Rednecks and Bluenecks is veteran Entertainment Weekly journalist Chris Willman's lively account of "how music makes strange political bedfellows and how artists' perceived politics change over time" (Booklist). How did the erstwhile music of the rural working class come to be the music of choice of the GOP? Rednecks and Bluenecks looks at the way country's increasing popularity and conservative drift parallel the transformation of the Democratic...

"A bold, essential account of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world"--

In the long-awaited follow-up to his 2016 best-seller The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray interrogates the vicious new culture wars playing out in our media, universities, homes and perhaps the most violent place of all: online. The Madness of Crowds is a must-read polemic-a vociferous demand for a return to free speech in an age of mass hysteria and political correctness. The global conversations around sexuality, race, mental health and...

When acclaimed Washington Post writer Wil Haygood had an early hunch that Obama would win the 2008 election, he thought he'd highlight the singular moment by exploring the life of someone who had come of age when segregation was so widespread, so embedded in the culture, as to make the very thought of a black president inconceivable. He struck gold when he tracked down Eugene Allen, a butler who had served no fewer than eight presidents, from Harry...

"In the age of hot takes and trolling, this expansive and funny study of the art and science of trash talk reveals something essential about public life--and even human nature. In the modern economy and culture, fame and virality have become increasingly difficult to separate from success. From athletes to comedians to politicians to big-ticket CEOs, everyone seemingly has to manage their brand. Saying the wrong thing is often more profitable than...

The battles over evolution, climate change, childhood vaccinations, and the causes of AIDS, alternative medicine, oil shortages, population growth, and the place of science in our country―all are reaching a fevered pitch. Many people and institutions have exerted enormous efforts to misrepresent or flatly deny demonstrable scientific reality to protect their nonscientific ideology, their power, or their bottom line. To shed light on this darkness,...

"The threat of cyberwar can feel like something out of a movie: nuclear codes hacked, powerplants melting down, immediate crisis. In reality, state-sponsored hacking looks nothing like this. It's covert, insidious, and constant. Ben Buchanan reveals the cyberwar that's already here, reshaping the global contest for geopolitical advantage"-- "Ever since WarGames, we have been bracing for the cyberwar to come, conjuring images of exploding power plants...

"What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? Drawing on more than a decade of research, award-winning scholar Kate Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the minerals drawn from the earth, to the labor pulled from low-wage information workers, to the data taken from every action and expression. This book reveals...

"Some democracies are highly homogeneous. Others have long maintained a brutal racial or religious hierarchy, with some groups dominating and exploiting others. Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world. It is, Yascha Mounk argues, the greatest experiment...

"Setting the great crisis of 2020 in broad historical perspective, Niall Ferguson challenges the conventional wisdom that our failure to cope better with disaster was solely a crisis of political leadership, as opposed to a more profound systemic problem. Disasters are by their very nature hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate...