomacy, and why rebuilding a bipartisan foreign-p...

In Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change, scholars and practitioners who have worked together in various capacities across different school systems examine systemic equity leadership in U.S. public schools over the course of nearly a decade and across a time of profound racial and historical change. This volume weaves together real-world insights, research-based strate...

In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even today progress and prosperity in the world's largest, most advanced economies--the United States and China--have fallen sho...

Americans have always fought over the meaning of freedom and equality. What is not commonly recognized is that the battles most pivotal in defining our democracy, from the framing of the Constitution to the decades-long backlash to the civil rights movement, hinged on one issue—taxes. In The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History (Basic Books, 2025), Vanessa S...

Today I’m speaking with Hélène Landemore, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, about Democracy and Bullshit, with a special focus on her 2020 book, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2020). Bullshit is a feature of both democracies and dictatorships alike, but it takes different forms. In democracies, while citizens enjo...

For well over one hundred years, people have been attempting to make American colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable. Indeed, Ethan Ris argues in Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform (U Chicago Press, 2022), the reform impulse is baked into American higher education, the result of generations of elite reformers who have called for sweeping...

Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize A groundbreaking look at how ordinary people are fighting back against their local and state governments to keep their communities safe, by an award-winning journalist Most Americans are likely to encounter the effects of government malfeasance or neglect close to home—from their governors, mayors, town councils, school boards, police, and prosecutors. In...

The United States has long been an international outlier, with a powerful business class, a weak social state, and an exceptional gun culture. In Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment (Princeton UP, 2025), David Garland shows how, after the 1960s, American-style capitalism disrupted poor communities and depleted social controls, giving rise to violence...

Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education and demands to desegregate public schools, race and class remain the most reliable predictors of educational achievement in America. In attempting to address this divide, many school reformers have championed school choice: solutions like charter schools, vouchers, and other innovations designed to build more options into the system. Today, at least...

As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divide. In Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Ali analyzes the promise and the failure of national rural broadband policy in the United States and...

In Rehab: An American Scandal (Simon and Schuster, 2025), Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter exposes the country’s failed response to the opioid crisis, and the malfeasance, corruption, and snake oil which blight the drug rehabilitation industry. Our country’s leaders all seem to agree: People who suffer from addiction need treatment. Today, more people have access to treatment than ever before....

Climate change is real, and extreme weather events are its physical manifestations. These extreme events affect how we live and work in cities, and subsequently the way we design, plan, and govern them. Taking action 'for the environment' is not only a moral imperative; instead, it is activated by our everyday experience in the city. Based on the author's site visits and interviews in Darwin (Aust...

David Beito's new book brings to bear the latest historical scholarship to shed light on the life and achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Professor Beito traces the irresistible political rise of Roosevelt, a scion of inherited wealth who never posed as a man of the people but was always perceived as a genial aristocrat. As well as eyebrow-raising disclosures on FDR's private life, Beito's...

In Infected: How Power, Politics, and Privilege Use Science Against the World’s Most Vulnerable (The New Press, 2025), Professor Muhammad H. Zaman reveals the troubling history of how science and public health have been manipulated to serve the interests of power. Moving from the U.S.–Mexico border to Pakistan, from the Tuskegee syphilis trials to COVID-19 vaccine disinformation campaigns, the boo...

In the fourth edition of Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present, drawing on important feminist concepts -- social reproduction, the gender division of labor, and patriarchy -- Mimi Abramovitz exposes the gendered and racialized myths and stereotypes built into welfare state programs. The book explains the contextual conditions that contributed to th...

For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries. The passage of the Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 expedited the entry of foreign medical graduates (FMGs) from postcolonial South Asia and sent them to provide ca...

Dr. Michael F. Maniates is a leading scholar in environmental politics and sustainability studies whose work has fundamentally reshaped how researchers and policymakers understand consumption, responsibility, and power in environmental change.  In this current book, The Living-Green Myth (Polity Press, 2025), he identifies recurring paradoxes in the sustainable-consumption agenda: the tendency to...

For many years, Diane Ravitch was among the country’s leading conservative thinkers on education. The cure for what ailed the school system was clear, she believed: high-stakes standardized testing, national standards, accountability, competition, charters, and vouchers. Then Ravitch saw what happened when these ideas were put into practice and recanted her long-held views. The problem was not bad...