How Bill de Blasio’s mayoral victory triggered a seismic shift in the nation’s urban political landscape—and what it portends for our cities in the future In November 2013, a little-known progressive stunned the elite of New York City by capturing the mayoralty by a landslide. Bill de Blasio’s promise to end the “Tale of Two Cities” had struck a chord among ordinary residents still struggling to recover from the Great Recession. De Blasio’s election heralded the advent of the most progressive New York City government in generations. Not since the legendary Fiorello La Guardia in the 1930s had so many populist candidates captured government office at the same time. Gotham, in other words, had been suddenly reclaimed in the name of its people. How did this happen? De Blasio’s victory, journalist legend Juan González argues, was not just a routine change of government but a popular rebellion against corporate-friendly policies that had dominated New York for decades. Reflecting that broader change, liberal Democrats Bill Peduto in Pittsburgh, Betsy Hodges in Minneapolis, and Martin Walsh of Boston also won mayoral elections that same year, as did insurgent Ras Baraka in Newark the following year. This new generation of municipal leaders offers valuable lessons for those seeking grassroots reform.

Nora Ephron and Allie Brosh fans take note: Alisa Jones' memoir Gotham Girl Interrupted is a smart stand-up comedy about the power of falling down. "Get to your safe spaces, people. Here comes the shimmer..." From irreverent NYC blogger Alisa Kennedy Jones comes an account of her "misadventures in motherhood, love, and epilepsy" that James Patterson calls "smart, harrowing, heart-warming, and very funny." What do Da Vinci, Agatha Christie, and blogger Alisa Kennedy Jones have in common? If you said "timeless artistic genius", stop sucking up--the answer is ecstatic epilepsy. In this hilarious and moving dispatch from the frontlines of neurodiversity, Jones chronicles life with these terrifying-yet-beautiful grand mal seizures. Characteristic of Jones's condition are attacks which leave her with what Zen Buddhists sometimes refer to as a "beginner's mind": a vast, open expanse of headspace, coupled with a creative euphoria. With bracing candor and humility, Jones describes living with chronic illness, single motherhood, and her day-to-day life as a hapless writer in NYC. Above all, Jones reminds us to fight the battle for becoming who we are supposed to be--no matter how much flopping around on the ground and wetting ourselves we have to do to get there.

Majora Carter shows how brain drain cripples low-status communities and maps out a development strategy focused on talent retention to help them break out of economic stagnation. "My musical, In the Heights, explores issues of community, gentrification, identity and home, and the question: Are happy endings only ones that involve getting out of your neighborhood to achieve your dreams? In her refreshing new book, Majora Carter writes about these issues with great insight and clarity, asking us to re-examine our notions of what community development is and how we invest in the futures of our hometowns. This is an exciting conversation worth joining.” —Lin-Manuel Miranda How can we solve the problem of persistent poverty in low-status communities? Majora Carter argues that these areas need a talent-retention strategy, just like the ones companies have. Retaining homegrown talent is a critical part of creating a strong local economy that can resist gentrification. But too many people born in low-status communities measure their success by how far away from them they can get. Carter, who could have been one of them, returned to the South Bronx and devised a development strategy rooted in the conviction that these communities have the resources within themselves to succeed. She advocates measures such as • Building mixed-income instead of exclusively low-income housing to create a diverse and robust economic ecosystem • Showing homeowners how to maximize the long-term value of their property so they won't succumb to quick-cash offers from speculators • Keeping people and dollars in the community by developing vibrant “third spaces”—restaurants, bookstores, and places like Carter's own Boogie Down Grind Cafe This is a profoundly personal book. Carter writes about her brother's murder, how turning a local dumping ground into an award-winning park opened her eyes to the hidden potential in her community, her struggles as a woman of color confronting the “male and pale” real estate and nonprofit establishments, and much more. It is a powerful rethinking of poverty, economic development, and the meaning of success.

American history told from the bottom up by Howard Zinn himself—and the perfect all-ages introduction to his eye-opening viewpoint, published on Zinn’s hundredth birthday Truth Has a Power of Its Own is an engrossing collection of conversations with the late Howard Zinn and “an eloquently hopeful introduction for those who haven’t yet encountered Zinn’s work” (Booklist). Here is an unvarnished, yet ultimately optimistic, tour of American history—told by someone who was often an active participant in it. Viewed through the lens of Zinn’s own life as a soldier, historian, and activist and using his paradigm-shifting A People’s History of the United States as a point of departure, these conversations explore the American Revolution, the Civil War, the labor battles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, U.S. imperialism from the Indian Wars to the War on Terrorism, World Wars I and II, the Cold War, and the fight for equality and immigrant rights—all from an unapologetically radical standpoint. Longtime admirers and a new generation of readers alike will be fascinated to learn about Zinn’s thought processes, rationale, motivations, and approach to his now-iconic historical work. Zinn’s humane (and often humorous) voice—along with his keen moral vision—shine through every one of these lively and thought-provoking conversations. Battles over the telling of our history still rage across the country, and there’s no better person to tell it than Howard Zinn.

Our cities are changing. Global real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, 36 times the value of all the gold ever mined. It makes up 60 percent of the world's assets, and the most powerful person in the world - the president of the United States - made his name as a landlord and real estate developer. As Samuel Stein makes clear in this tightly argued book, its through seemingly innocuous profession of city planners that we can best understand the transformations underway. Planners provide a window into the practical dynamics of urban change: the way the state uses and is used by organized capital, and the power of landlords and developers at every level of government. But crucially, planners also possess some of the powers we must leverage if we ever wish to reclaim our cities from real estate capital.

The transformation of child care after welfare reform in New York City and the struggle against that transformation is a largely untold story. In the decade following welfare reform, despite increases in child care funding, there was little growth in New York's unionized, center-based child care system and no attempt to make this system more responsive to the needs of working mothers. As the city delivered child care services "on the cheap," relying on non-union home child care providers, welfare rights organizations, community legal clinics, child care advocates, low-income community groups, activist mothers, and labor unions organized to demand fair solutions to the child care crisis that addressed poor single mothers' need for quality, affordable child care as well as child care providers' need for decent work and pay. Social Reproduction and the City tells this story, linking welfare reform to feminist research and activism around the "crisis of care," social reproduction, and the neoliberal city. At a theoretical level, Simon Black's history of this era presents a feminist political economy of the urban welfare regime, applying a social reproduction lens to processes of urban neoliberalization and an urban lens to feminist analyses of welfare state restructuring and resistance. Feminist political economy and feminist welfare state scholarship have not focused on the urban as a scale of analysis, and critical approaches to urban neoliberalism often fail to address questions of social reproduction. To address these unexplored areas, Black unpacks the urban as a contested site of welfare state restructuring and examines the escalating crisis in social reproduction. He lays bare the aftermath of the welfare-to-work agenda of the Giuliani administration in New York City on child care and the resistance to policies that deepened race, class, and gender inequities.