Audiobooks Narrated by Patrick Harrison

The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World

'In describing insidiously interconnected global regimes of inequality and injustice, Atossa Abrahamian boldly renews our sense of reality and brilliantly illuminates our political impasse.' - Pankaj Mishra, author of The Age of Anger Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist's riveting account exposes a parallel universe exempt from the laws of the land, and how the wealthy and powerful benefit from it. The map of the globe shows the world we think we know: sovereign nations that grant and restrict their citizens' rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside its neatly delineated borders, however, a parallel universe has been engineered into existence, consisting of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, increasingly for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of the hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed the commodity they had-bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Following its evolution around the world, she reveals how prize-winning economists, eccentric theorists, visionary statesmen, and consultants masterminded its export in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers where immigrants languish in limbo, and charter cities controlled by by foreign governments and multinational foreign corporations-and even into outer space, where tiny Luxembourg aspires to mining rights on asteroids. By mapping the hidden geography that decides who wins and who loses in this new global order-and how it might be otherwise-The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian (Author), Patrick Harrison, TBD (Narrator)

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Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life

A groundbreaking history of how the decades-long war on terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of citizenship down to the cars we bought and TV we watched-by an acclaimed n+1 writer For twenty years after September 11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. With all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home, Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time. In one of them, soldiers fought overseas so that nothing at home would have to change at all. In the other, life in the United States took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, changing people's sense of themselves, their neighbors, and the strangers they sat next to on airplanes. In Homeland, Richard Beck delivers a gripping exploration of how much the war changed life in the United States and explains why there is no going back. Though much has been made of the damage that Donald Trump did to the American political system, Beck argues that it was the war on terror that made Trump's presidency possible, fueling and exacerbating a series of crises that all came to a head with his rise to power. Homeland brilliantly isolates and explores four key issues: the militarism that swept through American politics and culture; the racism and xenophobia that boiled over in much of the country; an economic crisis that, Beck convincingly argues, connects the endurance of the war on terror to at least the end of the Second World War; and a lack of accountability that produced our "impunity culture"-the government-wide inability or refusal to face consequences that has transformed how the U.S. government relates to the people it governs. To see American life through the lens of Homeland's sweeping argument is to understand the roots of our current condition. In its startling analysis of how the war on terror hollowed out the very idea of citizenship in the United States, Beck gives the most compelling explanation yet offered for the ongoing disintegration of America's social, political, and cultural fabric.

Richard Beck (Author), Patrick Harrison, TBD (Narrator)

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Cage Kings: How an Unlikely Group of Moguls, Champions and Hustlers Transformed the UFC into a $10 B

A cultural and business history of the UFC, tracing the unlikely rise of mixed martial arts from what was derided in the '90s as 'human cockfighting' - more violence than sport - to a global pop culture phenomenon. Senator John McCain once decried mixed martial arts as 'human cockfighting,' while the New York Times despaired that the sport offered a 'pay-per-view prism' onto the decline of western civilization. But the violent spectacle of cage fighting no longer feels nearly as scandalous as it did when the sport debuted in 1993. Today, it's spoken of reverentially as a kind of 'human chess' played out in real-time between two bodies and the UFC is one of the most valuable franchises in the world, worth more than any team in the NFL, NBA, or MLB and equal to what Disney paid to acquire Marvel Comics. Once banned in thirty-six states and hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, the UFC has evolved into a $10 billion industry. How did cage fighting go so mainstream? A rollicking behind-the-scenes account of one of the most spectacular upsets in American sports history, Kings of the Cage follows the desperate fighters, audacious promoters, fanboy bloggers, fatherly trainers, philosophical announcers, hustling sponsors, and three improbable twentysomething corporate titans on a darkly comic odyssey to normalize a new level of brutality in American pop culture-and make a fortune doing so. Stylishly written and poignantly observed, the book offers a provocative look at how the hollowing out of the American dream over the past three decades and the violence endemic to modern capitalism left us ready to embrace a sport like cage fighting.

Michael Thomsen (Author), Patrick Harrison (Narrator)

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