New Books in Public Policy

For many years, Diane Ravitch was among the country’s leading conservative thinkers on education. The cure for what ailed the school system was clear, she believed: high-stakes standardized testing, national standards, accountability, competition, charters, and vouchers. Then Ravitch saw what happened when these ideas were put into practice and recanted her long-held views. The problem was not bad teachers or failing schools, as conservatives claimed, but poverty. She denounced privatization as a hoax that did not help students and that harmed the public school system. She urged action to address the root causes of inequality. In An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else (Columbia UP, 2025) this passionate and timely memoir of her life’s work as a historian and advocate, Ravitch traces her ideological evolution. She recounts her personal and intellectual journey: her childhood in Houston, her years among the New York intelligentsia, her service in government, and her leftward turn. Ravitch shares how she came to hold conservative views and why she eventually abandoned them, exploring her switch from championing standards-based curriculum and standardized testing to arguing for greater investment in professional teachers and in public schools. Bringing together candid reflections with decades of research on education, Ravitch makes a powerful case for becoming, as she calls herself, “an activist on behalf of public schools.” Diane Ravitch is a historian of education and a prominent commentator about education and politics. Her many books include Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (2013); The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010); and The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805–1973 (1974). Ravitch was assistant secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush and served on the national testing board during the Clinton administration. She is cofounder and president of the Network for Public Education Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Death is the great equalizer, but not all deaths are created equal. In recent years, there has been an increased interest and advocacy concerning end-of-life and after-death care. An increasing number of individuals and organizations from health care to the funeral and death care industries are working to promote and encourage people to consider their end-of-life wishes. Yet, there are limits to who these efforts reach and who can access such resources. These conversations come from a place of good intentions, but also from a place of privilege. Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins (Rutgers UP, 2025), is a collection of closely connected essays, takes the reader on a journey into what happens to those who die while experiencing homelessness or who end up indigent or unclaimed at the end of life. Too Poor to Die bears witness to the disparities in death and dying faced by some of society's most vulnerable and marginalized and asks the reader to consider their own end-of-life and disposition plans within the larger context of how privilege and access plays a role in what we want versus what we get in death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

What does it mean to be an artist? In Artists At Work: Rethinking Policy for Artistic Careers (Stanford UP, 2025) Joanna Woronkowicz, the co-founder of the Center for Cultural Affairs and co-director of the Arts, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lab at Indiana University Bloomington and currently based at Copenhagen Business School, tells the story of cultural work and cultural policy in the USA. Offering a broad definition of artists and creatives, the book offers a deep dive into the demographics of the arts workforce, their working patterns, the places where they work and live, and their education and training. The analysis also shows the range of challenges confronting the contemporary arts workforce, and crucially demonstrates what policy can do to help. Rich with empirical detail, as well as being clear and accessible, the book is essential reading across the humanities, social sciences, and for anyone interested in the arts today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Food consumers are demanding a healthier and more sustainable food system. Yet labor is rarely part of the discussion. In Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain (U California Press, 2025), Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern and Teresa Mares chronicle labor across the food chain, connecting the entire food system--from fields to stores, restaurants, home kitchens, and even garbage dumps. Using a political economy framework, the authors argue that improving labor standards and building solidarity among frontline workers across sectors is necessary for creating a more just food system. What would it take, they ask, to move toward a food system that is devoid of human exploitation? Combining insights from food systems and labor justice scholarship with actionable recommendations for policy makers, the book is a call to action for labor activists, food studies students and scholars, and anyone interested in food justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Today, images of cartels, security agents donning face coverings, graphs depicting egregious murder rates, and military guards at US border crossings influence the world's perception of Mexico. Mexico's so-called drug war, as generally conceived by journalists and academics, was the product of recent cartel turf wars, the end of the PRI's single party rule in 2000, and enhanced US border security measures post-9/11. These explanations are compelling, but they overlook state actions beginning in the 1970s that set the foundation for drug violence over the longer term. In Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2025), Aileen Teague chronicles a largely ignored but critical prehistory of intensified bilateral antidrug efforts by exploring their origins and inherent contradictions in Mexico. Beginning in the 1960s, US leaders externalized their aggressive domestic drug control practices by forcing junior partners such as Mexico into adopting their policies. Leaders on both sides of the border situated counternarcotics within a larger paradigm of militarized policing, which increased the power and influence of the military and aggressive counternarcotics in both countries. However, different security imperatives motivated US and Mexican agents, complicating enforcement in Mexico. Between 1969 and 2000, Mexico's embrace of America's punitive antidrug policies strengthened the coercive capacities of the Mexican state, exacerbated crime, and were so ineffective in an era of open trade blocs that they hastened the expansion of the drug trade. Drawing on such sources as records from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the US State Department, interviews with key officials, accounts from Mexican journalists, and rarely seen Mexican intelligence reports, Teague relates the war on drugs as a transnational story with deep historical roots in US and Mexican conceptions of policing and security. The negative impacts of US-led counternarcotics policies in Mexico can be attributed to the complex relationship between the United States' and Mexico's shared approach to the drug war--with critical implications for present-day relations. Aileen Teague is an Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She is a former Marine Corps officer and a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

In the age of AI, where personal data fuels corporate profits and state surveillance, what are the implications for democracy? This incisive book You Must Become an Algorithmic Problem: Renegotiating the Socio-Technical Contract (Policy Press, 2025) explores the unspoken agreement we have with tech companies. In exchange for reducing the anxiety of an increasingly complex online world, we submit to algorithmic classification and predictability. This reduces incentives for us to become “algorithmic problems” with dire consequences for liberal democracy. He calls for a movement to demand that algorithms promote play, creativity and potentiality rather than conformity. This is a must-read for anyone navigating the intersection of technology, politics and identity in an increasingly data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Freedom is often considered the cornerstone of the American political project. The 1776 revolutionaries declared it an inalienable right that could neither be taken nor granted, a sacred concept upon which the nation was established. The concept and actualization of freedom are also to be defended by the state. However, when such a concept has been arrogated, litigated, and delegitimized by a state that ignores its very definition, the concept of freedom comes under critical examination. Political theorist Elisabeth R. Anker, Associate Professor of American Studies and Political Science at George Washington University, has a new book dissecting the core of this conception of freedom. Ugly Freedoms (Duke UP, 2022) explores who defined and continues to define freedom, she also examines freedom’s rhetorical capacity, and thus its potential for weaponization. Anker illuminates how the tainted gestation of freedom birthed a status quo based on the individualistic and conditional conception of ‘freedom’ that has long been tangoing with white supremacy, colonialism, climate destruction, capitalism, and exploitation. Such a dance is by design and has been constant throughout U.S. history.Anker establishes that for democratic government to take hold in the United States, racial domination and violence transpired, limiting the freedoms of some individuals in order to establish a governmental system that is based, in theory, on protecting liberty and freedom. This is the kind of tension that Anker explains as “ugly freedom.” Thus, American freedom, our freedom, has embedded in it the role of colonialism, imperialism, enslavement, and land theft. The shocking stains of slavery produced freedom of prosperity and leisure for white people through direct dehumanization of Black and Brown people—this is what Anker is talking about within the concept of ugly freedom. This has also been manifested through more contemporary rhetoric regarding imperial wars like those in the Philippines, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, destroying infrastructure and lives in those countries for the capital prosperity of the imperial core. These ugly freedoms legitimize the economic exploitation of the masses in the name of individual success for the few. Thus, ugly freedom examines the acts of freedom that rely on violence and brutality—this challenges how we often imagine freedom to be. Ugly Freedom explores the connection between politics and aesthetics as well, taking up an array of historical events, political theories and concepts, different forms of art, televisual productions, poetry, music, and biology to illustrate the compounding violence of the few in the name of freedom. The cultural artifacts interrogated were controversial in their own right, and Anker explores them to help understand which kinds of freedom are worth fighting for and which kinds of freedom must be fought against. Through a critical lens, Anker shifts the perception of freedom to help restore justice to its foundational value—one that is less dependent on the individual or individual heroics, and more enveloping of the community and shared collaboration.Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A former journalist and environmental campaigner named Pan Yue rose through the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party, championing the concept of “ecological civilization.” This green dream combines elements of traditional Chinese culture with eco-Marxism, suggesting a radical reorientation of humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Is the idea a serious alternative to sustainable development, as the CCP claims? Or is it just a cynical cover for eco-authoritarianism? We speak with Beijing-based journalist and environmentalist Ma Tianjie, author of In Search of Green China (2025) This is the fourth episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Dr. Lily Hseuh is trained as an economist and public policy scholar, and is an associate professor in Economics and Public Policy in the School of Public Affairs, at Arizona State University. Her research bridges the fields of economics, public policy, and management to investigate how the environment and the global commons are managed and the ways in which behaviors of firms and organizations are shaped by multiple forces from markets to government policies. During her tenure at ASU, she has been a two-time recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, as well as receiving the Professor of Impact award Her work been featured in major news outlets, including the Financial Times, Fortune, and PBS News Hour, and recently, she was awarded an American Fellowship by the American Association of University Women. She earned her PhD in Public Policy and Management from the University of Washington, and before her just published book, she has been asked to contribute a chapter to a number of other publications and has over 20 peer-reviewed articles in such areas as:  Private And Public Interactions And Global Climate Change, Rights-Based Management And Ocean And Marine Resources, Sustainability And State And Local Governments, Participatory Governance And Social Equity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

The first and definitive history of the use of food in American law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control, a Fast Food Nation for the Black Lives Matter era In 1779, to subjugate Indigenous nations, George Washington ordered his troops to “ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” Destroying harvests is just one way that the United States has used food as a political tool. Trying to prevent enslaved people from rising up, enslavers restricted their consumption, providing only enough to fuel labor. Since the Great Depression, school lunches have served as dumping grounds for unwanted agricultural surpluses. From frybread to government cheese, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: America’s Politics of Food, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch (Metropolitan Books, 2024) on the Ground draws on over fifteen years of research to argue that American food law and policy have created and maintained racial and social inequality. In an epic, sweeping account, Andrea Freeman, who pioneered the term “food oppression,” moves from colonization to slavery to the Americanization of immigrant food culture, to the commodities supplied to Native reservations, to milk as a symbol of white supremacy. She traces the long-standing alliance between the government and food industries that have produced gaping racial health disparities, and she shows how these practices continue to this day, through the marketing of unhealthy goods that target communities of color, causing diabetes, high blood pressure, and premature death. Ruin Their Crops on the Ground is a groundbreaking addition to the history and politics of food. It will permanently upend the notion that we freely and equally choose what we put on our plates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy