Mass Politics

Every medical decision - whether to have chemotherapy, an X-ray, or surgery - is a risk, no matter which way you choose. In You Bet Your Life, physician Paul A. Offit argues that, from the first blood transfusions 400 years ago to the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine, risk has been essential to the discovery of new treatments. More importantly, understanding the risks is crucial to whether, as a society or as individuals, we accept them.

In this signal work of history, Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lizabeth Cohen shows how the pursuit of prosperity after World War II fueled our pervasive consumer mentality and transformed American life. Trumpeted as a means to promote the general welfare, mass consumption quickly outgrew its economic objectives and became synonymous with patriotism, social equality, and the American Dream.

Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr. was only fourteen when he first became entangled with serial rapist and murderer Dean Corll in 1971. Fellow Houston, Texas, teenager David Brooks had already been ensnared by the charming older man, bribed with cash to help lure boys to Corll's home. Corll baited Henley with the same deal he'd given Brooks: $200 for each boy they could bring him.

In 1994, Rwanda was the scene of the first acts since World War II to be legally defined as genocide. Two years later, Clea Koff, a twenty-three-year-old forensic anthropologist, left the safe confines of a lab in Berkeley, California, to serve as one of sixteen scientists chosen by the United Nations to unearth the physical evidence of the Rwandan genocide. Over the next four years, Koff’s grueling investigations took her across geography synonymous with some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century.

In this six-part series, journalist and host Goldie Taylor will take us on a journey to uncover key misunderstandings that Americans have about our relationship with guns. Goldie will also unpack her own complicated relationship with gun ownership. There are no easy answers. But if we are to find solutions, we’ve got to face facts, then start asking ourselves tough questions. This series aims to be that starting point.

In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe. Westermann draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated "performative masculinity," expressly linked to physical or sexual violence.

Electronic monitoring. Locked-down drug treatment centers. House arrest. Mandated psychiatric treatment. Data-driven surveillance. Extended probation. These are some of the key alternatives held up as cost-effective substitutes for jails and prisons. But many of these so-called reforms actually widen the net, weaving in new strands of punishment and control, and bringing new populations, who would not otherwise have been subject to imprisonment, under physical control by the state.

La storia di come le reti di informazione hanno fatto e disfatto il nostro mondo, dall’autore del bestseller mondiale Sapiens. Negli ultimi centomila anni, noi Sapiens abbiamo accumulato un enorme potere. Eppure, nonostante tutte le nostre scoperte, invenzioni e conquiste, oggi ci troviamo in una crisi esistenziale. Il mondo è sull’orlo del collasso ecologico. La disinformazione dilaga. E ci stiamo buttando a capofitto nell’era dell’intelligenza artificiale, una nuova rete di informazioni che minaccia di annientarci. Perché siamo così autodistruttivi?

The Violence Project is about an examination of the phenomenon of mass shootings in America and an urgent call to implement evidence-based strategies to stop these tragedies. Using first-person accounts from the perpetrators themselves, along with data from the writers’ groundbreaking research on mass shooters, The Violence Project charts new pathways to prevention and innovative ways to stop the social contagion of violence.

In his new audiobook, Stop Mass Hysteria, number one New York Times best-selling author Michael Savage calls out the mass hysteria mongers and their methods and shows Americans that we must look to history to understand the present and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

On the evening of July 7, 2016, protesters gathered in cities across the nation after police shot two black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. As officers patrolled a march in Dallas, a young man stepped out of an SUV wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a high-powered rifle. He killed five officers and wounded 11 others. Thompson’s minute-by-minute account includes intimate portrayals of the negotiator, a surgeon who operated on the fallen officers, a mother of four shot down in the street, and the SWAT officers tasked with stopping the gunman.

Alec Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings - an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color. Usual Cruelty is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively, wildly successfully, challenging it.

Transportation planners, engineers, and policymakers in the United States face the monumental task of righting the wrongs of their predecessors while charting the course for the next generation. This task requires empathy while pushing against forces in the industry that are resistant to change. How do you change a system that was never designed to be equitable? How do you change a system that continues to divide communities? In Inclusive Transportation, expert Veronica O. Davis shines a light on the inequitable and often destructive practice of transportation planning and engineering.

Sprawling and illuminating, Dan Gretton’s I You We Them is an unprecedented study of perpetrators of crimes against humanity: the “desk killers” who ordered and directed some of the worst atrocities of the last century. From Albert Speer’s Nazi complicity to Royal Dutch Shell’s role in the murder of the Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, Gretton probes the depths of the figure “who, by giving orders, uses paper or a phone or a computer to kill, instead of a gun.”

Ever wonder why glum rock à la Nirvana became popular in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, or why gastropubs that serve organic kumquat have replaced all-American chain restaurants like Applebee’s as the trendiest dining establishments? Can the tennis rivalry between John McEnroe and Björn Borg shed light on the type of sadness inherent to success? And what’s the connection between the music of the bands Weezer and the Presidents of the United States of America?

In this short, searing book, Auster traces centuries of America’s use and abuse of guns, through the colonial prehistory of the Republic, armed conflict against the native population, the forced enslavement of millions, and the mass shootings that dominate the current news cycle. He examines the embattled gun-control and anti-gun-control camps, frames gun violence as a public health issue, and investigates the details of one horrific incident including the perpetrator’s unchecked purchase of the gun he used and the suffering of a bystander-turned-hero.

In this classic of political and social psychology, Joost Meerloo attempts to account for the mechanisms of mind that have made the brainwashing techniques of totalitarian states so historically successful. His frightening conclusion, that "hardly anyone can resist," appeals to mechanisms undergirding human thought, many of which are not obviously available to individuals.

Plan of Attack is the definitive account of how and why President George W. Bush, his war council, and allies launched a preemptive attack to topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq. Bob Woodward's latest landmark account of Washington decision making provides an original, authoritative narrative of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, examining the causes and consequences of the most controversial war since Vietnam.

The United States incarcerates more of its residents than any other nation. Though home to five percent of the global population, the United States has nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners - a total of over two million people. This number continues to steadily rise. Over the past 40 years, the number of people behind bars in the United States has increased by 500 percent.

In the era of mass incarceration, over 600,000 people are released from federal or state prison each year, with many returning to chaotic living environments. In these circumstances, how do former prisoners navigate reentering society? In Homeward, sociologist Bruce Western examines the tumultuous first year after release from prison. Drawing from in-depth interviews with over 100 individuals, he describes the lives of the formerly incarcerated and demonstrates how poverty, racial inequality, and failures of social support trap many in a cycle of vulnerability.