Media Studies Politics

Based on a seven-year study of 1,000 of the wealthiest African Americans, The Wealth Choice offers a trove of sound and surprising advice about climbing the economic ladder, even when the odds seem stacked against you. Listeners will learn about how business leaders, entrepreneurs, and celebrities like Bob Johnson, Spike Lee, L. A. Reid, Herman Cain, T. D. Jakes, and Tyrese Gibson found their paths to wealth; what they did or didn't learn about money early on; what they had to sacrifice to get to the top; and the role of discipline in managing their success.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the landscape of television began an unprecedented transformation. While the networks continued to chase the lowest common denominator, a wave of new shows, first on premium cable channels like HBO and then basic cable networks like FX and AMC, dramatically stretched television’s narrative inventiveness, emotional resonance, and artistic ambition. Just as the Big Novel had in the 1960s and the subversive films of New Hollywood had in 1970s, television shows became the place to go to see stories of the triumph and betrayals of the American Dream.

Award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his property, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys on the grounds of the estate.

The distinguished American civil rights leader, W. E. B. DuBois first published these fiery essays, sketches, and poems individually in 1920 in the Atlantic, the Journal of Race Development, and other periodicals. Reflecting the author's ideas as a politician, historian, and artist, this volume has long moved and inspired readers with its militant cry for social, political, and economic reform. It is essential reading for all students of African American history.

An unusually sharp look at the way in which the U.S. press and experts have dealt with the crisis in the Middle East and Iran.

For decades, Sherry Turkle has shown how we remake ourselves in the mirror of our machines. Here, she illuminates our present search for authentic connection in a time of uncharted challenges. Growing up in postwar Brooklyn, Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries. She mastered the codes that governed her mother's secretive life. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father—and never to use his name, her name. Before empathy became a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival.

Virtually anyone who has ever watched a profound movie, a powerful TV show, or read a moving novel understands that entertainment can and does affect us in surprising and significant ways. But did you know that our most popular forms of entertainment can have a direct physical effect on us, a measurable impact on society, geopolitics, the economy, and even the future itself? In You Are What You Watch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Walter Hickey proves how exactly how what we watch (and read and listen to) has a far greater effect on us and the world at large than we imagine.

Dr. Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science and economics at UCLA, has spent years constructing precise quantitative measures of the slant of media outlets. He does this by measuring the political content of news, as a way to measure the PQ, or political quotient, of voters and politicians.

The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass was Douglass' third autobiography. In it he was able to go into greater detail about his life as a slave and his escape from slavery, as he and his family were no longer in any danger from the reception of his work. In this engrossing narrative he recounts early years of abuse; his dramatic escape to the North and eventual freedom, abolitionist campaigns, and his crusade for full civil rights for former slaves.

Every president has been convinced of his own honesty and transparency; every reporter who has covered the White House beat has believed with equal fervency that his or her journalistic rigor protects the country from danger. Our first president, George Washington, was also the first to grouse about his treatment in the newspapers, although he kept his complaints private. Subsequent chiefs like John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Barack Obama were not so reticent, going so far as to wield executive power to overturn press freedoms, and even to prosecute journalists.

In Future Babble, award-winning journalist Dan Gardner presents landmark research debunking the whole expert prediction industry and explores our obsession with the future. The truth is that experts are about as accurate as dart-throwing monkeys.

An in-depth celebration of the romantic comedy’s modern golden era and its role in our culture, tracking the genre from its heyday in the ’80s and the ’90s, its unfortunate decline in the 2000s, and its explosive reemergence in the age of streaming, featuring exclusive interviews with the directors, writers, and stars of the iconic films that defined the genre.

In 1970, on a soundstage on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a group of men, women, and Muppets of various ages and colors worked doggedly to finish the first season of a children’s TV program that was not yet assured a second season: Sesame Street. They were conducting an experiment to see if television could be used to better prepare disadvantaged preschoolers for kindergarten. What they didn’t know then was that they were starting a cultural revolution that would affect all American kids.

For many centuries the figure of the witch has haunted our imagination and our nightmares. There have been many attempts to quash our fascination with these wielders of forbidden powers, but all have failed. We invite you now on a journey through a moonlit world, where every shadow tells a tale of magic, persecution and persistence. In this fascinating volume, discover witches real and legendary, who once terrorized, devoured, helped or empowered their communities, but who are now largely forgotten.

In her latest forays into the American scene, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer's gargantuan "manor" to the racial battlefields of New York's criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates; she gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst; she charts America's rollercoaster ride through evanescent booms and hard times that won't go away.

On Instagram, the private work of mothering has been turned into a public performance that’s generating billions of dollars, and the message is simple: that we’re all just a couple of clicks away from a better, more beautiful experience of motherhood. Momfluenced examines the performance of motherhood—producers of it and consumers of it—through the multilayered phenomenon of the mommy influencer.

A riveting exploration of how visual media has shifted the narrative on race and reignited the push towards justice by the author of the “worthy and necessary” (The New York Times) Nobody Marc Lamont Hill and the bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Todd Brewster.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were only three major television networks. And there was only one Harlan Ellison taking them all to task in a series of weekly essays he wrote for the countercultural, underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press, a.k.a. “The Freep”. For nearly four years, he channel-surfed through the mire of ABC, CBS, and NBC, finding little of value but much to critique. No one offered a more astute analysis of the idiot box’s influence on American culture, or its effects on the intelligence and psyche of viewers.

World War II was a media war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the press to a great extent, of course, but as the war progressed, the media also came to influence commanders' decisions on the battlefield. The Media Offensive offers a new way to understand military-media relations during World War II. The press and public opinion shaped not only how the conflict was seen but also how it was fought. In what could be called "the new history of war reporting," the focus is switched from how the military controlled reporters to how military decisions were shaped by the press.

Alex Marlow was just a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student when renowned media mogul Andrew Breitbart hired him as his first employee. Breitbart began mentoring Marlow on how to fight the culture war one headline at a time and to remain resilient in the face of personal attacks. Now, in this eye-opening and timely book, Marlow explains how the establishment press destroyed its own credibility with a relentless stream of “fake news” designed to smear Donald Trump and his supporters while advancing a leftist agenda.