Social Systems

This collection of essays suggests that the EU and US are both cases of modern federalism at the empire political-level and scale.

Eminent ecologist Jeremy B. C. Jackson and award-winning journalist Steve Chapple traveled the length of the Mississippi River interviewing farmers, fishermen, scientists, and policymakers to better understand the mounting environmental problems ravaging the United States. Along their journey, which quickly expanded to California, Florida, and New York, the pair uncovered surprising and profound connections between ecological systems and environmental crises across the country.

Who are the children of foster care? What, as a country, do we owe them? Cris Beam, a foster mother herself, spent five years immersed in the world of foster care looking into these questions and tracing firsthand stories. The result is To the End of June, an unforgettable portrait that takes us deep inside the lives of foster children in their search for a stable, loving family. Beam shows us the intricacies of growing up in the system - the back-and-forth with agencies, the rootless shuffling between homes, the emotionally charged tug between foster and birth parents.

The Supreme Court's decisions on constitutional rights are well known and much talked about. But individuals who want to defend those rights need something else as well: access to courts that can rule on their complaints. And on matters of access, the Court's record over the past generation has been almost uniformly hostile to the enforcement of individual citizens' constitutional rights.

Victor Rios grew up in the ghetto of Oakland, California, in the 1980s and '90s. A former gang member and juvenile delinquent, Rios managed to escape the bleak outcome of many of his friends and earned a PhD at Berkeley and returned to his hometown to study how inner-city young Latino and African American boys develop their sense of self in the midst of crime and intense policing. Punished examines the difficult lives of these young men.

Hard White explains how the mainstreaming of white nationalism occurred, pointing to two major shifts in the movement. While the book argues that white extremism will have enduring effects on American electoral politics for some time to come, it suggests that the way forward is to refocus the conversation on social solidarity, concluding with ideas for how to build this solidarity.

Two young women, dormitory mates, embark on their education at a big state university. Five years later, one is earning a good salary at a prestigious accounting firm. With no loans to repay, she lives in a fashionable apartment with her fiance. The other woman, saddled with burdensome debt and a low GPA, is still struggling to finish her degree in tourism. In an era of skyrocketing tuition and mounting concern over whether college is "worth it", Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education.

The food system is broken, but there is a revolution underway to fix it. Bite Back presents an urgent call to action and a vision for disrupting corporate power in the food system, a vision shared with countless organizers and advocates worldwide.

Who controls American immigration policy? The biggest immigration controversies of the last decade have all involved policies produced by the President - policies such as President Obama protecting Dreamers from deportation and President Trump banning immigrants from several majority-Muslim nations. While critics of these policies have been separated by a vast ideological chasm, their broadsides have embodied the same widely shared belief: that Congress, not the President, ought to dictate who may come to the United States and who will be forced to leave. This belief is a myth.

Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author's own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions - including solitary confinement - these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender. The impact of their art, Fleetwood observes, can be felt far beyond prison walls.

This "provocative and personally searching"memoir follows one mother's story of enrolling her daughter in a local public school (San Francisco Chronicle), and the surprising, necessary lessons she learned with her neighbors. From the time Courtney E. Martin strapped her daughter, Maya, to her...

Blackout Wars is about the historically unprecedented threat to our electronic civilization from its dependence on the electric power grid. In a nationwide blackout lasting months or years, the entire population of the US could be at risk. There would be no food. No water. Communications, transportation, industry, business, and finance - all of the critical infrastructures that support modern civilization would be paralyzed. Threats to the electric power grid are posed by cyber-attack, sabotage, a geomagnetic super-storm, and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from the high-altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon.

Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose, the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography.

Equality is easy to grasp in theory but often hard to achieve in reality. In this accessible and wide-ranging work, American University law professor Robert L. Tsai offers a stirring account of how legal ideas that aren't necessarily about equality at all - ensuring fair play, behaving reasonably, avoiding cruelty, and protecting free speech - have often been used to overcome resistance to justice and remain vital today.

Social media doesn’t have to feel overwhelming. You just need a smarter way to approach it. Social Media Made Smarter is your real-world guide to building a time-saving, repeatable system for showing up online with confidence. Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, service-based business, or small business owner wearing all the hats, this audiobook gives you clear steps to create content that works, without burning out.

The concept of habeas corpus - literally, to receive and hold the body - empowers courts to protect the right of prisoners to know the basis on which they are being held by the government and grant prisoners their freedom when they are held unlawfully. It is no wonder that habeas corpus has long been considered essential to freedom.

Kaum ein Tag vergeht, ohne dass deutsche Gerichte skandalös anmutende Urteile fällen: Brutale Gewalttäter erhalten lächerlich milde Strafen, Wiederholungstäter entgehen längst fälligen Haftbefehlen, weil die Verfahren viel zu lange dauern, Freiheitsstrafen werden wieder und wieder zur Bewährung ausgesetzt. Das Vertrauen in unsere Justiz schwindet. Skandal- und Fehlurteile sind kein Zufall, sondern systembedingt, sagt Richter Thorsten Schleif. Unser Justizsystem versagt bereits lange vor den eigentlichen Verfahren, bei der Ausbildung und Auswahl seiner Richter.

Nomine, spartizioni, accordi sottobanco fra le correnti. Tutto avvilente, per carità. Ma c'è ben altro, ben altre infezioni, nel corpo malato della corporazione togata. Comportamenti e azioni davanti a cui si resta interdetti e si fatica a trovare parole adeguate. Ci sono giudici che hanno depositato sentenze con mesi e mesi di ritardo e altri che hanno dimenticato in cella gli imputati per 51 giorni. Ci sono giudici che hanno chiamato i carabinieri per non pagare il conto al ristorante e altri che hanno smarrito pratiche e fascicoli, vanificando anni di processi.

Werden wir gut regiert? Oder bleibt die Politik hinter ihren Möglichkeiten zurück? Und wenn das so ist - woran liegt das? Gibt es Techniken guten Regierens? In seinem Bestseller beschreibt Thilo Sarrazin die Mechaniken von Politik, ihre typischen Fehler und die Gründe für den Erfolg oder Misserfolg von Gesellschaften. Er verdeutlicht, warum die Träume von einer besseren Gesellschaft oft nichts Gutes hervorgebracht haben. Von hier schlägt er den Bogen zu den Fehlern der aktuellen deutschen Politik, von der Einwanderung bis zur Energiewende.

Die "Phänomenologie des Geistes" zählt zu den bedeutendsten Werken der Philosophie. Hegel veröffentlichte sie 1807 als den einleitenden Teil seines Gesamtkonzepts, eines methodisch zusammenhängenden "Systems der Wissenschaften", welches er bis zu seinem Tode 1830 ausbaute. Auf eine bis heute einzigartige Weise stellt die "Phänomenologie" das notwendig fortschreitende Wechselverhältnis der Formen unseres Bewusstseins mit seinen Gegenstandsinhalten dar. Unser Wissen entwickelt sich hierbei vor unserem geistigen Auge von seiner einfachsten Stufe bis zu seiner höchsten Erscheinung.