New Books in Public Policy

Wendy H. Wong, author of 'We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age', discusses the impact of data collection and tracking on autonomy, community, dignity, and equality. Topics include data ownership, facial recognition technology, recreating deceased individuals using data, and the importance of data literacy in the digital age.

Cancel culture is something all academics are aware of and some are concerned about.  Certainly that’s true of Greg Lukianoff who was the co-author (with Jonathan Haidt) of The Coddling of the American Mind (Penguin, 2018) and who has now co-authored (with Rikki Schlott) of The Canceling of the American Mind (Simon and Schuster, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

This book is a tour de force. In The Making of Constitutional Democracy: From Creation to Application of Law (Bloomsbury, 2022), Dr Paolo Sandro explores the assumed unproblematic tension between the creation and application of law, and the way that this guides constitutional democracy. Crossing both jurisdictional borders and legal traditions, the author draws out the intrinsic relation between law, power and politics, to reveal law's authority. Ten years in the writing, the work is truly interdisciplinary. It integrates jurisprudential methodology, history, anthropology, political science, philosophy of language and philosophy of action. It will be of use to anyone who is serious about becoming a better scholar. It compels reflection on the assumptions that scholars make in writing, in practice, in scholarship and study. All the while Sandro breaks new ground in legal theory and in the study of constitutional democracy. Dr Paolo Sandro is a lecturer in law at The University of Leeds. The Making of Constitutional Democracy: From Creation to Application of Law is available open access.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Is art education worthwhile? In The Value of Art Education: Cultural Engagements at the Swedish Folk High Schools (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Henrik Fürst, Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Stockholm University and Erik Nylander, Associate Professor in Education at Linköping University, explore this question using the case study of a unique form of educational institution in Sweden. Drawing on a project that examined questions of admissions, teaching, assessments, students’ experiences, and the value and values of art itself, the research delivers a comprehensive picture of why and how art education matters. Rich in detail and offering more general reflections on the importance of the arts, the book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities, as well as for those interested in defending arts education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Black Liberation through Action and Resistance: MOVE (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) serves as a call to action for Black millennials and co-conspirators who are immersed in the work of Black liberation or want to begin their own journey toward anti-racism. Its central mission is to provide additional context to an ongoing discussion regarding Black liberation and proper allyship. The theory behind MOVE challenges anti-Blackness, patriarchy, white supremacy, and misogynoir ideologies aimed at the continued oppression of the descendants of the American enslaved.Dr. Frederick V. Engram Jr. is an assistant professor of higher education at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His research focuses on understanding how African Americans comprehend anti-Black racism in higher education and the criminal justice system.Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States. From the climate crisis to the opioid crisis to the Coronavirus crisis, the language of crisis is everywhere around us and ubiquitous in contemporary American politics and policymaking. But for every problem that political actors describe as a crisis, there are myriad other equally serious ones that are not described in this way. Why has the term crisis been associated with some problems but not others? What has crisis come to mean, and what work does it do? In When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dara Z. Strolovitch brings a critical eye to the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis. Using systematic analyses to trace the evolution of the use of the term crisis by both political elites and outsiders, Strolovitch unpacks the idea of “crisis” in contemporary politics and demonstrates that crisis is itself an operation of politics. She shows that racial justice activists innovated the language of crisis in an effort to transform racism from something understood as natural and intractable and to cast it instead as a policy problem that could be remedied. Dominant political actors later seized on the language of crisis to compel the use of state power, but often in ways that compounded rather than alleviated inequality and injustice. In this eye-opening and important book, Strolovitch demonstrates that understanding crisis politics is key to understanding the politics of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the early twenty-first century.Dara Z. Strolovitch is Professor of Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Political Science at Yale University, where her research and teaching focus on political representation, social movements, and the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality.Host Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

A fascinating look at Walt Disney's last, unfinished project and the controversy that surrounded it. It was going to be Disneyland at the top of a mountain. A vacation destination where guests could ski, go ice skating, or be entertained by a Disney Imagineer-created band of Audio-Animatronic bears. In the summer, visitors could fish, camp, hike, or take a scenic chairlift ride to the top of a mountain. It was the Mineral King resort in Southern California, and it was Walt Disney's final passion project. But there was one major obstacle to Walt's dream: the growing environmentalist movement of the 1960s. In Disneyland on the Mountain: Walt, the Environmentalists, and the Ski Resort That Never Was (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer provide an unprecedented look inside the Mineral King saga, from its origins at the 1960 Winter Olympics to the years-long environmental fight that eventually shut the development down. The fight, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, reshaped the environmental movement and helped to put in place long-reaching laws to protect nature. Although the court battle, coupled with Walt's death in 1966, meant the end for the Mineral King resort, the ideas and planning behind it have permeated throughout the Walt Disney company and the ski tourism industry in ways that are still seen today. With firsthand interviews and behind-the-scenes details, Disneyland on the Mountain offers incredible access to a part of Disney history that hasn't been thoroughly explored before, including Walt's love of nature, how the company changed after Walt's death, and of course, the story of Mineral King. It's a tale of man versus nature, ambition versus mortality, and how a gang of scrappy environmentalists took on one of America's most beloved companies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Thanks to the First Amendment, Americans enjoy a rare privilege: the constitutional right to lie. And although controversial, they should continue to enjoy this right.When commentators and politicians discuss misinformation, they often repeat five words: "fire in a crowded theater." Though governments can, if they choose, attempt to ban harmful lies, propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation, how effective will their efforts really be? Can they punish someone for yelling "fire" in a crowded theater―and would those lies then have any less impact? How do governments around the world respond to the spread of misinformation, and when should the US government protect the free speech of liars?In Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), law professor Jeff Kosseff addresses the pervasiveness of lies, the legal protections they enjoy, the harm they cause, and how to combat them. From the COVID-19 pandemic to the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and the January 6, 2021, insurrection on the Capitol building, Kosseff argues that even though lies can inflict huge damage, US law should continue to protect them. Liar in a Crowded Theater explores both the history of protected falsehoods and where to go from here.Drawing on years of research and thousands of pages of court documents in dozens of cases―from Alexander Hamilton's enduring defense of free speech to Eminem's victory in a lawsuit claiming that he stretched the truth in a 1999 song―Kosseff illustrates not only why courts are reluctant to be the arbiters of truth but also why they're uniquely unsuited to that role. Rather than resorting to regulating speech and fining or jailing speakers, he proposes solutions that focus on minimizing the harms of misinformation. If we want to seriously address concerns about misinformation and other false speech, we must finally exit the crowded theater.Jeff Kosseff is an associate professor of cybersecurity law at the United States Naval Academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Even before the Covid pandemic began in 2020, chronic loneliness was a private experience of profound anguish that had become a public health crisis. Since then it has reached new heights. Loneliness assumes many forms, from enduring physical isolation to feeling rejected because of difference, and it can have devastating consequences for our physical and mental health. Jeremy Nobel founded Project UnLonely to bring creativity as well as social and medical strategies to address this societal problem. In his book Project UnLonely: Healing our Crisis of Disconnection (Avery, 2023), Dr. Nobel unpacks our personal and national experiences of loneliness to discover its roots and to show how we can take steps to find comfort and connection. Dr. Nobel brings together many voices, from pioneering researchers, to leaders in business, education, the arts, and healthcare, to lonely people of every age, background, and circumstance. He discovers that the pandemic isolated us in ways that were not only physical, and that, at its core, a true sense of loneliness results from a disconnection to the self. He clarifies how meaningful reconnection can be nourished and sustained. And he reveals that an important component of the healing process is engaging in creativity, a powerful opportunity he shows us can be accessed by all.Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical and science reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Matthew Guariglia, author of 'Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York', explores the history of the New York Police Department and its entanglement with race, ethnicity, and whiteness. Topics discussed include the origins and evolution of policing, diverse policing tactics, efforts to diversify the police force, interesting anecdotes from the history of policing in New York City, and the history of state power and information.