NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • When did America give up on fairness? The author of Fantasyland tells the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever change—and charts a way back to the future. “Essential, absorbing . . . a graceful, authoritative guide . . . a radicalized moderate’s moderate case for radical change.”—The New York Times Book Review During the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled. The clock was turned back on a century of economic progress, making greed good, workers powerless, and the market all-powerful while weaponizing nostalgia, lifting up an oligarchy that served only its own interests, and leaving the huge majority of Americans with dwindling economic prospects and hope. Why and how did America take such a wrong turn? In this deeply researched and brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt Andersen offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of America’s undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame—to the radical right in economics and the law, the high priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and liberal “useful idiots,” among whom he includes himself. Only a writer with Andersen’s crackling energy, deep insight, and ability to connect disparate dots and see complex systems with clarity could make such a book both intellectually formidable and vastly entertaining. And only a writer of Andersen’s vision could reckon with our current high-stakes inflection point, and show the way out of this man-made disaster.

David Kupelian, veteran journalist and bestselling author of The Marketing of Evil, probes the millennia-old questions of evil—what it is, how it works, and why it so routinely and effortlessly ruins our lives—once again demonstrating his uncanny knack for demystifying complex, elusive, and intimidating subjects with fresh insights into the hidden mechanisms of seduction, corruption, religion, and power politics. Analyzing today’s most electrifying news stories and hot-button topics, Kupelian explores such profoundly troubling questions as Why are big lies more believable than little ones? How does terrorism really work? Why do so many celebrities who “have it all” end up self-destructing? Why are boys doing worse in school today than girls? Why do we treat the problems of anger and depression with drugs? . . . and much more. Fortunately, once we really understand “how evil works”—both in our own lives and in the world at large—evil loses much of its power and the way out becomes more clear.

In A Necessary Evil, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills shows that distrust of government is embedded deep in the American psyche. From the revolt of the colonies against king and parliament to present-day tax revolts, militia movements, and debates about term limits, Wills shows that American antigovernment sentiment is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of our history. By debunking some of our fondest myths about the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the taming of the frontier, Wills shows us how our tendency to hold our elected government in disdain is misguided.

The fascinating story of American efforts to liberate and remake Russia since the 1880s.

Reporting from war zones around the globe, acclaimed journalist William Shawcross gives us an unforgettable portrait of a dangerous world and of the brave men and women, ordinary and extraordinary, who risk their lives to make and keep the peace. The end of the Cold War was followed by a decade of regional and ethnic wars, massacres and forced exiles, and by constant calls for America to lead the international community as chief peace-keeper. The efforts of that community -- identified with the United Nations but often dominated by the world's wealthy nations -- have had mixed results. In Africa, the West is accused of indifference or too little, too late. In Cambodia, the UN presides over free elections, but the results are overridden. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein continues to defy the UN, and in Bosnia and Kosovo, the West acts hesitantly after terrible slaughter and ethnic cleansing. Shawcross, a veteran of many war zones, has had broad access to global policymakers, including UN secretary general Kofi Annan, high American diplomats, peacekeepers and humanitarian-aid professionals. He has traveled with them to some of the world's most horrifying killing fields. Deliver Us from Evil is his stark, on-the-ground report on the many crises faced by the international community and its servants as they struggle to respond around the world. He brings home the price many have paid attempting to restore peace and help alleviate terrible suffering. He illuminates the risks we face in a complex and dangerous world. Some critics have concluded that some interventions may prolong conflict and create further casualties. The lesson we learn from ruthless and vengeful warlords the world over is that goodwill without strength can make things worse. Shawcross argues that recent interventions -- in Kosovo and East Timor, for example -- provide reason for concern as well as hope. Still, the unmistakable message of the past decade is that we cannot intervene everywhere, that not every wrong can be righted merely because the international community desires it, or because we wish to remove images of suffering from our television screens. Nor can we necessarily rebuild failed states in our image. When we intervene, we must be certain of our objectives, sure of popular support and willing to expend the necessary resources -- even lives. If our interventions are to be effective and humane, they must last for more than the fifteen minutes of attention that the media accord to each succeeding crisis. That is a tall order. As Shawcross concludes, "In a more religious time it was only God whom we asked to deliver us from evil. Now we call upon our own man-made institutions for such deliverance. That is sometimes to ask for miracles."

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, 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.