"What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self--a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience--she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo? Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us--and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror. Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now--and an intellectual adventure story for our times"--

"For several years, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, has been embedded in two worlds. The first is the world of social-media entrepreneurs, who, acting out of naïvete and reckless ambition, upended all traditional means of receiving and transmitting information. The second is the world of the people he calls "the gate crashers" -- the conspiracists, white supremacists, and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda. Antisocial ranges broadly -- from the first mass-printed books to the trending hashtags of the present; from secret gatherings of neo-Fascists to the White House press briefing room -- and traces how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then how it becomes reality. Combining the keen narrative detail of Bill Buford's Among the Thugs and the sweep of George Packer's The Unwinding, Antisocial reveals how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in a deeply broken informational landscape -- the landscape in which we all now live. Marantz shows how alienated young people are led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization, and how fringe ideas spread -- from anonymous corners of social media to cable TV to the President's Twitter feed. Marantz also sits with the creators of social media as they start to reckon with the forces they've unleashed. Will they be able to solve the communication crisis they helped bring about, or are their interventions too little too late?" --

What happens to democracy and free speech if people use the Internet to create echo chambers--to listen and speak only to the like-minded? What is the democratic benefit of the Internet's unlimited choices if citizens narrowly limit the information they receive, creating ever-smaller niches and fragmenting the shared public conversation on which democracy depends? Cass Sunstein first asked these questions before 9/11, in Republic.com, and they have become even more urgent in the years since. Now, in Republic.com 2.0, Sunstein thoroughly rethinks the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet in a world where partisan Web logs have emerged as a significant force in politics and where cyber-jihadists have embraced the Internet to thwart democracy and spread violence. Emphasizing the value of unplanned, unchosen encounters, the original Republic.com provoked a strong reaction from cyber-optimists. In Republic.com 2.0 Sunstein answers the critics and expands his argument to take account of new developments, including the blogosphere, and fresh evidence about how people are using the Internet. He demonstrates that the real question is how to avoid "information cocoons" and to ensure that the unrestricted choices made possible by technology do not undermine democracy. Sunstein also proposes new remedies and reforms--focusing far less on what government should do, and much more on what consumers and producers should do--to help democracy avoid the perils, and realize the promise, of the Internet.

Using historical research, original organizational case studies, and personal interviews, the authors illuminate how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies

"Noam Chomsky dissects the multiple crises facing humankind and the planet; and provides a road map for resistance. In this completely original set of interviews between the legendary duo of Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, the two confront topics such as the pandemic, the wealth gap (made worse because of the pandemic), climate destruction, the increasing power of the corporate owned media, systematic racism, Big Tech, and more."--

"Life for citizens of the developed world before the pandemic was safer, easier, and healthier than for any other people in history thanks to modern medicine, science, technology, and intelligence ... but COVID-19 has stolen that security and our nation's peace of mind. Now there is a pandemic virus, as well as a crippling epidemic of fear sweeping America. Why? The answer, according to nationally renowned health commentator Dr. Marc Siegel, is that we already lived in an artificially created culture of fear that was just waiting to be unleashed. In COVID: The Politics of Fear and the Power of Science, Siegel identifies three major catalysts of the culture of fear: government, the media, and our own psyche. With fascinating, blow-by-blow analyses of the most sensational false alarms of the past few years, compounded now by the worst contagion of our lifetimes, he shows how fear mongers manipulate our most primitive instincts-- often without our even realizing it. COVID shows us how to look behind the hype and hysteria, inoculate ourselves against these crippling fear tactics, and develop the emotional and intellectual skills needed to take back our lives, even as we battle the pandemic itself."--Provided by publisher

From stem cell research to global warming, human cloning, evolution, and beyond, political debates about science have raged in recent years - and, to the chagrin of most observers, have increasingly fallen into the familiar categories of America's culture wars. In Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy, Yuval Levin explores the complicated meanings of science and technology in American politics and finds that the science debates have a lot to teach us about our political life. These debates, Levin argues, reveal some serious challenges to American self-government, and put on stark display the deepest strengths and greatest weaknesses of both the left and the right. American life has been profoundly shaped by science and technology, and will be all the more so in the coming decades, making it crucial that we understand how to think and speak about science in politics. Yuval Levin's smart and eminently well-reasoned book makes the important point that the purpose of science is a moral one -- to improve human life -- and that judging what that involves is sometimes a job for more than science alone in a democratic society. Levin's insights speak directly to today's political debates and make his book a must-read for policymakers and all those who care about science and society. --Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House Imagining the Future goes far beyond the contemporary polarized debates over science to unpack the moral premises of the modern scientific project and its consequences for American democracy. In the process, Yuval Levin provides us with a deep understanding of policy issues from genetic engineering to global warming. --Francis Fukuyama, Johns Hopkins University This book is important to the thinking of both progressives and conservatives. Clearly and incisively, it shows how science and technology are shaping humanity's future and world views. Levin alerts democratic societies that human dignity and equality are imperiled unless we provide political and moral guidance to prevent the submergence of humanity in its own ingenuity. --Edmund Pellegrino, Chairman, President's Council on Bioethics

"A major contribution to the study of global events in times of global media. Owning the Olympics tests the possibilities and limits of the concept of 'media events' by analyzing the mega-event of the information age: the Beijing Olympics. . . . A good read from cover to cover." —Guobin Yang, Associate Professor, Asian/Middle Eastern Cultures & Sociology, Barnard College, Columbia University From the moment they were announced, the Beijing Games were a major media event and the focus of intense scrutiny and speculation. In contrast to earlier such events, however, the Beijing Games are also unfolding in a newly volatile global media environment that is no longer monopolized by broadcast media. The dramatic expansion of media outlets and the growth of mobile communications technology have changed the nature of media events, making it significantly more difficult to regulate them or control their meaning. This volatility is reflected in the multiple, well-publicized controversies characterizing the run-up to Beijing 2008. According to many Western commentators, the People's Republic of China seized the Olympics as an opportunity to reinvent itself as the "New China"---a global leader in economics, technology, and environmental issues, with an improving human-rights record. But China's maneuverings have also been hotly contested by diverse global voices, including prominent human-rights advocates, all seeking to displace the official story of the Games. Bringing together a distinguished group of scholars from Chinese studies, human rights, media studies, law, and other fields, Owning the Olympics reveals how multiple entities---including the Chinese Communist Party itself---seek to influence and control the narratives through which the Beijing Games will be understood. digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

In this original and controversial book, historian and philosopher Reviel Netz explores the development of a controlling and pain-inducing technology--barbed wire. Surveying its development from 1874 to 1954, Netz describes its use to control cattle during the colonization of the American West and to control people in Nazi concentration camps and the Russian Gulag. Physical control over space was no longer symbolic after 1874. This is a history told from the perspective of its victims. With vivid examples of the interconnectedness of humans, animals, and the environment, this dramatic account of barbed wire presents modern history through the lens of motion being prevented. Drawing together the history of humans and animals, Netz delivers a compelling new perspective on the issues of colonialism, capitalism, warfare, globalization, violence, and suffering. Theoretically sophisticated but written with a broad readership in mind, Barbed Wire calls for nothing less than a reconsideration of modernity.

For a range of historical and contemporary issues in eugenics, human evolution, and procreative technology, Ruth Hubbard explains why scientific descriptions and choices should not generalize human, or female, attributes without acknowledging the realities of people's lives. Sophisticated in its analysis, yet not at all technical in its exposition, this book will find a wide readership among feminists, the general public, and the scientific community.

Following a vast expansion in the twentieth century, government is beginning to creak at the joints under its enormous weight. The signs are clear: a bloated civil service, low approval ratings for Congress and the President, increasing federal-state conflict, rampant distrust of politicians and government officials, record state deficits, and major unrest among public employees. In this compact, clearly written book, the noted legal scholar Richard Epstein advocates a much smaller federal government, arguing that our over-regulated state allows too much discretion on the part of regulators, which results in arbitrary, unfair decisions, rent-seeking, and other abuses. Epstein bases his classical liberalism on the twin pillars of the rule of law and of private contracts and property rights—an overarching structure that allows private property to keep its form regardless of changes in population, tastes, technology, and wealth. This structure also makes possible a restrained public administration to implement limited objectives. Government continues to play a key role as night-watchman, but with the added flexibility in revenues and expenditures to attend to national defense and infrastructure formation. Although no legal system can eliminate the need for discretion in the management of both private and public affairs, predictable laws can cabin the zone of discretion and permit arbitrary decisions to be challenged. Joining a set of strong property rights with sound but limited public administration could strengthen the rule of law, with its virtues of neutrality, generality, clarity, consistency, and forward-lookingness, and reverse the contempt and cynicism that have overcome us.

'Does a great service in making available a clear set of critiques of the headlong rush into a planned and administered future, while at the same time providing tools for analysis and policy which demonstrate the necessity, not to plan the future, but to take responsibility for the grounds upon which it can emerge' - Futures'An authoritative guide to thinking seriously about information technology, [It] helps to shift debate from its current journalistic level to a more considered overview of the phenomenon' - Dr Jonathan Bigwell, University of Reading

How have regimes used the agencies of criminal justice for their own purposes? What characterizes the linkage of politics and justice? Drawing on a wealth of foreign and domestic source material, Otto Kirchheimer examines systematically the structure of state protection, the nature of a strictly political trial, including the trial by fiat of the successor regime, and the forms of legal repression that states have used against political organizations. He analyzes the Nuremberg trials, the Communist purge trials, and a number of Smith Act trials. In two highly original chapters he also explores the political and judicial nature of asylum and clemency. This study of the uneasy balance between abstract justice and political expediency is a contribution to constitutional and criminal law, political science, and social psychology.Originally published in 1961.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"This book develops a method that emphasizes the entwinements of "technology," "ideology," and the medium-specific particularities of photography in five twentieth-century cases in which photography and Jewish history intersect"--

As a distinguished scientist, pacifist, and feminist, Ursula Franklin has been regularly invited by diverse groups to share her insights into the social and political impacts of science and technology. This collection contains twenty-two of Franklin's speeches and five interviews from 1986 to 2012 that have been retrieved and restored from audio and visual recordings with the help of her collaborator, Jane Freeman. These speeches and interviews, available here in print for the first time, stress the increased need for discernment and principled dialogue among Canadians. Although civic life for many Canadians has changed drastically in the past five decades, the basic principles of building and maintaining peaceful communities remain unchanged. Addressing practices of education, research, and civic life, Franklin looks to the past as well as the future to suggest collective ways of cultivating discernment and of advancing human betterment. As a whole, the collection reveals the evolution of Franklin's perspective: a perspective that is further elaborated in her afterthoughts that form the book's introduction and conclusion. Although her speeches and interviews are often critical of the status quo, Ursula Franklin Speaks is a fundamentally optimistic book, grounded in the conviction of the human capacity for compassion and understanding.

"Eli Noam provides a comprehensive and balanced survey of media concentration with a methodical, scientific approach. He assembles a wealth of data from the last 25 years about mass media such as radio, television, film, music, and print publishing, as well as the Internet, telecommunications, and media-related information technology." "Media Ownership and Concentration in America will be essential reading and a trove of information for scholars and students in media, telecommunications, IT, economics, and the history of business, as well as media industry professionals, business researchers, and policy makers around the world. Critics and defenders of media alike will find much that confirms and refutes their worldview."--BOOK JACKET.