Bøger udgivet af Basic Books

"The age of Atlantic revolutions-a six-decade period that packed in the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, the independence of Spanish-speaking Latin America, and a host of lesser-known upheavals-transformed Europe and the Americas, and eventually the globe. Before 1765, most of Europe and the Americas were under the rule of monarchies and empires, and the institution of slavery existed in every jurisdiction. In the ensuing decades, empires were shattered, hierarchies were toppled, new independent states arose, republican forms of government spread widely, and new abolitionist movements arose and, sometimes, triumphed. The modern world owes its basic political complexion to the Atlantic revolutions. But ever since, historians have debated just how radical these changes truly were and how they truly came about"--

"Have you ever dismissed a potential date because they didn't check off all of your "must-have" boxes? Have you ever decided there would be no second date because you didn't feel sparks fly right away? Many modern daters are stuck playing by old and outdated rules that no longer reflect the world we live in. To find love that lasts, TV host, podcaster, and love expert Damona Hoffman encourages readers to break free of the myths that no longer serve us in the twenty-first century-and to write our own love stories. In F the Fairy Tale, Hoffman draws on twenty years of experience as a dating coach to bust four common myths-The List Myth, the Rules Myth, the Chemistry Myth, and the Soulmate Myth. She replaces those myths with the four pillars necessary to build lasting love: goals, values, communication, and trust. Hoffman pulls from close to two decades of experience as a dating expert, coupled with a trove of data from OkCupid and other dating sites. And she doesn't just tell readers what to do or not to do - she explains why. Using questions received from her podcast and her LA Times advice column, Hoffman thoughtfully explores the psychological and social factors behind our behavior, helping us break free of old habits for good. F the Fairy Tale gives readers the tools they need to choose the right partner and establish a solid foundation for love"--

"Over Plato's Academy in ancient Athens, it is said, hung a sign: "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here." Plato thought no one could do philosophy without also doing mathematics. In The Waltz of Reason, mathematician and philosopher Karl Sigmund shows us why. Charting an epic story spanning millennia and continents, Sigmund shows that philosophy and mathematics are inextricably intertwined, mutual partners in a reeling search for truth. Beginning with-appropriately enough-geometry, Sigmund explores the power and beauty of numbers and logic, and then shows how those ideas laid the ground work for everything from the theory of a fair election, to modern conceptions of governance, cooperation, morality, and even of reason itself. Did you know, for example, that John Locke, author of some of the most important texts in the Western theory of government, was motivated in his work by his study of geometry? Or, that Locke was actually terrible at geometry, a seventeenth-century mathematical laughingstock? He was, a fact that might want us to think again about the logic of his life's work. And Locke wasn't the only one! Sigmund reveals how many of our modern ideas about what is true and what is reasonable are based on similarly shaky grounds. The economists and other thinkers who promulgated game theory, classical economics, and behavioral economics-the basis of so much in modern life-were not necessarily good at either math or philosophy, or both. The result is a remarkable book: accessible, funny, and wise, it tells an engrossing history of ideas that spins as dizzyingly and beautifully as a ballroom full of expert dancers. But it doesn't just celebrate the past. Instead, by making all these great ideas accessible to all, The Waltz of Reason empowers as it entertains, giving each of us the tools to ask, what do we know, how do we know it, and what do we want to do, with all these ideas?"--

In this instant New York Times bestseller, a renowned philosopher puts forth the case for longtermism  The fate of the world – and the future – is in our hands. Now with a new foreword, What We Owe the Future argues for longtermism: that positively influencing the distant future is our time’s key moral priority. It’s not enough to reverse climate change or avert a pandemic. We must ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed; counter the end of moral progress; and prepare for a planet where the smartest beings are digital.  If we make wise choices now, our grandchildren will thrive, knowing we did everything we could to give them a world full of justice, hope and beauty.  “To take these ideas seriously is a truly radical endeavor — one with the power to change the world and even your life.”—Ezra Klein, New York Times  “An intellectually thrilling exploration of moral philosophy and human history in the hands of a very skilled thinker and clear writer.”—Kevin J. Delaney, The Charter

"The Espionage Act was passed in 1917 to prosecute spies and critics during World War I. And yet, after a century of piecemeal revisions, the Espionage Act still forms the basis of our national security architecture today - a tool that lets the government keep an untold amount of information secret, without ever justifying the need for that secrecy. In State of Silence, political historian Sam Lebovic uncovers the troubling history of the Espionage Act and the shaky foundations on which our security state was built. The Espionage Act began as a series of vague statutes. Over time and aided by interventions from the executive branch and the courts, it became the basis of a patchwork system for protecting state secrets. Early drafts of the Act gave the president the authority to stop the presses. That provision was struck down after public outcry over freedom of speech, but the resulting legal ambiguities left room for decades of distortion as lawmakers leveraged Cold War paranoia into ever-tightening security. The resulting system for classifying information, Lebovic points out, is absurdly cautious: nearly 80 million documents are classified each year, and the system costs the government more than $18 billion annually to maintain. Aside from being costly, this system is shrouded in secrecy, hiding information from citizens in a way that Lebovic argues is fundamentally antithetical to our democracy. When individuals do try to make this information public, they're punished for it. As Lebovic shows, prosecuting whistleblowers (instead of journalists) has been built into our national security system from the beginning. Far before Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, he shares with us the near-forgotten story of Colonel John Nickerson, the first whistleblower prosecuted under the Espionage Act in 1956 - and a proud Army man who had no idea that his sharing of information could be considered illegal. Finally, Lebovic calls for broad and sweeping reform, proposing a new approach to securing state secrets, one that places the interests of the people first from the very beginning. Shedding new light on the bloated governmental security apparatus that's weighing our democracy down, State of Silence offers the definitive history of America's turn toward secrecy--and its staggering human costs"--

"We live at a time of soaring global inequalities and a concerted challenge to the very notion that human beings can live as equals. Equality, in short, is in crisis. Yet surprisingly little work has been done to understand this complex ideal. Far from being a modern aspiration, as is commonly thought, equality has a long history stretching back to the ancient world. Across the ages, we have also been profoundly ambivalent toward-and even skeptical of-equality: we have both desired equality and questioned how much of it exactly we want and for whom. Today's anxiety about equality is the historic norm. In Equality, historian Darrin M. McMahon offers the definitive intellectual history of equality. McMahon traces equality's global origins in early human societies before he turns to its ideological development from antiquity, through the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, into the modern period. Taking a close look at how equality has been imagined over time-as justice in ancient Greece, for instance, or fraternity in the age of the Enlightenment-McMahon finds that across the ages our ambivalence about what equality means and who deserves to be equals has led to dramatic transformations in the very concept. While equality is today associated with the political left's fight for social justice, the concept has been reimagined by every generation, and put to many different uses over time by actors from across the political spectrum. The ideal has in fact served just as often to consolidate the position of elites in fraternity as to contest their power. Ancient Athenians and Haitian revolutionaries built a more levelled political system through appeals to equality; 19th-century Marxists used the idea to wage class warfare; fascists and Nazis divided the world into equals and unequals, with horrific results; and postwar civil rights reformers, feminists, and gay activists built a more just society by advocating equality for all. Today, socioeconomic inequality is spiraling globally, and the dream of an equal world seems threatened. Only by studying equality's deep history, McMahon concludes, might we make it anew for our own age. Spanning centuries of history, this is a magisterial history of equality, revealing how we came to value the ideal and why we continue to reimagine what it means"--

The remarkable story of how African Americans transformed Atlanta, the former heart of the Confederacy, into today's Black mecca Atlanta is home to some of America's most prominent Black politicians, artists, businesses, and HBCUs. Yet, in 1861, Atlanta was a final contender to be the capital of the Confederacy. Sixty years later, long after the Civil War, it was the Ku Klux Klan's sacred "Imperial City." America's Black Capital chronicles how a center of Black excellence emerged amid virulent expressions of white nationalism, as African Americans pushed back against Confederate ideology to create an extraordinary locus of achievement. What drove them, historian Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar shows, was the belief that Black uplift would be best advanced by forging Black institutions. America's Black Capital is an inspiring story of Black achievement against all odds, with effects that reached far beyond Georgia, shaping the nation's popular culture, public policy, and politics.

"From the Gilded Age to the first Red Scare of 1919-1920, the American anarchist movement clashed with some of the nation's most powerful institutions and individuals. Anarchists never comprised more than a small minority the labor movement. Their vision of a world without states, borders, laws, organized religion, or private property proved far too radical for even the most open-minded liberals of their day-particularly when some anarchists advocated terrorist violence. By the turn of the twentieth century, in the face of this challenge to American values and political traditions, American leaders chose to suspend those very values to destroy the anarchist movement. They vilified anarchism as an "alien" contagion, launched an unprecedented buildup of government surveillance, called for draconian restrictions on free speech, and used immigration laws to expel non-citizen anarchists from the nation. This decades-long "war on anarchy" in turn inspired the emergence of the modern civil liberties movement, grounded in Constitutional freedoms of speech and due process. Seeking to defend anarchist thinkers who denounced the liberal idea of the rule of law, this movement breathed new life into the Bill of Rights and spurred debates about the proper limits of government power that continue today. In American Anarchy, award-winning historian Michael Willrich weaves the gripping tale of these anarchists, their allies, and their enemies, showing how they together transformed the United States. Willrich vividly recaptures the radical political world of early twentieth-century New York City-the nation's chief port of arrival for new immigrants and its preeminent financial and industrial center. New York was home to the infamous Russian-Jewish anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and their social network of Eastern European and Italian immigrant radicals, who championed industrial democracy, demanded reproductive freedom for women, and fought for free speech. From the start, their alien status and spectacles of protest made the anarchists targets for government officials. But when anarchists took a stand against the First World War and celebrated the Russian Revolution, the war against anarchy took on a new ferocity. To fight back, Goldman, Berkman, and their colleagues called on lawyers like the young Harry Weinberger, a night-school-educated attorney from the Lower East Side who found his calling defending radicals in criminal trials, Ellis Island deportation hearings, and before the U.S. Supreme Court, and whose work laid the groundwork for the American Civil Liberties Union. By taking the anarchists seriously as flawed but principled political actors, American Anarchy unlocks one of the great puzzles of modern U.S. history, revealing how a powerful national government and a robust conception of individual liberty emerged at the very same moment in the early twentieth century."--

"The nineteenth century was a transformative period in the history of American science, as scientific study, once the domain of armchair enthusiasts and amateurs, became the purview of professional experts and institutions. In [this book], historian Catherine McNeur shows that women were central to the development of the natural sciences during this critical time. She does so by uncovering the forgotten lives of entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris and botanist Elizabeth Morris--sister scientists whose essential contributions to their respective fields, and to the professionalization of science as a whole, have been largely erased"--

"More so than any politician or philosopher, it is William Shakespeare who can teach us about power. What it is, what it means, how it is gained, used, and lost. From the princes and kings of Henry IV to the scheming senators of Julius Caesar, politics fills his plays: brutal cunning, Machiavellian manipulation, fatal overreach, even the rare possibility of redemption. And it is these enduring narratives that can teach us how power plays out to this day. In The Hollow Crown, military scholar Eliot A. Cohen decodes Shakespeare's understanding of politics as theater, shedding light on how businesses, corporations, and governments work in the modern world. The White House, after all, is a court, with intrigues and rivalries just as Shakespeare described, as is an army, a department of state, or even a university. And, besides their settings, what most of all defines these various dramas are their characters, in all their ambition, cruelty, hope, and humanity. Cohen looks to the inspiring speeches of Henry V to better understand John F. Kennedy, to Richard III's darkness to plumb Adolf Hitler's psychology, and to Prospero from The Tempest for a window into George Washington's graceful abdication of power. Ultimately, through Cohen's incisive gaze, Shakespeare's work becomes a skeleton key into the lives of the leaders who, for good or ill, have made and remade our world"--

"The best modern account" (Wall Street Journal) of the war that toppled the French Empire, unified Germany, and set Europe on the path to World War I   Among the conflicts that convulsed Europe during the nineteenth century, none was more startling and consequential than the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. Deliberately engineered by Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the war succeeded in shattering French supremacy, deposing Napoleon III, and uniting a new German Empire. But it also produced brutal military innovations and a precarious new imbalance of power that together set the stage for the devastating world wars of the next century.    In Bismarck’s War, historian Rachel Chrastil chronicles events on the battlefield in full, while also showing in intimate detail how the war reshaped and blurred the boundaries between civilian and soldier as the fighting swept across France. The result is the definitive history of a transformative conflict that changed Europe, and the history of warfare, forever.

"Before there was Colin Kaepernick, there was Fritz Pollard. The first Black quarterback to play in the NFL, Pollard was a dynamo, leading his team to a national championship, drawing record crowds, and earning the highest salary in the league. He was also subject to a constant stream of racist abuse. Spectators jeered and threw rocks, and opposing players singled him out, using the cover of the game to pummel the only Black man on the field. It would be nearly fifty years before another NFL team started a Black man as quarterback. In Rocket Men, sportswriter John Eisenberg offers the definitive history of Black quarterbacks in the league-men who not only shaped the history of football, but made indelible contributions to the cause of civil rights in America. As Eisenberg recounts, white coaches, scouts, and team owners long perceived Black players as unfit for the quarterback position. Believing Black athletes could not play "in thinking roles," they relegated them to running back, defensive back, and receiver positions. In the late 1960s, a few teams began to bring on Black quarterbacks once more. Players like James "Shack" Harris and Marlin Briscoe proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Black men could play the position just as well-if not better-than their white peers. Yet it wouldn't be until the 1990s, when the league began hiring more Black coaches and general managers, that Black quarterbacks truly got the opportunity to shine. When they did, they transformed the game. Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Black quarterbacks and the players, coaches, and managers who work alongside them, Rocket Men is a reminder of how much Black quarterbacks have had to overcome to gain a space in pro football, and a celebration of the athletes and activists who paved the way for today's Black quarterbacks to triumph"--

"Mothers aren't supposed to be angry. Still, Minna Dubin was an angry mom: exhausted by hard, thankless full-time parenting work and feeling her career slip away from her, she would find herself screaming at her child or exploding in anger at her husband. Despite the pressure she felt to suffer in silence, Minna chose to talk publicly about her experiences, kicking off an international conversation about a rage that, it turns out, nearly every mother has experienced. Mom Rage is Dubin's groundbreaking work of reportage on the national crisis of mother rage - what it is, where it comes from, and how we can all learn to work through it. As Dubin reveals, mom rage is a global phenomenon, but it's particularly acute in the United States, where mothers are expected to manage physical care, education, and emotional support for their children; household and administrative labor for their families; and their own careers, all with little to no institutional support. Adding insult to injury, mothers' struggles go largely unacknowledged and unvalidated, making them feel like their rage is a personal failure caused by being a "bad mom." This sense of guilt is only exacerbated by the intense public scrutiny that mothers (especially poor mothers and mothers of color) are subject to. Dubin assures these readers that they're not alone. She shares her personal story of understanding and eventually overcoming her rage, and includes interviews from women experiencing mom rage across the spectrum of race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. She then breaks down the research on rage, emotional intelligence, anger management, and motherhood to give women accessible tools to alleviate their burden and issue a call for broader social reforms. Mom Rage is a no-holds-barred excavation of the national crisis of mother rage and a call for women to let go of their internalized shame and guilt, resist the patriarchy, and reclaim their lives"--

"Conservatives have succeeded in establishing their vision of education in America, one in which government funds can be used to pay for both public and private schools. As a result, the very meaning of public education in the United States has shifted away from the idea of a universal good. To understand how we got here, The Death of Public School argues, we must look back at the turbulent history of school choice. The Death of Public School tells the rich and surprising story about the people, unusual political alliances, and philanthropic interests that have fueled the rise of the school choice movement over the last 70 years. Drawing on two decades of experience as an education reporter, Fitzpatrick traces the origins of school choice in the modern era from Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who helped lead a revival of conservatism in the 20th century, to the present day, in which conservatives are propelling the spread of choice options, such as charter schools, school vouchers, and tax-credit scholarships. Fitzpatrick paints rich portraits of people from various political and cultural backgrounds-from free-market conservatives to Catholic priests to white segregationists in the South to Black parents in urban school systems-who, in pursuit of their vision of education, linked arms with individuals across the aisle"--

This devastating critique by the authors of The Deindustrialization of America documents how the economic policies of the Reagan era have damaged the American standard of living and suggests how this trend may be reversed.

The quest for social justice is a powerful crusade of our time, with an appeal to many different people, for many different reasons. But those who use the same words do not always present the same meanings. Clarifying those meanings is the first step toward finding out what we agree on and disagree on. From there, it is largely a question of what the facts are. Social Justice Fallacies reveals how many things that are thought to be true simply cannot stand up to documented facts, which are often the opposite of what is widely believed. However attractive the social justice vision, the crucial question is whether the social justice agenda will get us to the fulfillment of that vision. History shows that the social justice agenda has often led in the opposite direction, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. More things are involved besides simply mistakes. All human beings are fallible, and social justice advocates may not necessarily make any more mistakes than others. But crusaders with an utter certainty about their mission are often undeterred by obstacles, evidence or even fatal dangers. That is where much of the Western world is today. The question is whether we will continue on heedlessly, past the point of no return.

"In The Overlooked Americans, public policy expert Elizabeth Currid-Halkett breaks through stereotypes about rural America. She traces how small towns are doing as well as, or better than, cities by many measures. She also shows how rural and urban Americans share core values, from opposing racism and upholding environmentalism to believing in democracy. When we focus too heavily on the far-right fringe, we overlook the millions of rural Americans who are content with their lives"--

"Imagine a friend who earnestly tells you that he thinks men and women are equally good leaders. But when he talks about men's leadership skills, he places his palm at eye-level, and when he talks about women's leadership skills, he places his palm a bit lower, at mouth-level. His hands have given him away: even if he truly thinks that his views are egalitarian, he holds an implicit belief that is now there for all the word to see. You swear you heard him say something disparaging, even if you don't fully realize why. In Thinking With Your Hands, cognitive psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow reveals just how essential gestures are to how we think and communicate. Drawing on decades of research, including experiments and studies from throughout her own illustrious career, Goldin-Meadow presents the definitive overview of the most important feature of human communication that you've never thought about. Gesture is a universal behavior common to every culture and language. It's found among Deaf people who use their hands to speak in sign language and blind people who have never seen anyone gesture before. Far from being an affective flourish, Goldin-Meadow argues, gestures are an integral piece of the conversation-even if we don't realize it while we're using them. They give form to ideas that are difficult to phrase in language and help us express ideas that we are grappling with but haven't yet fully grasped. Indeed, understanding gesture compels us to re-think everything from to how we set development milestones for children, to what's admissible in a court of law, to whether FaceTime is a good communication technology. A landmark achievement by a star in the field of cognitive psychology, Thinking With Your Hands reveals the entire landscape of communication that's hidden in our hands and promises to transform the way we think about language for decades to come"--

"From Joan of Arc to Queen Elizabeth I, to Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony, to Sally Ride and Jennifer Aniston, history is full of women without children. Some chose to forego reproduction in order to pursue intellectually satisfying work--a tension noted by medieval European nuns, 1970s women's liberationists, and modern professionals alike. Some refused to bring children into a world beset by famine, pollution, or climate change. For others, childlessness was involuntary: infertility has been a source of anguish all the way back to the biblical Hannah. But most women without children didn't--and don't--perceive themselves as either proudly childfree or tragically barren. ... It is women ... whose ambivalence throughout their child-bearing years ... makes their choice for them that make up the vast majority of millennials without children in the United States. Drawing on deep archival research and her own experience as a woman without children, historian Peggy O'Donnell shows modern women who are struggling to build lives and to figure out whether those lives allow for children that they are part of a long historical lineage"--

"Founded in 1958 by a small band of anti-New Deal businessmen, the John Birch Society held that a vast communist conspiracy existed within America and posed an existential threat to the country. Birchers railed against the federal government, defended segregation, and accused liberal elites of conspiring to destroy the country's core values-Christianity, capitalism, and individual freedom. Shunned by the political establishment and mainstream media, the organization invented new methods for reaching mass audiences and spread their paranoid anti-government ideology nationwide. Although seen as a fringe movement throughout the 1960s and considered all but dead by the mid-1970s, the John Birch Society in fact birthed an alliance uniting super-rich business titans with grassroots activists that lasts to this day. In Birchers, historian Matthew Dallek uncovers how the Birchers, once the far-right fringe of American politics, forged a conspiratorial, media-savvy style of conservatism that would ultimately take over the Republican Party. Drawing on thousands of archival documents, Dallek traces how an elite coterie of white businessmen kickstarted a national grassroots movement of devout, upwardly mobile defenders of the status quo, who feared the expansion of the welfare state, the advance of communism overseas, and growing calls for racial and gender equality. Ultraconservative propaganda produced by these elites, Dallek shows, radicalized white homeowners, housewives, and middle-class professionals and inspired them to relentlessly push a handful of fringe causes through direct action techniques, such as phone banking, letter writing, and public protest. Liberal critics dismissed the organization as unserious and assumed the far right was destined for failure, but they underestimated the society's depth of support. Most Birchers were in fact affluent, educated, skilled political operatives for whom the movement had touched a chord. Recognizing the strength of these voters, the Republican Party accommodated their extremism, wooed them for money and votes, and gave them a political home long after the John Birch Society had ceased to exist. When the Republican establishment lost credibility following the '08 financial crisis, however, party leaders lost their control over this powerful fringe tradition. Drawing on Birchers' anti-establishment precedent, far-right politicians like Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, and Marjorie Taylor Green were able to thrive and ultimately dominate the GOP electoral coalition in the 2010s. Deeply researched and full of insight, Birchers is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the growth of right-wing extremism in the United States"--

How essential workers’ fight for better jobs during the pandemic revolutionized US labor politics Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, essential workers lashed out against low wages, long hours, and safety risks, attracting a level of support unseen in decades. This explosion of labor unrest seemed sudden to many. But Essential reveals that American workers had simmered in discontent long before their anger boiled over.  Decades of austerity, sociologist Jamie K. McCallum shows, have left frontline workers vulnerable to employer abuse, lacking government protections, and increasingly furious. Through firsthand research conducted as the pandemic unfolded, McCallum traces the evolution of workers’ militancy, showing how their struggles for safer workplaces, better pay and health care, and the right to unionize have benefitted all Americans and spurred a radical new phase of the labor movement. This is essential reading for understanding the past, present, and future of the working class.

"On October 16, 1987 meteorologists predicted a nice, breezy day in the south of England. Instead, the countryside was battered by the worst storm to hit the country in over 300 years. Twenty-two people were killed and damages totaled more than 3.3 million dollars. In the aftermath, scientists asked themselves: why was the forecast wrong? What could have been done to predict this? Meteorologist Tim Palmer discovered the answer: it comes down to embracing chaos. In The Primacy of Doubt, Palmer tells the story of how scientists learned to accurately predict the weather, and how we can use those insights to predict everything else, from the workings of the brain and how it creates consciousness to how quantum mechanics enables everything we see to emerge from just four basic particles. The key is embracing uncertainty. In the case of the Great Storm of 1987, Palmer found, forecasters were too obsessed with finding an on-off switch in their models: either it would be stormy or it wouldn't. Palmer led the charge to inject probabilistic forecasting into weather models, a massive breakthrough that has revolutionized our ability not only to know whether to bring an umbrella, but to prevent life-threatening catastrophes. But weather isn't the only thing that we use deterministic models to predict. Our understanding of quantum physics, climate change, and the economy could all be revolutionized by acknowledging uncertainty, Palmer argues, and those revolutions are long overdue. A fascinating firsthand account of the science of uncertainty, The Primacy of Doubt is for anyone seeking to better understand not just what scientists do and don't understand about the universe. The Primacy of Doubt proves one thing for certain: the key to knowing is to admit when you don't know"--