Best of
Journalism

2019

No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us


Rachel Louise Snyder - 2019
    Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores not only the dark corners of private violence, but also its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators


Ronan Farrow - 2019
    As Farrow drew closer to the truth, shadowy operatives, from high-priced lawyers to elite war-hardened spies, mounted a secret campaign of intimidation, threatening his career, following his every move and weaponizing an account of abuse in his own family.All the while, Farrow and his producer faced a degree of resistance that could not be explained - until now. And a trail of clues revealed corruption and cover-ups from Hollywood, to Washington, and beyond.This is the untold story of the exotic tactics of surveillance and intimidation deployed by wealthy and connected men to threaten journalists, evade accountability and silence victims of abuse - and it's the story of the women who risked everything to expose the truth and spark a global movement.Both a spy thriller and a meticulous work of investigative journalism, Catch and Kill breaks devastating new stories about the rampant abuse of power - and sheds far-reaching light on investigations that shook the culture.In a dramatic account of violence and espionage, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Ronan Farrow exposes serial abusers and a cabal of powerful interests hell-bent on covering up the truth, at any cost.

She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement


Jodi Kantor - 2019
    For months Kantor and Twohey had been having confidential discussions with top actresses, former Weinstein employees and other sources, learning of disturbing long-buried allegations, some of which had been covered up by onerous legal settlements. The journalists meticulously picked their way through a web of decades-old secret payouts and nondisclosure agreements, pressed some of the most famous women in the world--and some unknown ones--to risk going on the record, and faced down Weinstein, his team of high-priced defenders, and even his private investigators. But nothing could have prepared them for what followed the publication of their Weinstein story. Within days, a veritable Pandora's Box of sexual harassment and abuse was opened, and women who had suffered in silence for generations began coming forward, trusting that the world would understand their stories. Over the next twelve months, hundreds of men from every walk of life and industry would be outed for mistreating their colleagues. But did too much change--or not enough? Those questions plunged the two journalists into a new phase of reporting and some of their most startling findings yet. With superlative detail, insight, and journalistic expertise, Kantor and Twohey take us for the first time into the very heart of this social shift, reliving in real-time what it took to get the story and giving an up-close portrait of the forces that hindered and spurred change. They describe the surprising journeys of those who spoke up--for the sake of other women, for future generations, and for themselves--and so changed us all.

Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing


Robert A. Caro - 2019
    He describes what it was like to interview the mighty Robert Moses; what it felt like to begin discovering the extent of the political power Moses wielded; the combination of discouragement and exhilaration he felt confronting the vast holdings of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas; his encounters with witnesses, including longtime residents wrenchingly displaced by the construction of Moses’ Cross-Bronx Expressway and Lady Bird Johnson acknowledging the beauty and influence of one of LBJ’s mistresses. He gratefully remembers how, after years of loneliness, he found a writers’ community at the New York Public Library’s Frederick Lewis Allen Room and details the ways he goes about planning and composing his books. Caro recalls the moments at which he came to understand that he wanted to write not just about the men who wielded power but about the people and the politics that were shaped by that power. And he talks about the importance to him of the writing itself, of how he tries to infuse it with a sense of place and mood to bring characters and situations to life on the page. Taken together, these reminiscences–some previously published, some written expressly for this book–bring into focus the passion, the wry self-deprecation, and the integrity with which this brilliant historian has always approached his work.

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom


Katherine Eban - 2019
    Drawing on exclusive accounts from whistleblowers and regulators, as well as thousands of pages of confidential FDA documents, Eban reveals an industry where fraud is rampant, companies routinely falsify data, and executives circumvent almost every principle of safe manufacturing to minimize cost and maximize profit, confident in their ability to fool inspectors. Meanwhile, patients unwittingly consume medicine with unpredictable and dangerous effects.The story of generic drugs is truly global. It connects middle America to China, India, sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil, and represents the ultimate litmus test of globalization: what are the risks of moving drug manufacturing offshore, and are they worth the savings? A decade-long investigation with international sweep, high-stakes brinkmanship and big money at its core, Bottle of Lies reveals how the world’s greatest public-health innovation has become one of its most astonishing swindles.

Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World


Zahra Hankir - 2019
     In Our Women on the Ground, nineteen of these women tell us, in their own words, about what it's like to report on conflicts that are (quite literally) close to home. From sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo to the impossibility of traveling without a male relative in Yemen, their challenges are unique—as are their advantages, such as being able to speak candidly with other women or gain entry to places that an outsider would never be able to access. Their daring, shocking, and heartfelt stories, told here for the first time, shatter stereotypes about Arab women and provide an urgently needed perspective on a part of the world that is often misunderstood. INCLUDING ESSAYS BY: Donna Abu-Nasr, Aida Alami, Hannah Allam, Jane Arraf, Lina Attalah, Nada Bakri, Shamael Elnoor, Zaina Erhaim, Asmaa al-Ghoul, Hind Hassan, Eman Helal, Zeina Karam, Roula Khalaf, Nour Malas, Hwaida Saad, Amira Al-Sharif, Heba Shibani, Lina Sinjab, and Natacha Yazbeck

The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment


Amelia Gentleman - 2019
    Her tenacious reporting revealed how the government's 'hostile environment' immigration policy had led to thousands of law-abiding people being wrongly classified as illegal immigrants, with many being removed from the country, and many more losing their homes and their jobs.In The Windrush Betrayal Gentleman tells the full story of her investigation for the first time. Her writing shines a light on the people directly affected by the scandal and illustrates the devastating effect of politicians becoming so disconnected from the world outside Westminster that they become oblivious to the impact of their policy decisions. This is a vitally important account that exposes deeply disturbing truths about modern Britain.

The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution


Peter Hessler - 2019
    He wanted to learn Arabic, explore Cairo's neighborhoods, and visit the legendary archaeological digs of Upper Egypt. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker, friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring had begun, and now the country was in chaos.In the midst of the revolution, Hessler often traveled to digs at Amarna and Abydos, where locals live beside the tombs of kings and courtiers, a landscape that they call simply al-Madfuna "the Buried." He and his wife set out to master Arabic, striking up a friendship with their instructor, a cynical political sophisticate. They also befriended Peter's translator, a gay man struggling to find happiness in Egypt's homophobic culture. A different kind of friendship was formed with the neighborhood garbage collector, an illiterate but highly perceptive man named Sayyid, whose access to the trash of Cairo would be its own kind of archaeological excavation. Hessler also met a family of Chinese small-business owners in the lingerie trade; their view of the country proved a bracing counterpoint to the West's conventional wisdom.Through the lives of these and other ordinary people in a time of tragedy and heartache, and through connections between contemporary Egypt and its ancient past, Hessler creates an astonishing portrait of a country and its people. What emerges is a book of uncompromising intelligence and humanity--the story of a land in which a weak state has collapsed but its underlying society remains in many ways painfully the same. A worthy successor to works like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, The Buried bids fair to be recognized as one of the great books of our time.

Charged: Overzealous Prosecutors, the Quest for Mercy, and the Fight to Transform Criminal Justice in America


Emily Bazelon - 2019
    But in practice, it is prosecutors who have the upper hand, in a contest that is far from equal. More than anyone else, prosecutors decide who goes free and who goes to prison, and even who lives and who dies. The system wasn't designed for this kind of unchecked power, and in Charged, Emily Bazelon shows that it is an underreported cause of enormous injustice—and the missing piece in the mass incarceration puzzle.But that's only half the story. Prosecution in America is at a crossroads. The power of prosecutors makes them the actors in the system—the only actors—who can fix what's broken without changing a single law. They can end mass incarceration, protect against coercive plea bargains and convicting the innocent, and tackle racial bias. And because in almost every state we, the people, elect prosecutors, it is within our power to reshape the choices they make. In the last few years, for the first time in American history, a wave of reform-minded prosecutors has taken office in major cities throughout the country. Bazelon follows them, showing the difference they make for people caught in the system and how they are coming together as a new kind of lobby for justice and mercy.In Charged, Emily Bazelon mounts a major critique of the American criminal justice system—and also offers a way out.

Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation


Andrew Marantz - 2019
     For several years, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, has been embedded in two worlds. The first is the world of social-media entrepreneurs, who, acting out of naïvete and reckless ambition, upended all traditional means of receiving and transmitting information. The second is the world of the people he calls "the gate crashers"—the conspiracists, white supremacists, and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda. Antisocial ranges broadly—from the first mass-printed books to the trending hashtags of the present; from secret gatherings of neo-Fascists to the White House press briefing room—and traces how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then how it becomes reality. Combining the keen narrative detail of Bill Buford's Among the Thugs and the sweep of George Packer's The Unwinding, Antisocial reveals how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in a deeply broken informational landscape—the landscape in which we all now live. Marantz shows how alienated young people are led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization, and how fringe ideas spread—from anonymous corners of social media to cable TV to the President's Twitter feed. Marantz also sits with the creators of social media as they start to reckon with the forces they've unleashed. Will they be able to solve the communication crisis they helped bring about, or are their interventions too little too late?

Had It Coming: What's Fair in the Age of #MeToo?


Robyn Doolittle - 2019
    Her findings were shocking: across the country, in big cities and small towns, the system was dismissing a high number of allegations as "unfounded." A police officer would simply view the claim as baseless and no investigation would follow. Of the 26,500 reported cases of sexual assault in 2015, only 1,400 resulted in convictions.The response to Doolittle's groundbreaking Unfounded series was swift. Federal ministers immediately vowed to establish better oversight, training, and policies; Prime Minister Trudeau announced $100 million to combat gender-based violence; Statistics Canada began to collect and publish unfounded rates; and to date, about a third of the country's forces have pledged to review more than 10,000 sex-assault cases dating back to 2010.Had It Coming picks up where the Unfounded series left off. Doolittle brings a personal voice to what has been a turning point for most women: the #MeToo movement and its aftermath. The world is now increasingly aware of the pervasiveness of rape culture in which powerful men got away with sexual assault and harassment for years: from Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Bill O'Reilly, and Matt Lauer, to Charlie Rose and Jian Ghomeshi. But Doolittle looks beyond specific cases to the big picture. The issue of "consent" figures largely: not only is the public confused about what it means, but an astounding number of police officers and judges do not understand Canadian consent law. The brain's reaction to trauma and how it affects memory is also crucial to understanding victim statements. Surprisingly, Canada has the most progressive sexual assault laws in the developed world, yet the system is failing victims at every stage.Had It Coming is not a diatribe or manifesto, but a nuanced and informed look at how attitudes around sexual behaviour have changed and still need to change.

The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle


Kent Alexander - 2019
    Inside was a bomb, the largest of its kind in FBI and ATF history. Minutes later, the bomb detonated amid a crowd of fifty thousand people. But thanks to Jewell, it only wounded 111 and killed two, not the untold scores who would have otherwise died. With the eyes of the world on Atlanta, the Games continued. But the pressure to find the bomber was intense. Within seventy-two hours, Jewell went from the hero to the FBI’s main suspect. The news leaked and the intense focus on the guard forever changed his life. The worst part: It let the true bomber roam free to strike again.  What really happened that evening during the Olympic Games? The attack left a mark on American history, but most of what we remember is wrong. In a triumph of reporting and access in the tradition of the best investigative journalism, former U.S. Attorney Kent Alexander and former Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Salwen reconstruct all the events leading up to, during, and after the Olympic bombing from mountains of law enforcement evidence and the extensive personal records of key players, including Richard himself.The Suspect, the culmination of more than five years of reporting, is a gripping story of the rise of domestic terrorism in America, the advent of the 24/7 news cycle, and an innocent man’s fight to clear his name.

How to Feed a Dictator: Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot Through the Eyes of Their Cooks


Witold Szabłowski - 2019
    Dishy, deliciously readable, and dead serious, How to Feed a Dictator provides a knife’s-edge view of life under tyranny.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber


Mike Isaac - 2019
    Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley.Award-winning New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against an era of rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley. Backed by billions in venture capital dollars and led by a brash and ambitious founder, Uber promised to revolutionize the way we move people and goods through the world. A near instant “unicorn,” Uber seemed poised to take its place next to Amazon, Apple, and Google as a technology giant.What followed would become a corporate cautionary tale about the perils of startup culture and a vivid example of how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong. Isaac recounts Uber’s pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company’s toxic internal culture, and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance. With billions of dollars at stake, Isaac shows how venture capitalists asserted their power and seized control of the startup as it fought its way toward its fateful IPO.Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history.

Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another


Matt Taibbi - 2019
    reveals that what most people think of as "the news" is, in fact, a twisted wing of the entertainment businessIn this characteristically turbocharged new book, celebrated Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi provides an insider's guide to the variety of ways today's mainstream media tells us lies. Part tirade, part confessional, it reveals that what most people think of as "the news" is, in fact, a twisted wing of the entertainment business.In the Internet age, the press have mastered the art of monetizing anger, paranoia, and distrust. Taibbi, who has spent much of his career covering elections in which this kind of manipulative activity is most egregious, provides a rich taxonomic survey of American political journalism's dirty tricks.Heading into a 2020 election season that promises to be a Great Giza Pyramid Complex of invective and digital ugliness, Hate Inc. will be an invaluable antidote to the hidden poisons dished up by those we rely on to tell us what is happening in the world.

Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family's Lust for Power Destroyed Syria


Sam Dagher - 2019
    Tlass pushed for conciliation but Assad decided to crush the uprising -- an act which would catapult the country into an eight-year long war, killing almost half a million and fueling terrorism and a global refugee crisis.Assad or We Burn the Country examines Syria's tragedy through the generational saga of the Assad and Tlass families, once deeply intertwined and now estranged in Bashar's bloody quest to preserve his father's inheritance. By drawing on his own reporting experience in Damascus and exclusive interviews with Tlass, Dagher takes readers within palace walls to reveal the family behind the destruction of a country and the chaos of an entire region.Dagher shows how one of the world's most vicious police states came to be and explains how a regional conflict extended globally, engulfing the Middle East and pitting the United States and Russia against one another.

The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption


Dahr Jamail - 2019
    In response, Jamail embarks on a journey to the geographical front lines of this crisis—from Alaska to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, via the Amazon rainforest—in order to discover the consequences to nature and to humans of the loss of ice.We follow Jamail as he scales Denali, the highest peak in North America, dives in the Pacific only to find ghostly coral reefs, and explores the tundra of St. Paul Island where he meets the last subsistence seal hunters of the Bering Sea and witnesses its melting glaciers. Accompanied by climate scientists and people whose families have fished, farmed, and lived in the areas he visits for centuries, Jamail begins to accept the fact that Earth, most likely, is in a hospice situation. Ironically, this allows him to renew his passion for the planet’s wild places, cherishing Earth in a way he has never been able to before.le we still can.

Airhead: The Imperfect Art of Making News


Emily Maitlis - 2019
    How it came about. How it ended. The compromises that were made. The regrets, the rows, the deeply inappropriate comedy.Making news is an essential but imperfect art, and it rarely goes according to plan.I never expected to find myself wandering around the Maharani of Jaipur's bedroom with Bill Clinton or invited to the Miss USA beauty pageant by its owner, Donald Trump. I never expected to be thrown into a provincial Cuban jail, or to be drinking red wine at Steve Bannon's kitchen table or spend three hours in a lift with Alan Partridge.I certainly didn't expect the Dalai Lama to tell me the story of his most memorable poo.The beauty of television is its ability to simplify, but that's also its weakness: it can distil everything down to one snapshot, one soundbite. Then the news cycle moves on.

Unfreedom of the Press


Mark R. Levin - 2019
    Levin shows how those entrusted with news reporting today are destroying freedom of the press from within: “not government oppression or suppression,” he writes, but self-censorship, group-think, bias by omission, and passing off opinion, propaganda, pseudo-events, and outright lies as news. With the depth of historical background for which his books are renowned, Levin takes the reader on a journey through the early American patriot press, which proudly promoted the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, followed by the early decades of the Republic during which newspapers around the young country were open and transparent about their fierce allegiance to one political party or the other. It was only at the start of the Progressive Era and the twentieth century that the supposed “objectivity of the press” first surfaced, leaving us where we are today: with a partisan party-press overwhelmingly aligned with a political ideology but hypocritically engaged in a massive untruth as to its real nature.

Fixed It: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media


Jane Gilmore - 2019
    Far too many Australian women have experienced physical or sexual violence. Only rarely do these women capture the attention of the media and the public. What can we do to stem the tide of violence and tragedy?Finally, we are starting to talk about this epidemic of gendered violence, but too often we are doing so in a way that can be clumsy and harmful. Victim blaming, passive voice and over-identification with abusers continue to be hallmarks of reporting on this issue. And, with newsrooms drastically cutting staff and resources, and new business models driven by rapid churn and the 24 hour news cycle journalists and editors often don't have the time or resources bring new ways of thinking into their newsrooms.Fixed It demonstrates the myths that we’re unconsciously sold about violence against women, and undercuts them in a clear and compelling way. This is a bold, powerful look at the stories we are told – and the stories we tell ourselves – about gender and power, and a call to action for all of us to think harder and do better.

The Scandal of the Century: And Other Writings


Gabriel García Márquez - 2019
    And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a representative selection from across the first four decades of his career–years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982. Here are the first pieces he wrote while working for newspapers in the coastal Colombian cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla . . . his longer, more fictionlike reportage from Paris and Rome . . . his monthly columns for Spain’s El País. And while all the work points in style, wit, depth, and passion to his fiction, these fifty pieces are, more than anything, a revelation of the writer working at the profession he believed to be “the best in the world.”

Bill Cunningham: On the Street: Five Decades of Iconic Photography


The New York Times - 2019
    "A dazzling kaleidoscope from the gaze of an artist who saw beauty at every turn."--Andr� Leon TalleyBill Cunningham's photography captured the evolution of style, of trends, and of the everyday, both in New York City and in Paris. But his work also shows that street style is not only about fashion; it's about the people and the changing culture.These photographs--many never before seen, others having originally appeared in The New York Times and elsewhere--move from decade to decade, beginning in the 1970s and continuing until Cunningham's death in 2016. Here you'll find Cunningham's distinctive chronicling of the 1980s transit strike, the rise of 1990s casual Fridays, the sadness that fell over the city following 9/11, Inauguration Day 2009, the onset of selfies, and many other significant moments.This enduring portfolio is enriched by essays that provide a revealing portrait of Cunningham and a few of his many fascinations and influences, contributed by Cathy Horyn, Tiina Loite, Vanessa Friedman, Ruth La Ferla, Guy Trebay, Penelope Green, Jacob Bernstein, and a much favored subject, Anna Wintour. More than anything, On the Street is a timeless representation of Cunningham's commitment to capturing the here and now."An absolute delight."--People

The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America


Jim Acosta - 2019
    In Mr. Trump’s campaign against what he calls “Fake News,” CNN Chief White House Correspondent, Jim Acosta, is public enemy number one. From the moment Mr. Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he has attacked the media, calling journalists “the enemy of the people.” Acosta presents a revealing examination of bureaucratic dysfunction, deception, and the unprecedented threat the rhetoric Mr. Trump is directing has on our democracy. When the leader of the free world incites hate and violence, Acosta doesn’t back down, and he urges his fellow citizens to do the same. At CNN, Acosta offers a never-before-reported account of what it’s like to be the President’s least favorite correspondent. Acosta goes head-to-head with the White House, even after Trump supporters have threatened his life with words as well as physical violence. From the hazy denials and accusations meant to discredit the Mueller investigation, to the president’s scurrilous tweets, Jim Acosta is in the eye of the storm while reporting live to millions of people across the world. After spending hundreds of hours with the revolving door of White House personnel, Acosta paints portraits of the personalities of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Sean Spicer, Hope Hicks, Jared Kushner and more. Acosta is tenacious and unyielding in his public battle to preserve the First Amendment and #RealNews.

Homegrown: How the Red Sox Built a Champion from the Ground Up


Alex Speier - 2019
    The best team in Major League Baseball-indeed, one of the best teams ever-the Sox won 108 regular season games and then romped through the postseason, going 11-3 against the three next-strongest teams baseball had to offer.As Boston Globe baseball reporter Alex Speier reveals, the Sox' success wasn't a fluke-nor was it guaranteed. It was the result of careful, patient planning and shrewd decision-making that allowed the Boston to develop a golden generation of prospects-and then build upon that talented core to assemble a formidable champion. Speier has covered the key players-Mookie Betts, Andrew Benintendi, Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers, Jackie Bradley, Matt Barnes, and many others-since the beginning of their professional careers, as they rose through the minor leagues and ultimately became the heart of this historic championship squad. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews and years of reporting, Homegrown is the definitive look at the construction and ascendency of an extraordinary team.It is a story that offers startling insights for baseball fans of any team, and anyone looking for the secret to building a successful organization. Why do many highly touted prospects fail, while others rise out of obscurity to become transcendent? How can franchises help young players reach their full potential? And why, when teams invest tens of millions of dollars in young talent, are they so poor at providing them with a framework to thrive?Illustrated with eight pages of color photographs, Homegrown is the fascinating inside account of one of the greatest baseball teams ever, and a meditation on how to build a winner.

Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America


Chris Arnade - 2019
    Arnade's raw, deeply reported accounts cut through today's clickbait media headlines and indict the elitists who misunderstood poverty and addiction in America for decades.After abandoning his Wall Street career, Arnade decided to document poverty and addiction in the Bronx. He began interviewing, photographing, and becoming close friends with homeless addicts, and spent hours in drug dens and McDonald's. Then he started driving across America to see how the rest of the country compared. He found the same types of stories everywhere, across lines of race, ethnicity, religion, and geography.The people he got to know, from Alabama and California to Maine and Nevada, gave Arnade a new respect for the dignity and resilience of what he calls America's Back Row--those who lack the credentials and advantages of the so-called meritocratic upper class. The strivers in the Front Row, with their advanced degrees and upward mobility, see the Back Row's values as worthless. They scorn anyone who stays in a dying town or city as foolish, and mock anyone who clings to religion or tradition as naive.As Takeesha, a woman in the Bronx, told Arnade, she wants to be seen she sees herself: "a prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God." This book is his attempt to help the rest of us truly see, hear, and respect millions of people who've been left behind.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2019


Sy Montgomery - 2019
    “Science is important because this is how we seek to discover the truth about the world. And this is what makes excellent science and nature writing essential,” observes New York Times best-selling author Sy Montgomery. “Science and nature writing are how we share the truth about the universe with the people of the world.” And collected here are truths about nearly every corner of the universe. From meditations on extinction, to the search for alien life, to the prejudice that infects our medical system, the pieces in this year’s Best American Science and Nature Writing seek to bring to the people stories of some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, as well as moments of wonder reflecting the immense beauty our natural world offers.

Welcome to Hell World


Luke O'Neil - 2019
    When he’s awake, he gives vent to some of the most heartfelt, political and anger-fueled prose to power its way to the public sphere since Hunter S. Thompson smashed a typewriter’s keys.Welcome to Hell World is an unexpurgated selection of Luke O’Neil’s finest rants, near-poetic rhapsodies, and investigatory journalism. Racism, sexism, immigration, unemployment, Marcus Aurelius, opioid addiction, Iraq: all are processed through the O’Neil grinder. He details failings in his own life and in those he observes around him: and the result is a book that is at once intensely confessional and an energetic, unforgettable condemnation of American mores.Welcome to Hell World is, in the author’s words, a “fever dream nightmare of reporting and personal essays from one of the lowest periods in our country in recent memory.” It is also a burning example of some of the best writing you’re likely to read anywhere.____________________________________________________________________________"Luke O’Neil is not on staff. " — The Boston Globe"Unbelievable." —Ben Shapiro"The Left’s new low." —Tucker Carlson"A widely read, offbeat newsletter… " —Mike Isaac, The New York Times"Luke O’Neil is one of the few writers who faces our grim reality the way it is, and not the way we wish it was. Compiling Hell World is a sin-eater’s task, and we are indebted to him for doing it.”—Dan Ozzi, co-author of Tranny"One of my favorite things I read all year…” —Frida Garza, Jezebel’s The Best Political Writing 2018"Welcome to Hell World is a distress call from a place where hope still exists, dispatched by a man who clearly sees the insanity of life in America and believes it doesn’t have to be this way.” —Keith Buckley of Every Time I Die, author of Watch"Luke O’Neil is like no other journalist working today, fusing original reporting with memoir and frequently-profane observational humor to create what feels like a new type of truth-telling: precise, fucked-up, infuriating, and, somehow, beautiful. ...This is what it looks like when a gifted writer finds his voice.” —Hamish McKenzie, co-founder of Substack and author of Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil

Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts


David E. McCraw - 2019
    McCraw recounts his experiences as the top newsroom lawyer for the New York Times during the most turbulent era for journalism in generations.In October 2016, when Donald Trump's lawyer demanded that The New York Times retract an article focused on two women that accused Trump of touching them inappropriately, David McCraw's scathing letter of refusal went viral and he became a hero of press freedom everywhere. But as you'll see in Truth in Our Times, for the top newsroom lawyer at the paper of record, it was just another day at the office.McCraw has worked at the Times since 2002, leading the paper's fight for freedom of information, defending it against libel suits, and providing legal counsel to the reporters breaking the biggest stories of the year. In short: if you've read a controversial story in the paper since the Bush administration, it went across his desk first. From Chelsea Manning's leaks to Trump's tax returns, McCraw is at the center of the paper's decisions about what news is fit to print.In Truth in Our Times, McCraw recounts the hard legal decisions behind the most impactful stories of the last decade with candor and style. The book is simultaneously a rare peek behind the curtain of the celebrated organization, a love letter to freedom of the press, and a decisive rebuttal of Trump's fake news slur through a series of hard cases. It is an absolute must-have for any dedicated reader of The New York Times.

The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity


Lewis Raven Wallace - 2019
    #BlackLivesMatter. #NeverAgain. #WontBeErased. Though both the right- and left-wing media claim “objectivity” in their reporting of these and other contentious issues, the American public has become increasingly cynical about truth, fact, and reality. In The View from Somewhere, Lewis Raven Wallace dives deep into the history of “objectivity” in journalism and how its been used to gatekeep and silence marginalized writers as far back as Ida B. Wells.   At its core, this is a book about fierce journalists who have pursued truth and transparency and sometimes been punished for it—not just by tyrannical governments but by journalistic institutions themselves. He highlights the stories of journalists who question “objectivity” with sensitivity and passion: Desmond Cole of the Toronto Star; New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse; Pulitzer Prize-winner Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah; Peabody-winning podcaster John Biewen; Guardian correspondent Gary Younge; former Buzzfeed reporter Meredith Talusan; and many others. Wallace also shares his own experiences as a midwestern transgender journalist and activist who was fired from his job as a national reporter for public radio for speaking out against “objectivity” in coverage of Trump and white supremacy.    With insightful steps through history, Wallace stresses that journalists have never been mere passive observers—the choices they make reflect worldviews tinted by race, class, gender, and geography. He upholds the centrality of facts and the necessary discipline of verification but argues against the long-held standard of “objective” media coverage that asks journalists to claim they are without bias. Using historical and contemporary examples—from lynching in the nineteenth century to transgender issues in the twenty-first—Wallace offers a definitive critique of “objectivity” as a catchall for accurate journalism. He calls for the dismissal of this damaging mythology in order to confront the realities of institutional power, racism, and other forms of oppression and exploitation in the news industry.   Now more than ever, journalism that resists extractive, exploitive, and tokenistic practices toward marginalized people isn’t just important—it is essential. Combining Wallace’s intellectual and emotional journey with the wisdom of others’ experiences, The View from Somewhere is a compelling rallying cry against journalist neutrality and for the validity of news told from distinctly subjective voices.

Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS


Azadeh Moaveni - 2019
    Emma from Hamburg, Sharmeena and three high school friends from London, Nour, a religious dropout from Tunis: all found rebellion or community in political Islam and fell prey to sophisticated propaganda that promised them a cosmopolitan adventure and a chance to forge an ideal Islamic community where they could live devoutly without fear of stigma or repression. It wasn’t long before the militants exposed themselves as little more than violent criminals, more obsessed with power than the tenets of Islam, and the women of ISIS were stripped of any agency, perpetually widowed and remarried, and ultimately trapped in a brutal, lawless society. The fall of the caliphate only brought new challenges to women no state wanted to reclaim. Moaveni’s sensitivity and reporting makes these forgotten women indelible and illuminates the turbulent politics that set them on their paths.

Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning


Elliot Ackerman - 2019
    At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after establishing a rapport with Abu Hassar, he takes a risk by revealing to him that in fact he was a Marine special operation officer. Ackerman then draws the shape of the Euphrates River on a large piece of paper, and his one-time adversary quickly joins him in the game of filling in the map with the names and dates of places where they saw fighting during the war. They had shadowed each other for some time, it turned out, a realization that brought them to a strange kind of intimacy.The rest of Elliot Ackerman's extraordinary memoir is in a way an answer to the question of why he came to that refugee camp, and what he hoped to find there. By moving back and forth between his recent experiences on the ground as a journalist in Syria and its environs and his deeper past in Iraq and Afghanistan, he creates a work of remarkable atmospheric pressurization. Ackerman shares vivid and powerful stories of his own experiences in combat, culminating in the events of the Second Battle of Fallujah, the most intense urban combat for the Marines since Hue in Vietnam, where Ackerman's actions leading a rifle platoon saw him awarded the Silver Star. He weaves these stories into the latticework of a masterful larger reckoning with contemporary geopolitics through his vantage as a journalist in Istanbul and with the human extremes of both bravery and horror.At once an intensely personal story about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the larger meaning of the past two decades of strife for America, the region, and the world, Places and Names bids fair to take its place among our greatest books about modern war.

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich Are Stealing Canada’s Public Wealth


Linda McQuaig - 2019
    Another popular movement succeeded in establishing Canada’s public broadcasting system to counter American dominance of the airwaves. And a Canadian doctor created a publicly-owned laboratory that saved countless lives by producing affordable medications, contributing to medical breakthroughs and helping eradicate smallpox throughout the world.In recent decades, however, Canadians have allowed their inspiring public enterprises to be privatized and their vital public programs downsized, leaving them increasingly dominated by the forces of private greed that rule the marketplace.In this provocative book, Linda McQuaig challenges the dogma of privatization that has defined our political age. She argues that, particularly now as we grapple with climate change and income inequality, we need to expand, not shrink, our public sphere.

Murder on the Malta Express: Who Killed Daphne Caruana Galizia?


Carlo Bonini - 2019
    She was Malta’s most fearless journalist until someone with money and power decided that she should be silenced forever. Her assassination was a brutal blow to anyone who cares about the truth.Their book sets out the evidence on the dirty money merchants exposed by Daphne Caruana Galizia. It is written in her honour.

The Sun King


David Dimbleby - 2019
    He is a disruptor who has changed the nature of our politics with a steadfast focus on giving the people what he believes they want. But to what extent has Murdoch shaped our modern world? Has he created new audiences, or given existing, under-served audiences a voice? And what motivates the media mogul? Money or power?Broadcaster David Dimbleby, one of the UK’s most respected politics and current affairs journalists, has followed Murdoch’s career for more than five decades. In this series he charts the rise of the man they call The Sun King, beginning when the 38-year-old Australian newspaper executive arrived in London in 1968 and the two men met for the first time.Dimbleby tells the story of how Murdoch turned The Sun from a serious and staid broadsheet into the UK’s most widely read tabloid newspaper, before moving to the US to take on the New York Post. He explores Murdoch’s war against the British print unions and how eventual victory helped him gain access to the highest echelons of power in Britain. But this is not just about Murdoch’s rise and rise, Dimbleby also investigates the media mogul’s lowest moment – the phone hacking scandal and how it almost brought his empire crashing down. Finally, he tells the story of the origins of Fox News in the US and how that TV channel helped create a president.Talking to people who have worked with Murdoch and against him, David asks what Murdoch’s special insight is when it comes to building an audience. And how has that insight – the idea of giving people what they want – affected our politics? How influential is Murdoch really and what does that mean for us as a society? At a time when Murdoch’s relationship with Trump might leave him in his most powerful position yet, who is the man they call The Sun King?©2019 Audible, Ltd. (P)2019 Audible, Ltd.

The Weight of a Moment


Michael Bowe - 2019
    On list of “10 Best Indie Books of 2019” at Shelf Unbound Magazine. Finalist for Best Novel at the Next Generation Book Awards 2020, (often referred to as the "Sundance of Books" in the media). Winner of a Bronze Medal at the Readers' Favorite Awards 2020."Emotionally rich, psychologically exciting, and inspiring" - Readers' Favorite”The Weight of a Moment is the best book I have read in a long time.” – Linda Carson, Host, Suncoast View, ABC 7, Sarasota FL"Profound...replete with startling twists and turns" - Seattle Book Review “One of the most compelling and thought-provoking pieces of literature I’ve read in quite some time.” - Blogger, booksinmylibraryblog .wordpress .comAnd, Goodreads reviewers praised it also, calling it “profound,” “beautifully written,” "relevant," "powerful," and “one of the best books I’ve read this year.” Critically acclaimed, this second novel from the author of Skyscraper of a Man is a brilliant sophomore effort.The Weight of a Moment is a beautiful story about the fragility of life and the redemptive power of friendship. Nick Sterling, a Fenwick Prize winning journalist, can't move beyond a tragedy caused by one of his articles. Tom Corbett, a successful antiques dealer, is humiliated and shamed by an internet video that damages his business, marriage, and family. After their blunders, one shameful and one fatal, the two men run from their pasts, meet in a small Pennsylvania town, and, despite—or because of—the most unusual circumstances, help each other find redemption. Together, they make an unusual discovery that changes everything, one that unwittingly puts them back onto the national stage. Joined by fate, each man's journey is remarkable in its own right and only exceeded by their shared journey. In a profound final scene, Nick confronts his tragic mistake, asks for forgiveness, and the novel's title, The Weight of a Moment, is fully realized. Contrasting elements: big cities and small towns, modern and historic, priceless and valuable, compassion and condemnation, add to the richness of the tale. Critically acclaimed, this second novel from the author of Skyscraper of a Man is a brilliant sophomore effort.

Make Noise: A Creator's Guide to Podcasting and Great Audio Storytelling


Eric Nuzum - 2019
      Nuzum identifies core principles, including what he considers the key to successful audio storytelling: learning to think the way your audience listens. He delivers essential how-tos, from conducting an effective interview to marketing your podcast, developing your audience, and managing a creative team. He also taps into his deep network to offer advice from audio stars like Ira Glass, Terry Gross, and Anna Sale.   The book’s insights and guidance will help readers successfully express themselves as effective audio storytellers, whether for business or pleasure, or a mixture of both.

Hello, Shadowlands: Inside the Meth Fiefdoms, Rebel Hideouts and Bomb-Scarred Party Towns of Southeast Asia


Patrick Winn - 2019
    Essential to understanding Southeast Asia in the 21st century, Hello, Shadowlands reveals a booming underworld of organised crime across a region in flux— a $100 billion trade that deals in narcotics, animals and people —and the staggering human toll that is being steadily ignored by the West.

Outside the Gates of Eden


Lewis Shiner - 2019
    Outside the Gates of Eden follows two men from their first meeting in high school to their final destination in the twenty-first century. Alex is torn between his father’s business empire and his own artistic yearnings. Cole finds his calling at a Bob Dylan concert in 1965. From the Summer of Love in San Francisco to Woodstock, from campus protests to the SoHo loft scene, from a commune in Virginia to the outlaw country music of Austin, the novel charts the rise and fall of the counterculture—and what came after. Using the music business as a window into half a century, Outside the Gates of Eden is both epic and intimate, starkly realistic and ultimately hopeful, a War and Peace for the Woodstock generation.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement


Dave Cullen - 2019
    David Hogg called out Adult America. The uprising had begun. Cameron Kasky immediately recruited a colorful band of theatre kids and rising activists and brought them together in his living room to map out a movement. Four days after escaping Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, two dozen extraordinary kids announced the audacious March for Our Lives. A month later, it was the fourth largest protest in American history.Dave Cullen, who has been reporting on the epidemic of school shootings for two decades, takes us along on the students’ nine-month odyssey to the midterms and beyond. With unrivaled access to their friends and families, meetings and homes, he pulls back the curtain to reveal intimate portraits of the quirky, playful organizers that have taken the nation by storm. Cullen brings us onto the bus for the Road to Change tour showing us how these kids seized an opportunity. They hit the highway to organize the young activist groups mushrooming across America in their image. Rattled but undeterred, they pressed on in gun country even as adversaries armed with assault weapons tailed them across Texas and Utah trying to scare them off. The Parkland students are genuinely candid about their experiences. We see them cope with shattered friendships and PTSD, along with the normal day-to-day struggles of school, including AP exams and college acceptances. Yet, with the idealism of youth they are mostly bubbling with fresh ideas. As victims refusing victimhood, they continue to devise clever new tactics to stir their generation to action while building a powerhouse network to match the NRA’s. This spell-binding book is a testament to change and a perceptive examination of a pivotal moment in American culture. After two decades of adult hand-wringing, the MFOL kids are mapping a way out. They see a long road ahead, a generational struggle to save every kid of every color from the ravages of gun violence in America. Parkland is a story of staggering empowerment and hope, told through the wildly creative and wickedly funny voices of a group of remarkable kids.

We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent


Nesrine Malik - 2019
    Six myths have taken hold, ones which are at odds with our lived experience and in urgent need of revision.Has freedom of speech become a cover for promoting prejudice? Has the concept of political correctness been weaponised to avoid ceding space to those excluded from power? Does white identity politics pose an urgent danger? These are some of the questions at the centre of Nesrine Malik's radical and compelling analysis that challenges us to find new narrators whose stories can fill the void and unite us behind a shared vision.

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019


Stewart Lee - 2019
    But he knew how to weaponise his inconvenience.He would treat all his subsequent writing, until we left the EU, as interrelated episodes of a complete work. The cast of characters include Lemming-obsessed Michael Gove, violent tanning-salon entrepreneur Tommy Robinson and Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Bumboys Letterbox Cake Disaster Weightloss Haircut Bullshit Johnson. A dramatic chorus is made up of online commenters and Kremlin bots. And Lee himself would play the defeated, unreliable narrator-hero, whose resolve and tolerance would gradually unravel as the horror show dragged on. Until the 29 March, 2019, when it would all definitely be over.Drawing on three years of newspaper columns, a complete transcript of the Content Provider stand-up show, and Lee's caustic footnote commentary, March of the Lemmings is the scathing, riotous record the Brexit era deserves.

So You Want to Start a Podcast: Finding Your Voice, Telling Your Story, and Building a Community That Will Listen


Kristen Meinzer - 2019
    Few know the secrets of successfully creating a knockout podcast better than Kristen Meinzer. An award-winning commentator, producer, and former director of nonfiction programming for Slate’s sister company, Panoply, Meinzer has also hosted three successful podcasts, reaching more than ten million listeners. Now, she shares her expertise, providing aspiring podcasters with crucial information and guidance to work smarter, not harder as they start their own audio forum.Meinzer believes that we each have a unique voice that deserves to be heard. But many of us may need some help transforming our ideas into reality. So You Want to Start a Podcast asks the tough but important questions to help budding podcasters define and achieve their goals, including:Why do you want to start a podcast?  Think about specifically why you want to start a podcast versus a blog, zine, YouTube channel, Instagram feed, or other media outlet. Find out if a podcast is really the best way to tell your story—and what you really need (and don’t need!) in order to get started.What is your show about?  For any advertiser, corporate partner, or press outlet, you need a snappy pitch. How would you describe what you want to do in two to three sentences?Who is your podcast for? Who are you trying to reach? How will your content and tone appeal to those listeners?How is your show going to be structured?  Create a step-by-step map planning the show out. Think about length, segments, interviews, advice, news reads, and other aspects of successful podcasts you can adapt for your own.With this motivational how-to guide—the only one on the subject available—you’ll find the smart, bottom-line advice and inspiration you need to produce an entertaining and informative podcast and promote it to an audience that will love it. So You Want to Start a Podcast gives you the tools you need to start a podcast—and the insight to keep it thriving!

I Can Write the World


Joshunda Sanders - 2019
    When her mother explains that the power of stories lies in the hands of those who write them, Ava decides to become a journalist. I Can Write the World follows Ava as she explores her vibrant South Bronx neighborhood - buildings whose walls boast gorgeous murals of historical figures as well as intricate, colorful street art, the dozens of different languages and dialects coming from the mouths of passersby, the many types of music coming out of neighbors’ windows and passing cars. In reporting how the music and art and culture of her neighborhood reflect the diversity of the people of New York City, Ava shows the world as she sees it, revealing to children the power of their own voice.

A Fabulous Creation: How the LP Saved Our Lives


David Hepworth - 2019
    Henceforth, everybody else wanted to Make An Album. The end came only fifteen years later, coinciding with the release of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. By then the Walkman had taken music out of the home and into the streets and the record business had begun trying to reverse-engineer the creative process in order to make big money. Nobody would play music or listen to it in quite the same way ever again.It was a short but transformative time. Musicians became ‘artists’ and we, the people, patrons of the arts. The LP itself had been a mark of sophistication, a measure of wealth, an instrument of education, a poster saying things you dare not say yourself, a means of attracting the opposite sex, and, for many, the single most desirable object in their lives.This is the story of that time; it takes us from recording studios where musicians were doing things that had never been done before to the sparsely furnished apartments where their efforts would be received like visitations from a higher power. This is the story of how LPs saved our lives.

China's Vision of Victory


Jonathan D. T. Ward - 2019
    After seventy-five years of peace in the Pacific, a new challenger to American power has emerged, on a scale not seen in generations. Working from a deep sense of national destiny, the Chinese Communist Party is guiding a country of 1.4 billion people towards what it calls "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," and, with it, the end of an American-led world. Will this generation witness the final act for America as a superpower? Can American ingenuity, confidence, and will power outcompete the long-term strategic thinking and planning of China's Communist Party? These are the challenges that will shape the next decade and more. China's Vision of Victory brings the reader to a new understanding of China's planning, strategy, and ambitions. From seabed to space, from Africa to the Arctic, from subsurface warfare to the rise of China's global corporations, this book will illuminate for the reader the new great game of our lifetimes, and how our adversary sees it all.

No Nation for Women: Reportage on Rape from India, the World's Largest Democracy


Priyanka Dubey - 2019
    Beyond statistics, there are stories, often unreported—of women in Damoh, Madhya Pradesh, who are routinely raped if they spurn the advances of men; of girls from de-notified tribes in Central India who have no recourse to justice if sexually violated; of victimized lower-caste girls in small-town Baduan, Uttar Pradesh. There are also stories of custodial rape, non-consensual incest and trafficking.Priyanka Dubey travels through large swathes of India, over a period of six years, to uncover the accounts of disenfranchised women who are caught in the grip of patriarchy. Equally, she asks if after the globally-reported December 2012 gang-rape of Nirbhaya in New Delhi, India’s gender narrative has shifted—and if it hasn’t, what needs to be done to make this a nation worthy of its intrepid girls.

Fallen: The inside story of the secret trial and conviction of Cardinal George Pell


Lucie Morris-Marr - 2019
    'Guilty' he pronounced five times. The third most senior Catholic cleric in the world had been found guilty of sex crimes against children, bringing shame to the Church on a scale never seen before in its history. Investigative journalist Lucie Morris-Marr was the first to break the story that Cardinal George Pell was being investigated by the police. In this riveting dispatch, she recounts how the cleric was trailed by a cloud of scandal as he rose to the most senior ranks of the church in Australia, all the way to his appointment by Pope Francis to the position of treasurer in the Vatican.Despite anger and accusations, it seemed nothing could stop George Pell. Yet in 2017 he was charged by detectives, returning to Australia to face trial.Take a front row seat in court with the author as she reveals the many intriguing developments in the secret legal proceedings which the media could not report at the time. Fallen reveals the full story of the brutal battle waged by the prince of the church as he fought to clear his name, including a ferocious bid to be freed from jail. The author also shares her own compelling personal journey investigating the biggest story of her career and the frequent attacks she endured from powerful Pell supporters. This book also charts how Pell's shocking conviction plunged the Vatican into an unprecedented global crisis after decades of clergy abuse cases. It is a vitally important story that will fascinate anyone interested in the failure of the Catholic Church to address the canker in its heart.

Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins


Alex Tizon - 2019
    The late Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Alex Tizon told the epic stories of marginalized people—from lonely immigrants struggling to forge a new American identity to a high school custodian who penned a New Yorker short story. Edited by Tizon’s friend and former colleague Sam Howe Verhovek, Invisible People collects the best of Tizon’s rich, empathetic accounts—including “My Family’s Slave,” the Atlantic magazine cover story about the woman who raised him and his siblings under conditions that amounted to indentured servitude.Mining his Filipino American background, Tizon tells the stories of immigrants from Cambodia and Laos. He gives a fascinating account of the Beltway sniper and insightful profiles of Surfers for Jesus and a man who tracks UFOs. His articles—many originally published in the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times—are brimming with enlightening details about people who existed outside the mainstream’s field of vision. In their introductions to Tizon’s pieces, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, Atlantic magazine editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize winners Kim Murphy and Jacqui Banaszynski, and others salute Tizon’s respect for his subjects and the beauty and brilliance of his writing. Invisible People is a loving tribute to a journalist whose search for his own identity prompted him to chronicle the lives of others.

The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet


James Griffiths - 2019
    Even as the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and any attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. But the effects of the Great Firewall are not confined to China itself. More and more, China is threatening global internet freedoms as it seeks to shore up its censorship regime, with methods that are providing inspiration for aspiring autocrats the world over.As censorship, distortion and fake news gain traction around the world, and internet giants such as Facebook show ever greater willingness to compromise internet freedoms in pursuit of the Chinese market, James Griffiths takes a look inside the Great Firewall and explores just how far it has spread, arguing that its influence can only be countered by initiating a radical new vision of online liberty.

No Human Is Illegal: An Attorney on the Front Lines of the Immigration War


J.J. Mulligan Sepúlveda - 2019
    For author Mulligan Sepúlveda, the son and husband of Spanish-speaking immigrants, the battle for immigration reform is personal. Mulligan Sepúlveda writes of visiting border detention centers, defending undocumented immigrants in court, and taking his services to JFK to represent people being turned away at the gates during Trump's infamous travel ban.

My Name Is Bridget: The Untold Story of Bridget Dolan and the Tuam Mother and Baby Home


Alison O'Reilly - 2019
    Alone and pregnant. Bridget gave birth to a boy, John, who died at the home less than two years later. Her second child was once again delivered into the care of the nuns and was taken from her. She would go on to marry a wonderful man and have a daughter Anna Corrigan, but it was only after Bridget's death that Anna discovered she had two brothers her mother had never spoken about. Anna became compelled to try and uncover any information she could about her baby brothers. What followed was the revelation that the remains of 796 babies were buried on the site of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. Anna was left to wonder, were her brothers among them? Here, with Alison O'Reilly, she pieces together the mystery.

Collected Essays of George Orwell


George Orwell - 2019
    George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, (born June 25, 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India—died January 21, 1950, London, England), English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the latter a profound anti-utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule.

The Killing in the Consulate: Investigating the Life and Death of Jamal Khashoggi


Jonathan Rugman - 2019
    What happened next turned into a major international scandal, now finally pieced together by Channel 4's BAFTA award-winning Foreign Affairs Correspondent Jonathan Rugman.Described by Donald Trump as the 'worst cover-up ever', this is the first comprehensive account of one of the most notorious and outrageous murder plots of our time. In The Killing in the Consulate, Rugman pieces together in minute-by-minute detail the events after Khashoggi entered the Saudi diplomatic building on 2 October 2018, expecting to receive the documentation that would enable him to marry Hatice Cengiz, patiently waiting for him outside. Little did they realise, he was entering a trap, as a 15-man Saudi hit squad had just flown in to the country and was waiting for him. Within minutes he had been viciously murdered and his body was quickly disposed of. The Saudis thought they would be able to get away with it all, and concocted a far-fetched story to cover it up. But what they didn't realise was that Turkey's President Erdogan's security and intelligence agencies had bugged the consulate, and captured the horrific events on tape.Based on confidential sources, dramatic new evidence and in-depth research across several countries, Rugman reveals the context behind the murder and attempted cover-up. He shows how a power struggle between Erdogan and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, had such fatal results. The prince had seemed to promise a new and more open era for his country, while also investing vast sums in arms deals with the West. Inevitably other nations, including President Trump and the USA, were drawn into the affair, which created the biggest crisis in US-Saudi relations since 9/11. Skilfully, Rugman draws together all the strands to tell a gripping story of one man's tragedy that had global consequences.

Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic


Ben Westhoff - 2019
    is the first deep-dive investigation of a hazardous and illicit industry that has created a worldwide epidemic, ravaging communities and overwhelming and confounding government agencies that are challenged to combat it. "A whole new crop of chemicals is radically changing the recreational drug landscape," writes Ben Westhoff. "These are known as Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS) and they include replacements for known drugs like heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana. They are synthetic, made in a laboratory, and are much more potent than traditional drugs"--and all-too-often tragically lethal. Drugs like fentanyl, K2, and Spice--and those with arcane acronyms like 25i-NBOMe-- were all originally conceived in legitimate laboratories for proper scientific and medicinal purposes. Their formulas were then hijacked and manufactured by rogue chemists, largely in China, who change their molecular structures to stay ahead of the law, making the drugs' effects impossible to predict. Westhoff has infiltrated this shadowy world, becoming the first journalist to report from inside an illicit Chinese fentanyls lab and providing startling and original reporting on how China's vast chemical industry operates, and how the Chinese government subsidizes it. He tracks down the little-known scientists who invented these drugs and inadvertently killed thousands, as well as a mysterious drug baron who turned the law upside down in his home country of New Zealand. Poignantly, Westhoff chronicles the lives of addicted users and dealers, families of victims, law enforcement officers, and underground drug awareness organizers in the U.S. and Europe. Together they represent the shocking and riveting full anatomy of a calamity we are just beginning to understand. From its depths, as Westhoff relates, are emerging new strategies that may provide essential long-term solutions to the drug crisis that has affected so many.

The Fruit of All My Grief


J. Malcolm Garcia - 2019
    Malcolm Garcia lets the people he writes about speak for themselves. His writing highlights the struggles and the dignity of people quietly fighting for their lives. They include families and small businesses still recovering from the BP oil spill; the man sentenced to life in prison for transporting drugs to pay for the medical care that would save his son’s life; the widows of soldiers who died, not in war, but from toxic fumes they were exposed to at their bases overseas; the Iraqi interpreter who was promised American asylum, only to arrive and be forced to live in poverty. The soaring narratives told in The Fruit of All My Grief let us feel the fears, hopes, and outrage of those living in the shadows of the American Dream.

Middle Rages: Why the Battle for Medieval Studies Matters to America


Milo Yiannopoulos - 2019
    No understanding of Western civilization is possible without it. Inevitably, Left-wing academics want to introduce gender studies and race theory to the field—and punish those who refuse to conform. When one University of Chicago professor dared to publicly celebrate the Christian identity of the Middle Ages, she was branded a ‘violent fascist’ and ‘white supremacist’ by her colleagues. Now Medieval Studies scholars are tearing their own discipline apart with witch-hunts, name-calling, boycotts and intimidation. The damage done to academia could be incalculable. In this influential essay, originally published to widespread online acclaim, New York Times-bestselling author and award-winning journalist Milo Yiannopoulos explains why we should all care about the newest front in the cultural war, the academic battle for the Middle Ages.

In Defense of Julian Assange


Tariq Ali - 2019
    James Goodale, who represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, commented: “The charge against Assange for ‘conspiring’ with a source is the most dangerous I can think of with respect to the First Amendment in all my years representing media organizations.”It is critical now to build support for Assange and prevent his delivery into the hands of the Trump administration. That is the urgent purpose of this book. A wide range of distinguished contributors, many of them in original pieces, here set out the story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, the importance of their work, and the dangers for us all in the persecution they face. In Defense of Julian Assange is a vivid, vital intervention into one of the most important political issues of our day.Contributors: Pamela Anderson, Julian Assange, Renata Avila, Katrin Axelsson, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Sally Burch, Noam Chomsky, Patrick Cockburn, Naomi Colvin, The Courage Foundation, Mark Curtis, Daniel Ellsberg, Teresa Forcades i Vila, Charles Glass, Kevin Gosztola, Serge Halimi, Nozomi Hayase, Chris Hedges, Srećko Horvat, Caitlin Johnstone, Margaret Kimberley, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Lisa Longstaff, Alan MacLeod, Chelsea Manning, Stefania Maurizi, Craig Murray, Fidel Narváez, John C. O’Day, John Pilger, Jesselyn Radack, Michael Ratner, Angela Richter, Geoffrey Robertson, Jen Robinson, Matt Taibbi, Natalia Viana, Ai Weiwei, Vivienne Westwood and Slavoj Žižek.320 pages • Paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-221-4 • E-book 978-1-68219-223-8“I think the prosecution of him [Assange] would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers … from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and I think the law would have a very hard time drawing a distinction between The New York Times and WikiLeaks.” —David McCraw, lead lawyer for The New York Times

Newsworthy: Poems


Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton - 2019
    And yet, we yearn to know. We crave a thoughtfulness--apart from soundbites and viral videos--that plumbs deeper, one that reawakens our shared humanity by reminding us that under headlines beat all of our "pierced hearts."A leading light in the new poetic guard, Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton's collection is a poetic reimagining of the newspaper, collecting cutouts from the editing floor to resurrect those who would otherwise be forgotten. Not content to further sensationalize the horrors perpetrated on Black Americans by a broken justice system, Mouton boldly relays stories of police brutality by reinventing poetic form and function, reminding us that wisdom, context, and every angle of truth is what infuses information with elucidation.Akin to An American Marriage, Newsworthy grounds the fragility and danger inherent in contemporary Black experience in an "ordinary" family: mother, father, brother (Josh), and sister (Amandla), following their near and lived tragedies against the backdrop of murdered black Americans. Amandla serves as a surrogate for all of us, regardless of skin color, morphing from naive bystander to headline herself. Alongside her, we witness the exponential compilation of threat. We learn to conceive of dread, anger, compassion, suffering, and love as survival tactics. And we uncover what we should have seen all along: that to be human in the world is to rectify its injustices. With Newsworthy, Mouton brings us news of the heart.

Notes on the Mueller Report: A Reading Diary


Benjamin Wittes - 2019
    Originally published on www.lawfareblog.com, Brookings Senior Fellow and legal analyst Benjamin Wittes, read the 448-page Mueller report carefully, and wrote his thoughts as he progressed.

Queens of the Kingdom: The Women of Saudi Arabia Speak


Nicola Sutcliff - 2019
    To separate fact from fiction, Nicola Sutcliff decided to go behind the veil for four years living, working and socialising in Saudi society. The resulting project - this fascinating and revelatory book - aims to raise the voices of these women; to share their realities, dreams, frustrations and talents. Through personal interviews, thirty women share their stories: from world-renowned activists to wives in polygamous households; high-ranking princesses to desert-dwelling bedouins. They talk candidly about the issues most intriguing to a Western audience – driving, sister wives and the religious police – as well as lesser known aspects of their lives, including under-the-abaya fashion, underground parties, and the practice of ‘purchasing’ husbands online.  Many of the topics they discuss are completely unreported, until now.  This compelling book also includes timely essays on wide-ranging subjects including driving, transgenderism, male guardianship, religion, politics and sexuality.     Authentic, eye-opening, inspiring, courageous, this book will challenge stereotypes and reveal the intimate thoughts and details of women's lives in this most intriguing and mysterious of countries. At a time when the Kingdom appears to be on the cusp of change, this unique book captures the essence of what it is like to be a woman living in Saudi Arabia today.

Claws of the Panda: Beijing's Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada


Jonathan Manthorpe - 2019
    In particular the book tells of Ottawa’s failure to recognize and confront the efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate and influence Canadian politics, academia, and media, and to exert control over Canadians of Chinese heritage.Claws of the Panda gives a detailed description of the CCP’s campaign to embed agents of influence in Canadian business, politics, media and academia. The party’s aims are to be able to turn Canadian public policy to China’s advantage, to acquire useful technology and intellectual property, to influence Canada’s international diplomacy, and, most important, to be able to monitor and intimidate Chinese Canadians and others it considers dissidents.The book traces the evolution of the Canada-China relationship over nearly 150 years. It shows how Canadian leaders have constantly misjudged the reality and potential of the relationship while the CCP and its agents have benefited from Canadian naivete.

The Lost Decade (2008-18): How India's Growth Story Devolved into Growth Without a Story


Puja Mehra - 2019
    The economic boom impacted a large section of Indians, even if unequally. With sustained high growth over an extended period, India could have achieved what economists call a 'take-off' (rapid and self-sustained GDP growth). The global financial meltdown disrupted this momentum in 2008. In the decade that followed, each time the country's economy came close to returning to that growth trajectory, political events knocked it off course.In 2019, India's GDP is growing at the rate of 7 per cent, making it the fastest-growing major economy in the world, but little on the ground suggests that Indians are actually better off. Economic discontent and insecurity are on the rise, farmers are restive and land-owning classes are demanding quotas in government jobs. The middle class is palpably disaffected, the informal economy is struggling and big businesses are no longer expanding aggressively.India is not the star it was in 2008 and in effect, the 'India growth story' has devolved into 'growth without a story'. The Lost Decade tells the story of the slide and examines the political context in which the Indian economy failed to recover lost momentum.

Marriageology: The Art and Science of Staying Together


Belinda Luscombe - 2019
    Plus they were boring. But after covering the relationship beat for Time magazine for ten years, she realized there was a surprisingly upbeat and little-known story to tell about the benefits of staying together for the long haul. Casting a witty, candid, and probing eye on the latest behavioral science, Luscombe has written a fresh and persuasive report on the state of our unions, how they've changed from the marriages of our parents' era, and what those changes mean for the happiness of this most intimate and important of our relationships.In Marriageology Luscombe examines the six major fault lines that can fracture contemporary marriages, also known as the F-words: familiarity, fighting, finances, family, fooling around, and finding help. She presents facts, debunks myths, and provides a fascinating mix of research, anecdotes, and wisdom from a wide range of approaches--from how properly dividing up chores can result in a better sex life to the benefits of fighting with your spouse (though not in the car) to whether or not to tell your partner that you lost $70,000. (The last one is from firsthand experience.)Marriageology offers simple, actionable, maybe even borderline fun techniques and tips to try, whether the relationship in question is about to conk out or just needs a little grease and an oil change. The best news of all is that sticking together is easier than it looks.Praise for Marriageology"Few things are more important than the quality of our relationships--and especially the one we build with our life partners. Belinda Luscombe has written a smart and funny book to help anyone work toward a stronger and more fulfilling marriage."--Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and founder of LeanIn.Org and OptionB.Org"I'd recommend this book to anyone who is married. Or thinking of getting married. Or knows anyone who is married. Or who is simply interested in getting along with other human beings. Belinda Luscombe combines science, memoir, and sharp wit in this fascinating and useful book. She takes on myths about everything from soul mates to finance to going to bed angry (her advice: Do it!). Skip the gravy boat and give this as a gift to all your engaged friends."--A. J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically

The Districts: Justice and Power in New York City


Johnny Dwyer - 2019
    In Manhattan, a hedge fund portfolio manager misrepresents his company's assets to investors. At JFK International Airport, a college student returns from Jamaica with cocaine stuffed in the handle of her suitcase. These are just a few of the stories that come to life in this comprehensive look at the Southern District Court in Manhattan, and the Eastern District Court in Brooklyn--the two federal courts tasked with maintaining order in New York City. Johnny Dwyer takes us not just into the courtrooms but into the lives of those who enter through its doors: the judges and attorneys, prosecutors and defendants, winners and losers. He examines crimes we've read about in the papers or seen in movies and television--organized crime, terrorism, drug trafficking, corruption, and white-collar crime--and weaves in the nuances that rarely make it into headlines. Brimming with detail and drama, The Districts illuminates the meaning of intent, of reasonable doubt, of deception, and--perhaps most importantly of all--of justice.

The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia


Anya Bernstein - 2019
    In The Future of Immortality, Anya Bernstein explores the contemporary Russian communities of visionaries and utopians who are pressing at the very limits of the human.The Future of Immortality profiles a diverse cast of characters, from the owners of a small cryonics outfit to scientists inaugurating the field of biogerontology, from grassroots neurotech enthusiasts to believers in the Cosmist ideas of the Russian Orthodox thinker Nikolai Fedorov. Bernstein puts their debates and polemics in the context of a long history of immortalist thought in Russia, with global implications that reach to Silicon Valley and beyond. If aging is a curable disease, do we have a moral obligation to end the suffering it causes? Could immortality be the foundation of a truly liberated utopian society extending beyond the confines of the earth--something that Russians, historically, have pondered more than most? If life without end requires radical genetic modification or separating consciousness from our biological selves, how does that affect what it means to be human?As vividly written as any novel, The Future of Immortality is a fascinating account of techno-scientific and religious futurism--and the ways in which it hopes to transform our very being.

The Best American Magazine Writing 2019


Sid Holt - 2019
    The anthology features remarkable reporting, including the story of a teenager who tried to get out of MS-13, only to face deportation (ProPublica); an account of the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar (Politico); and a sweeping California Sunday Magazine profile of an agribusiness empire. Other journalists explore the indications of environmental catastrophe, from invasive lionfish (Smithsonian) to the omnipresence of plastic (National Geographic).Personal pieces consider the toll of mass incarceration, including Reginald Dwayne Betts's "Getting Out" (New York Times Magazine); "This Place Is Crazy," by John J. Lennon (Esquire); and Robert Wright's "Getting Out of Prison Meant Leaving Dear Friends Behind" (Marshall Project with Vice). From the pages of the Atlantic and the New Yorker, writers and critics discuss prominent political figures: Franklin Foer's "American Hustler" explores Paul Manafort's career of corruption; Jill Lepore recounts the emergence of Ruth Bader Ginsburg; and Caitlin Flanagan and Doreen St. F�lix reflect on the Kavanaugh hearings and #MeToo. Leslie Jamison crafts a portrait of the Museum of Broken Relationships (Virginia Quarterly Review), and Kasey Cordell and Lindsey B. Koehler ponder "The Art of Dying Well" (5280). A pair of never-before-published conversations illuminates the state of the American magazine: New Yorker writer Ben Taub speaks to Eric Sullivan of Esquire about pursuing a career as a reporter, alongside Taub's piece investigating how the Iraqi state is fueling a resurgence of ISIS. And Karolina Waclawiak of BuzzFeed News interviews McSweeney's editor Claire Boyle about challenges and opportunities for fiction at small magazines. That conversation is inspired by McSweeney's winning the ASME Award for Fiction, which is celebrated here with a story by Lesley Nneka Arimah, a magical-realist tale charged with feminist allegory.

Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration


Julie Hirschfeld Davis - 2019
    Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear have covered the Trump administration from its earliest days. In Border Wars, they take us inside the White House to document how Stephen Miller and other anti-immigration officials blocked asylum-seekers and refugees, separated families, threatened deportation, and sought to erode the longstanding bipartisan consensus that immigration and immigrants make positive contributions to America. Their revelation of Trump’s desire for a border moat filled with alligators made national news. As the authors reveal, Trump has used immigration to stoke fears (“the caravan”), attack Democrats and the courts, and distract from negative news and political difficulties. As he seeks reelection in 2020, Trump has elevated immigration in the imaginations of many Americans into a national crisis. Border Wars identifies the players behind Trump’s anti-immigration policies, showing how they planned, stumbled and fought their way toward changes that have further polarized the nation. “[Davis and Shear’s] exquisitely reported Border Wars reveals the shattering horror of the moment, [and] the mercurial unreliability and instability of the president” (The New York Times Book Review).

Democracy without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society


Victor Pickard - 2019
    Meanwhile, continuous revelations about the role that major media outlets--from Facebook to Fox News--play in the spread of misinformation have exposed deep pathologies in American communication systems. Despite these threats to democracy, policy responses have been woefully inadequate.In Democracy Without Journalism? Victor Pickard argues that we're overlooking the core roots of the crisis. By uncovering degradations caused by run-amok commercialism, he brings into focus the historical antecedents, market failures, and policy inaction that led to the implosion of commercial journalism and the proliferation of misinformation through both social media and mainstream news. The problem isn't just the loss of journalism or irresponsibility of Facebook, but the very structure upon which our profit-driven media system is built. The rise of a "misinformation society" is symptomatic of historical and endemic weaknesses in the American media system tracing back to the early commercialization of the press in the 1800s. While professionalization was meant to resolve tensions between journalism's public service and profit imperatives, Pickard argues that it merely camouflaged deeper structural maladies. Journalism has always been in crisis. The market never supported the levels of journalism--especially local, international, policy, and investigative reporting--that a healthy democracy requires. Today these long-term defects have metastasized.In this book, Pickard presents a counter-narrative that shows how the modern journalism crisis stems from media's historical over-reliance on advertising revenue, the ascendance of media monopolies, and a lack of public oversight. He draws attention to the perils of monopoly control over digital infrastructures and the rise of platform monopolies, especially the "Facebook problem." He looks to experiments from the Progressive and New Deal Eras--as well as public media models around the world--to imagine a more reliable and democratic information system. The book envisions what a new kind of journalism might look like, emphasizing the need for a publicly owned and democratically governed media system. Amid growing scrutiny of unaccountable monopoly control over media institutions and concerns about the consequences to democracy, now is an opportune moment to address fundamental flaws in US news and information systems and push for alternatives. Ultimately, the goal is to reinvent journalism.

1971: A People's History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India


Anam Zakaria - 2019
    It marks the birth of the nation, it's liberation. More than 1000 miles away, in Pakistan too, 1971 marks a watershed moment, its memories sitting uncomfortably in public imagination. It is remembered as the 'Fall of Dacca', the dismemberment of Pakistan or the third Indo-Pak war. In India, 1971 represents something else-the story of humanitarian intervention, of triumph and valour that paved the way for India's rise as a military power, the beginning of its journey to becoming a regional superpower.Navigating the widely varied terrain that is 1971 across Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, Anam Zakaria sifts through three distinct state narratives, and studies the institutionalization of the memory of the year and its events. Through a personal journey, she juxtaposes state narratives with people's history on the ground, bringing forth the nuanced experiences of those who lived through the war. Using intergenerational interviews, textbook analyses, visits to schools and travels to museums and sites commemorating 1971, Zakaria explores the ways in which 1971 is remembered and forgotten across countries, generations and communities.

Talk to Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro


Dean Nelson - 2019
    Yet to many, the perfect interview feels more like luck than skill—a rare confluence of rapport, topic, and timing. But the thing is, great interviews aren’t the result of serendipity and intuition, but rather the result of careful planning and good journalistic habits. And Dean Nelson is here to show you how to nail the perfect interview every time.  Drawing on forty-years of award-winning journalism and his experience as the founder and host of the Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, Nelson walks readers through each step of the journey from deciding whom to interview and structuring questions, to the nitty gritty of how to use a recording device and effective note-taking strategies, to the ethical dilemmas of interviewing people you love (and loathe). He also includes case studies of famous interviews to show readers how these principles play out in real time.Chock full of comprehensive, time-tested, gold-standard advice, Talk to Me is an indispensable guide to the subtle art of the interview guaranteed to afford readers with the skills and confidence they need the next time they say, “talk to me.”

Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter


Kerri K. Greenidge - 2019
    With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post-Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of black liberation that prefigured leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Synthesizing years of archival research, historian Kerri Greenidge renders the drama of turn-of-the-century America and reclaims Trotter as a seminal figure, whose prophetic, yet ultimately tragic, life offers a link between the vision of Frederick Douglass and black radicalism in the modern era.

American Epidemic: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Opioid Crisis


John McMillian - 2019
    This is in large part thanks to the extraordinary writings featured in this volume, which includes some of the most impactful reporting in the United States in recent years addressing the opiate addiction crisis. American Epidemic collects, for the first time, the key works of reportage and analysis that provide the best picture available of the origins, consequences, and human calamity associated with the epidemic.Spirited, informed, and eloquently written, American Epidemic will serve as an essential introduction for anyone seeking insight into the deadliest drug crisis in American history.“These pieces are brave, clear-eyed, heartbreaking and pragmatic—but above all, they’re impossible to put down.” —Seth Mnookin, professor of science writing, MIT, and author of The Panic Virus and the New York Times bestselling Feeding the Monster“John McMillian has masterfully assembled a crucial window into the origins, expansion, and deepening devastation of the latest drug abuse nightmare to menace our society. American Epidemic also demonstrates the ugly racial and economic disparities that cynically distort our reactions to drug abuse.” —Douglas A. Blackmon, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II“A kaleidoscopic introduction to the devastation wrought by—and possible remedies for—the opioid crisis.” —Kirkus Reviews“Each piece is well-written, and together they bring light to a quiet but deadly scourge, create plenty of sympathy for its victims, and inspire readers to consider what society can do.” —Publishers Weekly

Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War


Wilfred Reilly - 2019
     But is that really true? In Hate Crime Hoax, Professor Wilfred Reilly examines over one hundred widely publicized incidents of so-called hate crimes that never actually happened. With a critical eye and attention to detail, Reilly debunks these fabricated incidents—many of them alleged to have happened on college campuses—and explores why so many Americans are driven to fake hate crimes. We're not experiencing an epidemic of hate crimes, Reilly concludes—but we might be experiencing an unprecented epidemic of hate crime hoaxes.

Investigative Journalism: A Survival Guide


David Leigh - 2019
    This book explores the history and art of investigative journalism, and explains how to deal with legal bullies, crooked politicians, media bosses, big business and intelligence agencies; how to withstand conspiracy theories; and how to work collaboratively across borders in the new age of data journalism. It also provides a fascinating first-hand account of the work that went into breaking major news stories including WikiLeaks and the Edward Snowden affair.Drawing on over 40 years of experience with world-leading investigative teams at newspapers including the Guardian and The Washington Post, award-winning journalist David Leigh provides an illuminating insight into some of the biggest news events of the 20th and 21st centuries. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the behind-the-scenes work of journalists and news organizations. It also acts as an essential practical toolkit for both aspiring and established investigative journalists.

Andrey Tarkovsky: Life and Work: Film by Film, Stills, Polaroids & Writings


andrey tarkovskyAleksandr Sokurov - 2019
    

The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg


Cory Morningstar - 2019
    The "climate change is real" message is reframed for public consumption and rolled out at an international level, using Greta and her global platform to "sound the alarm" on climate change.This climate emergency is likened to a "house on fire", while urging the public to be serious, patriotic, empathetic and, of course, nonviolent. Not one sentence of the new strategy mentions the horrific impact militarism has on climate change.The New Climate Economy being pushed by groups like Extinction Rebellion merely repackage our oppression into emergency mode. This urgency becomes global so that governments, NGOs and corporations will all direct immediate funding towards unlocking trillions of capital needed to save capitalism by further funding the new green imperialism.Today's youth are used and molded into market solutions to insulate a global elite. Celebrity-sponsored activism seeks to build a new industry in which NGOs, the media and corporate powers collude to get people to support the very industries we should be erasing from the planet.The planet's most powerful capitalists lie behind these "youth-led" movements for climate change, helping to manufacture consent for the "fourth industrial revolution" in an attempt to quell resistance to industrial civilisation.

Ibn Al Bitar's Voyages


Aly Brisha - 2019
    After overthrowing the generals, the creation of a new future seemed possible.But gradually, dreams became nightmares.As a journalist specializing in extremism and terrorism, I have worked on fire lines in many locations. I have stared into the eyes of death, while it hovers over the ruins of cities and people and turns those who demand freedom into refugees or the dead.The more details I gather in the lands of death, the more I realize how military dictatorships and religious extremism are twins feeding on violence and hatred. Both compete for authority, but in the end they are two sides of the same coin.However this novel is neither about me nor my journalistic work. It is somehow about the "lost love message" that had been buried for eight centuries at the gates of Rome. Hence, here I am sweeping the dust and preaching it among people again.

Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing


Natalie DíazWilliam Bearhart - 2019
    Think of the Roman Colosseum, Jesse Owens’s four gold-medal victories in the 1936 Nazi Olympics, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s protest at the 1968 Olympics, and the fallout Colin Kaepernick suffered as a result of his recent protest on the sidelines of an NFL game. Sport is a place where the body and the mind are the most dangerous because they are allowed to be unified as one energy.Bodies Built for Game brings together poems, essays, and stories that challenge our traditional ideas of sport and question the power structures that athletics enforce. What is it that drives us to athletics? What is it that makes us break our own bodies or the bodies of others as we root for these unnatural and performed victories? Featuring contributions from a diverse group of writers, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Fatimah Asghar, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Louise Erdrich, Toni Jensen, Ada Limón, Tommy Orange, Claudia Rankine, Danez Smith, and Maya Washington, this book challenges America by questioning its games.

The Travel Writer's Way: Turn Your Travels Into Stories


Jonathan Laurie - 2019
    Expert author Jonathan Lorie shares 20 years' experience as a travel magazine editor, travel writer for national newspapers and magazines, and teacher of travel writing courses around the world to create the ultimate guide for travellers who want to turn their journeys into stories, whether for pleasure or for publication, for friends or for media. The result is an entertaining and illuminating way in to writing travel, whatever your level or purpose.This unique, interactive guide - from specialist travel publisher Bradt Travel Guides - offers a 12-step programme for developing your travel writing through enjoyable exercises and expert tuition, backed up with a comprehensive overview of how to publish your work as blogs, books or articles. Interviews with today's finest travel writers and editors offer the insiders' view, while top tips and themed booklists give each topic real depth.Whether you're a first-time writer or experienced hand, The Travel Writer's Way is the essential guide.

Bonnie and Clyde: Radioactive (Book 3)


Clark Hays - 2019
    It’s January 1945, six years since the start of World War Two. As the bloody conflict drags on, America has undertaken a massive top-secret effort to unleash the power of the atom and develop the first nuclear bomb. A network of Nazi and Soviet spies is determined to steal the technology, or failing that, sabotage the project. But first they have to get past Bonnie and Clyde. A decade has passed since the infamous outlaw lovers were spared their gruesome deaths and forced into a covert life. Now seasoned spies, they’re embedded in the Manhattan Project, as bar owners and petty crooks, trying to sort out who would sell out the USA to its enemies. In a heart-pounding adventure spanning the windswept landscapes of eastern Washington to an isolated internment camp in the California mountains, Bonnie and Clyde face deception at every turn along with a personal tragedy, pushing them close to the edge. Can the former outlaws put aside their desire for revenge long enough to help end the war?The thrilling story cuts back and forth between the modern era where a washed-up investigative reporter teams up with the now-elderly Bonnie Parker to hunt down the truth, risking their own lives, and the dangerous 1940s undercover exploits of the young Bonnie and Clyde, as they are thrust into a battle that will define the future global power structure. Advance praise for RadioactiveBonnie and Clyde: Radioactive continues the explosive “what-if” story about two unlikely heroes fighting to preserve the founding principles of American democracy—a historical thriller that reimagines the past to reclaim the present. Another winner in this highly entertaining series, capped off with satisfying revelations. Hays and McFall keep up the momentum in this third series outing, which features plenty of action and danger. There are also intermittent steamy interludes between Bonnie and Clyde, who come off as a wisecracking, low-rent version of Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man. Tricky puzzles, chases, spycraft, and red herrings keep the plot bubbling along. But underlying all the shenanigans is a serious consideration of the nature of patriotism in an America that's increasingly becoming dominated by the military-industrial complex. Overall, the book makes a rousing stand in favor of have-nots, working people, and dreamers; at one point, Bonnie unusually stands up for gay rights in 1945 ("Love is love no matter what"). Kirkus ReviewsRefreshingly original, a literary breath of fresh air. Unexpected delights in a story that excels in nonstop surprises. And as with the other books, the humor is one of this story's driving forces. With its thriller component tempered by mystery, historical fact, political interactions, and gunslinger intrigue, Bonnie & Clyde: Radioactive is a powerful series addition. It deftly evolves from a story of thieves and murders to an inspection of war, social issues, and second chances not just for the characters, but for America itself. Midwest Book Review

Street Journalist: Understand and Report the News in Your Community


Lisa Loving - 2019
    A local business in trouble. A neighbor with a heroic story. An opportunity to work together for positive change.Whatever the stories are in your community that most need to be told, the best person to tell them is you. Whether you're writing for your local newspaper, producing a podcast or video series, or simply sharing what you see and learn every day on social media, the power of journalism is in your hands, as is the responsibility to use it ethically and wisely.Longtime journalist Lisa Loving opens up the world of journalism, sharing her hard-won skills and knowledge to help expand your media literacy so that you can report on what matters most, hold powerful people accountable, and strengthen your community.

The Western Front Diaries of Charles Bean


Charles Bean - 2019
    Bean’s extensive private wartime diaries, held by the Australian War Memorial, form a unique and personal record of his experiences and observations throughout the war and were the basis of his monumental multi-volume official war history. While a selection of his diaries relating to the Gallipoli campaign have been available for some time, Bean’s Western Front diaries are published here for the first time, edited by esteemed historian Peter Burness, and accompanied by over 500 remarkable photographs, sketches and maps.

A Day Like Today: Memoirs


John Humphrys - 2019
    Humphrys was the BBC’s youngest foreign correspondent; he was the first reporter at the catastrophe of Aberfan, an experience that marked him for ever; he was in the White House when Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign; in South Africa during the dying years of apartheid; and in war zones around the globe throughout his career. John was also the first journalist to present the Nine O’Clock News on television.Humphrys pulls no punches and now, freed from the restrictions of being a BBC journalist, he reflects on the politicians he has interrogated and the controversies he has reported on and been involved in, including the interview that forced the resignation of his own boss, the director general. In typically candid style, he also weighs in on the role the BBC itself has played in our national life – for good and ill – and the broader health of the political system today.A Day Like Today is both a sharp, shrewd memoir and a backstage account of the great newsworthy moments in recent history – from the voice behind the country’s most authoritative microphone.

Talk Radio’s America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States


Brian Rosenwald - 2019
    Brian Rosenwald charts the transformation of AM radio entertainers into political kingmakers. By giving voice to the conservative base, they reshaped the Republican Party and fostered demand for a president who sounded as combative and hyperbolic as a talk show host.

Assam: The Accord, The Discord


Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty - 2019
    Immediately afterwards, the student leaders were catapulted from their hostel rooms into the corridors of power. Their party, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), was voted to power the same year, with Prafulla Kumar Mahanta becoming the youngest ever chief minister of an Indian state.Key clauses of the Assam Accord remained unimplemented during Mahanta's often controversial tenures (1985-1990, 1996-2001), and through three terms of Congress rule, which ended with the BJP's victory in the state in 2016. Central to the Accord was deportation of those who could not prove their roots in India prior to 24 March 1971. In 2015, the process of updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC) based on the 1971 cut-off of the Accord began. The first list was released in December 2017 and did not include 14 million names.Assam: The Accord, The Discord looks at the making of the Assam Accord and its long shadow on the state, through political gamesmanship between principle players, periods of ULFA and Bodo militancies, and right-wing propaganda that has split the state along communal lines.

50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology


Gail WeissMark A. Ralkowski - 2019
    Critical phenomenology foregrounds experiences of marginalization, oppression, and power in order to identify and transform common experiences of injustice that render “the familiar” a site of oppression for many. In Fifty Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, leading scholars present fresh readings of classic phenomenological topics and introduce newer concepts developed by feminist theorists, critical race theorists, disability theorists, and queer and trans theorists that capture aspects of lived experience that have traditionally been neglected. By centering historically marginalized perspectives, the chapters in this book breathe new life into the phenomenological tradition and reveal its ethical, social, and political promise. This volume will be an invaluable resource for teaching and research in continental philosophy; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; critical race theory; disability studies; cultural studies; and critical theory more generally.

Finding the News: Adventures of a Young Reporter


Peter Copeland - 2019
    Starting in Chicago as a night police reporter, Copeland went on to work as a war correspondent in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa before covering national politics in Washington, DC, where he rose to be bureau chief of the E. W. Scripps Company. The lessons he learned about accuracy and fairness during his long career are especially relevant today, given widespread concerns about the performance of the media, potential bias, and the proliferation of so-called "fake news." He offers an honest and revealing narrative, told with surprising humor, about how he learned the craft of news reporting.Copeland's story begins in 1980, when a colleague hastily declared him a full-fledged reporter after barely four days of training. He went on to learn the business the old-fashioned way: by chasing the news in thirty countries and across five continents. As a young person entering journalism and reporting during some of recent history's most fraught military situations-- including Operation Desert Storm and the US invasions of Panama and Somalia--Copeland discovered the craft was his calling. Looking back on his career, Copeland asserts his most important lessons were not about reporting, writing, or the latest technologies, but about the core values that underlie quality journalism: accuracy, fairness, and speed.Replete with behind-the-scenes stories about learning the trade, Copeland's inspiring account builds into a heartfelt defense of journalism "done the right way" and serves as a call to action for today's reporters. The values he learned as a cub reporter are needed now more than ever, he argues, as the integrity and motives of even seasoned journalists are called into question by political partisans. Copeland admits that those critics are not entirely wrong but contends that exciting new technologies, combined with a return to old-school news values, could usher in a golden age of journalism.

Statistical: Ten Easy Ways to Avoid Being Misled By Numbers


Anthony Reuben - 2019
    

The Broken Estate: Journalism and Democracy in a Post-Truth World (BWB Texts)


Mel Bunce - 2019
    The New Zealand and global media are in upheaval: the old economic models for print journalism are failing, public funding has been neglected for decades, and many major news organisations are shedding journalists.New Zealander Mel Bunce researches and teaches journalism at the acclaimed Department of Journalism at City, University of London. Drawing upon the latest international research, Bunce provides a fresh analysis that goes beyond the usual anecdote and conjecture. Insightful and impassioned, this short book provides a much-needed assessment of the future for New Zealand journalism in a troubled world.What are BWB Texts?BWB Texts are short books on big subjects by great New Zealand writers. Spanning contemporary issues, history and memoir, new BWB Texts are released regularly, and the series now amounts to well over fifty works.

No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class


Christopher R. Martin - 2019
    have been invisible for decades because the mainstream news media lost sight of the American working class"--

Crying the News: A History of America's Newsboys


Vincent Richard DiGirolamo - 2019
    But what do we really know about the children who hawked and delivered newspapers in American cities and towns? Who were they? What was their life like? And how important was their work to the development of a free press, the survival of poor families, and the shaping of their own attitudes, values, and beliefs?Crying the News: A History of America's Newsboys offers an epic retelling of the American experience from the perspective of its most unshushable creation. It is the first book to place newsboys at the center of American history, analyzing their inseparable role as economic actors and cultural symbols in the creation of print capitalism, popular democracy, and national character. DiGirolamo's sweeping narrative traces the shifting fortunes of these "little merchants" over a century of war and peace, prosperity and depression, exploitation and reform, chronicling their exploits in every region of the country, as well as on the railroads that linked them. While the book focuses mainly on boys in the trade, it also examines the experience of girls and grown-ups, the elderly and disabled, blacks and whites, immigrants and natives.Based on a wealth of primary sources, Crying the News uncovers the existence of scores of newsboy strikes and protests. The book reveals the central role of newsboys in the development of corporate welfare schemes, scientific management practices, and employee liability laws. It argues that the newspaper industry exerted a formative yet overlooked influence on working-class youth that is essential to our understanding of American childhood, labor, journalism, and capitalism.

Low-Tech Magazine 2012-2018


Kris De Decker - 2019
    Sometimes, past technologies can be copied without any changes. More often, interesting possibilities arise when older technology is combined with new knowledge and new materials, or when past concepts and traditional knowledge are applied to modern technology. Inspiration is also to be found in the so-called "developing" world, where resource constraints often lead to inventive, low-tech solutions. Contains 159 images.

China (Logic #7)


Julian Gewirtz - 2019
    But in fact, since its founding, the People’s Republic has been driven by dreams of rapid modernization and innovation, with engineers turned politicians drafting policy at Zhongnanhai. Apps in China now operate at scales American entrepreneurs only dream of.

There's No Crying in Newsrooms: What Women Have Learned about What It Takes to Lead


Kristin Gilger - 2019
    They started out as editorial assistants, fact checkers and news secretaries and ended up running multi-million-dollar news operations that determine a large part of what Americans read, view and think about the world. These women, who were calling in news stories while in labor and parking babies under their desks, never imagined that 40 years later young women entering the news business would face many of the same battles they did - only with far less willingness to put up and shut up. The female pioneers in "There's No Crying in Newsrooms" have many lessons to teach about what it takes to succeed in media or any other male-dominated organization, and their message is more important now than ever before.

Red Hot and Blue: Fifty Years of Writing About Music, Memphis, and Motherf**kers


Stanley Booth - 2019
    Booth’s close contacts with many of the musicians he writes about provide a gateway to truly understanding the music and culture of Memphis and other blues strongholds in the South. Subjects include Elvis Presley, Otis Redding, William Eggleston, Ma Rainey, Blind Willie McTell, Graceland, Beale Street and much more.

Straying from Honor: Untold Stories from Guantanamo


Peter Jan Honigsberg - 2019
    Forty-one prisoners remained. Many of them have been tortured, and they will likely die there without receiving a trial.Through the stories Honigsberg captures, he introduces readers to an unforgettable cast of characters. There is Ayub Muhammed, who was kidnapped and sold to the American military as a "Taliban operative" at the age of sixteen. Brandon Neely, a prison guard who processed the first group of suspected operatives to arrive in Cuba. Matt Diaz, a Navy whistleblower who covertly released the names of 500 detainees by sending them in a greeting card to a lawyer in New York. Carol Rosenberg, a journalist who has committed the past ten years of her career to documenting life at Guantanamo. And many, many more, including Damien Corsetti, an interrogator who came to be known as the "King of Torture."In startling, aching prose, Straying from Honor shines a light on these untold stories, and through them, provides a powerful testament to the consequences of unchecked state power.

Due Diligence and the News: Searching for a Moral Compass in the Digital Age


Stanley E. Flink - 2019
    He has worked as a journalist and editor for many years, in many different venues and platforms.Flink knows, as we all should, that democracy has no life without truth. In Due Diligence and the News, Stan reviews, succinctly and gracefully, the relationship between the press and American civic life from colonial days to the digital age. He shows that while opinions may differ, facts are not optional. How it can be possible to assure publication based on verifiable facts without curtailing differing opinions is the issue addressed throughout this collection of linked essays.Can internal verification earn the trust of the reading/listening public?Can a voluntary body of experts, like the Hutchins Commission, make workable rules?Can government--international, national, state or local--serve as a watchdog without violating the Constitution?Can the press, in the absence of malice, do less than full due diligence in commenting on a public official?These questions are addressed thoughtfully throughout this well written book, but no one, not even Stan, can answer them conclusively and for all situations. Ultimately, as Stan takes a look forward into the digital age, the age of learned intelligence and poses unanswerable questions about the future of the press.

Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists


Joan Smith - 2019
     Terrorism is seen as a special category of crime that has blinded us to the obvious - that it is, almost always, male violence. The extraordinary link between so many tragic recent attacks is that the perpetrators have practised in private before their public outbursts. In these searing case studies, Joan Smith, feminist and human rights campaigner, makes a compelling and persuasive argument for a radical shift in perspective. Incomprehensible ideology is transformed through her clear-eyed research into a disturbing but familiar pattern.From the Manchester bomber to the Charlie Hebdo attackers, from angry white men to the Bethnal Green girls, from US school shootings to the London gang members who joined ISIS, Joan Smith shows that, time and time again, misogyny, trauma and abuse lurk beneath the 'justifications' of religion or politics. Until Smith pointed it out in 2017, criminal authorities missed this connection because violence against women is dangerously normalised. Yet, since domestic abuse often comes before a public attack, it's here a solution to the scourge of our age might be found. Thought-provoking and essential, Home-Grown will lift the veil on a revelatory truth.For fans of Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez and Misogynation by Laura Bates.

Automating the News: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Media


Nicholas Diakopoulos - 2019
    An expert in computer science and media explains the present and future of a world in which news is created by algorithm.Amid the push for self-driving cars and the roboticization of industrial economies, automation has proven one of the biggest news stories of our time. Yet the wide-scale automation of the news itself has largely escaped attention. In this lively expos� of that rapidly shifting terrain, Nicholas Diakopoulos focuses on the people who tell the stories--increasingly with the help of computer algorithms that are fundamentally changing the creation, dissemination, and reception of the news.Diakopoulos reveals how machine learning and data mining have transformed investigative journalism. Newsbots converse with social media audiences, distributing stories and receiving feedback. Online media has become a platform for A/B testing of content, helping journalists to better understand what moves audiences. Algorithms can even draft certain kinds of stories. These techniques enable media organizations to take advantage of experiments and economies of scale, enhancing the sustainability of the fourth estate. But they also place pressure on editorial decision-making, because they allow journalists to produce more stories, sometimes better ones, but rarely both.Automating the News responds to hype and fears surrounding journalistic algorithms by exploring the human influence embedded in automation. Though the effects of automation are deep, Diakopoulos shows that journalists are at little risk of being displaced. With algorithms at their fingertips, they may work differently and tell different stories than they otherwise would, but their values remain the driving force behind the news. The human-algorithm hybrid thus emerges as the latest embodiment of an age-old tension between commercial imperatives and journalistic principles.

Marguerite Martyn: America's Forgotten Journalist


George Garrigues - 2019
    Early 20th century journalist Marguerite Martyn not only interviewed but sketched the people and events of her time: women marching for the vote, child workers dreaming of a better life, teenagers dancing the Bunny Hug in dimly lit clubs, long skirts and big hats. Criminals and politicians, artists and archbishops, corsets and conventions, romance and rebellion-Martyn covered it all, with sensitivity, wit and whimsy. This selection of Martyn's work illuminates the changing role of women at the turn of the last century: their struggle for voting rights and the heated debate over "a woman's place" in society. Sketchbook in hand, Martyn pursued and asked questions of suffragists and their critics, of social reformers and society women. She interviewed or sketched activists Alice Paul, Sylvia Pankhurst, Jane Adams, and Margaret Sanger, as well as Helen Taft and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. She sketched and was sketched by Charles Gibson, creator of the "Gibson Girl," made fun of the dictates of fashion, solicited advice from 'experts' about marriage and romance, and was informed by one of the current political bosses there was 'absolutely no hope' for women's suffrage. Author George Garrigues has edited and curated Martyn's work to give you a compelling look at the Progressive Era through the eyes of this pioneering reporter and illustrator, and how she was changed by what she saw. (less)