New Books in Public Policy

Few social justice struggles have captivated recent political history like the broad Black Lives Matter movement. From the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore to campaign rally interruptions of leading politicians, we have seen people speak up in outrage about injustices of policing, racist violence, wealth inequality and much more. What does this cycle of struggle have to do with the history of cap...

How are humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect changing in the current international political scene? In Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (3rd ed., Polity Press, 2016), Thomas G. Weiss (The Graduate Center, CUNY) explores the past, present, and future of these phenomena. The book offers a synthesis of conceptual debates, case studies, and historical analysis in explo...

Jefferson Cowie is the James G. Stahlman professor of history at Vanderbilt University. His book The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2016) interprets the New Deal as a massive but unstable experiment from the main of American political culture. Against arguments that the New Deal was the product of the American penchant for reform, Cow...

Eben Kirksey new book asks and explores a series of timely, important, and fascinating questions: How do certain plants, animals, and fungi move among worlds, navigate shifting circumstances, and find emergent opportunities? When do new species add value to ecological associations, and when do they become irredeemably destructive? When should we let unruly forms of life run wild, and when should w...

Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman are the authors of Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2016). Potter is a former health insurance executive, is the author of Deadly Spin, and is a regular contributor for the Huffington Post and HealthInsurance.org. Penniman is the executive director of Issue One. In Nation on the Take, Potter and Penniman catalogue the enormous a...

All of us are familiar with multiple-choice tests. They may be the one thing that you can find in kindergarten classrooms, college courses, and workplace training programs. But why are they so common? Multiple-choice tests may be the simplest and easiest way to see if someone knows something — or at least that someone probably knows something. No one would contend that this form of assessment move...

March Madness is big business. Each year the NCAA collects $700 million for television rights to the men’s college basketball tournament, under the terms of a 14-year, $10.8 billion contract with CBS and Turner Broadcasting. The two networks, in turn, bring in just over a billion dollars each year in advertising revenue. And it’s estimated that over nine billion dollars changes hands in bets every...

Teenagers live in their phones. As an educator you can try to pull them away or meet them where they are. The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) urges educators to meet teens on their must-have device. Author Benjamin Castleman of the University of Virginia shows how text messaging combined with in...

Everyone hates being underestimated. We want to feel included without others showing us condescension. At the same time, no one wants to be overestimated. We want to feel challenged without others overwhelming us. We recognize that children can be frustrated or disengaged, but we often fail to see that their feelings and behaviors are caused by the same things that stir up these feelings in adults...

When adults today look back on their time as children, many of their memories may come from moments when they were engaged in free play with kids in their neighborhood — exploring creeks, riding bikes, and playing pick-up sports. Moments like these, occurring outside of adult-imposed structures, put children in a position to make decisions, take risks, and navigate social relationships. Now parent...

How is the medical profession regulated in a ‘risk society’. This is the core question of John M. Chamberlain‘s Medical Regulation, Fitness to Practice and Revalidation: A Critical Introduction (Policy Press, 2015). Chamberlain, an associate professor of medical criminology at the University of Southampton, explores both the history of the medical profession as well as recent attempts to regulate...

Nadim Bakhshov joins the New Books in Network to discuss his book Against Capitalist Education: What is Education for? (Zero Books, 2015). The book posits new alternatives to educational thought and philosophy through an innovated, yet classic, style of dialogue between two characters, John and George, whom both channel philosophers, intellectuals, and great thinkers in history. You can connect to...

El Sistema, the massive Venezuelan youth orchestra program, has been hailed in some quarters as the next big idea in music education (if not as the savior of classical music itself). Any who have found the press coverage of El Sistema suspiciously rosy, however, will find quite another account in Geoffrey Baker‘s engrossing and at times sharply critical book, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s ...

Adam Seth Levine has written American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction (Princeton University Press, 2015). Levine teaches in the Department of Government at Cornell University. If we have learned anything about American politics over the last several months, it is that there are a lot of people who are angry about the present and fearful about the future. American Inse...

The experience of the African American middle class has been an important area of research in the USA. However, the British experience has, by comparison, not been subject to the same amount of attention, particularly with regard to the middle class experience of education. Dr. Nicola Rollock, Deputy Director, Centre for Research in Race & Education and Senior Lecturer at the University of Birming...

There is no shortage of talk about our public schools being broken. Some critics say we need to embrace a reform agenda that includes more standardized testing and a longer school day for students and performance pay and an end to tenure for teachers. Others respond that the effects of these measures are overstated or counterproductive and that the most sensible place to start is to dramatically i...

Jessica Martucci‘s fascinating new book traces the emergence, rise, and continued practice of breastfeeding in America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America (University of Chicago Press, 2015) looks at the lives and work of scientists, nurses, medical researchers, lay groups, doctors, and mothers to understand the shifting...

How are we to think and live with climate change? In Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014), Dale Jamieson (Environmental Studies and Philosophy, NYU) grapples with these questions. The book is a pragmatic philosophical exploration of climate change and the human response to it at the same time that i...

William C. Smith (ed.), senior associate with RESULTS Educational Fund, joins New Books in Education to discuss The Global Testing Culture: Shaping Education Policy, Perceptions, and Practice (Symposium Books, 2016). This edited volume provides an analysis of the global testing culture that has permeated societies throughout the world. With a diverse range of academic contributors, perspectives of...

Christopher Faricy has written Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Faricy is an assistant professor of political science and public policy at The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Conventional wisdom says that Democrats fight to expand spending on social policy, while Repub...

It seems obvious that children need to be loved, that having a loving home and upbringing is essential to a child’s emotional and cognitive development. It is also obvious that, under typical circumstances at least, for every child there are adults who should love them. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that many national and international charters and declarations specifically ascribe to childr...

Have you seen those Facebook memes floating around, arguing that we shouldn’t support a 15-dollar -per-hour minimum wage for service sector workers because the military doesn’t earn a living wage? Jennifer Mittelstadt tells us how these stark lines were drawn between the military and the civilian economy – and on how military welfare affects us all. Jennifer Mittelstadt is Associate Professor of H...

Robert Stoker is the co-author (with Clarence Stone, John Betancur, Susan Clarke, Marilyn Dantico, Martin Horak, Karen Mossberger, Juliet Musso, Jeffrey Sellers, Ellen Shiau, Harold Wolman, and Donn Worgs) of Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Stoker is professor of public policy political science at George Wash...

Whatever its current prestige in our society, teaching is undoubtedly complex work. Like physicians and therapists, teachers work with people, rather than things. They try to help their students to improve over time, and while they have influence, they do not have complete control. Unlike these other human-centered professions, we often see teachers as being directly responsible for the success or...

Historic Preservation in a Nutshell (West Academic Publishing, 2014), co-authored by Sara Bronin and Ryan Rowberry provides the first-ever in-depth summary of historic preservation law within its local, state, tribal, federal, and international contexts. Historic Preservation is a burgeoning area of law that includes aspects of property, land use, environmental, constitutional, cultural resources,...