New Books in Public Policy

In Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America (UNC Press, 2022), Psyche A. Williams-Forson offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to e...

In 1997, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a small leak of radioactive water near their research reactor. Brookhaven was--and is--a world-class, Nobel Prize-winning lab, and its reactor was the cornerstone of US materials science and one of the world's finest research facilities. The leak, harmless to health, came from a storage pool rather than the reactor. But its discovery trig...

In Disability in Contemporary China: Citizenship, Identity and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2022), Sarah Dauncey offers the first comprehensive exploration of disability and citizenship in Chinese society and culture from 1949 to the present. Through the analysis of a wide variety of Chinese sources, from film and documentary to literature and life writing, media and state documents, she sheds important...

Seattle has a reputation as a city of Progressive values, but as Megan Asaka argues in Seattle From the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City (U Washington Press, 2022), that image had to be built on bulldozed neighborhoods of migrant workers. Asaka argues it was these individuals, from Japan, Europe, and Indigenous to the Puget Sound, who worked in the extractive ind...

The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. Mass Incarceration Nation offers a novel, in-the-trenches perspective to explain the factors - historical, political, and institutional - that led to the current system of mass imprisonment. Jeffrey Bellin's book Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How it C...

A few big companies are selling information about us to governments and companies. But beyond a general sense of unease, what do we need to know about this and what do we need to do about it? Professor Sarah Lamdan gives answers to those questions in her book Data Cartels: The Companies that Control and Monopolise our Information (Stanford UP, 2022). Listen to her conversations with Owen Bennett J...

Is Marx relevant today, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe? Is Marx’s political theory compatible with individual rights? You will be surprised to learn that the answers are yes and yes. Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality and Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) offers a theoretical reconstruction of Karl Marx’s new materialist understanding of justi...

During the early twentieth century New York State, with its settlement houses, muckraking journalists, labor unions and national political leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, was central to the political ferment of the Progressive Era. And in that time, the New York State Court of Appeals—the state’ highest court--made vitally important decisions on the constitutional legitimacy of laws relating to p...

Adam Crowley's book Representations of Poverty in Videogames (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) argues that digital games address contemporary, middle-class anxieties about poverty in the United States. The early chapters consider gaming as a modern form of slumming and explore the ways in which titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and World of Warcraft thematize poverty. The argument turns to the fiel...

Richard Petts' Father Involvement and Gender Equality in the United States: Contemporary Norms and Barriers (Routledge, 2022) focuses on issues of family, work, and gender, with a focus on gender inequality. Women are disadvantaged in both paid and domestic work, due in large part to being primarily responsible for duties within the domestic sphere. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these ineq...

While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Meyers met a woman named Beverly. In All That Was Not Her (Duke UP, 2022) Meyers presents an intimate ethnographic portrait of Beverly, stitching together small moments they shared scattered over months and years and, following her death, into the prese...

Societies are often judged by how they treat their most vulnerable members: the poor and near poor. In the United States, this responsibility belongs not only to governments, but also to charities, businesses, individuals, and family members. Their combined efforts generate a social safety net.  In Who Cares: The Social Safety Net in America (Oxford UP, 2022), Christopher Howard offers the first c...

The census isn't just a data-collection process; it's a ritual, and a tool, of American democracy. Behind every neat grid of numbers is a collage of messy, human stories--you just have to know how to read them. In Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them (MCD, 2022), the data historian Dan Bouk examines the 1940 U.S. census, uncovering what those numbers both co...

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 officially ended the explicit prejudice in American immigration policy that began with the 1790 restriction on naturalization to free White persons of “good character.” By the 1980s, the rest of the Anglo-European world had followed suit, purging discriminatory language from their immigration laws and achieving what many believe to be a colorblind intern...

In Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity (Routledge, 2021), June Carolyn Erlick explores the relationship between natural disasters and civil society, immigration and diaspora communities and the long-term impact on emotional health. Natural disasters shape history and society and, in turn, their long-range impact is determined by history and society. This is e...

Canadians are proud of their multicultural image both at home and abroad. But that image isn t grounded in historical facts. As recently as the 1960s, the Canadian government enforced discriminatory, anti-Black immigration policies, designed to restrict and prohibit the entry of Black Barbadians and Black West Indians. The Canadian state capitalized on the public s fear of the Black unknown and ra...

How the FDA was shaped by public health crises and patient advocacy, told against a background of the contentious hearings on the breast cancer drug Avastin. Food and Drug Administration approval for COVID-19 vaccines and the controversial Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm made headlines, but few of us know much about how the agency does its work. Why is the FDA the ultimate US authority on a drug's safety...

Today I talked to Richard Reeves about his important new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (Brookings Institution, 2022). The statistics are stunning. Men have a 9% lower graduation rate from college. One in three men without a completed high school education are now out of the workforce. About 40% of births take place outside of marri...

It is easy to condemn obvious wrongdoers such as Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, Harvey Weinstein, and the Sackler family. But we rarely think about the many people who supported their unethical or criminal behavior. In each case there was a supporting cast of complicitors: business partners, employees, investors, news organizations, and others. And, whether we're aware of it or not, almost all of...

This agenda-setting book presents a framework for creating a more just and equitable care-centered world. Climate change, pandemic events, systemic racism, and deep inequalities have all underscored the centrality of care in our lives. Yet care work is, for the most part, undervalued and exploited. In Care-Centered Politics: From the Home to the Planet (MIT Press, 2022), Robert Gottlieb examines h...

The Resistance, Persistence and Resilience of Black Families Raising Children with Autism (Peter Lang, 2020) presents nuanced perspectives in the form of counternarratives of what Black families who have children with autism experience at the intersection of race, class, disability and gender. It intentionally centers the expertise of Black parents, challenging what is considered knowledge, whose...

How can you hide and spend billions of dollars? Many people hoping to do that go to London which is today considered the money laundering capital of the world. It’s the place where the world’s most corrupt individuals can park their money safely. How does that work? Where else does it happen and can anything be done about it? Owen Bennett Jones discusses the business of cleaning up dirty money wit...

Paris Marx is one of the sharpest modern writers on Silicon Valley and transit. We have been talking a lot lately about the idea of techno-utopian thinking, but we’re coming to a somewhat surprising conclusion: there isn’t as much of it as there used to be. Our Silicon Valley tech bros have quite a curtailed vision. If they do have a utopia, it is a utopia of sustaining the unsustainable, of pavin...

The world's population has just passed the 8 billion mark and an increasing proportion of those people are old, including increasingly the so-called "old old" in their 90s and beyond. Indeed, never before have so many older people inhabited the planet. Are we prepared for them? Given the inevitable medical and health challenges that accompany old age, are we ready to take care of all those people?...

Why don't trains run on time? Why are fares so expensive? Why are there so many strikes? Few would disagree that Britain's railways are broken, and have been for a long time. In Derailed: How to Fix Britain's Broken Railways (Manchester University Press, 2022), Dr. Tom Haines-Doran provides an insightful new book that calls for a radical rethink of how we view the railways, and explains the proble...