Search results for ""publicaffairs,u.s.""

The authors of The Red Web examine the shifting role of Russian expatriates throughout history, and their complicated, unbreakable relationship with the mother country--be it antagonistic or far too chummy.The history of Russian espionage is soaked in blood, from a spontaneous pistol shot that killed a secret policeman in Romania in 1924 to the attempt to poison an exiled KGB colonel in Salisbury, England, in 2017. Russian émigrés have found themselves continually at the center of the mayhem.Russians began leaving the country in big numbers in the late nineteenth century, fleeing pogroms, tsarist secret police persecution, and the Revolution, then Stalin and the KGB--and creating the third-largest diaspora in the world. The exodus created a rare opportunity for the Kremlin. Moscow's masters and spymasters fostered networks of spies, many of whom were emigrants driven from Russia. By the 1930s and 1940s, dozens of spies were in New York City gathering information for Moscow.But the story did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some émigrés have turned into assets of the resurgent Russian nationalist state, while others have taken up the dissident challenge once more--at their personal peril. From Trotsky to Litvinenko, The Compatriots is the gripping history of Russian score-settling around the world.

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In the mid-1970s, the CIA and KGB watched Karel Koecher closely-they were both convinced he was working for the enemy. And they were both right. Traveling with his wife, Hana, Koecher posed as a Czechoslovak asylum seeker and arrived in the US as a Communist sleeper agent. After parlaying a doctorate from Columbia into a job at the CIA, Koecher proceeded to operate as a double agent at the height of the Cold War.Shunning a low profile, the Koechers embraced Manhattan's high life-with cocaine, swinging, and parties emblematic of the times and their penchant for risk. Hana, who was no more than a shy teenager when she arrived, grew into a sophisticated international diamond dealer who relayed messages to Karel's handlers. Riding a wave of euphoria, the Koechers felt unstoppable. But it was too good to last.Using newly declassified documents, interrogation tapes, and extraordinary firsthand accounts from the Koechers themselves, Cunningham reconstructs their double lives and the fading Cold War, where a strange moral fog made it hard to know what truth was being fought for, and to what end.

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We've all seen the ads on TV and in magazines: "50 is the new 30!" or "60 is the new 40!" A nice sentiment to be sure, but CEO of AARP Jo Ann Jenkins disagrees. 50 is 50, and she, for one, likes the look of it.In Disrupt Aging, Jenkins focuses on three core areas--health, wealth, and self--to show us how to embrace opportunities and change the way we look at getting older. Here, she chronicles her own journey and that of others who are making their mark as disrupters to show readers how we can be active, healthy, and happy as we get older. Through this powerful and engaging narrative, she touches on all the important issues facing people 50+ today, from caregiving and mindful living to building age-friendly communities and making our money last.This is a book for all the makers and doers who have a desire to continue exploring possibilities, to celebrate discovery over decline, and to seek out opportunities to live the best life there is.

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The Devil's Financial Dictionary skewers the plutocrats and bureaucrats who gave us exploding mortgages, freakish risks, and banks too big to fail. And it distills the complexities, absurdities, and pomposities of Wall Street into plain truths and aphorisms anyone can understand.An indispensable survival guide to the hostile wilderness of today's financial markets, The Devil's Financial Dictionary delivers practical insights with a scorpion's sting. It cuts through the fads and fakery of Wall Street and clears a safe path for investors between euphoria and despair. Staying out of financial purgatory has never been this much fun.Definitions include:DAY-TRADER, n. See IDIOT.FEE, n. A tiny word with a teeny sound, which nevertheless is the single biggest determinant of success or failure for most investors. Those who keep fees as low as possible will, on average, earn the highest possible returns.

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In the past decade Pakistan has become a country of immense importance to its region, the United States, and the world. With almost 200 million people, a 500,000-man army, nuclear weapons, and a large diaspora in Britain and North America, Pakistan is central to the hopes of jihadis and the fears of their enemies. Yet the greatest short-term threat to Pakistan is not Islamist insurgency as such, but the actions of the United States, and the greatest longterm threat is ecological change. Anatol Lieven's book is a magisterial investigation of this highly complex and often poorly understood country. Engagingly written, combining history and profound analysis with reportage from Lieven's extensive travels as a journalist and academic, Pakistan: A Hard Country is both utterly compelling and deeply revealing.

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Is this the America you want? If not, here's how to claim the power to change your country.We are in an age of epic political turbulence in America. Old hierarchies and institutions are collapsing. From the election of Donald Trump to the upending of the major political parties to the spread of grassroots movements like Black Lives Matter and $15 Now, people across the country and across the political spectrum are reclaiming power.Are you ready for this age of bottom-up citizen power? Do you understand what power truly is, how it flows, who has it, and how you can claim and exercise it?Eric Liu, who has spent a career practicing and teaching civic power, lays out the answers in this incisive, inspiring, and provocative book. Using examples from the left and the right, past and present, he reveals the core laws of power. He shows that all of us can generate power-and then, step by step, he shows us how. The strategies of reform and revolution he lays out will help every reader make sense of our world today. If you want to be more than a spectator in this new era, you need to read this book.

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The Cult of the Dead Cow is the story of the oldest, most respected and most famous hacking group of all time. Its members invented the the concept of hacktivism, released both the top tool for cracking passwords and the reigning technique for controlling computers from afar, and spurred development of Snowden's anonymity tool of choice. With its origins in the earliest days of the Internet, the cDc is full of oddball characters--spies, activists, musicians, and politicians--who are now woven into the top ranks of the American establishment. Today, this small group and their followers represent the best hope for making technology a force for good instead of for surveillance and oppression. Like a modern (and real) illuminati, cDc members have had the ears of presidents, secretaries of defense, and the CEO of Google. The Cult of the Dead Cow shows how we got into the mess we find ourselves in today, where governments and corporations hold immense power over individuals, and and how we are finally fighting back.

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In this "must-read" guide (Lonnie Ali), four leading doctors and advocates offer a bold action plan to prevent, care for, and treat Parkinson's disease-one of the great health challenges of our time.Brain diseases are now the world's leading source of disability. The fastest growing of these is Parkinson's: the number of impacted patients has doubled to more than six million over the last twenty-five years and is projected to double again by 2040. Harmful pesticides that increase the risk of Parkinson's continue to proliferate, many people remain undiagnosed and untreated, research funding stagnates, and the most effective treatment is now a half century old.In Ending Parkinson's Disease, four top experts provide a plan to help prevent Parkinson's, improve care and treatment, and end the silence associated with this devastating disease.

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In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful.In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.

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The world is at a turning point. While globalization benefited many, it produced extremes with drastic wealth inequality, indebtedness, and political volatility among the most important. As the ground underneath globalization undergoes tectonic shifts, noisy, chaotic, and disorderly events--such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump--are the first harbingers of a world being turned upside down.In this book, Michael O'Sullivan shows the many ways the levelling of the twenty-first century will unfold: The levelling-out of wealth between rich and poor countries; of power between nations and regions; of political accountability and responsibility between political leaders and "the people"; and of institutional power--away from central banks and defunct twentieth-century institutions such as the WTO and IMF.The Levelling comes at a crucial time in the rise and fall of nations and has special importance for Americans as our place in the world undergoes radical change--the ebbing of our influence, profound questions over our economic model, the apparent decay in our society, and turmoil in our public life-- before our very eyes.

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To limit executive power, the Founding Fathers created fixed presidential terms of four years, giving voters regular opportunities to remove their leaders. Americans also discovered more dramatic paths for disempowering--or coming razor-close to removing--chief executives: undermining the president's authority, a preemptive strike to derail a presidential candidacy, assassination, impeachment, resignation, and declaration of inability. Although the United States has gone decades without assassination or resignation, the most dramatic forms of presidential removal, getting rid of a president or a potential president is a political reality-just ask not president Hillary Clinton.How To Get Rid of a President presents the dark side of the nation's history, from the Constitutional Convention through the aftermath of the shocking 2016 election, a stew of election dramas, national tragedies and presidential exits mixed with party intrigue, political betrayal and backroom scheming. It is a briskly paced, darkly humorous voyage through historical events relevant to today's headlines, highlighting the many ways that presidents have been undermined and nearly kicked out, how each method of removal offers opportunities and dangers for the republic and the thorny ethical issues that surround the choice to resist, disobey, or eject a president.

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Forbes, Best Business Books of 2022Behavioral Scientist, Notable Books of 2022Immigration is one of the most fraught, and possibly most misunderstood, topics in American social discourse-yet, in most cases, the things we believe about immigration are based largely on myth, not facts. Using the tools of modern data analysis and ten years of pioneering research, new evidence is provided about the past and present of the American Dream, debunking myths fostered by political opportunism and sentimentalized in family histories, and draw counterintuitive conclusions, including:* Upward Mobility: Children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially those of poor immigrants, do better economically than children of U.S.-born residents - a pattern that has held for more than a century.* Rapid Assimilation: Immigrants accused of lack of assimilation (such as Mexicans today and the Irish in the past) actually assimilate fastest.* Improved Economy: Immigration changes the economy in unexpected positive ways and staves off the economic decline that is the consequence of an aging population.* Helps U.S. Born: Closing the door to immigrants harms the economic prospects of the U.S.-born-the people politicians are trying to protect.Using powerful story-telling and unprecedented research employing big data and algorithms, Abramitzky and Boustan are like dedicated family genealogists but millions of times over. They provide a new take on American history with surprising results, especially how comparable the "golden era" of immigration is to today, and why many current policy proposals are so misguided.

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Anyone who experienced the attacks on September 11 cannot forget the imagery: the smoking, falling towers, the Pentagon smoldering, the Shanksville crash site, the first responders.But there is an invisible story hidden in the wreckage, one that required years of patient investigation and the piecing together of a sequence from many scattered sources. By establishing the most definitive timeline of how that day unfolded, William M. Arkin shows how the US government failed in the face of the unprecedented attack. It is a story of laughable airport security, vulnerable airspace, blind intelligence, poor communications, muddled orders, Pentagon chaos, and presidential isolation. Everything about the emergency procedures of the governments-from White House security to continuity of government to military alerts-went wrong.On That Day is a stunning, nightmare journey through a government reeling in confusion while many civilians performed individual acts of heroism. It is a chilling exposé of government negligence and overreach, and a constitution in crisis.

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In the mid-1970s, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Andy Kaufman, Richard Lewis, Robin Williams, Elayne Boosler, Tom Dreesen, and several hundred other shameless showoffs and incorrigible cutups from across the country migrated en masse to Los Angeles, the new home of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. There, in a late-night world of sex, drugs, dreams and laughter, they created an artistic community unlike any before or since. It was Comedy Camelot-but it couldn't last.William Knoedelseder was then a cub reporter covering the burgeoning local comedy scene for the Los Angeles Times. He wrote the first major newspaper profiles of several of the future stars. And he was there when the comedians-who were not paid by the clubs where they performed- tried to change the system and incidentally tore apart their own close-knit community. In I'm Dying Up Here he tells the whole story of that golden age, of the strike that ended it, and of how those days still resonate in the lives of those who were there. As comedy clubs and cable TV began to boom, many would achieve stardom.... but success had its price

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A nuanced, story-driven narrative about the deeply intertwined business and cultural relationship between the United States and Mexico, and the need to tear down, rather than fortify, wallsA certain narrative about the relationship between the United States and Mexico has taken shape over the last twenty years. Many believe that our trade and immigration policies have undercut American labor, and that Mexico itself is a place where drugs and violence are rampant. They believe that these two countries, living side by side, are about as different as can be. But as Andrew Selee shows, the demographics, economics, politics, and culture of these two countries have more in common than meets the eye.Vanishing Frontiers is the story of the cultural and economic intertwining of these two countries. Beloved US brands like Sara Lee and Thomas' English Muffins are owned by Mexico City-based Grupo Bimbo. Forty percent of the manufactured goods that flow across the border with Mexico are products that US and Mexican firms assemble together in shared supply chains. As immigration from Mexico has reached an all-time low, a million Americans--retirees, job seekers, and more--live in Mexico, almost as many expats as live in all the countries of the European Union combined. Meanwhile, more than a tenth of all Americans now trace their heritage to Mexico, and they are among the fastest-growing consumer segments for everything from prime-time television programs to the Super Bowl.There has been a dramatic change in the way Mexico and the United States relate to each other, but few Americans have noticed the depth of this change. As Selee shows in this important and timely book, the US-Mexico border is a seam that weaves together the two economies and cultures, not a barrier between two radically different societies.

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The story of America's forgotten black pioneers, who escaped slavery, settled the frontier, and proved that racial equality was possible even as the country headed toward civil war.The American frontier is one of our most cherished and enduring national images. We think of the early settlers who tamed the wilderness and built the bones of our great country as courageous, independent--and white.In this groundbreaking work of deep historical research, Anna-Lisa Cox shows that this history simply isn't accurate. In fact, she has found a stunning number of black settlements on the frontier--in the thousands. Though forgotten today, these homesteads were a matter of national importance at the time; their mere existence challenged rationalizations for slavery and pushed the question toward a crisis--one that was not resolved until the eruption of the Civil War.Blending meticulous detail with lively storytelling, Cox brings historical recognition to the brave people who managed not just to secure their freedom but begin a battle that is still going on today--a battle for equality.

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Post-war Afghanistan is fragile, volatile, and perilous. It is also a place of extraordinary beauty. Evolutionary biologist Alex Deghan came to Afghanistan and created a startup, Conservation X Labs, to save Afghanistan's unique and extraordinary wildlife and natural landscape after decades of war. His workplace was so remote that roads themselves would disappear, and travel was by foot, yak, or mule, following ancient pathways for weeks into the mountain kingdoms and desolate landscapes.Conservation, it turned out, provided a common bond between Alex's team and the people of Afghanistan, where his international team worked unarmed in some of the most dangerous places in the country. They successfully built the country's first national park, completed the first wildlife survey in thirty years, and worked to stop the poaching of the country's iconic endangered animals, including the elusive snow leopard. In doing so, they restored a part of Afghan identity that is ineffably tied to the land itself. For a people who had spent decades as refugees or subject to the horrors and desolation of war, the quest to restore Afghanistan's wildlife became the restoration of Afghanistan's very culture and deep history.

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As World War II raged in North Africa, General Irwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemies' plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 1942, he led his Axis army swiftly and terrifyingly toward Alexandria, with the goal of overrunning the entire Middle East. Each step was informed by detailed updates on British positions. The Nazis, somehow, had a source for the Allies' greatest secrets. Yet the Axis powers were not the only ones with intelligence. Brilliant Allied cryptographers worked relentlessly at Bletchley Park, breaking down the extraordinarily complex Nazi code Enigma. From decoded German messages, they discovered that the enemy had a wealth of inside information. On the brink of disaster, a fevered and high-stakes search for the source began. War of Shadows is the cinematic story of the race for information in the North African theater of World War II, set against intrigues that spanned the Middle East. Years in the making, this book is a feat of historical research and storytelling, and a rethinking of the popular narrative of the war. It portrays the conflict not as an inevitable clash of heroes and villains but a spiraling series of failures, accidents, and desperate triumphs that decided the fate of the Middle East and quite possibly the outcome of the war.

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Advances in technology are creating the next economy and enabling us to make things o things/connect with others in smarter, cheaper, faster, more effective ways. But the price of this progress has been a decoupling of the engine of prosperity from jobs that have been the means by which people have ascended to (and stayed in) the middle class.Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) spent four years traveling the country and asking economists, futurists, labour leaders, CEOs, investment bankers, entrepreneurs, and political leaders to help picture the U.S. economy 25 to 30 years from now. He vividly reports on people who are analyzing and creating this new economy,such as investment banker Steve Berkenfeld David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell International Andy Grove of Intel Carl Camden, the CEO of Kelly Services and Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone. Through these stories, we come to a stark and deeper understanding of the toll technological progress will continue to take on jobs and income and its inevitable effect on tens of millions of people.But there is hope for our economy and future. The foundation of economic prosperity for all Americans, Stern believes, is a universal basic income. The idea of a universal basic income for all Americans is controversial but American attitudes are shifting. Stern has been a game changer throughout his career, and his next goal is to create a movement that will force the political establishment to take action against something that many on both the right and the left believe is inevitable. Stern's plan is bold, idealistic, and challenging,and its time has come.

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Absorbing and unforgettable, City of Lies travels up and down Vali Asr Street in today's Tehran, where the most ordinary Iranians are forced to live extraordinary lives. Ramita Navai paints an intimate portrait of the city's recesses where intrigues abound. Survival depends on an intricate network of falsehoods, and the difference between modesty and profanity, loyalty and betrayal, honor and disgrace is often no more than the believability of a lie.

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The pages of history recall scarcely any parallel episode at once so romantic in character and so extensive in scale." ,Winston S. ChurchillIn 1917, two empires that had dominated much of Europe and Asia teetered on the edge of the abyss, exhausted by the ruinous cost in blood and treasure of the First World War. As Imperial Russia and Habsburg-ruled Austria-Hungary began to succumb, a small group of Czech and Slovak combat veterans stranded in Siberia saw an opportunity to realize their long-held dream of independence.While their plan was audacious and complex, and involved moving their 50,000-strong army by land and sea across three-quarters of the earth's expanse, their commitment to fight for the Allies on the Western Front riveted the attention of Allied London, Paris, and Washington.On their journey across Siberia, a brawl erupted at a remote Trans-Siberian rail station that sparked a wholesale rebellion. The marauding Czecho-Slovak Legion seized control of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and with it Siberia. In the end, this small band of POWs and deserters, whose strength was seen by Leon Trotsky as the chief threat to Soviet rule, helped destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire and found Czecho-Slovakia.British prime minister David Lloyd George called their adventure one of the greatest epics of history," and former US president Teddy Roosevelt declared that their accomplishments were unparalleled, so far as I know, in ancient or modern warfare."

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Shiver-inducing science not for the faint of heart.No one studies fear quite like Margee Kerr. A sociologist who moonlights at one of America's scariest and most popular haunted houses, she has seen grown men laugh, cry, and push their loved ones aside as they run away in terror. And she's kept careful notes on what triggers these responses and why.Fear is a universal human experience, but do we really understand it? If we're so terrified of monsters and serial killers, why do we flock to the theatres to see them? Why do people avoid thinking about death, but jump out of planes and swim with sharks? For Kerr, there was only one way to find out.In this eye-opening, adventurous book, she takes us on a tour of the world's scariest experiences: into an abandoned prison long after dark, hanging by a cord from the highest tower in the Western hemisphere, and deep into Japan's mysterious suicide forest." She even goes on a ghost hunt with a group of paranormal adventurers. Along the way, Kerr shows us the surprising science from the newest studies of fear,what it means, how it works, and what it can do for us. Full of entertaining science and the thrills of a good ghost story, this book will make you think, laugh,and scream.

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In 2008, American journalist Jere Van Dyk was kidnapped and held for 45 days. At the time, he had no idea who his kidnappers were. They demanded a ransom and the release of three of their comrades from Guantanamo, yet they hinted at their ties to Pakistan and to the Haqqani network, a uniquely powerful group that now holds the balance of power in large parts of Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. After his release, Van Dyk wrote a book about his capture and what it took to survive in this most hostile of circumstances. Yet he never answered the fundamental questions that his kidnapping raised: Why was he taken? Why was he released? And who saved his life?Every kidnapping is a labyrinth in which the certainties of good and bad, light and dark are merged in the quiet dialogues and secret handshakes that accompany a release or a brutal fatality. In The Trade, Jere Van Dyk uses the sinuous path of his own kidnapping to explain the recent rise in the taking of Western hostages across the greater Middle East. He discovers that he was probably not taken by the anonymous "Taliban," as he thought, but by the very people who helped arrange his trip and then bargained for his release. It was not a matter of chance: CBS, Van Dyk's employer at the time, launched a secret rescue and, he learned later, paid an undisclosed ransom to a tribal chief who controlled the area in which he was kidnapped and who delivered him and his guide safely to a US Army base. In 2013, Van Dyk returned to the Middle East to unravel the links among jihadist groups, specifically that of the Haqqani network. His investigation finally paid off in 2015, when Van Dyk was taken to a discreet room in a guesthouse in Islamabad where he met Ibrahim Haqqani, part of the leadership of the Haqqani network who has been seen by very few outsiders since 9/11. There, Van Dyk learned of the Haqqanis' links to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the ISI, and the CIA and their involvement in the kidnapping of Bowe Bergdahl and many others. Back in the United States, Van Dyk saw the other side of the kidnapping labyrinth as he became involved with other former hostages and the families of recent kidnapping victims murdered by the Islamic State. Van Dyk's investigation shows how America's foreign policy strategy, the terrible cynicism of the kidnappers, and a world of shadowy interlocutors who play both sides of many bargains combine to create a brutal business out of the exchange of individual human lives for vast sums of money.

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The epic battle of the fascinating, flawed figures behind America's deal culture and their fight over who controls and who benefits from the immense wealth of American corporations. Bloodsport is the story of how the mania for corporate deals and mergers all began. The riveting tale of how power lawyers Joe Flom and Marty Lipton, major Wall Street players Felix Rohatyn and Bruce Wasserstein, prominent jurists, and shrewd ideologues in academic garb provided the intellectual firepower, creativity, and energy that drove the corporate elite into a less cozy, Hobbesian world.With total dollar volume in the trillions, the zeal for the deal continues unabated to this day. Underpinning this explosion in mergers and acquisitions,including hostile takeovers,are four questions that radically disrupted corporate ownership in the 1970s, whose force remains undiminished:Are shareholders the sole owners" of corporations and the legitimate source of power?Should control be exercised by autonomous CEOs or is their assumption of power illegitimate and inefficient?Is the primary purpose of the corporation to generate jobs and create prosperity for the masses and the nation?Or is it simply to maximize the wealth of shareholders?This battle of ideas became the bloodsport" of American business. It set in motion the deal-making culture that led to the financialization of the economy and it is the backstory to ongoing debates over competitiveness, job losses, inequality, stratospheric executive pay, and who owns" America's corporations.

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In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, America went from being a largely rural economy, with little internal transportation infrastructure, to a fledgling industrial powerhouse- setting the stage for the vast fortunes that would be made in the golden age of American capitalism. In The Dawn of Innovation, Charles R. Morris vividly brings to life a time when three stupendous American innovations- universal male suffrage, the shift of political power from elites to the middle classes, and a broad commitment to mechanized mass-production- gave rise to the world's first democratic, middle-class, mass-consumption society, a shining beacon to nations and peoples ever since. Behind that ideal were the machines, the men, and the trading and transportation networks that created a new, world-class economic power.

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Rupert Murdoch is the most significant media tycoon the English-speaking world has ever known. No one before him has trafficked in media influence across those nations so effectively, nor has anyone else so singularly redefined the culture of news and the rules of journalism. In a stretch spanning six decades, he built News Corp from a small paper in Adelaide, Australia into a multimedia empire capable of challenging national broadcasters, rolling governments, and swatting aside commercial rivals. Then, over two years, a series of scandals threatened to unravel his entire creation.Murdoch's defenders questioned how much he could have known about the bribery and phone hacking undertaken by his journalists in London. But to an exceptional degree, News Corp was an institution cast in the image of a single man. The company's culture was deeply rooted in an Australian buccaneering spirit, a brawling British populism, and an outsized American libertarian sensibility,at least when it suited Murdoch's interests.David Folkenflik, the media correspondent for NPR News, explains how the man behind Britain's take-no-prisoners tabloids, who reinvigorated Roger Ailes by backing his vision for Fox News, who gave a new swagger to the New York Post and a new style to the Wall Street Journal , survived the scandals,and the true cost of this survival. He summarily ended his marriage, alienated much of his family, and split his corporation asunder to protect the source of his vast wealth (on the one side), and the source of his identity (on the other). There were moments when the global news chief panicked. But as long as Rupert Murdoch remains the person at the top, Murdoch's World will be making news.

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The security services have played a central,and often mysterious,role at key turning points in Russia during the tumultuous years following the Soviet collapse: from the Moscow apartment house bombings and theatre siege, to the war in Chechnya and the Beslan school massacre. In this riveting investigation, two intrepid journalists penetrate the secret world of the FSB and illustrate how the security services have evolved into a ruthless, violently powerful force that is inextricably woven into modern Russia's fundamental makeup, and has become more shadowy than its predecessor, the Soviet KGB.

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The Future of Power examines what it means to be forceful and effective in a world in which the traditional ideas of state power have been upended by technology, and rogue actors.Joseph S. Nye, Jr., a longtime analyst of power and a hands-on practitioner in government, delivers a new power narrative that considers the shifts, innovations, bold technologies, and new relationships that are defining the twenty-first century. He shows how power resources are adapting to the digital age and how smart power strategies must include more than a country's military strength.At the beginning of the twenty-first century, unsurpassed in military strength and ownership of world resources, the United States was indisputably the most powerful nation in the world. Today, China, Russia, India, and others are increasing their share of world power resources. Information once reserved for the government is now available for mass consumption. The Internet has literally put power at the fingertips of nonstate agents, allowing them to launch cyberattacks from their homes. The cyberage has created a new power frontier among states, ripe with opportunity for developing countries. To remain at the pinnacle of world power, the United States must adopt a strategy that designed for a global information age.

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In the early nineteenth century the major English chocolate firms,Fry, Rowntree, and Cadbury,were all Quaker family enterprises that aimed to do well by doing good. The English chocolatiers introduced the world's first chocolate bar and ever fancier chocolate temptations,while also writing ground-breaking papers on poverty, publishing authoritative studies of the Bible, and campaigning against human rights abuses. Chocolate was always a global business, and in the global competitors, especially the Swiss and the Americans Hershey and Mars, the Quaker capitalists met their match. The ensuing chocolate wars would culminate in a multi-billion-dollar showdown pitting Quaker tradition against the cutthroat tactics of a corporate behemoth. Featuring a cast of savvy entrepreneurs, brilliant eccentrics, and resourceful visionaries, Chocolate Wars is a delicious history of the fierce, 150-year business rivalry for one of the world's most coveted markets.

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Donald Trump is putting together the most dangerous cabinet in history. Showing no inclination toward moderation, tolerance or genuine bipartisanship, he has assembled a team that is backed with billionaires, CEOs, rigid ideologues and a rogue's gallery of white nationalists, alt-right hatemongers, voter-suppression schemers, immigrant bashers and climate-change deniers. The people Trump is bringing into his inner circle and handing positions of immense authority make no secret of their determination to impose an uncompromising and ultimately unworkable conservative agenda on a country where most Americans did not vote for Donald Trump or the Congress that will advance his policies. The Trump team, consisting of famously controversial figures and little-known but potentially even more dangerous mandarins, may not have mandate. But it will have the power to remake American foreign policy, redistribute wealth upward and suppress wages, destroy unions, dismantle Medicare and Medicaid, undermine abortion rights and affirmative action, privatize and voucherize education, make health care a privilege rather than a right and create a climate of fear and intimidation for immigrants, refugees, religious and racial minorities and Americans who dare to dissent. This is about much more than one man; this is about a wrecking crew with the power to transform everything we know about America and to make our country and our world a more dangerous place. If we are going to navigate the next four years and have the tools to fight back, we need to know who will be handling the levers of power. And we need to know how to challenge their excesses.Enter John Nichols, veteran political correspondent at The Nation, who has been covering many of these deplorables for decades. Sticking to the hard facts and unafraid to dig deep into histories and the ideologies of the people who make up Trump's inner circle, Nichols will deliver a clear-eyed and complete guide to who these people really are. This is not a laundry list of the high-profile politicians we are already familiar with -- in these pages Nichols will examine and expose all the new power players, including those who operate below the headlines but that can still cause immeasurable damage.

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Synthetic biology will revolutionize how we define family, how we identify disease and treat aging, where we make our homes, and how we nourish ourselves. This fast-growing field-which uses computers to modify or rewrite genetic code-has created revolutionary, groundbreaking solutions such as the mRNA COVID vaccines, IVF, and lab-grown hamburger that tastes like the real thing. It gives us options to deal with existential threats: climate change, food insecurity, and access to fuel.But there are significant risks.Who should decide how to engineer living organisms? Whether engineered organisms should be planted, farmed, and released into the wild? Should there be limits to human enhancements? What cyber-biological risks are looming? Could a future biological war, using engineered organisms, cause a mass extinction event? Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel's riveting examination of synthetic biology and the bioeconomy provide the background for thinking through the upcoming risks and moral dilemmas posed by redesigning life, as well as the vast opportunities waiting for us on the horizon.

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Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road, turned that plan into reality.Public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws didn't disappear, but they got quieter: meek suggestions barely heard in the town's thick wilderness. The bears, on the other hand, were increasingly visible. Grafton's freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city, in an effort to get off the grid. And with a large and growing local bear population, conflict became inevitable.A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is both a screwball comedy and the story of a radically American commitment to freedom. Full of colorful characters, puns and jokes, and one large social experiment, it is a quintessentially American story, a bearing of our national soul.

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Miami, Florida, is likely to be entirely underwater by the end of this century. Residents are already starting to see the effects of sea level rise today. From sunny day flooding caused by higher tides to a sewer system on the brink of total collapse, the city undeniably lives in a climate changed world. In Disposable City, Miami resident Mario Alejandro Ariza shows us not only what climate change looks like on the ground today, but also what Miami will look like 100 years from now, and how that future has been shaped by the city's racist past and present. As politicians continue to kick the can down the road and Miami becomes increasingly unlivable, real estate vultures and wealthy residents will be able to get out or move to higher ground, but the most vulnerable communities, disproportionately composed of people of color, will face flood damage, rising housing costs, dangerously higher temperatures, and stronger hurricanes that they can't afford to escape. Miami may be on the front lines of climate change, but the battle it's fighting today is coming for the rest of the U.S.--and the rest of the world--far sooner than we could have imagined even a decade ago. Disposable City is a thoughtful portrait of both a vibrant city with a unique culture and the social, economic, and psychic costs of climate change that call us to act before it's too late.

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Unsympathetic, ambiguous, and openly racist remarks are a hallmark of Donald Trump's public life. They may have reached their nadir after he failed to condemn white supremacy in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, but perhaps no remark of his is more telling than his campaign pitch to African Americans: "What the hell do you have to lose?"Quite a lot, as it turns out. In this vigorous and timely book, civil rights historian and political analyst Juan Williams issues the truth about just what African Americans have to lose, and how Trump is threatening to take it away. In Williams's lifetime, civil rights have improved, vastly and against great resistance -- including from Trump and his family. Using the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a rubric, Williams recounts the less known and forgotten stories of heroes like Bob Moses, A. Philip Randolph, and Everett Dirksen, who fought for voting rights, integration of public schools and spaces, and more.This book is not merely a much-needed and highly visible history lesson. It signals the alarm about the Trump administration's policies and intentions, which pose a threat to civil rights without precedent in modern America.In a polarized era, it's especially telling when moderates like Williams are prepared to stand up and shout. This book is clear-sighted, inspiring, and necessary, from an author with the experience and standing to make it heard.

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The last days of colonialism taught America's revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But according to investigative reporter Radley Balko, over the last several decades, America's cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as an other-an enemy.Today's armored-up policemen are a far cry from the constables of early America. The unrest of the 1960s brought about the invention of the SWAT unit-which in turn led to the debut of military tactics in the ranks of police officers. Nixon's War on Drugs, Reagan's War on Poverty, Clinton's COPS program, the post-9/11 security state under Bush, Obama: by degrees, each of these innovations empowered police forces, always at the expense of civil liberties. And under Trump, these powers were expanded in terrifying new ways, as evidenced by the tanks and overwhelming force that met the Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020.In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians' ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative shows how over a generation, a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.

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In the tradition of Why Nations Fail, this book solves one of the great puzzles of history: Why did the West become the most powerful civilization in the world?Western exceptionalism-the idea that European civilizations are freer, wealthier, and less violent-is a widespread and powerful political idea. It has been a source of peace and prosperity in some societies, and of ethnic cleansing and havoc in others.Yet in The Invention of Power, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita draws on his expertise in political maneuvering, deal-making, and game theory to present a revolutionary new theory of Western exceptionalism: that a single, rarely discussed event in the twelfth century changed the course of European and world history. By creating a compromise between churches and nation-states that, in effect, traded money for power and power for money, the 1122 Concordat of Worms incentivized economic growth, facilitated secularization, and improved the lot of the citizenry, all of which set European countries on a course for prosperity. In the centuries since, countries that have had a similar dynamic of competition between church and state have been consistently better off than those that have not.The Invention of Power upends conventional thinking about European culture, religion, and race and presents a persuasive new vision of world history.

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From Abraham Lincoln's political savvy and rhetorical gifts to James Buchanan's indecisiveness, this book teaches much about what makes a great leader--and what does not.Over a period of decades, C-SPAN has surveyed leading historians on the best and worst of America's presidents across a variety of categories -- their ability to persuade the public, their leadership skills, their moral authority, and more. The crucible of the presidency has forged some of the very best and very worst leaders in our national history, along with much in between.Based on interviews conducted over the years with a variety of presidential biographers, this book provides not just a complete ranking of our presidents, but stories and analyses that capture the character of the men who held the office. As America looks ahead to our next election, this book offers perspective and criteria that may help us choose our next leader wisely.

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From the financial fraudsters of Enron, to the embezzlers at Tyco, to the insider traders at McKinsey, to the Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, the failings of corporate titans are regular fixtures in the news. In Why They Do It, Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes draws from extensive personal interaction and correspondence with nearly fifty former executives as well as the latest research in psychology, criminology, and economics to investigate how once-celebrated executives become white-collar criminals. White-collar criminals are not merely driven by excessive greed or hubris, nor do they usually carefully calculate costs and benefits before breaking the law. Instead, Soltes shows that most of the executives who committed crimes made decisions the way we all do-on the basis of their intuitions and gut feelings. The trouble is that these gut feelings are often poorly suited for the modern business world where leaders are increasingly distanced from the consequences of their decisions and the individuals they impact.The extraordinary costs of corporate misconduct are clear to its victims. Yet, never before have we been able to peer so deeply into the minds of the many prominent perpetrators of white-collar crime. With the increasing globalization of business threatening us with even more devastating corporate misconduct, the lessons Soltes draws in Why They Do It are needed more urgently than ever.

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After two three-year-old girls were raped and murdered in rural Mississippi, law enforcement pursued and convicted two innocent men: Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks. Together they spent a combined thirty years in prison before finally being exonerated in 2008. Meanwhile, the real killer remained free.The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist recounts the story of how the criminal justice system allowed this to happen and of how two men, Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West, built successful careers on the back of that structure. For nearly two decades, Hayne, a medical examiner, performed the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies, while his friend Dr. West, a local dentist, pitched himself as a forensic jack-of-all-trades. Together they became the go-to experts for prosecutors and helped put countless Mississippians in prison. But then some of those convictions began to fall apart.Here, Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington tell the haunting story of how the courts and Mississippi's death investigation system--a relic of the Jim Crow era--failed to deliver justice for its citizens. The authors argue that bad forensics, structural racism, and institutional failures are at fault, raising sobering questions about our ability and willingness to address these crucial issues.

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Known in health care circles for his ability to fix ailing hospitals, David Shulkin was originally brought into government by President Obama, in an attempt to save the broken Department of Veterans Affairs. When President Trump made him the first VA secretary without military experience-a fact Dr. Shulkin first learned from his television-he was as shocked as anyone.Yet this surprise was trivial compared to what Shulkin encountered as the VA secretary: a team of political appointees devoted to stopping anyone -- including the secretary himself -- who stood in the way of privatising the organisation. In this uninhibited memoir, Shulkin opens up about why the government has long struggled to get good medical care to military veterans and how the current government has stopped even trying. This is a book about the commitment we make to the people who risk their lives for our country, how and why we've failed to honour it and why the new administration is making things worse than they've ever been.

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Millions have sat under the "big top," watching as trapeze artists glide and clowns entertain, but few know the captivating stories behind the men who shaped the circus.Battle for the Big Top is the untold story of the battles of the three circus kings--James Bailey, P.T. Barnum, and John Ringling-all vying for control of the vastly profitable and widely influential American Circus.New York Times bestselling author Les Standiford recreates a remarkable era when a community-without regard for gender, creed, or nationality--would be captivated by the spectacle created by three diversely talented individuals who transcended the ordinary. Ultimately, the rivalry of these three men resulted in the creation of an institution that would surpass all intentions and, for 147 years, hold a nation spellbound.Filled with details of their ever-evolving showmanship, business strategies, and personal magnetism, this Ragtime-like narrative will delight and enchant circus-lovers everywhere.

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In Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton takes a tour through contemporary American religiosity. As the once dominant totems of civic connection and civil discourse--traditional churches--continue to sink into obsolescence, people are looking elsewhere for the intensity and unity that religion once provided. We're making our own personal faiths - theistic or not - mixing and matching our spiritual, ritualistic, personal, and political practices in order to create our own bespoke religious selves. We're not just building new religions in 2019, we're buying them, from Gwyneth Paltrow's gospel of Goop, to the brilliantly cultish SoulCycle, to those who believe in their special destiny on Mars.In so doing, we're carrying on a longstanding American tradition of religious eclecticism, DIY-innovation and "unchurched" piety (and highly effective capitalism). Our era is not the dawn of American secularism, but rather a brand-bolstered resurgence of American pluralism, revved into overdrive by commerce and personalized algorithms, all to the tune of "Hallellujah"--America's most popular and spectacularly misunderstood wedding song.

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From historical figures such as Marie Curie to contemporaries such as Steve Jobs, a handful of innovators have changed the world. What made them so spectacularly inventive? Melissa A. Schilling, one of the world's leading experts on innovation, looks at the lives of seven creative geniuses--Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Nicola Tesla, Curie, and Jobs--to identify the traits and quirks that led them to become breakthrough innovators.Though all innovators possess incredible intellect, intellect alone does not create a serial innovator. There are other very strong commonalities: for instance, nearly all exhibit very high levels of social detachment. They all have extreme, almost maniacal, faith in their ability to overcome obstacles. And they have a passionate idealism that pushes them to work with intensity even in the face of criticism or failure. These individual traits would be unlikely to work in isolation--being unconventional without having high levels of confidence and direction, for example, might result in rebellious behavior that does not lead to meaningful innovation.Schilling reveals the science behind the convergence of traits that increases the likelihood of success, and shows us how to nurture and facilitate breakthrough innovation in our own lives.

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Trust is the most powerful force underlying the success of every business. Yet it can be shattered in an instant, with a devastating impact on a company's market cap and reputation. How to build and sustain trust requires fresh insight into why customers, employees, community members, and investors decide whether an organization can be trusted.Based on two decades of research and illustrated through vivid storytelling, Sandra J. Sucher and Shalene Gupta examine the economic impact of trust and the science behind it, and conclusively prove that trust is built from the inside out. Trust emerges from a company being the "real deal": creating products and services that work, having good intentions, treating people fairly, and taking responsibility for all the impacts an organization creates, whether intended or not.When trust is in the room, great things can happen. Sucher and Gupta's innovative foundation for executing the elements of trust-competence, motives, means, impact-explains how trust can be woven into the day-to-day and the long term. Most importantly, even when lost, trust can be regained, as illustrated through their accounts of companies across the globe that pull themselves out of scandal and corruption by rebuilding the vital elements of trust.

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