New Books in Public Policy

Ben Westhoff is an award-winning investigative journalist whose best-selling 2019 book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Press, 2019), was one of the first to take fentanyl seriously as both a social phenomenon and a national threat. Since its release, Westhoff has become a policy expert, advising top government officials on the fentan...

In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of the symptoms and results of that inequality. Racial, social, and class inequities and the public health crises in the United States are deeply intertwined, their roots and manifestations continually pressuring each other. This has been both illuminat...

Systemic sexual violence by the Myanmar army and proxies began to be widely reported in the 2010s, in the course of genocidal violence against Rohingya in the country’s west. At the same time, the Myanmar government, which was then a military-civilian hybrid, negotiated with international organisations to set up a mechanism to monitor and deal with the violence. In this episode of New Books in Sou...

For centuries, monuments have telegraphed the values and origin myths of dominant culture in public space and on massive scale. They have signaled both who is part of a culture and who is not, often overlooking histories that complicate the stories they tell. Yet in the last 50 years in the United States, the role of monuments has changed significantly. Numerous historical monuments have been remo...

For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious change. What happened to bold political vision on the left, and what shrunk the very horizons of possibility? In Thinking like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman tells the story of how a distinctive way of thinking—an “economic style of reasoning”—becam...

How has the digital revolution transformed criminal opportunities and behaviour? What is different about cybercrime compared with traditional criminal activity? What impact might cybercrime have on public security? In this updated edition of his authoritative and field-defining text, cybercrime expert David Wall carefully examines these and other important issues. Incorporating analysis of the lat...

EPISODE SUMMARY: What becomes visible when you shift the lens away from Beijing to how China’s Belt and Road projects unfold on the ground? Seeing China’s Belt and Road, edited by Edward Schatz and Rachel Silvey, answers this question by reorienting conversations on China’s global infrastructure development to their “downstream” effects. Instead of analyzing the BRI through grand geopolitical narr...

An engaging history of motherhood, demography, and infertility in twentieth-century France, Fertile expectations: The politics of involuntary childlessness in twentieth-century France (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Margaret Andersen explores fraught political and cultural meanings attached to the notion of an "ideal" family size. When statistics revealed a sustained drop in France's bi...

This book provides insight into the impact of climate change on human mobility - including both migration and displacement - by synthesizing key concepts, research, methodology, policy, and emerging issues surrounding the topic. It illuminates the connections between climate change and its implications for voluntary migration, involuntary displacement, and immobility by providing examples from aro...

As the crisis of democratic capitalism sweeps the globe, The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't (Oxford University Press, 2025) makes the controversial argument that what democracies require most are stronger political parties that serve as intermediaries between citizens and governments. Once a centralizing force of the democratic process, political parties have...

Bruce Harvey is a historian and photographer based in Syracuse, NY, who works at the intersection of memory, place, and public history. As an independent consultant, he helps both public and private clients document historic sites--shaping how we remember, preserve, and sometimes say goodbye to the built environment. In this episode, Bruce reflects on what drew him to historical consulting, the ar...

Examining the conditions that not only blocked attempts to make America great again, but actively made the country worse, Why America Didn't Become Great Again (Routledge, 2025) identifies those organizations, institutions, politicians and prominent characters in the forefront of the economic and social policies - ultimately asking who is responsible. While the period from the late 1970s to 2020s...

The United States and the Origins of World War II in Europe (Taylor & Francis, 2025), spans 1914–1939 to provide a concise interpretation of the role the United States played in the origins of the Second World War. It synthesizes recent scholarship about interwar international politics while also presenting an original interpretation of the sources of American policy. The book shows how the drive...

Inflation is back, and its impact can be felt everywhere, from the grocery store to the mortgage market to the results of elections around the world. What's more, tariffs and trade wars threaten to accelerate inflation again. Yet the conventional wisdom about inflation is stuck in the past. Since the 1970s, there has only really been one playbook for fighting inflation: raise interest rates, there...

Michael Grunwald is a well renown journalist, who over the last thirty years has focused on public policy and national politics, with the last fifteen years having him zeroing in or climate-related issues. His current book, which he wrote this after six years of research. It was a passionate journey to understand, not to advocate for any position. Because of his reporting for such publications as...

A class of child artists in Mexico, a ship full of child refugees from Spain, classrooms of child pageant actors, and a pair of boy ambassadors revealed facets of hemispheric politics in the Good Neighbor era. Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (Brill, 2024) by Dr. Elena Jackson Albarran explores how and why culture-makers in the Americas tuned into to children as...

In his new book, The Community College Reform Movement: Contentions and Ideological Origins (Routledge, 2025), political scientist Milton Clarke critically examines the rise of the higher education reform movement, often referred to as the “completion agenda,” which, since the early 2000s, has sought to restructure core aspects of the community college experience. Drawing on community colleges fro...

How do feminist movements develop and organise in ethno-nationally divided societies? How does this challenge our understandings of contemporary fourth wave feminism? Women's Troubles: Gender and Feminist Politics in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Claire Pierson sets out to answer these questions using rich empirical data and analysis in an examination o...

Disorder and Diagnosis: Health and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Arabia (Stanford UP, 2024) offers a social and political history of medicine, disease, and public health in the Persian Gulf from the late nineteenth century until the 1973 oil boom. Foregrounding the everyday practices of Gulf residents--hospital patients, quarantined passengers, women migrant nurses, and others too often...

The 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked mass protests that challenged many institutions, including large for-profit companies, to reflect on how to address racial inequality. Large corporations began making systematic public statements to show alignment with causes that impact people of color. These statements were also used to protect corporate reputations against claims that their businesses may...

How housing policy failed the people it was designed to help -- and how to fix it As the US struggles to provide affordable housing, millions of Americans live in deteriorating public housing projects, enduring the mistakes of past housing policy. In The Projects: A New History of Public Housing (NYU Press, 2025), Howard A. Husock explains how we got here, detailing the tragic rise and fall of pub...

A vital examination of how social and economic justice organizations overcome resource disadvantages and build political power. Why do some coalitions triumph while others fall short? In Power to the Partners: Organizational Coalitions in Social Justice Advocacy, Maraam A. Dwidar documents the vital role of social and economic justice organizations in American politics and explores the process by...

In Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons (Beacon Press, 2025), urban planner and oral historian Jonathan Tarleton introduces readers to 2 social housing co-ops in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Longtime residents of St. James Towers and Southbridge Towers lock horns over whether to maintain the rules that have kept their homes affordable for decades or to cash out at g...

Biological justification for all forms of inequality has a long history, with the claim that particular groups suffer disproportionately from inherited flaws of ability and character used to explain a remarkably wide variety of inequalities. Providing an important critique of that biodeterminist history and how the Human Genome Project has inspired some contemporary scientists and economists to fo...

The Loyalty Trap: Conflicting Loyalties of Civil Servants Under Increasing Autocracy (Columbia University Press, 2025) explores how civil servants navigated competing pressures and duties amid the chaos of the first Trump administration, drawing on in-depth interviews with senior officials in the most contested agencies over the course of a tumultuous term. A revealing investigation that is now mo...