Mass Politics

There are doers and there are preachers. The people who were executing orders or abusing people in World War Two wouldn’t have been able to commit any atrocities if the country hadn’t warmed up to an inhumane narrative. That’s where propaganda came in. Propaganda has long been part of various countries and societies to make the population believe something, and to find culprits, create feelings of animosity, and glorify local leaders or military campaigns.

The Cambodian genocide was the methodical abuse and death of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, who pushed Cambodia toward being an entirely self-dependent agrarian socialist state. Between 1975 and 1979, 1.5 to two million people were murdered, representing about a quarter of Cambodia's population in 1975. Through a high number of propaganda resources and sheer force, the coup forced millions of people from the cities to farmlands, leaving them there to die.

The United States has the world’s highest rate of incarceration, a form of punishment that ruins lives and makes a return to prison more likely. With the authority of a prominent legal scholar and the practical insights gained through on-the-ground work on criminal-justice reform, Rachel Barkow explains how dangerous it is to base criminal-justice policy on the whims of the electorate, which puts judges, sheriffs, and politicians in office.

“Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” —New Yorker The famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” (Wall Street Journal) by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman. A...

From San Francisco to Shanghai, many of the world's most innovative places are highly unequal, with the benefits going to a small few. Rather than simply asking how we can create more high-tech cities and nations, Innovation for the Masses focuses on places that manage to foster innovation while also delivering the benefits more widely and equally. In this book, economist Neil Lee draws on case studies of Taiwan, Sweden, Austria, and Switzerland to set out how innovation can be successfully balanced toward equity.

In this book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps draws on a lifetime of thinking to make a sweeping new argument about what makes nations prosper--and why the sources of that prosperity are under threat today. Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s, creating not just unprecedented material wealth but "flourishing"--meaningful work, self-expression, and personal growth for more people than ever before?

While state and federal prisons like Attica and Alcatraz occupy a central place in the national consciousness, most incarceration in the US occurs within the walls of local jails. In This Is My Jail, Melanie D. Newport situates the late twentieth-century escalation of mass incarceration in a longer history of racialized, politically repressive jailing. Centering the political actions of people until now overlooked, Newport shows how local, grassroots contestation shaped the rise of the carceral state.

This gang of serial killers did unthinkable crimes. It's hard to believe that their story is not a work of fiction. But it's not! Most serial killers work alone. Killing is usually a private crime, something that mass murderers are keen to keep hidden. But this is not always the case. During the 1990s, a small town in Australia witnessed first-hand how devastating, horrendous, and effective a gang of serial killers could be.

Catherine Bréchignac montre comment l'homme a cherché à comprendre le monde qui l'entoure. Pourquoi cet être étrange qu'est l'humain est-il attiré par ce qui est énigmatique au point de fabriquer lui-même ses propres mystères et d'en avoir peur ? Il y a cent cinquante ans, l'électricité était considérée comme une innovation dont il fallait se méfier, une source de dangers, une invention diabolique même. L'idée fait aujourd'hui sourire, y compris ceux-là mêmes qui se méfient de la 5G ou du cloud, dont on ne saurait dire à quel nuage il est arrimé.

From the COVID lab leak theory to Hunter Biden's laptop to Jeffrey Epstein, media critic and former CNN producer Steve Krakauer spotlights the problems of a news industry filled with geographically isolated, introspection-free, egomaniacal journalists. In Uncovered, America’s sharpest media...

Nearly every aspect of our criminal justice system encourages defendants-whether innocent or guilty-to take a plea deal. Punishment Without Trial showcases how plea bargaining has undermined justice at every turn and across socioeconomic and racial divides. It forces the hand of lawyers, judges, and defendants, turning our legal system into a ruthlessly efficient mass incarceration machine that is dogging our jails and pun­ishing citizens.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A renowned journalist and legal commentator exposes the unchecked power of the prosecutor as a driving force in America’s mass incarceration crisis—and charts a way out. “An important, thoughtful, and thorough examination of criminal justice in America that...

Vincent Schiraldi was New York City probation commissioner under Mayor Bloomberg, supervising a system charged with monitoring 30,000 people on a daily basis. In Mass Supervision, he combines firsthand experience with deep research on the inadequately explored practices of probation and parole, to illustrate how these forms of state supervision have strayed from their original goal of providing constructive and rehabilitative alternatives to prison. They have become instead, Schiraldi argues, a "recidivism trap" for people trying to lead productive lives in the wake of a criminal conviction.

A vivid account of the largest act of civil disobedience in US history, in Richard Nixon’s Washington They surged into Washington by the tens of thousands in the spring of 1971. Fiery radicals, flower children, and militant vets gathered for the most audacious act in a years-long movement to...

In Critical Mass, Whitley Strieber explores this unthinkable but real possibility in a furious story that is almost too terrifying to tell. Nuclear interdiction expert James Deutsch and his Muslim wife, Nabila, struggle to stop an impending nuclear attack on a great American city. Along the way, they delve deep into the hidden world of nuclear terrorism and the experts who strive to contain it, and get a compelling look at the titanic battle within Islam over its own future.

A revealing, news driven account of the Trump Administration’s mass deportation program, featuring never-before-told stories and behind-the-scenes reporting from NBC News’ Senior Homeland Security Correspondent. In Undue Process, NBC’s Senior Homeland Security correspondent Julia Ainsley...

The following cruel dictators, mass murderers, torturers, and sadists from an extensive world history will be described and discussed in further detail: Adolf Eichmann, Benito Mussolini, Enver Pasha, Francisco Pizarro, Josef Mengele, Oliver Cromwell, Paul Joseph Goebbels, Pol Pot, Robespierre, Rudolf Hoess, and Torquemada.

In this book, Katherine Beckett explains how and why mass incarceration persists despite growing recognition of its many failures, plummeting crime rates, and widespread efforts by state legislators and others to reduce prison populations. Beckett identifies three primary forces sustaining incarceration rates in this country: political dynamics around violence, resistance to criminal legal system reform in suburban and rural counties, and the failure of popular drug policy reforms to reduce the reach of the criminal legal system.

This audiobook brings together current cases of cyber intrusions (1996 to 2018) and provides the listener with an understanding of their societal impact and shows that cyberattacks have morphed into tools deployed by nation states. The book brings together the fields of technology, psychology, and discourse analysis/semiotics. It also provides guidance and policy on prevention of the use of cyberweapons.

Critical Mass is a treasure trove of sparkling, spiky prose and a fascinating portrait of our lives and cultural times over the past decades. In an age where a great deal of back scratching and softball pitching pass for criticism, James Wolcott’s fearless essays and reviews offer a bracing taste of the real critical thing.