Social High

Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don't get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. John von Sothen fell in love with Paris through the stories his mother told of her year spent there as a student. And then, after falling for and marrying a French waitress he met in New York, von Sothen moved to Paris. But 15 years in, he's finally ready to admit his mother's Paris is mostly a fantasy. In this hilarious and delightful collection of essays, von Sothen walks us through real life in Paris....

Former middle school teacher and teachers' advocate Taylor Mali struck a chord with his passionate response to a man at a dinner party who asked him what kind of salary teachers make - a poetic rant that has been seen and forwarded millions of times on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Based on the poem that inspired a movement, What Teachers Make is Mali's sharp, funny, reflective, critical call to arms about the joys of teaching and why teachers are so vital to America today.

Higher education has seen better days. Harsh budget cuts, the precarious nature of employment in college teaching, and political hostility to the entire enterprise of education have made for an increasingly fraught landscape. Radical Hope is an ambitious response to this state of affairs, at once political and practical - the work of an activist, teacher, and public intellectual grappling with some of the most pressing topics at the intersection of higher education and social justice.

Political leaders, diplomats, and business executives around the world - including every president from John F. Kennedy to Donald J. Trump - have sought the counsel of Henry Kissinger, a brilliant diplomat and political scientist whose unprecedented achievements as a negotiator have been universally acknowledged. Now, Kissinger the Negotiator provides a groundbreaking analysis of Kissinger’s overall approach to making deals and his skill in resolving conflicts - expertise that holds powerful and enduring lessons.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta has lived the American dream. As a boy he came here legally with his family. Together they left Santo Domingo behind, but life in New York City was harder than they imagined. Their visas lapsed, and Dan-el's father returned home. But Dan-el's courageous mother was determined to make a better life for her bright sons. Undocumented is a classic story of the triumph of the human spirit. It also is the perfect cri de coeur for the debate on comprehensive immigration reform.

Deer have been an important part of the world that humans occupy for millennia. They're one of the only large animals that can thrive in our presence. In the twenty-first century, our relationship is full of contradictions: We hunt and protect them, we cull them from suburbs while making them an icon of wilderness, we see them both as victims and as pests. But there is no doubt that we have a connection to deer: in mythology and story, in ecosystems biological and digital, in cities and in forests.

Between February 24, 1912, when TR came out of political retirement to challenge William Howard Taft for the Republican Party's nomination for president, and June 23 of that year, Roosevelt and his supporters created and benefited from 13 new presidential primaries, the first in the nation's history. Stressing the importance of primaries, TR's campaign theme became "the right of the people to rule".

Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade, and progressive projects on matters ranging from women's rights to world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction was growing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath. In this sweeping work of history, Tara Zahra examines how nationalism, rather than internationalism, came to ensnare world politics in the early twentieth century.

In The Red Mirror, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova uses social identity theory to explain Putin's leadership. The main source of Putin's political influence, she finds, lies in how he articulates the shared collective perspective that unites many Russian citizens. Under his tenure, the Kremlin's media machine has tapped into powerful group emotions of shame and humiliation - derived from the Soviet transition in the 1990s - and has politicized national identity to transform these emotions into pride and patriotism.

In the winter of 1969, from big cities to small towns, young women across the country sent in applications to Yale University for the first time. The Ivy League institution dedicated to graduating "1,000 male leaders" each year had finally decided to open its doors to the nation's top female students. The landmark decision was a huge step forward for women's equality in education. Or was it?

In the early 1980s, Brian O'Dea was operating a $100 million a year, 120-man drug smuggling business, and had developed a terrifying cocaine addiction. Under increasing threat from the DEA in 1986 for importing seventy-five tons of marijuana into the United States, he quit the trade - and the drugs - and began working with recovering addicts in Santa Barbara. Despite his life change, the authorities caught up with him years later and O'Dea was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years at Terminal Island Federal Penitentiary in Los Angeles Harbor.

In True Gentlemen, Hechinger embarks on a deep investigation of SAE and fraternity culture generally, exposing the vast gulf between its founding ideals and the realities of its impact on colleges and the world at large. He shows how national fraternities are reacting to a slowly dawning new reality and asks what the rest of us should do about it. Should we ban them outright, or will they only be driven underground? Can an institution this broken be saved?

If American government is to work, it must do so in the center - where open discussion, hard negotiation, and effective compromise take place. No living politician knows this better than former Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, who served for 40 years in state and national government, including 24 in the United States Senate and a campaign for the vice presidency. In this vivid account of his political life, Senator Lieberman shows how legislative progress and all-inclusive government occurs when politicians reject extremism and embrace productive compromise.

The term "home economics" may conjure traumatic memories of lopsided hand-sewn pillows or sunken muffins. But common conception obscures the story of the revolutionary science of better living. The field exploded opportunities for women in the 20th century by reducing domestic work and providing jobs as professors, engineers, chemists, and businesspeople. And it has something to teach us today. Danielle Dreilinger traces the field's history from Black colleges to Eleanor Roosevelt to Okinawa, from a Betty Crocker brigade to DIY techies.

Barry loved three things the most in the world—her son, Max, her husband, Bruce, and her job as the mayor of Nashville . . . until she lost two of them. Her monumental lapse in judgment led to a painful public reckoning and the fall of her rising political career. A battle with substance-use disorder robbed her of her only child. Grief, pride, shame, longing, and resentment nearly destroyed her marriage. Barry has to start again, the right way, with humility, hope, and a wicked sense of humor.

A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives—and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe. Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes listeners inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future.

Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes listeners from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities.

In Health Justice Now, Timothy Faust explains what single payer is, why we don't yet have it, and how it can be won. He identifies the actors that have misled us for profit and political gain, dispels the myth that healthcare needs to be personally expensive, shows how we can smoothly transition to a new model, and reveals the slate of humane and progressive reforms that we can only achieve with single payer as the springboard.

Ken Khachigian, trusted adviser and confidante to America's presidential giants and political legends, draws the curtains back on his most private moments with Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon during revolutionary changes in our economy, politics, communications, foreign policy, and culture.

A tragedy is unfolding all around us and is receiving well overdue attention. Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy than their white peers. But Dr. Monique Rainford is working to better understand these disparities and do something about them.