From music and fashion to activism and language, black culture constantly achieves worldwide influence. Yet, when it comes to who is allowed to thrive from black hipness, the pioneers are usually left behind as black aesthetics are converted into mainstream success—and white profit. Weaving together narrative, scholarship, and critique, Lauren Michele Jackson reveals why cultural appropriation—something that’s become embedded in our daily lives—deserves serious attention. It is a blueprint for taking wealth and power, and ultimately exacerbates the economic, political, and social inequity that persists in America. She unravels the racial contradictions lurking behind American culture as we know it—from shapeshifting celebrities and memes gone viral to brazen poets, loveable potheads, and faulty political leaders.An audacious debut, White Negroes brilliantly summons a re-interrogation of Norman Mailer’s infamous 1957 essay of a similar name. It also introduces a bold new voice in Jackson. Piercing, curious, and bursting with pop cultural touchstones, White Negroes is a dispatch in awe of black creativity everywhere and an urgent call for our thoughtful consumption.

    No conversation about the dangers of technology and its unavoidable effects on society can begin without a careful reading of this book."A magnificent book . . . He goes through one human activity after another and shows how it has been technicized, rendered efficient, and diminished in the process."-Harper's"One of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth-century. In it, Jacques Ellul convincingly demonstrates that technology, which we continue to conceptualize as the servant of man, will overthrow everything that prevents the internal logic of its development, including humanity itself-unless we take necessary steps to move human society out of the environment that 'technique' is creating to meet its own needs."-The Nation"A description of the way in which technology has become completely autonomous and is in the process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and suppressing these values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all non-technological difference and variety are mere appearance."-Los Angeles Free Press

    Bridging the world of spirit and activism, they urge a compassionate response to the systemic, state-sanctioned violence and oppression that has persisted against Black people since the slave era. With national attention focused on the recent killings of unarmed black citizens and the response of the Black-centered liberation groups such as Black Lives Matter, "Radical Dharma" demonstrates how social transformation and personal, spiritual liberation must be articulated and inextricably linked.Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah represent a new voice in American Buddhism. Offering their own histories and experiences as illustrations of the types of challenges facing dharma practitioners and teachers who are different from those of the past five decades, they ask how teachings that transcend color, class, and caste are hindered by discrimination and the dynamics of power, shame, and ignorance. Their illuminating argument goes beyond a demand for the equality and inclusion of diverse populations to advancing a new dharma that deconstructs rather than amplifies systems of suffering and prepares us to weigh the shortcomings not only of our own minds but also of our communities. They forge a path toward reconciliation and self-liberation that rests on radical honesty, a common ground where we can drop our need for perfection and propriety and speak as souls.In a society where profit rules, people's value is determined by the color of their skin, and many voices including queer voices are silenced, Radical Dharma recasts the concepts of engaged spirituality, social transformation, inclusiveness, and healing.

    Here’s Chris Christie’s urgent guide for recapturing Republican glory and winning elections again, told with all the New Jersey frankness and news-breaking insights that have made the two-term governor, Trump early endorser, and presidential candidate an indispensable voice and instant New York Times bestselling author. As governor of New Jersey and a key Trump insider and longtime friend, Chris Christie has always been known for speaking his mind. Now that the depressing 2020 election is finally behind us, he shares his bold insights on how a battered Republican Party can soar into the future and start winning big elections again. The wrong answers are everywhere. Dangerous conspiracy theorists. A tired establishment. Truth deniers and political cowards. In Republican Rescue, Christie reveals exactly how absurd grievances and self-inflicted wounds sabotaged Donald Trump’s many successes and allowed Democrats to capture the White House, the House, and Senate in two years—a first for the GOP since the days of Herbert Hoover. In his frank and compelling voice, Christie dissects the last year of the Trump administration—which provoked nothing but conspiracy theories and infighting—and he lays out an honest and hopeful vision, explaining how Republicans can capture the future and save America from today’s damaging Democratic excesses. The core Republican values of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan are as relevant now as they’ve ever been, Christie writes. Opportunity for all. A strong national defense. Leaders we can all be proud of. Americans in charge of their own lives. A federal government that answers to the people—not the other way around. But these Republican ideals need to be reinvigorated with fresh clarity and open arms. Christie watched in horror as some in his beloved party embraced paranoia and explained away violence. Determined to restore the party’s integrity and success, he shows how to build a movement voters will flock to again, a Republicanism that’s blunt, smart, conservative, potent, and perfectly suited for the 21st century.

    But the extreme right has been growing steadily in the US since the 1990s, with the rise of patriot militias; following 9/11, when conspiracy theorists found fresh life; and in virulent reaction to the first black president of the country. Nurtured by a powerful right-wing media sector in radio, TV, and online, the far-right, Tea Party movement conservatives, and Republican activists found common ground in ‘Producerist’ ideology and ‘Constitutionalist’ interpretations of US law – an alternative America that is resurgent, even as it has been ignored by the political establishment and mainstream media. Investigative reporter David Neiwert has been tracking extremists for more than two decades, and here he provides a deeply reported and authoritative report on the background, mindset, and growth on the ground of far-right movements across the country. The product of years of reportage, and including the most in-depth investigation of Trump’s ties to far-right figures, this is a crucial book about one of the most disturbing sides of the US.

    Together in this volume, these newly translated lectures offer an ideal point of entry into Weber's central project: understanding how, as Weber put it, "in the West alone there have appeared cultural manifestations [that seem to] go in the direction of universal significance and validity.

    In this forward-thinking and eye-opening book, feminist bisexual and genderqueer activist Shiri Eisner takes readers on a journey through the many aspects of the meanings and politics of bisexuality, specifically highlighting how bisexuality can open up new and exciting ways of challenging social convention.Informed by feminist, transgender, and queer theory, as well as politics and activism, Bi is a radical manifesto for a group that has been too frequently silenced, erased, and denied—and a starting point from which to launch a bisexual revolution.

     In recent years, David Mamet realized that the so-called mainstream media outlets he relied on were irredeemably biased, peddling a hypocritical and deeply flawed worldview. In 2008 Mamet wrote a hugely controversial op-ed for the "Village Voice," "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'," in which he methodically attacked liberal beliefs, eviscerating them as efficiently as he did Method acting in his bestselling book "True and False." Now Mamet employs his trademark intellectual force and vigor to take on all the key political issues of our times, from religion to political correctness to global warming. The legendary playwright, author, director, and filmmaker pulls no punches in his art or in his politics. And as a former liberal who woke up, Mamet will win over an entirely new audience of others who have grown irate over America's current direction.

    In this new book, he applies his deft and amusing hand to the goings-on in our nation's capital.

    Against all predictions, one of the most-disliked presidential candidates in history had swept the electoral college, elevating a man with open contempt for democratic norms and institutions to the height of power.Timothy Snyder is one of the most celebrated historians of the Holocaust. In his books Bloodlands and Black Earth, he has carefully dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”Twenty Lessons is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

    Pragmatic utopian and practical visionary, Jefferson was one of the most creative men who ever lived. He penned the thirty-five most revolutionary words in the history of the English language: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson has written a bold call for a Jeffersonian renewal in America. "We need the Sage of Monticello's vision as we begin what is the most difficult periods of American history." The Jeffersonian consists of self-reliance, an uncompromising dedication to liberty (over security, profit, comfort, and tradition), an unambiguous wall of seperation between church and state, first-rate public education, thoughtfulness and diffidence about America's place in the world, and a commitment to civility. Jefferson brought genius (not to mention reason, good sense, and idealism) to whatever he undertook, and he believed that the purpose of America was not to seek glory and profit in the world's arena, but to build a nation of equality, justice, and cultural achievement. Becoming Jefferson's People is part manifesto, part call for a new political persuasion in the United States, part self-help book, and part critique of the consumerist world empire that the United States has become at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

    In addition to nine essays from Goldman’s own 1910 collection, Anarchism and Other Essays; three dramatic sections from her 1931 autobiography, Living My Life; and the afterword to her My Disillusionment in Russia (which the collapse of the Soviet Union later revealed as prescient); this book contains sixteen more pieces covering a great range of subjects, assembled here for the first time to offer a rich composite or Goldman’s life and thought. Red Emma speaks on: anarchism, sex, prostitution, marriage, jealousy, prisons, religion, schools, violence, war, communism, and much more. This new third edition, containing a new foreword by Alix Kates Shulman and more accessible source listings, has been revised to situate the works more precisely in light of burgeoning Goldman scholarship.

    This innovative primer highlights sexual liberation as it traces the lineage of “witch feminism.” Juxtaposing scholarly research on the demonization of women and female sexuality that has continued since the witch hunts of the early modern era with pop occulture analyses and interviews with activists, artists, scholars, and practitioners of witchcraft, this book enriches our contemporary conversations about reproductive rights, sexual pleasure, queer identity, pornography, sex work, and more.Kristen J. Sollee is instructor at The New School and founding editrix of Slutist, an award-winning sex positive feminist website."

    Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.”Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory—with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary—is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.

    Encompassing more than a decade of research around the globe, this book shows that cultural capital has far more impact than politics, prejudice, or genetics on the social and economic fates of minorities, nations, and civilization.