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In this characteristically turbocharged book, now in a new post-election edition, celebrated Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi provides an insider's guide to the variety of ways today's mainstream media tells us lies. Part tirade, part confessional, it reveals that what most people think of as "e;the news"e; is, in fact, a twisted wing of the entertainment business.In the Internet age, the press have mastered the art of monetizing anger, paranoia, and distrust. Taibbi, who has spent much of his career covering elections in which this kind of manipulative activity is most egregious, provides a rich taxonomic survey of American political journalism's dirty tricks.After a 2020 election season that proved to be a Great Giza Pyramid Complex of invective and digital ugliness, Hate Inc. is an invaluable antidote to the hidden poisons dished up by those we rely on to tell us what is happening in the world.

In a characteristically explosive barrage, Ljubljana's most famous philosopher takes a passionate stance on the war in Ukraine, surveys the latest Hollywood blockbusters, and delivers detonations into a range of contemporary issues, from sexual politics in India to the prospects for a new Cold War. Ever attentive to moments where the bizarre and the epic join forces, among the questions Žižek considers here are: Is the giant orgy, planned to take place in Ukraine in the event of a Russian nuclear attack, really all that morbid? And what should society do, whether on the big screen or the battlefield, in preparation for the end of the world?Agree with him or not, Žižek rarely fails to provoke in a productive fashion. By examining matters through a lens that is bold and original, and often joyfully outlandish, Žižek helps us to better grasp a world in which, increasingly, the dominant motif is one of madness.

In real life, there is a person like "e;Anonymous"e;, who, for the sake of this story, I'll call Huey Carmichael. I was friends with this person for a while before I learned about his other life. The real Huey knows more than a thing or two about the weed business. He keeps rules.The Business Secrets of Drug Dealingtells the story of a hyper-observant, politically-minded, but humorously pragmatic weed dealer who has spent a working life compiling rules for how to a) make money and b) avoid prison.Each rule shapes a chapter of this fast-paced outlaw tale, all delivered in Huey's deliciously trenchant argot. Here are a few of them: No guns but keep shooters. Stay behind the white guy. Don't snitch. Always have a job. Be multi-sourced. Get your money and get out.Part edge-of-the-seat suspense story, part how-to manual in the tradition ofThe Anarchist Cookbook,The Business Secrets of Drug Dealingis as scintillating as it is subversive. Just reading it feels illegal.

“If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.”This rich, elegiac compilation of work from the late Palestinian poet and professor, Refaat Alareer, brings together his marvelous poetry and deeply human writing about literature, teaching, politics, and family. The renowned poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City alongside his brother, sister, and nephews in December 2023. He was just forty-four years old, but had already established a worldwide reputation that was further enhanced when, in the wake of his death, the poem that gives this book its title became a global sensation. “If I Must Die” is included here, alongside Refaat’s other poetry.Refaat wrote extensively about a range of topics: teaching Shakespeare and the way Shylock could be appreciated by young Palestinian students; the horrors of living under repeated brutal assaults in Gaza, one of which, in 2014, killed another of his brothers; and the generosity of Palestinians to each other, fighting, in the face of it all, to be the one paying at the supermarket checkout.Such pieces, some never before published, have been curated here by one of Refaat’s closest friends and collaborators. This collection forms a fitting testament to a remarkable writer, educator, and activist, one whose voice will not be silenced by death but will continue to assert the power of learning and humanism in the face of barbarity.

Traditionally, American Jews have been broadly liberal in their political outlook; indeed African-Americans are the only ethnic group more likely to vote Democratic in US elections. Over the past half century, however, attitudes on one topic have stood in sharp contrast to this group's generally progressive stance: support for Israel.Despite Israel's record of militarism, illegal settlements and human rights violations, American Jews have, stretching back to the 1960s, remained largely steadfast supporters of the Jewish "homeland". But, as Norman Finkelstein explains in an elegantly-argued and richly-textured new book, this is now beginning to change.Reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the United Nations, and books by commentators as prominent as President Jimmy Carter and as well-respected in the scholarly community as Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer and Peter Beinart, have increasingly pinpointed the fundamental illiberalism of the Israeli state. In the light of these exposes, the support of America Jews for Israel has begun to fray. This erosion has been particularly marked among younger members of the community. A 2010 Brandeis University poll found that only about one quarter of Jews aged under 40 today feel "very much" connected to Israel.In successive chapters that combine Finkelstein's customary meticulous research with polemical brio, Knowing Too Much sets the work of defenders of Israel such as Jeffrey Goldberg, Michael Oren, Dennis Ross and Benny Morris against the historical record, showing their claims to be increasingly tendentious. As growing numbers of American Jews come to see the speciousness of the arguments behind such apologias and recognize Israel's record as simply indefensible, Finkelstein points to the opening of new possibilities for political advancement in a region that for decades has been stuck fast in a gridlock of injustice and suffering.

In the past five years Israel has mounted three major assaults on the 1.8 million Palestinians trapped behind its blockade of the Gaza Strip. Taken together, Operation Cast Lead (2008-9), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), and Operation Protective Edge (2014), have resulted in the deaths of some 3,700 Palestinians. Meanwhile, a total of 90 Israelis were killed in the invasions.On the face of it, this succession of vastly disproportionate attacks has often seemed frenzied and pathological. Senior Israeli politicians have not discouraged such perceptions, indeed they have actively encouraged them. After the 2008-9 assault Israel’s then-foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, boasted, "Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent operation, which I demanded."However, as Norman G. Finkelstein sets out in this concise, paradigm-shifting new book, a closer examination of Israel's motives reveals a state whose repeated recourse to savage war is far from irrational. Rather, Israel's attacks have been designed to sabotage the possibility of a compromise peace with the Palestinians, even on terms that are favorable to it.Looking also at machinations around the 2009 UN sponsored Goldstone report and Turkey's forlorn attempt to seek redress in the UN for the killing of its citizens in the 2010 attack on the Gaza freedom flotilla, Finkelstein documents how Israel has repeatedly eluded accountability for what are now widely recognized as war crimes.Further, he shows that, though neither side can claim clear victory in these conflicts, the ensuing stalemate remains much more tolerable for Israelis than for the beleaguered citizens of Gaza. A strategy of mass non-violent protest might, he contends, hold more promise for a Palestinian victory than military resistance, however brave.

Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey collaborated to help achieve the biggest electoral success for socialism in recent British history. The two men share a passionate belief in a fairer, more equal Britain, encapsulated in Labour's election slogan "For the many, not the few."That slogan, inspired by Shelley's famous poem The Masque of Anarchy, points to something else the two have in common: a lifelong enthusiasm for poetry. In this sparkling anthology they discuss the poems that have moved and enlightened them. Their choices travel over centuries and continents, with poets ranging from Shakespeare and Juana de la Cruz, through William Blake and Emily Dickinson, to Bertolt Brecht, Stevie Smith and Linton Kwesi Johnson.Rounding out the collection are appreciations of poems selected by guest contributors Melissa Benn, Rob Delaney, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Ken Loach, Morag Livingstone, Francesca Martinez, Karie Murphy, Maxine Peake, Michael Rosen, Alexei Sayle and Gary Younge.With the burgeoning popularity of poetry, especially among Gen Z, this joyful celebration of the power of verse is bound to delight and inspire across a wide audience.All royalties from sales of this book will be donated to the Peace and Justice Project.

The Illustrated Guide to American Fascism is a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of fascism in the United States leading up to and following the rise of Donald Trump, as well as a stark warning for the future. This fierce, smart interweaving of punch-packing illustration and punctilious text lays bare the authoritarianism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny fueling Donald Trump's political rise, the fervor of MAGA extremism, and the alarming political landscape we are travelling through, notably the upcoming 2024 presidential election campaign.Designed especially to inform and activate younger readers, it pays particular attention to the attempted stealing of the 2020 election, including the harrowing Capitol insurrection on January 6th 2021, and Trump's efforts to evade its legal consequences. Beyond the crimes of Trump, Coe and Eisenman explore the threads of fascism in U.S. history and in today’s foreign policy under President Biden, including the proxy war against Russia, support for genocide in Gaza, and the brutal treatment of asylum seekers along the U.S./Mexican border.Sue Coe’s art in these pages is, by turns and often all at once, tough, satirical, bracing, sweet, and sober. It secures her place in a pantheon that features the zine illustration of Art Spiegelman, the realism of Philip Pearlstein, the caricatures of Honoré Daumier, the expressionism of Käthe Kollwitz, and the Dadaism of John Heartfield.

Return to Fukushima captures the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, chronicling the resilience of displaced communities navigating life amidst radioactivity. Thomas Bass explores the transformative journey from desolation to revitalization, offering a survival guide to our atomic future.Fukushima is an ongoing nuclear disaster. The four reactors that melted down and exploded in 2011 are still deadly, even to the robots that get burned up trying to explore them. Over a hundred thousand people remain displaced, their homes frozen in time, eerie ghost towns where slippers sit undisturbed at doorsteps and tables are set for absent guests. Wild animals have moved into the houses. Vines overgrow buildings surrendering to entropy. Visiting these places, we stare at the vacant world remaining after we have ended our brief tenure as overlords of the Anthropocene.The world is dotted with nuclear exclusion zones. Atolls blown to smithereens. Test sites in the Mojave Desert. Disasters at Soviet bomb-making factories. The red forest around Chernobyl. These zones are growing in number and melding one into another. What if our future demands that we learn how to live in nuclear exclusion zones? Learn how to master the risks and develop resistant crops and other survival skills?Nowhere is this future more evident than in Fukushima, where the Japanese government is pushing people to resettle in towns that are supposedly decontaminated. These attempts have largely failed. But what has not failed are the grassroots efforts at reviving Fukushima. This is propelled by the ingenuity of local farmers and entrepreneurs, citizen scientists, artists, and immigrants from around the world who are intrigued by starting new lives in the red zone.In 2018 and again four and a half years later, Thomas Bass travelled to Fukushima. The difference was dramatic The place had been cleaned up and reopened, not fully, but little-by-little people are learning to live with radioactivity, decontaminate their fields, monitor their food, and prepare for the next wave set to wash over this seismically precarious part of the world. After six years of research, including travels to Chernobyl, Bass gives us a remarkable account of how Fukushima's argonauts of the anthropocene are guiding us into our atomic future.

Send in the Clowns! reads Todd Phillips’ blockbuster movie Joker (2019) as an economic and political allegory of our times.What could be more surprising than Joker as a solution to our present economic and political predicament? But in twelve riveting chapters, Send in the Clowns! leads us precisely here. Grip this movie’s visual language, the book insists, and we can also grasp a political grammar, available to everyone, to articulate a new solidarity.The predicament Send in the Clowns! diagnoses is urgent: how late capitalism ensures astonishing inequality by persistently depoliticizing the demos, only to unleash a backlash in conspiracy, violence, and authoritarianism. Send in the Clowns! maps this unravelling to Arthur Fleck’s own transformation into the Joker. When the movie begins in 1981, neoliberal tides are shifting the sands: the rise of insecure work; the destabilizing of welfare; the explosion of racialized incarceration. Neoliberal theory vilifies power formed in solidarity with others. It criminalizes poverty. It labels social justice, democratic regulation, and collective redress as both inefficient and evil. Slow-reading this film, what Kennedy and McNaughton call grip-reading, allows Send in the Clowns! to isolate and confront the effects.But Send in the Clowns! says that movies have still more to teach us. Joker challenges the superhero melodrama of Batman: that we will be saved by canny corporate accounting and trust babies, tech bros and saviors who work beyond the law. Send in the Clowns! reminds us instead how inheritance and trust law fashion capital to offload costs to others and to nature. What’s more, Send in the Clowns! shows melodrama itself has become late capitalism’s preferred and recurrent genre. It appears in neoliberal economic theory; in a media seduced by villainy; in state justifications for war. Melodrama even appears perverted and disfigured in conspiracy theory. Melodrama allows demagogues to describe themselves as saviors and decry political opponents as criminals, threatening the foundations of democracy itself.Whether addressing psychic outcomes in late capital–where mothercare inverts to smotherhood, where broculture slips to incel—or diagnosing the structural fissures within liberalism itself—where prioritizing economic freedoms leads to suppressing democracy—Send in the Clowns! presents a compelling, accessible account of our current moment. And in a final chapter, Kennedy and McNaughton succinctly offer some ways forward.The myth of the lone superhero has let us down. If we don’t want jokers for president, we must empower the clowns!

Why did Hamas attack? What is Israel trying to achieve? Did this catastrophe have to happen? And is there a way forward? The book’s expert contributors address these and other questions, which have never been more urgent.In September 2023, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan boasted that the Middle East “is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” One week later, unprecedented violence in Gaza and Israel shattered the status quo and shocked the world.Hamas’s Operation Al-Aqsa Deluge punctured delusions of stability as hundreds of militants burst forth from the Gaza prison camp. In the ensuing carnage and firefights, 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds more taken hostage.Israel’s retaliation turned the besieged enclave into a howling wasteland. Nearly 30,000 people were killed in four months, including more than 12,000 children, and over 60 percent of homes were damaged or destroyed. Israel targeted the wounded and infirm, newborns and near-dead, as Gaza’s healthcare system—hospitals, clinics, ambulances, medical personnel—came under a systematic attack unprecedented in the annals of modern warfare.The Hamas massacre and the genocidal Israeli campaign which followed together mark a historic turning point in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The reverberations have also shaken politics far beyond, not least in Europe and the United States, where gigantic, round-the-clock protests for Palestinian rights pitted politicians against the public and exposed a growing statist authoritarianism.In this groundbreaking book—the first published about the 2023 Gaza war—leading Palestinian, Israeli, and international authorities put these momentous developments in context and provide an initial taking-stock.Contributors: Musa Abuhashhash, Ahmed Alnaouq, Nathan J. Brown, Yaniv Cogan, Clare Daly MEP, Talal Hangari, Khaled Hroub, R. J., Colter Louwerse, Mitchell Plitnick, Mouin Rabbani, Sara Roy, and Avi Shlaim

With President Biden recently describing the Chinese premier Xi Jinping as "a dictator," the shooting down of Chinese balloons in US airspace, the increasing of US military aid to Taiwan, and the banning of US exports of microchips to China, the American drumbeat for a new cold war with the world's second largest economy is getting ever louder.This new found aggression towards China is profoundly mistaken, in the view of authors Jodie Evans and Mikaela Nhondo Erskog. Their crisply focused and richly informative new book, based on years of first-hand experience and extensive research, lays out an accessible history of China, examines its culture and current economic strategy, and in particular focuses on the outlook of the younger generation. It concludes that  a strategy of peaceful co-existence will be far more beneficial for working people in both countries, especially for the many Chinese Americans resident in the US, and vital in reducing the risk of a cataclysmic military confrontation between two nuclear powers.

Russia's brutal February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has attracted widespread condemnation across the West. Government and media circles present the conflict as a simple dichotomy between an evil empire and an innocent victim. In this concise, accessible and highly informative primer, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies insist the picture is more complicated. Yes, Russia's aggression was reckless and, ultimately, indefensible.But the West's reneging on promises to halt eastward expansion of NATO in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union played a major part in prompting Putin to act. So didtheU.S. involvement in the 2014 Ukraine coup and Ukraine's failure to implement the Minsk peace agreements.The result is a conflict that is increasingly difficult to resolve, one that could conceivably escalate into all-out war between the United States and Russia-the world's two leading nuclear powers.Skillfully bringing together the historical record and current analysis,War In Ukrainelooks at the events leading up to the conflict, surveys the different parties involved, and weighs the risks of escalation and opportunities for peace. For anyone who wants to get beneath the heavily propagandized media coverage to an understanding of a war with consequences that could prove cataclysmic, reading this timely book will be an urgent necessity.

Israel’s relentless response to the October 7th murders on its southern border has turned Gaza yet again into a bloodbath, bringing unimaginable suffering to its inhabitants. There have always been two opposing tropes about those who inhabit the Strip: On the one hand, they are crazed terrorists.  On the other, they are perpetual victims. Each characterization feeds a dehumanization of Gaza’s Palestinians.While in no way diminishing the horrors that have been visited on the Strip in recent weeks, or the prior suffering of those forced to live in what was effectively an open prison, Mohammed Omer, born and raised in southern Gaza, here presents a necessary corrective: What the news reports have never shown are the ways in which, prior to Israel’s onslaught, the people of Gaza were able to rise above their hardship, to experience the simple joys of human existence despite the bombs and barbed-wire fences.In these pages Omer takes the reader on a tour of this most misunderstood and hidden territory, allowing us to discover the community spirit, the enduring family ties, the festivals and recreations, and the creativity and resourcefulness of people, who, in lives now tragically lost, refused to surrender to the deprivations visited on them.Now, more than ever, we need to recognize the humanity of people referred to by Israel’s defense minister as “animals”, and by news organizations around the world by numbers of nameless dead. With the sensitivity and compassion available to someone who comes from inside the community, Mohammed Omer’s magnificent book parts the smoke and dust to show us the extraordinary resilience of people whose lives war is now destroying.

Beckett’s Children is a lyrical blend of personal memoir, father–son dialogue, and literary investigation that probes the works of Irish writer Samuel Beckett and American poet Susan Howe in search of traces of their long-rumored status as father and daughter. Although Howe has denied the rumor, the possibility that it might be true leads Coffey to a highly original appreciation of her work and a fascinating focus on the dozens of unattended children who wander through Beckett’s oeuvre.The saga of Coffey’s adult son, at various moments on the run in the Indiana woods or incarcerated, shines light on life without parental connection in a cold America. As an adoptee himself, Coffey looks to literature for traces of his own origin story and lineage, a heritage held in secret by a closed adoption system but which, through books and cultural signs, he has been able to decipher in his own way. Provocative and beautifully expressed, Beckett’s Children suggests a new approach to the textual worlds of two highly respected artists, providing a revelatory perspective on both American poetics and the vibrant world of Beckett studies.

In this extensively updated edition of a book that was widely praised on its first publication nearly a decade ago, the acclaimed foreign correspondent and author Charles Glass, brings the the story of Syria up to date. In these pages he looks at the way the Assad government emerged victorious from a conflict that has left the country in ruins, wide swathes of its population immiserated, and a range of conflicts still unresolved.The nuances of the Syrian civil war have never been well-understood in the West, least of all, it seems, by governments in the US and Europe, who, anticipating Assad's departure, made it a condition of any negotiated settlement. The consequences of that miscalculation, Charles Glass contends in this illuminating survey, contributed greatly to the disaster we witness today.Glass has reported extensively from the Middle East, and travelled frequently in Syria, over several decades. Here he melds together reportage, analysis and history to provide an accessible overview of the origins and permutations defining the conflict, situating it clearly in the overall crisis of the region. His voice, elegant and concise, humane and richly-informed, is a vital antidote to the sloganizing that shapes so much commentary, and policy, concerning Syria.

Resisting the Right is a handbook for surviving a far-right take-over of the United States. Today, that prospect is a frightening reality. It threatens the irreversible destruction of America’s democratic system.In a powerful and necessary intervention, Robert Edwards urges that we prepare now for this nightmarish scenario, the better to resist and transcend it.Edwards shows how a right-wing autocracy can be combatted using political action, civil disobedience, economics, cyberspace, traditional media, social media, the arts, and even our personal relationships.A former US Army intelligence officer who now works as a successful screenwriter, Edwards draws on his military training to assess “the threat,” and his storyteller’s imagination to play out likely scenarios.At a time when the future of American democracy teeters on a cliff edge, the urgency of Resisting the Right could not be more acute.

Abolition Labor chronicles the national movement to end forced labor, much of it unpaid, in American prisons. It draws on interviews with formerly incarcerated persons in Alabama, Texas, Georgia and New York to give a more holistic picture of these work conditions, and it covers the new prisoner rights movement that began with system-wide work strikes involving more than 50,000 people in the 2010s.Incarcerated people work for penny wages (15 cents an hour is not unusual), and, in several states, for nothing at all, as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, garbage cans, athletic equipment, and uniforms. And they harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and labor in meat and poultry processing plants.Abolition Labor provides a wealth of insights into what has become a vast underground economy. It draws connections between the risky trade forced on prisoners who hustle to survive on the inside and the precarious economy on the outside. And it argues that, far from being quarantined off from society, prisons and their forced work regime have a sizable impact on the economic and social lives of millions of American households.

"Set in the author's homeland, Colombia, this is the heartbreaking story of Leonor, former child soldier of the FARC, a rural guerrilla group. Paula Delgado-Kling followed Leonor for nineteen years, from shortly after she was an active member of the FARC forced into sexual slavery by a commander thirty-four years her senior, through her rehabilitation and struggle with alcohol and drug addiction, to more recent days as the mother of two girls. Leonor's physical beauty, together with resourcefulness and imagination in the face of horrendous circumstances, helped her carve a space for herself in a male-dominated world. She never stopped believing that she was a woman of worth and importance. It took her many years of therapy to accept that she was also a victim. Throughout the story of Leonor, Delgado-Kling interweaves the experiences of her own family, involved with Colombian politics since the 19th century and deeply afflicted, too, by the decades of violence there."--Provided by publisher.

At the start of Mark Jacob's remarkable new novel-his first book in thirteen years-thirty-seven-year-old Smith wins a "stash" of diamonds in a poker game. The only catch: he has to find them. A Louisiana native, Smith is currently employed on an oil platform off the west coast of Africa, while the diamonds are somewhere in the immense, war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. But Smith's grown tired of the platform and he hates the idea of wasting a full house. One last adventure, he tells himself, and then, diamonds or no diamonds, he's heading home to Louisiana. In Kinshasa, Smith meets a young woman named Béatrice, who hails from a village on the other side of the country. But this village, she tells Smith, is where his diamonds are-a thousand miles away as the crow flies, but significantly longer on the patchwork of guerilla-patrolled roads that traverse the country. If he helps her get home, she'll show him where the stones are. What ensues is a guided tour of hell in which a not-so-innocent American abroad comes face to face with the legacy of European imperialism in the heart of the African continent. Like Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and V.S. Naipaul before him, Jacobs reveals the limits of the western gaze, inverting the tropes of the white-savior novel to give us a story about a man who realizes you don't have to travel to another country to get lost, and you don't have to go home to be found.

Concrete Utopia  conceptualizes the human rights project of the last two and a half centuries as a “backward-looking” endeavor, which, in order to move forward, must return to the utopian roots of its foundational documents. Human rights advance by judging the ills of the present world from a standpoint in the future where they might no longer exist—a fundamentally utopian gesture. This peculiar character of human rights makes them continually ripe for reinvention and for responding to changing world circumstances. Looking at topics such as the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the mid-1960s, public outrage to the Vietnam War, the US civil rights movement and the founding of Amnesty International in 1961, this book surveys the history of human rights and how they have been reconceived at different points in time. It closes by sketching the way they may be re-envisioned for new struggles in the 21st century.At a time when the human rights project has endured criticism for being toothless or even for providing a pretext for military invasions, Kaleck argues that the current global crises, from inequality, to ecological collapse and the “age of pandemics,” can be countered by reinventing human rights work through feminist, decolonial and ecological interventions.

Based on dramatic first-hand evidence, Deadly Betrayal uncovers why and how a cabal of Pentagon Advisors in the George W. Bush Administration created a fabricated justification to attack Iraq. The book provides a detailed insider account of how a Pentagon cabal strategized to manipulate intelligence, pressure the United Nations, force a Congressional authorization for the use of force through political threats, and scare the American people after 9/11 into supporting an attack on Iraq. Authored by a Pentagon insider and senior enlisted leader of nearly three decades standing, Command Chief Master Sergeant, Retired, Dennis Fritz worked directly for and advised some of the most senior General Officers in the Department of Defense. They included General Richard B. Myers, who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the height of the Iraq War. After military retirement, Fritz found himself inside Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon working for Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and key architect of the case for war. He was detailed to the Pentagon as a contracted Research Fellow and Analyst on a special project to gather and review all Iraqi Pre-War Planning Documents for declassification. His access to thousands of personal handwritten notes, documents, and Pentagon's internal conversations, has allowed him to tell the real story of why America invaded Iraq.

A deep dive into one of this century's most potent questions: do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it?This compact new edition of a paradigmatic text packs a big and actionable punch. Updated with a new section on the unique challenges posed by AI, Program or Be Programmed presents a spirited, accessible poetics of new media. On these pages (and screens), Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping readers recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age.The debate over whether the internet is good or bad for us fills the airwaves and the blogosphere. But for all the heat of claim and counter-claim, the argument is essentially beside the point: it’s here; it’s everywhere. The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? “Choose the former,” writes Rushkoff, “and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.” In eleven “commands,” Rushkoff provides cyberenthusiasts and technophobes alike with the guidelines to navigate this new universe.

Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey collaborated to help achieve the biggest electoral success for socialism in recent British history. The two men share a passionate belief in a fairer, more equal Britain, encapsulated in Labour's election slogan "For the many, not the few."That slogan, inspired by Shelley's famous poem The Masque of Anarchy, points to something else the two have in common: a lifelong enthusiasm for poetry. In this sparkling anthology they discuss the poems that have moved and enlightened them. Their choices travel over centuries and continents, with poets ranging from Shakespeare and Juana de la Cruz, through William Blake and Emily Dickinson, to Bertolt Brecht, Stevie Smith and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Rounding out the collection are appreciations of poems selected by guest contributors Melissa Benn, Rob Delaney, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Ken Loach, Morag Livingstone, Francesca Martinez, Karie Murphy, Maxine Peake, Michael Rosen, Alexei Sayle and Gary Younge. With the burgeoning popularity of poetry, especially among Gen Z, this joyful celebration of the power of verse is bound to delight and inspire across a wide audience. All royalties from sales of this book will be donated to the Peace and Justice Project.

Told through the lives of the American Century’s most talented and stubborn dissidents, Flights is the archetypal hero’s journey of a group of progressives whose struggle for truth, and for freedom from persecution, sent them into exile, both literal and metaphorical.Wanted for a crime she did not commit, Professor Angela Davis went on the run in 1970, describing the struggle against panic in her nightly safehouse transfers: “Living as a fugitive means resisting hysteria, distinguishing between the creations of a frightened imagination and the real signs that the enemy is near.” In her quest “to elude him, outsmart him,” she recalled, “Thousands of my ancestors had waited, as I had…for nightfall to cover their steps…”Davis is just one of a rich array of refugees portrayed here by Joel Whitney, all forced to flee homes and/or friends because of their progressive stance. In these pages are compelling profiles of Seymour Hersh, Lorraine Hansberry, Graham Greene, Paul Robeson, Gabriel García Márquez, George & Mary Oppen, Frances Stonor Saunders, Malcolm X, Octavio Paz, Diego Rivera, Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, N. Scott Momaday, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Guatemalan guerrilla fighter Everado and his American wife Jennifer Harbury, Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchú, deposed Honduran President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya and murdered Lenca environmentalist Berta Cáceres.At once a group portrait of these geniuses of creative escape, Flights is also a prehistory (and indictment) of American mass surveillance, culminating in Edward Snowden’s revelations, of torture, culminating in Abu Ghraib, of censorship, culminating in the incarceration of journalist Julian Assange, of fascism, culminating in January 6, and of political murder, culminating in the Bush-Obama-Trump air assassination program.

This story is a modern bildungsroman—the story of a young man searching for himself in turbulent times. Either by remarkable coincidence or Divine navigation, Lee Jaffe's curiosities and passions place him next to a parade of legendary artists who went on to change the world. Among those who he came to know and work with were Hélio Oiticica, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Jaffe even ended up playing with Marley and Wailers at venues including Madison Square Gardens.Jaffe’s determination to establish himself as an artist is a constant throughout these pages but little else was planned. Written with the rich detail and acute ear of a Studs Terkel profile, Jaffe’s story provides the reader with a front row seat on some of the most magical moments of artistic production in NYC, Jamaica, London, and Rio de Janeiro.

Tale of Ahmed is a gripping fictional account of the dangerous journey of a teenage boy, Ahmed, who travels from Afghanistan, across the Middle East and Europe, to seek refuge in England.Author Henry Cockburn lives at one end of a long trail stretching from Afghanistan to the southeast coast of England. His home in Kent is close to where small, frail boats arrive bringing refugees on the last lap of their 6,000-mile journey from Kabul and the Hindu Kush. Meeting and talking with refugees, Henry became aware that even they themselves rarely understand the heroic nature of their odyssey. The journey's never-ending risks have become second nature to them. For most other people, they are simply unknown. Correcting such misperceptions is one of the objectives of this powerful story.Written in the form of an epic poem and richly illustrated by the author, Tale of Ahmed describes how its eponymous hero gets help from fellow travelers and finds unexpected friends along the way. But Ahmed is also exploited for money by crooks and cheats, as well as targeted as a pariah. This unusual and unputdownable fable recounts with great sensitivity the Afghans' sufferings and their courage and resilience in making a grueling passage.

I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader is a timely and essential collection of the many works of Professor Gerald Horne-a historian who has made an indelible impact on the study of US and international history. Horne approaches his study of history as a deeply politically engaged scholar, with an insightful and necessarily partisan stance, critiquing the lasting reverberations of white supremacy and all its bedfellows-imperialism, colonialism, fascism and racism-which continue to wreak havoc in the United States and abroad to this day. Drawing on a career that spans more than four decades, The Gerald Horne Reader will showcase the many highlights of Horne's writings, delving into discussions of the United States and its place on the global stage, the curation of mythology surrounding titans of 20th Century African American history like Malcolm X, and Horne's thoughts on pressing international crises of the 21st Century including the war in Afghanistan during the early 2000s, and the war in Ukraine which erupted in February 2022. As we continue to observe the chaos of our current times, I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader foregrounds a firmly rooted, consistent analysis of what has come to pass-and provides illuminating insight that better informs where we may be headed, and outlines what needs to be done to stem the tide of growing fascism across the Western world.