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The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics
America's political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes listeners from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today's parties, overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld paint unforgettable portraits of figures such as Martin Van Buren, whose pioneering Democrats invented the machinery of the mass political party, and Abraham Lincoln and other heroic Republicans of that party's first generation who stood up to the Slave Power. And they show how today's fractious party politics arose from the ashes of the New Deal order in the 1970s. Activists in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention transformed presidential nominations but failed to lay the foundations for robust, movement-driven parties. Instead, modern American conservatism hollowed out the party system. Party hollowness lies at the heart of our democratic discontents. With historical sweep and political acuity, The Hollow Parties offers answers to pressing questions about how the nation's parties became so dysfunctional-and how they might yet realize their promise.
Daniel Schlozman, Sam Rosenfeld (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)
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The diplomat and historian George F. Kennan (1904-2005) ranks as one of the most important figures in American foreign policy. Drawing on many previously untapped sources, Frank Costigliola's biography offers a new picture of a man of extraordinary ability and ambition whose idea of containing the Soviet Union helped ignite the Cold War but who spent the next half century trying to extinguish it. Always prescient, Kennan in the 1990s warned that the eastward expansion of NATO would spur a new cold war with Russia. Even as Kennan championed rational realism in foreign policy, his personal and professional lives were marked by turmoil. And though he was widely respected and honored by presidents and the public, he judged his career a failure because he had been dropped as a pilot of US foreign policy. Kennan was a trenchant critic of both communism and capitalism, and a pioneering environmentalist. Living between Russia and the US, he witnessed firsthand Stalin's tightening grip on the Soviet Union, the collapse of Europe during WWII, and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. An absorbing portrait of an eloquent, insightful, and sometimes blinkered iconoclast whose ideas are still powerfully relevant, Kennan invites us to imagine a world that Kennan fought for but was unable to bring about-one not of confrontations and crises but of dialogue and diplomacy.
Frank Costigliola (Author), Paul Brion (Narrator)
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The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came To Control Your Life)
Brought to you by Penguin. We live under an ideology that preys on every aspect of our lives: our education and our jobs; our healthcare and our leisure; our relationships and our mental wellbeing; even the planet we inhabit – the very air we breathe. So pervasive has it become that, for most people, it has no name. It seems unavoidable, like a natural law. But trace it back to its roots, and we discover that it is neither inevitable nor immutable. It was conceived, propagated, and then concealed by the powerful few. It is time to bring it into the light - and, in doing so, to find an alternative worth fighting for. Neoliberalism. Do you know what it is? BASED ON A MAJOR MOTION FILM TO BE RELEASED IN 2024 ©2024 George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison (P)2024 Penguin Audio
George Monbiot, Peter Hutchison (Author), George Monbiot, TBD (Narrator)
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The Influence: Understand it, Use it, Resist it
One of the government’s former behavioural scientists reveals how you can do what you want, whilst everybody tries to influence you into doing what they want. Influence makes you think what you think and do as you do. You use it to change the thoughts and behaviours of others – just as others use it change yours. We have been perfecting our influence for millions of years, but in the last 20 years digital technologies have revolutionised how influence works. We are now connected to old school friends and niche interest groups – but unwittingly also to organised criminals, terrorists and hostile states who infiltrate our societies. The course of history is being shaped: elections have been hijacked, lies spread about pandemics and the rapidly heating climate, and information has become as important as bullets and bombs to winning wars. More than ever, influence has become the crucial currency for commercial and political gain: If you don’t understand it, you will likely become its victim. Written by a former government behavioural scientist working at the cutting edge of this field, Influence is a groundbreaking guide to the chaotic and murky world we live in. Through examining five key factors we are taken on a tour from the past to our real-world present, to build a picture of the major role influence plays in everyday life. Influence provides a simple personal plan illustrating how you can use influence to achieve your goals – whether gaining that promotion, getting your friends to a music festival, or your children to eat their greens. But by understanding the nature of influence, you will also see how it is changing in the information age, enabling dangerous adversaries to gain power, leaving our societies in peril. Most importantly, by using the tools of influence you will be empowered to play your part in protecting us – it will be down to you and everyone you know. Influence is a fascinating guide to how you can help by understanding it, using it and resisting it.
Justin Hempson-Jones (Author), Elliot Fitzpatrick, TBD (Narrator)
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Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France
For the past fifty years, the Palestinian question has served as a rallying cry in the struggle for migrant rights in postcolonial France, from the immigrant labor associations of the 1970s and Beur movements of the 1980s to the militant decolonial groups of the 2000s. In Natives against Nativism, Olivia C. Harrison explores the intersection of anticolonial solidarity and antiracist activism from the 1970s to the present. Natives against Nativism analyzes a wide range of texts-novels, memoirs, plays, films, and militant archives-that mobilize the twin figures of the Palestinian and the American Indian in a crossed critique of Eurocolonial modernity. Harrison argues that anticolonial solidarity with Palestinians and Indigenous Americans has been instrumental in developing a sophisticated critique of racism across imperial formations-in this case, France, the United States, and Israel. Serving as the first relational study of antiracism in France, Natives against Nativism observes how claims to indigeneity have been deployed in multiple directions, both in the ongoing struggle for migrant rights and racial justice, and in white nativist claims in France today.
Olivia C. Harrison (Author), Siiri Scott (Narrator)
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They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence
Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces ensured an easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of perpetual war across the globe. Benton describes how seemingly limited war sparked atrocities, from sudden massacres to long campaigns of dispossession and extermination. She brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined 'small' violence as essential to imperial rule and global order. Holding vital lessons for us today, They Called It Peace reveals how the imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order.
Lauren Benton (Author), Raquel Beattie (Narrator)
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Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire
Gaza, home to two million people, continues to face suffocating conditions imposed by Israel. This distinctive anthology imagines what the future of Gaza could be, while reaffirming the critical role of Gaza in Palestinian identity, history, and struggle for liberation. Light in Gaza is a seminal, moving, and wide-ranging anthology of Palestinian writers and artists. It constitutes a collective effort to organize and center Palestinian voices in the ongoing struggle. As political discourse shifts toward futurism as a means of reimagining a better way of living, beyond the violence and limitations of colonialism, Light in Gaza is an urgent and powerful intervention into an important political moment.
Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, Mike Merryman-Lotze (Author), Amin El Gamal, Hanne Rickert, TBD (Narrator)
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Ein Bullshit-Job ist eine Beschäftigungsform, die so völlig sinnlos, unnötig oder schädlich ist, dass selbst der Arbeitnehmer ihre Existenz nicht rechtfertigen kann. Es geht also gerade nicht um Jobs, die niemand machen will, sondern um solche, die eigentlich niemand braucht. Im Jahr 1930 sagte der britische Ökonom John Maynard Keynes voraus, dass durch den technischen Fortschritt heute niemand mehr als 15 Stunden pro Woche arbeiten müsse. Fast ein Jahrhundert danach stellt David Graeber fest, dass die Gegenwart anders aussieht: Die durchschnittliche Arbeitszeit ist gestiegen und immer mehr Menschen üben Tätigkeiten aus, die unproduktiv und daher eigentlich überflüssig sind – als Immobilienmakler, Investmentbanker oder Unternehmensberater. Es sind Jobs, die keinen sinnvollen gesellschaftlichen Beitrag leisten. Es sind Bullshit-Jobs. Warum bezahlt eine Ökonomie solche Tätigkeiten, die sie nicht braucht? Wie ist es zu dieser Entwicklung gekommen? Und was können wir dagegen tun? David Graeber, einer der radikalsten politischen Denker unserer Zeit, geht diesem Phänomen auf den Grund. Ein packendes Plädoyer gegen die Ausweitung sinnloser Arbeit, die die moralischen Grundfesten unserer Gesellschaft ins Wanken bringt. »Eine Einladung zum Umdenken.« Business Bestseller »Drastische Ideen, spannend zu lesen!« P. M.
David Graeber (Author), Michael Jürgen Diekmann (Narrator)
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Adventures in Democracy: The Turbulent World of People Power
Brought to you by Penguin. In a hyper-competitive world obsessed with rankings, super-wealth and greatness, how can we live up to democratic ideals of equality? Erica Benner has spent a lifetime thinking about these questions from different angles in different countries - from post-war Japan, where democracy was imposed on a defeated country, to post-communist Poland, with sudden gaps of wealth and security, and the US and South Africa with their legacies of slavery and racism. Adventures in Democracy draws on her experiences and the deep history of democracies - in ancient Rome and Athens, the American and French revolutions and Renaissance Florence - to offer an unflinching portrait of modern democracy. To salvage democratic institutions and ideals, Benner argues, we need to pay more attention to inequalities and struggles for power among citizens. Probing myths of heroic triumph over tyranny and inexorable progress towards equality, she reveals the vulnerabilities of people power, inviting us to consider why democracy is worth fighting for and the role each citizen must play. ©2024 Erica Benner (P)2024 Penguin Audio
Erica Benner (Author), Louise Brealey, TBD (Narrator)
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Data Grab: The new Colonialism of Big Tech and how to fight back
Brought to you by Penguin. If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product. In the past, colonialism was a landgrab of natural resources, exploitative labour and private property from developing countries. It made shiny promises to modernise and civilise, but actually sought to control. It made native populations sign contracts they didn't understand, and took resources just because they were there. Colonialism has not disappeared it has taken a new form. In the new world order where data is the new oil, big Tech companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources - our data - exploiting our labour and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations and discriminate against us. They tell us this is for our own good, to build innovation and develop new technology. But in fact every time we unthinkingly click 'Accept' on Terms and Conditions, we allow our most personal information to kept indefinitely, repackaged by big Tech companies to control and exploit us for their own profit. This is the era of data colonialism. The new colonial landgrab is a DATAGRAB. In this searing, cutting-edge guide, two leading global researchers and founders of the concept of data colonialism reveal how history can help us understand the emerging future - and how we can fight back. ©2024 Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias (P)2024 Penguin Audio
Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias (Author), Laurence Dobiesz, TBD (Narrator)
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Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World
Brought to you by Penguin. A story of staggering scope and drama, Revolusi is the masterful and definitive account of the epic revolution that sparked the decolonisation of the modern world. On a sunny Friday morning in August 1945, a handful of tired people raised a homemade cotton flag and on behalf of 68 million compatriots announced the birth of a new nation. With the fourth largest population in the world, inhabiting islands that span an eighth of the globe, Indonesia became the first colonised country to declare its independence after the Second World War. Four million civilians had died during the wartime occupation by the Japanese that ousted the Dutch colonial regime. Another 200,000 people would lose their lives in the astonishingly brutal conflict that ensued - as the Dutch used savage violence to reassert their control, and as the Allied troops of Britain and America became embroiled in pacifying Indonesia's guerrilla war of resistance: the 'Revolusi'. It was not until December 1949 that the newly created United Nations convinced the Netherlands to cede all sovereignty to Indonesia, finally ending 350 years of colonial rule and setting a precedent that would reshape the world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and eye-witness testimonies, David Van Reybrouck turns this vast and complex story into an utterly gripping narrative that is alive with human detail at every turn. A landmark publication, Revolusi shows Indonesia's struggle for independence to be one of the defining dramas of the twentieth century and establishes its author as one of the most gifted narrative historians at work in any language today. ©2024 David Van Reybrouck (P)2024 Penguin Audio
David Van Reybrouck (Author), Neil Gardner, TBD (Narrator)
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