No Matter the Wreckage is Sarah Kay's debut collection of poetry, showcasing her talent for celebrating family, love, travel, and unlikely romance between inanimate objects. The book is a powerful and honest journey through her self-discovery, featuring poems from a decade of her writing career. Sophia Janowitz's illustrations enhance the poetic experience, making it a beautiful and emotional read.
In 'Wounded in the House of a Friend', Sonia Sanchez delves into themes of betrayal, violence, and redemption, transforming painful experiences into a vision of emotional connection and self-fulfillment. The collection addresses issues like infidelity, rape, and drug abuse, offering a powerful exploration of human resilience and hope.
In 'Uneasy Peace', Patrick Sharkey explores the significant drop in violent crime in American cities from the late 1990s to the mid-2010s. He discusses how this decline has transformed urban life, improving safety and opportunities for disadvantaged communities, but also highlights the costs of aggressive policing and mass incarceration. Sharkey proposes innovative approaches to sustain these gains while addressing urban inequality.
In this ground-breaking book, Katy Milkman reveals a proven path to help readers move from where they are to where they want to be. Drawing on her original research and the work of her world-renowned scientific collaborators, Milkman shares strategic methods for identifying and overcoming common barriers to change, such as impulsivity, procrastination, and forgetfulness. The book offers innovative approaches like 'temptation bundling,' using timely reminders, and creating 'set-it-and-forget-it systems' to make change more achievable. It emphasizes the importance of tailoring solutions to specific roadblocks and using science to stack the deck in favor of successful change.
In 'Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,' Matthew Desmond provides a detailed and compassionate look at the lives of eight families in Milwaukee who are struggling to maintain stable housing. The book explores the intersection of poverty, housing, and profit in the United States, highlighting the systemic issues that contribute to eviction and its consequences on families and communities.
Our conversation over race and policing — like our conversations over virtually everything in America — is shot through with a crude individualism. Talking in terms of systems and contexts comes less naturally to us, but that means we often miss the true story.
Phillip Atiba Goff is the co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, as well as a professor of African-American studies and psychology at Yale University. At CPE, Goff sits atop the world’s largest collection of police behavioral data. So he has the evidence, and he knows what it tells us — and, just as importantly, what it doesn’t even attempt to measure. He knows what we can say with confidence about race and policing, and what we wish we knew, but simply don’t. He thinks in systems, in contexts, in uncertainty — in the bigger, harder picture.
That’s what this conversation is about. What do we know about racial bias in policing? At what levels does it operate? Where has it been measured, and what haven’t we even tried to measure? How much of policing is driven by crime rates? How do we think about the conditions that create crime in this analysis, and what do we miss when we ignore them? What do we know about the investments that actually make people safe? How do we balance the reality that police do reduce violent crime with the fury communities have at being over-policed, or victimized by police? How do we experiment with other models of safety carefully and systematically?
There’s a lot in this one. This conversation could’ve gone for hours longer. But these are tough issues, and they deserve someone who understands both the micro-level data and the macro-level context. Goff does, and he shares that knowledge generously and clearly here.
Book recommendations:
Wounded in the House of a Friend by Sonia Sanchez
Evicted by Matthew Desmond
Uneasy Peace by Patrick Sharkey
No Matter the Wreckage by Sarah Kay
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The Gray Area with Sean Illing 
