“Just when we thought the lawlessness in Iraq was over,” O’Farrell observes, “even more blatant incidents of looting have begun. With handkerchiefs masking their faces, two rioters roughly the height of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld kicked in the gates of the largest oilfield and grabbed the keys of the gasoline trucks. ‘Yee-haw! It’s all ours! Millions of barrels of the stuff’ they laughed. ‘Yup!’ added the leader ‘ and this mask guarantees my anonymousinity!’ So after all these years there really is such a person as the Thief of Baghdad. Except strangely his accent sounded vaguely Texan.”A writer for the groundbreaking television show Spitting Image and contributor to the screenplay for the hit movie Chicken Run, O’Farrell meticulously researched his conclusions “by spending five minutes on the internet and then giving up.” And while O’Farrell’s sharpest barbs and stingers have often been written to come out of the mouths of grotesque puppets and Claymation chickens, this time around he keeps the best lines for himself: ‘‘With the election of the 43rd President of the United States, the global village is complete,” O’Farrell writes. “’It has its own global village idiot.’”

    Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control, from the proliferation of capitalist logistics through governance by credit and management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.

    In recent times the argument has evolved from one of constructive discussion to one of a refusal to engage - where the bomb speaks louder than the word. This volume collects pieces from Kureishi's work which respond to this change, providing a historical perspective for the times in which we live. 'Kureishi has a particular appreciation for the complexity of modern British Muslim identity that comes from having a mixed-race family . . . Here, Kureishi's experience turns to insight.' Observer

    Featuring the conclusions to Issue 57's cliffhanger stories by Booker Prize nominee Oyinkan Braithwaite, Brian Evanson, and Mona Awad.

    Then in "Barbecue Blunder," sometimes it's fun to reminisce about picnics gone by!

    We all know one! They like to groan and grumble, offering their own commentary on the shortcomings of modern life. Whether it is queues at the supermarket, the state of the health system, the price of a pint these days, the hairstyles of teenagers, or the number of Maltesers you actually get in a bag, there is always something that will get their goat. 'The Grumpy Old Git's Guide to Life' is a hilarious celebration of all these grumps, how to identify one, what exactly they find so irritating and why we find their rants quite so amusing.

    The drawings provide a retrospective of Wolfe's twenty-three years as a graphic artist.

    Dr. Seuss) had a career in illustration that varied widely before he wrote his first juvenile book. Early Works Volume 1 is the first of a series collecting political cartoons, advertisements, and various images drawn by Geisel long before he had written any of his world-famous books.

    This book is a collection of her most personal and inspirational speeches, given over the course of a year and a half, on the Obama's historic journey to the White House. In her own words, Michelle Obama talks about her beliefs, her upbringing, and her values.

    Kratman’s contention: an army is for winning wars. And to win wars, you have to train men (and some women) to be warriors, not police or social workers. Herein Kratman gives guidance and a practical plan of action to officers tasked with training troops—advice than might be equally applied to other crucial training situations, as well.At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).Tom Kratman is a former infantry colonel who served in the U.S. Army for many years before becoming a lawyer in Virginia. He’s now a full-time writer.

    Sour Diesel. Wax, shatter, and vapes. Marijuana has come a long way since its seedy days in the back parking lots of our culture. So has Howard S. Becker, the eminent sociologist, jazz musician, expert on “deviant” culture, and founding NORML board member. When he published Becoming a Marihuana User more than sixty years ago, hardly anyone paid attention—because most people didn’t smoke pot. Decades of Cheech and Chong films, Grateful Dead shows, and Cannabis Cups later, and it’s clear—marijuana isn’t just an established commodity, it’s an entire culture. And that’s just the thing—Becker totally called it: pot has everything to do with culture. It’s not a blight on culture, but a culture itself—in fact, you’ll see in this book the first use of the term “users,” rather than “abusers” or “addicts.” Come along on this short little study—now a famous timestamp in weed studies—and you will be astonished at how relevant it is to us today.             Becker doesn’t judge, but neither does he holler for legalization, tell you how to grow it in a hollowed-out dresser, or anything else like that for which there are plenty of other books you can buy. Instead, he looks at marijuana with a clear sociological lens—as a substance that some people enjoy, and that some others have decided none of us should. From there he asks: so how do people decide to get high, and what kind of experience do they have as a result of being part of the marijuana world? What he discovers will bother some, especially those who proselytize the irrefutably stunning effects of the latest strain: chemistry isn’t everything—the important thing about pot is how we interact with it. We learn to be high. We learn to like it. And from there, we teach others, passing the pipe in a circle that begins to resemble a bona fide community, defined by shared norms, values, and definitions just like any other community.             All throughout this book, you’ll see the intimate moments when this transformation takes place. You’ll see people doing it for the first time and those with considerable experience. You’ll see the early signs of the truths that have come to define the marijuana experience: that you probably won’t get high at first, that you have to hold the hit in, and that there are other people here who are going to smoke that, too.

    The American Dream champions individualism.  But at what price?  In this timely revision of The Wilding of America, Charles Derber chronicles the latest incidents of "wilding" - extreme acts of self-interested violence and greed - that signal an eroding of the moral landscape of American society.  Despite this ever-increasing emphasis on individualism in America, Derber offers a communitarian alternative that is as inspiring as it is instructive.

     The internet has shaken the foundations of life: public and private lives are wrought by the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week news cycle that means no one is ever off duty. On Disruption is a report from the coalface of that change: what has happened, will it keep happening, and is there any way out of the chaos?

    “I believe you change laws.”The fraught conflict between conscience and politics – between morality and power – in addressing race hardly began with Clinton. An electrifying and traumatic encounter in the sixties crystallized these furious disputes.In 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought out James Baldwin to explain the rage that threatened to engulf black America. Baldwin brought along some friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and a valiant activist, Jerome Smith. It was Smith’s relentless, unfiltered fury that set Kennedy on his heels, reducing him to sullen silence.Kennedy walked away from the nearly three-hour meeting angry – that the black folk assembled didn’t understand politics, and that they weren’t as easy to talk to as Martin Luther King. But especially that they were more interested in witness than policy. But Kennedy’s anger quickly gave way to empathy, especially for Smith. “I guess if I were in his shoes…I might feel differently about this country.” Kennedy set about changing policy – the meeting having transformed his thinking in fundamental ways.There was more: every big argument about race that persists to this day got a hearing in that room. Smith declaring that he’d never fight for his country given its racist tendencies, and Kennedy being appalled at such lack of patriotism, tracks the disdain for black dissent in our own time. His belief that black folk were ungrateful for the Kennedys’ efforts to make things better shows up in our day as the charge that black folk wallow in the politics of ingratitude and victimhood. The contributions of black queer folk to racial progress still cause a stir. BLM has been accused of harboring a covert queer agenda. The immigrant experience, like that of Kennedy, versus the racial experience of Baldwin, is a cudgel to excoriate black folk for lacking hustle and ingenuity. The questioning of whether folk who are interracially partnered can authentically communicate black interests persists. And we grapple still with the responsibility of black intellectuals and artists to bring about social change.This book exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy – of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape. The future of race and democracy hang in the balance.

    If we really do get the government we deserve, On Mutiny might provoke a civilian rebellion.