George Floyd

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide

by Steven W. Thrasher  · 1 Aug 2022  · 361pp  · 110,233 words

(Racism) On May 25, 2020, a white Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin violently pressed his knee into the neck of a Black man named George Floyd, crushing him into the ground for some eight minutes and forty-six seconds. This ended Floyd’s life at just forty-six years of age

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thousand police killings—an autopsy revealed another way Floyd might have prematurely died. Though it got only passing mention in the news at the time, George Floyd died with SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in his system. This meant he had recently contracted the virus that was a leading cause of death in

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might have survived his arrest and COVID-19 only to later die of a drug overdose. We will never know what might have happened with George Floyd, because Derek Chauvin calmly murdered him. What I do know for sure, though, is that throughout his life, Floyd was repeatedly plagued by the vector

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disparities and premature death. Viruses also revealed to me how and where Black people are ensnared by poverty and the criminal justice system. But while George Floyd’s murder demonstrated the link between racism and viruses with stark clarity, I first learned about this dynamic years before, when a trusted editor sent

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the turn of the twentieth century, videos of police killing people like Oscar Grant in 2009, Eric Garner in 2014, Zak Kostopoulos in 2018, and George Floyd in 2020 serve both as proof of murder and, as they circulate online, a warning to marginalized folks of what could happen to them if

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city where, in 2020, a third of the budget went to policing while minimal funding went to housing or health; these budget priorities connected why George Floyd contracted the novel coronavirus and why he was killed by police. Minneapolis is in Minnesota, where the governorship and both houses of the legislature were

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to Garp (New York: Ballantine Books; reissue edition, 1990), 609. 1: Mandingo to pay for the counterfeit bill: “Clerk Who Took Counterfeit $20 Bill from George Floyd Says He Feels Guilty,” CBS News, March 31, 2021, https://www.cbs17.com/news/national-news/clerk-who-took-counterfeit-20-bill-from

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-george-floyd-says-he-feels-guilty/. every two thousand police killings: David Leonhardt, “A Very Rare Conviction,” New York Times, April 21, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/

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2021/04/21/briefing/chauvin-verdict-super-league-dementia.html. SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in his system: “George Floyd Was Infected with COVID-19, Autopsy Reveals,” Reuters, June 4, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-autopsy

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/george-floyd-was-infected-with-covid-19-autopsy-reveals-idUSKBN23B1HX. with falsifying evidence and murder: Aaron Barker, “Harris County DA Requests Posthumous Pardon for George Floyd in 2004 Drug Conviction,” Click2Houston, April 29, 2021, https://www.click2houston.com/news/local

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/2021/04/29/harris-county-da-requests-posthumous-pardon-for-george-floyd-of-2004-drug-conviction/. closed by the COVID-19 pandemic: Maya Rao

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, “George Floyd’s Search for Salvation,” Star Tribune, December 27, 2020, https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-hoped-moving-to-minnesota-would-save-him-what-he-faced-here-killed

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Are the 100 US Cities Where Protesters Were Tear-Gassed,” New York Times, June 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/16/us/george-floyd-protests-police-tear-gas.html. spraying entire cities with disinfectant: Hilary Brueck, “China Is Sending Trucks to Spray Bleach on Entire Cities as the Country

Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy

by Jennifer Carlson  · 2 May 2023  · 279pp  · 100,877 words

sparked by a more familiar terrain of racial unrest and rebellion—specifically, the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police uprisings in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. Unlike their lack of experience with pandemics, Americans alive today have not only experienced waves of racial unrest but have

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in riots. Portland’s going crazy! (Nathan, white, Arizona) Whether it’s for providing for your own physical security after the government murders a man [George Floyd], or whether it’s for your own financial security when you see your business being destroyed and toilet paper running off the shelves … what they

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. Accordingly, individual vulnerability overwhelmed the racial politics that bred protests in the first place—reframing, for example, police not as perpetrators of violence (as in George Floyd’s murder) but rather as negligent protectors against violence (i.e., “the police could not do anything”). This reframing galvanized the need for gun ownership

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among purchasers who break with the stereotype of white conservative gun owners;52 according to NAAGA’s founder Philip Smith, in just 36 hours after George Floyd was murdered by police, 2,000 people joined the organization.53 By year’s end, the NSSF estimated that 2020’s sales resulted in 8

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provided newfound grist for the partisan rancor and political division seething across the globe and especially in the United States, an African American man named George Floyd was brutally strangled to death by a group of police officers in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. The slow and deliberate murder was caught on

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the pent-up result of the protracted injustice built into the US system but rather the connivance of people set on destroying American society. Maybe George Floyd wasn’t even dead—or maybe he was dead, but his death was the result of a scheme involving counterfeit money and drug trafficking in

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gun stores in his area to implement social distancing. He likewise resisted the common conspiracist assumption among conservative gun sellers that the police murder of George Floyd was being exploited for gains by unsavory actors on the American Left. Recognizing that the “civil unrest has been mostly, mostly peaceful protests, and has

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.” Likening the particular economic difficulties facing “a lot of people living in inner cities” to “gasoline,” he describes the film of the police murder of George Floyd as “the spark … you basically had gasoline all over it, [and] that spark lit it.” He reasoned, “Police keep agitating, and various people are going

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fathomed where the pandemic would take us, let alone grasped the uprisings against white supremacy and anti-Black racism spurred by the police murder of George Floyd or the riots and insurrectionist protests instigated by Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud that would come by the end of 2020 and into

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’s apartment, and he was found not guilty in March 2022. See Lovan (2022); Oppel, Jr., Taylor, and Bogel-Burroughs (2021). On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a group of police officers led by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who handcuffed Floyd and knelt on his neck for nine

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B. Wells (Johnson 2014: 81)—a sentiment reflected more recently in the motivations of Black gun buyers in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the white supremacist attack on a Buffalo, NY, supermarket in a Black community in 2022 (Bunn, 2022). For a discussion on how

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story in The Truth About Guns called for “solace in the knowledge that Derek Chauvin has been fired, arrested, and indicted for the murder of George Floyd. Chauvin will ultimately be judged by a jury of his peers. The voices of peaceful resistance have been heard. Justice will be served,” while an

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Guns likewise ran headlines that publicized instances of illegitimate violence perpetrated by leftists, liberals, and progressives; consider, e.g., “Angry Leftist Brings Rifle to Lubbock George Floyd Protest to ‘Off Racists and MAGA People’ ” (The Truth About Guns); “Pennsylvania Doctor and School Board Member Threatens to Shoot Anyone Not Wearing a Mask

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, and many also intimated that racial injustice had, at some point, been a problem in the United States. Some even outright condemned the killing of George Floyd, as Oliver described, as a “tragedy.” But only a handful—largely the handful who identified as Democrat, liberal, or progressive—recognized racism, racial oppression, and

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., Hauser, C., MacFarquhar, N., Opam, K., Taylor, D. B., Tompkins, L., and Vigdor, N. (2021). How George Floyd Died, and What Happened Next. New York Times. Accessed July 15, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd.html. Arango, T. and Closson, T. (2022). “We Can’t Endure This”: Surge in US Shootings Shows

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? The Truth About Guns. Accessed August 2, 2021. https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/preparedness-much-enough/. Boch, J. (2020c). FEDS: Angry Leftist Brings Rifle to Lubbock George Floyd Protest to “Off Racists and MAGA People.” The Truth About Guns. Accessed October 24, 2021. https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/feds-angry-leftist-brings-rifle-to

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-lubbock-george-floyd-protest-to-off-racists-and-maga-people/. Boch, J. (2020d). Gun Owners: Be Goodwill Ambassadors to Your Neighbors, Community. The Truth About Guns. Accessed October

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. Brown, W. (2017). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books. Budryk, Z. (2020). Head of CrossFit to Staff: “We’re Not Mourning for George Floyd.” The Hill. Accessed August 12, 2021. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/501947-head-of-crossfit-told-staff-were-not-mourning-for

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-george-floyd. Bump, P. (2020). Trump Sides with Deranged Conspiracy Theories over Black Lives Matter Protestors. Washington Post. Accessed August 12, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/

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://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/aug/26/tucker-carlson-kenosha-shooting-teen-kyle-rittenhouse. Gutowski, S. (2020). African American Gun Group Saw Membership Surge After George Floyd Killing. Washington Free Beacon. Accessed April 18, 2022. https://freebeacon.com/issues/african-american-gun-group-saw-membership-surge-after

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-george-floyd-killing/. Gutsell, J. N. and Inzlicht, M. (2012). Intergroup Differences in the Sharing of Emotive States: Neural Evidence of an Empathy Gap. Social Cognitive and

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/04/01/share-of-republicans-saying-everything-possible-should-be-done-to-make-voting-easy-declines-sharply/. Hauck, G. (2021). Darnella Frazier, Teen Who Recorded George Floyd’s Murder, Awarded Pulitzer Prize Special Citation. USA Today. Accessed August 12, 2021. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/06/11/darnella-frazier

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-pulitzer-prize-citation-george-floyd-video/7656851002/. Healy, J. (2021). These Are the 5 People Who Died in the Capitol Riot. New York Times. Accessed October 25, 2021. https://www

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Confidence in Science: The Role of Ideological Alignment in Political Polarization. Social Forces. Kummer, J. and Bogel-Burroughs, N. (2022). Last 2 Officers Involved in George Floyd’s Death are Sentenced to Prison. New York Times. Accessed July 27, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/us

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/george-floyd-j-alexander-kueng.html. Krauss, L. M. (2016). Trump’s Anti-Science Campaign. New Yorker. Accessed August 12, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era

by Gary Gerstle  · 14 Oct 2022  · 655pp  · 156,367 words

vice-president in American history. But that was hardly sufficient, especially given the magnitude of the racial justice uprising triggered by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Floyd, an African American man, had been arrested that day for allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 check at a

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Times in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 42.Evan Hill, Ainara Tiefenthäler, Christiaan Triebert, Drew Jordan, Haley Willis, and Robin Stein, “How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody,” New York Times, May 31, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us

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/george-floyd-investigation.html, accessed September 28, 2021. 43.Derrick Bryson Taylor, “George Floyd Protests: A Timeline,” New York Times, June 2, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd-protests-timeline.html, accessed September 28, 2021; Audra D. S. Burch, Amy Harmon

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, Sabrina Tavernise, and Emily Badger, “The Death of George Floyd Reignited a Movement. What Happens Now?,” New York Times, April 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com

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/2021/04/20/us/george-floyd-protests-police-reform.html, accessed September 28, 2021; Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K

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Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html, accessed September 28, 2021; Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” New York Times, June 12, 2020, https://www

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections

by Mollie Hemingway  · 11 Oct 2021  · 595pp  · 143,394 words

the killing of a suspected criminal by Minneapolis police. A bystander had taken video of the nearly ten minutes that a cop spent kneeling on George Floyd’s neck during arrest as he begged for mercy before dying. Over ten thousand protests erupted around the country, at least a thousand of which

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to fires and looting. The media and their activist allies pushed the narrative that America was and is an irredeemably racist country and that the George Floyd video was just the latest proof of that reality. Despite the nationwide violence, the media insisted that the Black Lives Matter movement, which included calls

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Democrats were to inciting racial hatred for their political gain. This was the political context in which the nation learned of the police killing of George Floyd on May 25. Floyd, who was under suspicion of passing counterfeit bills, was killed when a police officer named Derek Chauvin restrained him by putting

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violence in horror as the deadly riots began spreading to other cities. President Trump tweeted on May 29, “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen.” He added, “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all

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crimes are crimes where there’s an explicit motive, and of bias,” Ellison said. “We don’t have any evidence that Derek Chauvin factored in George Floyd’s race as he did what he did.”16 But the facts of the case didn’t matter. The media and Democratic leadership were fully

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radicals began their long march to undermine the ideas that had driven racial progress in this country for more than a century. By the time George Floyd was killed, identity politics had become the dominant prism through which the media and all other elite institutions—but not ordinary Americans—had come to

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of racist associations. Calling Trump a racist was electorally advantageous, and the response to the George Floyd killing was another effort to sacrifice the good of the country for the good of the Democratic Party. * * * When George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, extremist groups such as Black Lives Matter sprang into action to

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point. The point is the system we are fighting.”58 * * * Trump saw the damage the rioters could do up close. Since the beginning of the George Floyd riots, protesters had been amassing in Lafayette Park across Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of the White House. The downtown area around the White House was

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A report emerged that Trump had been moved to a secure location to protect him from the protesters. In the week between the death of George Floyd and the assault on the White House, at least twelve statues and memorials were defaced by vandals, including the World War II Memorial and Lincoln

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bulletproof its own fact-check.”45 The censors would strike again just days later, on May 29. As riots consumed Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd, Trump sent two tweets: I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis. A total lack of leadership. Either the

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bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right.… These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let it happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way

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/trump-press-conference-transcript.html. 7. Dareh Gregorian, “ ‘Justice Will Be Served!’: Trump Weighs in on George Floyd Case,” NBC News, May 27, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/justice-will-be-served-trump-weighs-george-floyd-case-n1216026. 8. Jemima McEvoy, “ ‘It’s Just Devastating’: Some Minneapolis Businesses Still Fighting to

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Survive a Year after George Floyd Unrest,” Forbes, May 25, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/05/25/its

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-just-devastating-some-minneapolis-businesses-still-fighting-to-survive-a-year-after-george-floyd-unrest/?sh=7a66db8c3f77. 9. Tony Daniel, “Minneapolis Rioters Burned One of America’s Most Beloved Independent Bookstores to the Ground,” The Federalist, June 1, 2020

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/05/29/864818368/the-history-behind-when-the-looting-starts-the-shooting-starts. 14. Kathryn Watson, “Trump Calls George Floyd’s Death a ‘Terrible Thing,’ ” CBS News, May 29, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-calls-george-floyds-death-a-terrible-thing-2020-05-29/. 15. Scott Neuman, “Medical Examiner’s Autopsy Reveals

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George Floyd Had Positive Test for Coronavirus,” NPR, June 4, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial

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-justice/2020/06/04/869278494/medical-examiners-autopsy-reveals-george-floyd-had-positive-test-for-coronavirus. 16. Akshita Jain, “George Floyd’s Killing Not a Hate Crime because It Was Systemic Not ‘Explicit’ Racism, Says Official,” The Independent, April 26, 2021, https

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://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/george-floyd-killing-hate-crime-b1837419.html. 17. “964 People Have Been Shot and Killed by Police in the Past Year,” Washington Post, July 2, 2021, https

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Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html. 31. Joseph Wulfsohn, “MSNBC’s Ali Velshi Says Situation Not ‘Generally Speaking Unruly’ while Standing outside Burning Building,” Fox News, May

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Topples George Washington Statue in NE Portland,” Koin 6 News, June 18, 2020, https://www.koin.com/news/protests/portland-protests-black-lives-matter-blm-george-floyd-police-reform-racial-justice-demonstration-rally-march-day-21/; Joel Finkelstein et al., “9/14/20–Network-Enabled Anarchy: How Militant Anarcho-Socialist Networks Use

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of the Stars Who’ve Donated to Bail-Relief Funds across the US,” Insider, June 8, 2020, https://www.insider.com/minnesota-protests-celebrity-donations-george-floyd-reactions-2020-5. 57. Tyler Olson, “Minn. Group That Saw $$ Surge, Some from Biden Staffers, Bailed Out Alleged Violent Criminals: Report,” Fox News, August 10

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-those-accused-of-violent-crimes. 59. Peter Hermann, Sarah Pulliam Bailey, and Michelle Boorstein, “Fire Set at Historic St. John’s Church during Protest of George Floyd’s Death,” Washington Post, June 1, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/fire-set-at-historic-st-johns-church-during-protests-of

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-george-floyds-death/2020/06/01/4b5c4004-a3b6-11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html. 60. Vandana Rambaran, “At Least 60 Secret Service Members Injured during George Floyd Protests in DC,” Fox News, May 31, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/us/more

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-than-60-secret-service-officers-injured-during-violent-george-floyd-protests-in-washington-d-c. 61. Paul LeBlanc, “Famed DC Monuments Defaced after Night of Unrest,” CNN, May 31, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/

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, May 27, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-fact-checked-trump-tweets-mail-in-ballots/. 46. Jordan Culver, “Trump Says Violent Minneapolis Protests Dishonor George Floyd’s Memory, Twitter Labels ‘Shooting’ Tweet as ‘Glorifying Violence,’ ” USA Today, May 29, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/05/28

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/george-floyd-donald-trump-twitter-jacob-frey-thugs/5281374002/. 47. The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45), “Twitter, in an email to the White House moments ago, admitted

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

by Fredrik Deboer  · 4 Sep 2023  · 211pp  · 78,547 words

was genuinely viable. The country was simmering. On May 25, that simmer was brought to a boil. A forty-six-year-old Black man named George Floyd was confronted by Minneapolis police after a store clerk accused him of passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. Derek Chauvin and three other officers removed

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the Trump years. Our whole civic society seemed strewn with kindling. On May 25, 2020, four Minneapolis police officers lit the match. The killing of George Floyd, an unarmed man accused of nothing more than passing a counterfeit bill, reverberated around the world. Covid-19 had devastated the economy, causing massive and

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that the center could not hold. Those were the conditions that primed the country for an explosion, one that was triggered by the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. THE SIMMER BOILS OVER Floyd’s brutal execution became one of the most viral events in the history of politics. (Imagine if

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piece, Wesley Lowery wrote that the media should modify its pretenses to neutrality and embrace a “moral clarity” that had developed in light of the George Floyd killing. “For years, I’ve been among a chorus of mainstream journalists who have called for our industry to abandon the appearance of objectivity as

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or drastically defunding them, at large scale, was simply never in the cards. More granular reforms were proposed. Some of these demands coalesced into the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which among other things would have expanded the federal government’s oversight over potentially racist police departments, provided funding for investigations

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for systemic change. Not in such a rotten system. The problem with 2020 was that activists and journalists and academics mistook heat for light. The George Floyd protests were some of the most well-publicized in human history, and it’s true that publicity is necessary for a protest movement to succeed

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, and it has proven to be remarkably adaptable, a great survivor. The moral necessity of confronting it could not be more clear. The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 was both a sudden flashpoint and the culmination of years of frustration and rage. The unjustifiable killing of Black men is as

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made 2020 a year of tension and unease when a raw cell phone video of a group of Minneapolis police officers detaining, assaulting, and murdering George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, set the world on fire. It provoked an international response of unprecedented scale. Seemingly every corner of our culture responded to

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one would look back today and suggest that enough was done. Indeed, in time, very understandable resentment has grown that so little changed. The post–George Floyd moment was indeed unprecedented, but it did not bring unprecedented change. Black Lives Matter has both failed and been failed. It was a noble movement

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behind. Those daily inequities were the background against which the drama of 2020 took place. When protesters took to the streets, they were marching for George Floyd, whose murder was seen by billions across the globe and whose death was correctly understood to be a crime of horrific cruelty and historical significance

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. We do, luckily, have a number of policy goals that we can pursue to address this injustice. A good overview can be found in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the sadly failed bill of proposed 2020 and 2021 federal legislation that was the most prominent recent attempt to address policing

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the police in the criminal justice system, which tends to happen in only the most spectacular abuses, such as with the police officers who murdered George Floyd; or you can sue. The doctrine of qualified immunity makes the latter very, very difficult, and is a big part of the reason that police

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act with complete impunity. Any meaningful reform of our criminal justice system must involve the end of qualified immunity. Discussion of the merits of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act is largely academic, as the bill died in Congress, though I hope it might be revived. In 2020, Republicans controlled the

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other reason than to remind us of how hard change would be and that Republican power could not be wished away. Then again, perhaps the George Floyd Justice in Policing bill failed to attract much attention because it was overshadowed by the demand that became associated with the entire movement for justice

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that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s death, which became inescapable—“defund the police.” THE STRANGE LIFE OF DEFUND THE POLICE Defunding the police captured the public attention to a degree

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concept. The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale, a sociology professor at the City University of New York, was released just three years before George Floyd’s murder and called for an eventual end to policing in its entirety. The book became something like a bible for those who pressed the

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’s impossible to say what might have happened in a world where defund the police did not become the most-expressed demand associated with the George Floyd moment. I would certainly have been thrilled if “end qualified immunity” had gained similar prominence. Supporters of defunding the police, of course, would point out

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anti-racism movement is the degree to which police violence is the right frame for dealing with racial inequality writ large. Certainly, the reaction to George Floyd’s murder demonstrates the power of the image of yet another Black victim of police brutality. I only wish more of the rage of 2020

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stakes in our debates. We can see this clearly in the story of the “Central Park Karen.” On Memorial Day 2020, the same day as George Floyd’s murder, a white woman walking her dog in Central Park got into an altercation with a Black birdwatcher. As their confrontation escalated, she threatened

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for more. This is a very durable finding in polling. Pew Research Center, for example, found that in June 2020, at the height of the George Floyd protest moment, 55 percent of Black respondents wanted police spending in their area to stay the same or to grow; by September 2021, that number

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number of disparate variables. Beyond that, I will leave the question to the sociologists. What I can tell you is that, especially in the post–George Floyd era of American race relations, the progressive left in the contemporary United States seems almost entirely unwilling to even broach the subject. I feel strongly

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broadcast shows increased from 8.3 percent to 11.6 percent and in cable shows from 12.9 percent to 14.1 percent. Since the George Floyd protests, media companies, universities, and charitable foundations have made major efforts to hire more Black employees. There are far more Black voices in the national

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show should be played by Black people.” My God. What sacrifice. George Floyd was killed in the street, and an actor gave up a voice-over gig. George Floyd was killed in the street, and investment banks adopted new corporate sensitivity policies. George Floyd was killed in the street, and defense contractors updated their employee handbooks

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. George Floyd was killed in the street, and universities made their language codes for faculty

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even more stringent. George Floyd was killed in the street, and the term “BIPOC”—that’s

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causes in 2020 and the years since. According to the Washington Post, the top fifty American corporations raised $50 billion for BLM-related purposes between George Floyd’s death and August 2021, though much of this money was not immediately accessible for charitable work. Individual donors and independent philanthropic organizations no doubt

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unheard.” And the whole thing was curious because the man who said it was a lifelong opponent of riots. Most of the protests inspired by George Floyd were peaceful. The vast majority of protesters, though filled with righteous and justifiable rage, showed up at the sites of demonstrations, chanted, carried signs, and

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, I can’t see how even those rare protests that involved tearing down statues could be considered violent by any fair standard. Some of the George Floyd protests did devolve into riot behavior, including arson and looting. Some cities saw repeated bouts of protester violence. In places like Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle

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never necessary: the bad behavior of a few bad actors did nothing to jeopardize the righteousness of the protest movement inspired by the murder of George Floyd. And yet defending riots became something of a cottage industry among progressives in 2020. “Merchandise can be replaced,” went one commonplace on social media, “Black

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poll found that, while large majorities were sympathetic to the peaceful protests, only 22 percent felt that violence and unrest were an appropriate response to George Floyd’s death. Protests have many purposes. Sometimes, they exist only to ensure that attention is paid to a great injustice so that no one can

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to politics, carefully developed and expressed demands, and the capacity to organize intelligently, all the money in the world won’t lead to justice. When George Floyd was murdered in the street in Minneapolis in 2020, countless Americans suddenly found themselves possessed of the demand for change. My worry is that for

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, as lamentable as it may be, the public did grow numb to #MeToo. And this is far from unique in social movements; the horror of George Floyd’s murder remains powerful, but the intensity of the immediate period following his murder could never be sustained. Perhaps some of #MeToo’s champions contributed

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the chapter on Black Lives Matter, annually a majority of people killed by the police are white. During the days of greatest public anger about George Floyd’s murder, pointing this fact out came to be seen as wicked and racist; we weren’t worrying about white people in that moment, the

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Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html. “it is an error to jump”: Jonathan Chait, “The Still-Vital Case for Liberalism in a Radical Age,” New York, June

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: Tracy Jan, Jena McGregor, and Meghan Hoyer, “Corporate America’s $50 Billion Promise,” Washington Post, August 23, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/george-floyd-corporate-america-racial-justice/?itid=lk_inline_manual_55. “Individual donors and independent philanthropic”: Ann Brown, “$10.6B+ Was Given to Black Lives Matter Causes

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Jackson, “The Double Standard of the American Riot.” The Atlantic, June 1, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/06/riots-are-american-way-george-floyd-protests/612466/. “suggest a new phase of opposition”: Thomas J. Sugrue, “2020 Is Not 1968: To Understand Today’s Protests, You Must Look Further Back

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”: Terry Nguyen, “There Isn’t a Simple Story about Looting,” Vox, June 2, 2020, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/6/2/21278113/looting-george-floyd-protests-social-unrest. “our country was built on looting”: Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Kind of Society Values Property Over Black Lives?,” New York Times

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, June 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/opinion/george-floyd-protests-looting.html. “have given the Second Amendment”: Glenn Harlan Reynolds, “Riots of 2020 Have Given the Second Amendment a Boost,” USA Today, October 8

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-capitol-301338240.html. But a similar 2020 poll: Ipsos, “Civil Unrest in the Wake of George Floyd’s Killing,” Reuters/Ipsos, June 2, 2020, https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/reuters-ipsos-civil-unrest-george-floyd-2020-06-02. 4: THE NONPROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX According to the Urban Institute’s: NCCS Project

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voters’ disillusionment with, 28 youth in, 79 Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), 29–30, 168, 177–179 Democrats center-left, analyses of, 134–135 and George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, 39 and labor unions, 195 liberals’ votes for, 135 moderates and liberals, 64 and police funding, 52 political positions of, 136

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gay marriage, 27, 188, 199, 214 gay rights issues, 2–3 gender identity, 173, 188 general case against nonprofits, 99–106 generational politics, 17–18 George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, 38–39, 49–51 German Ideology, The (Marx), 176 Gitlin, Todd, 192 GiveWell, 102–103 globalization, 171 Good White Men, 157

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, 58, 62–63 racial bias in, 57–58 reforming, 58–59 police violence, 47, 199–200 against Black people, 47–49, 55–57, 199–200 George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, 38–39 “moral clarity” about, 36–37 at protests, 81 qualified immunity for, 50, 54 Scott’s policing reform bill, 39

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation

by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler  · 14 Sep 2021  · 735pp  · 165,375 words

consciousness as our minds flit to other concerns. The Occupy movement of 2011 sought to expose the inequities of the Great Recession. The killing of George Floyd led millions to feel anger and shame over the long and sustained mistreatment of African American men and women by the police. Like contagious disease

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those countries. State and local governments must also become stronger, and that strength must serve rather than oppress. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the calls to “defund the police” have become loud. Yet a poorer police department will provide neither more safety nor more respect for the community

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increasing inequality that is not offset by upward mobility. Many see a broken system, and their anger flared into street protests after the killing of George Floyd. The combination of profound challenges and political wildfire makes the post-COVID urban landscape far more treacherous. This chapter focuses on gentrification and the economic

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institutional reform and designing government policy, where it is hard to get things exactly right. Chapter 9 URBANIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS On May 25, 2020, George Floyd allegedly passed a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill at a convenience store in a gentrifying neighborhood of Minneapolis. The store called the police. The police arrived

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could never plausibly claim self-defense, because the bystanders’ videos show that Floyd was helpless and Chauvin was surrounded by other officers. Those videos turned George Floyd from a data point into a cause. As of December 1, 2020, the five most-watched videos of Floyd’s death had over fifty million

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-19, the streets exploded. Societies are more vulnerable to pestilence or natural disaster when they are already riven by conflict. Anger over the slaying of George Floyd brought people out even in the face of an airborne pandemic. We don’t know if the protests spread COVID-19, but in 1918, patriotic

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to spread the deadly flu.” One 2020 study found that “in the eight cities analyzed, all had positive abnormal growth in infection rate” after the George Floyd–related protests occurred. But another paper found “no evidence that urban protests reignited COVID-19 case or death growth after more than five weeks following

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misdemeanors because the ‘children who were the victims of his assault couldn’t be made to testify against him in court.’ ” As the video of George Floyd’s death illustrates, a single graphic incident can be vastly more powerful than a mountain of statistics. The day after the Seattle Times article, “a

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a politician who was giving voters what they wanted: more punishment and less crime. This history presents a warning to the would-be avengers of George Floyd today. The activists who imposed the draconian laws that imprisoned so many young men were also fueled by an understandable rage. To them, no policy

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far if it protected a future Diane Ballasiotes. Today, some protesters seem to think no policy can go too far if it protects some future George Floyd. Both perspectives are comprehensible. Unfortunately, both are wrong. We must find the middle ground that protects our children from both private violence and police malfeasance

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their “job is to improve working conditions for our members—police officers who work in Minneapolis—and to make certain their rights are protected.” After George Floyd’s murder, the president of the Minneapolis police union, Lieutenant Bob Kroll, made it clear that the union’s labor attorneys were going to fight

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“they were terminated without due process.” For good measure, he threw in the accusation that the media was covering up “the violent criminal history of George Floyd” and suggested that the protesters were a “terrorist movement.” Kroll himself has been the subject of twenty-two internal affairs complaints. The Wall Street Journal

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a key element of public safety.” That line would be greeted warmly by any right-wing, libertarian audience. In a coauthored article written after the George Floyd killing, Meares calls for “a relationship in which state and community co-produce public safety, with an emphasis on transitioning power from the police to

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.” In 2011, demonstrators seized: Gabbatt, Townsend, and O’Carroll, “ ‘Occupy’ Anti-capitalism Protests Spread around World.” Two months after the COVID lockdowns: Sullivan and Morrison, “George Floyd Fallout: Unrest Overshadows Peaceful Protests for Another Night.” Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”: Bush, “Welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, Where Seattle Protesters

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of Housing Supply.” CHAPTER 9: URBANIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS On May 25, 2020: Hill et al., “How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody.” Derek Chauvin: Barker and Kovaleski, “Officer Who Pressed His Knee on George Floyd’s Neck Drew Scrutiny Long Before.” In 2018 alone: Mapping Police Violence. As of December: Taken from

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the YouTube website, December 1, 2020. “little to end the war”: “The Flu in Boston,” PBS. “in the eight”: Valentine, Valentine, and Valentine, “Relationship of George Floyd Protests to Increases in COVID-19 Cases Using Event Study Methodology.” “no evidence that urban”: Dave et al., “Black Lives Matter Protests and Risk Avoidance

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of Minneapolis,” FindGlocal. “they were terminated without”: Matthews, “How Police Unions Became So Powerful—and How They Can Be Tamed.” “the violent criminal history”: Sheehy, “George Floyd Had ‘Violent Criminal History’: Minneapolis Police Union Chief.” twenty-two internal affairs complaints: Belkin, Maher, and Paul, “Clout of Minneapolis Police Union Boss Reflects National

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.” Accessed January 25, 2021. www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator. Barker, Kim, and Serge F. Kovaleski. “Officer Who Pressed His Knee on George Floyd’s Neck Drew Scrutiny Long Before.” The New York Times, July 18, 2020. www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/us/derek-chauvin

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-george-floyd.html. Barnett, Michael L., Lissy Hu, Thomas Martin, et al. “Mortality, Admissions, and Patient Census at SNFs in 3 US Cities During the COVID-19

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. Collins, Sean. “The Anger behind the Protests, Explained in 4 Charts.” Vox, May 31, 2020. www.vox.com/2020/5/31/21276004/anger-police-killing-george-floyd-protests. “Combating the Coronavirus Pandemic: Bosch Develops Rapid Test for COVID-19.” Bosch Global. Accessed December 25, 2020. www.bosch.com/stories/vivalytic-rapid-test

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-sf. Hill, Evan, Ainara Tiefenthäler, Christiaan Triebert, Drew Jordan, Haley Willis, and Robin Stein. “How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody.” The New York Times, June 1, 2020. www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html. Hilmers, Angela, David C. Hilmers, and Jayna Dave. “Neighborhood Disparities in Access to Healthy

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-Cigarettes.” US Food and Drug Administration. Last modified September 10, 2019. www.fda.gov/news-events/fda-voices/how-fda-regulating-e-cigarettes. Sheehy, Kate. “George Floyd Had ‘Violent Criminal History’: Minneapolis Police Union Chief.” New York Post, June 2, 2020. https://nypost.com/2020/06/02

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/george-floyd-had-violent-criminal-history-minneapolis-union-chief. Sheridan, Adam, Asger Lau Andersen, Emil Toft Hansen, and Niels Johannesen. “Social Distancing Laws Cause Only Small Losses

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News, February 14, 2020. https://seniorhousingnews.com/2020/02/14/long-term-care-executive-salaries-rose-2-8-in-2019. Sullivan, Tim, and Aaron Morrison. “George Floyd Fallout: Unrest Overshadows Peaceful Protests for Another Night; No Apparent Injuries after Semitruck Drives into Minneapolis Demonstrators.” Chicago Tribune, May 31, 2020. www.chicagotribune.com

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/nation-world/ct-nw-george-floyd-protests-minneapolis-nation-20200531-7qcojsy535bs7a56cxk3cnmrgq-story.html. Summers, Judith. “Broad Street Pump Outbreak.” UCLA Fielding School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology. Accessed January 17

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-releases/nih-funded-studies-show-stents-surgery-no-better-medication-lifestyle-changes-reducing-cardiac-events. Valentine, Randall, Dawn Valentine, and Jimmie L Valentine. “Relationship of George Floyd Protests to Increases in COVID-19 Cases Using Event Study Methodology.” Journal of Public Health 42, no. 4 (November 2020): 696–97. https://doi.org

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failure to prepare for, 150–52, 153–56 federal aid programs, 195–96 in Florida, 197–98 and forward-looking prevention strategies, 326–29 and George Floyd-related protests, 276 hot spots for, 7, 175, 185 humans as primary vectors of, 86 job losses due to, 2, 169, 196, 197, 228, 229

Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse

by Thomas Chatterton Williams  · 4 Aug 2025  · 242pp  · 76,315 words

“Black” President and the Failure (or Fear) of Post-racialism 2. Donald Trump and the State of Exception 3. The Plague 4. The Death of George Floyd and the Cult of “Antiracism” 5. The New New Journalism: Media in the Age of “Moral Clarity” 6. “Fiery but Mostly Peaceful Protests” 7.

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dimension of 2020’s reckoning that I will return to throughout this book remains, half a decade later, conspicuously underarticulated:[*2] the simple fact that George Floyd was a poor man. That was the most salient fact about his life. Reparations not for race—not for some ambient, transnational state of metaphysical

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—not as stereotypes or avatars of broad social categories, but as living individuals, in all our fullness and contradiction. The spectacle of the death of George Floyd and the stasis of the pandemic provided an unusually sustained interest in national and even international renewal and betterment. This potential good carried with it

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, fathered thirteen children out of wedlock by four different mothers. *5 This logic was strangely echoed in a comment Jeanelle Austin, the leader of the George Floyd Global Memorial, had made to me in Minnesota when I asked her about the reality of disproportionate violence within predominantly black neighborhoods like the one

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in which George Floyd was murdered. “I don’t think that there’s more violence in the black community than there is in the white community,” she told

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quintessence of a centuries-long and cancerous history—a tortured transatlantic oppression rendered in flesh and pixels. From that moment on, there would be two George Floyds, related but not identical, and it has become necessary to separate them. On the one hand, there was the son and the brother, certainly

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dozing in a parked car, having passed a counterfeit banknote moments earlier—a petty crime that even the cashier seemed embarrassed to have reported. This George Floyd had survived an early bout of COVID-19, only to be asphyxiated in broad daylight by an officer he’d once worked side by side

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black presidency and its immediate succession by what has been ruefully termed “the first white presidency.”[*1] On the other hand, there is the immortalized George Floyd, whose death exists in footage, on wretched loop in our brains, and can be instantaneously conjured on our screens as a discrete and profoundly shareable

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to the next, they suddenly fail to do so. We fumble around blindly in the dark until a new framework takes over. The death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis touched on every single aspect of our public lives and much of our interior ones also. During the season

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law enforcement agents and political leaders, about the general state of social progress in their society. They could intuit what was happening to people like George Floyd more clearly now, in large part, because of the simple fact that they were seeing what was happening to themselves and others like them in

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atrocities from around the world prompted the heads of Oxford’s colleges to sign an open letter declaring, as they did after the killing of George Floyd, “Any student taking university assessments who feels their performance has been affected should submit a self-assessment mitigating circumstances form after their final examination or

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which atrocities would captivate our attention and stoke our moral indignation. For instance, the case of Tony Timpa bears striking similarities to the killing of George Floyd. Timpa, an unarmed thirty-two-year-old white man suffering from schizophrenia, was killed in Dallas on August 10, 2016, by the police officer

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the squalid condition of ignorance and impotence—mixed with proselytizing self-righteousness—we’d all been thrust in. The other, of course, is a prostrate George Floyd, whose excruciating Memorial Day execution at the sudden conjunction of burgeoning summer restlessness and soul-crushing vigilance sparked a global protest movement against racism and

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demand accountability and justice. But so long as we are speaking analogically, poverty is certainly another kind of public health crisis. It cannot be overstated: George Floyd was not simply or even necessarily killed on account of race—a point very few Americans of any stripe were willing to admit—his death

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issue of merely secondary importance. How could this not feel like gaslighting or something far more devious? Less than two weeks before the death of George Floyd, the enlightened position in both Europe and America was to exercise nothing less than extreme caution and restraint. Many of us went further still, voluntarily

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considerations about who could and could not access limited vaccines and novel treatments like Paxlovid were being weighed in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and the protests, riots, and ongoing reckoning that followed his killing. In Mounk’s telling: As Lori Bruce, the associate director of the Center

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Cary Funk, “U.S. Public Now Divided over Whether to Get COVID-19 Vaccine,” Pew Research Center, Sept. 17, 2020. Chapter Four The Death of George Floyd and the Cult of “Antiracism” “When all are guilty, no one is,” Hannah Arendt argued in Eichmann in Jerusalem. It’s an obvious truth, but

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on the pavement and others stand solemnly behind them. With hands stretched above their heads and banners adorned with “Black Lives Matter” as well as George Floyd’s bleak final statement—“I can’t breathe”—prominently displayed in the background, they recite in unison that they will renounce their “white privilege.” It

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is nonetheless true that he had elevated the category of performative allegiance in all our lives. This cannot be denied. On the spectrum of post–George Floyd ritualistic repentance, the scene in Maryland amounts to an act of significantly more commitment than merely making a post on social media, but less so

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with White Fragility (and to a lesser extent a handful of other “antiracist” instruction manuals) became mandatory in the days and weeks and months following George Floyd’s death in police custody: The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised

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so doing, they abolished their long-standing merit-based admissions processes entirely on the grounds of racial justice. Several months prior to the killing of George Floyd, and before his name became household familiar, Ibram X. Kendi had contributed a short, eyebrow-raising proposal to a Politico magazine special feature about inequality

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hyperbole or held outside the realm of actionable possibility. Back in Minneapolis, for one eye-catching example, less than two weeks after the death of George Floyd, a veto-proof nine-member majority of the city council stood before a crowd of hundreds gathered in sunny Powderhorn Park and pledged to “dismantle

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For the truest of the true believers, such as the mostly white anti-police activists who attempted to prevent police and emergency personnel from accessing George Floyd Square—a chaotic pilgrimage site that retains a pseudo-religious ambience to this day—to deliver aid to a woman who had been shot there

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was a vision of comparable security. This alarming incident had scarcely been reported. When I interviewed Jeanelle Austin, the charismatic young executive director of the George Floyd Global Memorial,[*15] at a Minneapolis coffee shop in 2021, she explained to me that the area in those days was essentially lawless and impenetrable

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woman was shot,” Austin conceded: I got a message on my phone. It was late at night. And there was a shooting that happened in George Floyd Square, the police are here, protesters are not letting the police in, there’s no black people here. And so, I was like, “Okay,

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tangential issue within the larger antiracist project. The reality is that most non-white people’s experiences at any income level do not adequately resemble George Floyd’s—a genuine member of the American subaltern, bereft of voice, representation, and, to a significant degree, agency or what psychologists call “internal locus

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spectacle of oppression of which someone else is the victim.” In that vein, one of the first and most ambitious responses to the killing of George Floyd—again, an impoverished black man without an education or vocational training—took place, of all places, four hundred miles away at the Poetry Foundation,

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in the country to see a streak of a hundred nights and days of frequently violent, sometimes deadly protests and rioting following the death of George Floyd. White activists, often cosplaying as antifa militants, besieged and ransacked the city’s downtown area around the Multnomah County Justice Center. The pandemic exacerbated problems

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and energy. There was certainly disarray then, but it didn’t feel like the city’s predominant feature. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, I had watched videos of the chaos and anarchy that enveloped downtown and gave President Trump an excuse to propose military intervention. A year and

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Antiracist Research at Boston University. The center, known as CAR, raised “a whopping $55 million” in philanthropy, much of it right after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. But CAR’s output wasn’t nearly as impressive as its fundraising: “The degree programs that CAR was supposed to

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their names to raise funds.” Sean Campbell, “Black Lives Matter Secretly Bought a $6 Million House,” New York, April 4, 2022. *15 According to the George Floyd Global Memorial website, On May 25, 2020, George Perry Floyd was lynched by the Minneapolis Police Department just steps away from the intersection of 38th

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and supported by the Midwest Arts Conservation Center. They continue to tend to the offerings at the intersection of 38th & Chicago laid in memory of George Floyd and other black lives lost in this community and across the nation.” “About,” Rise and Remember, georgefloydglobalmemorial.org. *16 “Black, indigenous, people of color.” *17

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restore safety and order and protect property during the spasms of rioting and looting that had erupted in U.S. cities since the killing of George Floyd.[*5] He described the widespread disorder as an “orgy of violence” that was being excused by elites “in the spirit of radical chic.” He

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37 percent of African-Americans, would support cities’ calling in the military to ‘address protests and demonstrations’ that are in ‘response to the death of George Floyd.’ ” Tom Cotton, “Send in the Troops,” New York Times, June 3, 2020. *5 The Floyd family forcefully condemned rioting and violence, it should be stressed

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. “I’m not over here blowing up stuff,” George Floyd’s brother Terrence said, addressing a crowd in Minneapolis on June 1, 2020. “What are y’all doing? You’re doing nothing. That’s not

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similar reaction to what Baldwin observed occurred in Kenosha. A powerfully oversimplified narrative took hold and slotted into the discursive space that the case of George Floyd had flung wide open three pandemic months prior. We can understand why certain stories arise and resonate with audiences, and we can empathize with the

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have looked to America for another vocabulary to express what is happening in their own country, whether or not it fully makes sense here. After George Floyd died, a growing number now felt they’d found it. “Ideological debates differ from country to country, according to which particular aspect of the

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struggle and common values was palpable, undeniable. What a difference just five years can make. By the fall of 2020, America in the age of George Floyd and Donald Trump had fully turned its gaze inward, no longer seeming to have the stamina or the desire to interpret events elsewhere on their

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pause, if not for the reasons that Putin intended. * * * — In June and July 2020, in the heated days and weeks after watching the video of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis and corresponding with American friends about the bizarre and chilling institutional and cultural developments that had followed it, I was part

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country. One of the most disturbing and strange moments of the 2020 campaign season came not from Trump but from Joe Biden, three days before George Floyd’s death reset the national conversation on race. In a remote interview from his basement in Delaware, Biden jokingly but revealingly told a popular black

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for the body politic—seemed to have scant meaning or physical weight outside the self-referential generation of images. More than even the death of George Floyd, the pandemonium of January 6 fully inhabited our screens, seemingly existing in a space somewhere beyond the reality principle. Rioters wore costumes, draping themselves

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comes to drug offenses. When thinking about Appalachian communities brought to a standstill by the omnipresence of opioids or people in inner-city communities like George Floyd’s, we might consider the bigger picture of high unemployment rates and low educational attainment, in addition to whatever we think of individual agency and

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2021, the momentum behind the social justice movement that reached its zenith in the summer of 2020 seemed unquestionable, irresistible. In a society in which George Floyd so publicly and lamentably died on camera, our notions of inclusion, safety, harm, and agency had expanded profoundly. We were now far beyond discussions

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Then, on October 7, 2023, three years into the era of racial reckoning, soul-searching, and institutionalized “moral clarity” epitomized by the pandemic summer of George Floyd, the surprise slaughter of twelve hundred men, women, and children in Israel, as well as the abduction of at least 250 more, remade the culture

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2020, the school’s then president, Lawrence Bacow, issued an official university statement that concluded, “The Harvard community is deeply distressed by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and many more Black Americans at the hands of those who have promised to protect communities and uphold the rule of

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and remedy racial injustice.” As dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Claudine Gay had also released a rousing statement on the death of George Floyd, one that did not hesitate to name his killer or describe the encounter as unequivocally racist: Like many of you, I have watched in pain

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so much to oversimplify and obscure our national conversation about race and policing. *8 Frazier was the seventeen-year-old who recorded the video of George Floyd’s death and uploaded it to Facebook and Instagram. *9 The ne plus ultra of this tendency would have to be Ta-Nehisi Coates’s

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History

by Alex von Tunzelmann  · 7 Jul 2021  · 337pp  · 87,236 words

were thrown into the sea. Sharks were said to follow slave ships to eat the discarded human meat.7 This crossing was the fate of George Floyd’s ancestors. His great-great-grandfather, Hillery Thomas Stewart Sr, was a slave in North Carolina, freed by the Thirteenth Amendment when he was eight

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up without a new plaque. Fourteen months later, in May 2020, Britain was in lockdown to slow the spread of coronavirus when the story of George Floyd’s death broke. Britain has a different history and culture surrounding race from that of the United States, but they are linked – most clearly, in

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Matter’ and ‘Trump is a Wasteman’, knelt on the statue’s neck for eight minutes, just as Derek Chauvin had knelt on the neck of George Floyd.30 Edward Colston was rolled and kicked through Bristol streets, covered in paint, with bits falling off him, until protesters reached Bristol Harbour. They set

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7 June 2020. The sequence of acts by the Black Lives Matter protesters on that day engaged profoundly with the stories of Colston, Bristol and George Floyd, bringing them together in a statement against racism with global reverberations. Every phase in the protester’s actions was rich with historical and contemporary meaning

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so literally in the hands of the people. The protesters who knelt on its neck for eight minutes paid a sobering and powerful tribute to George Floyd. When the statue was lobbed into the harbour, it recalled breathtakingly the fate of almost one quarter of the Africans whom Colston’s ships transported

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, the protesters could not have made it clearer. Their action highlighted the links of slavery that bound American and British history, from Edward Colston to George Floyd, illuminated the endurance of white supremacy and racism across the transatlantic world, and demanded justice. 12American Idol George Washington Location: Portland, Oregon, USA Put up

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’s statue endured silently on a well-kept lawn outside the German American Society in Portland, Oregon. In 2020, though, everything changed. The death of George Floyd was not the only racially charged incident fuelling unrest in 2020. Ahmaud Arbery, a twenty-five-year-old black man, was jogging in Brunswick, Georgia

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set fire to its head.19 The statue’s body and plinth were covered in graffiti: ‘Genocidal colonist’, ‘Fuck cops’, ‘Big Floyd’ (a reference to George Floyd), ‘You’re on native land’ and ‘1619’ – the date African slaves were first brought to the American colonies. Once the fire was out, ropes were

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a groundbreaking work of musical theatre, yet its image of Washington is resoundingly traditional. Washington cannot, of course, be held responsible for the death of George Floyd, nor for the excesses of twenty-first-century policing. But the protesters who pulled down his statue on the night of 18 June 2020 were

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bound to arise of who, if anyone, should fill them. The public art made by protesters over the summer of 2020 included portrait murals of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as strikingly long lists of the names of the dead. As yet, they have not been memorialized as statues. Perhaps

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America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), p. 293. 11: Making a Splash: Edward Colston 1Manny Fernandez and Audra D. S. Burch, ‘George Floyd, From “I Want to Touch the World” to “I Can’t Breathe”’, The New York Times, 18 June 2020; ‘Before his deadly encounter with police

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begun a new life in Minnesota’, Los Angeles Times, 28 May 2020. 2Dalton Bennett, Joyce Sohyun Lee and Sarah Cahlan, ‘The death of George Floyd: What video and other records show about his final minutes’, Washington Post, 30 May 2020. 3Frank Kitson, Prince Rupert: Portrait of a Soldier (London: Constable,

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, but his experience would have been all too familiar to many who went before him. 8Molly Hennessy-Fiske, ‘The many chapters marked by racism in George Floyd’s family history’, Los Angeles Times, 3 June 2020; Toluse Olorunnipa and Griff Witte, ‘Born with two strikes’, Washington Post, 8 October 2020. 9Carrie Gibson

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: Police officer charged but not over death’, BBC News, 23 September 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-54273317. 11Derrick Bryson Taylor, ‘George Floyd protests: a timeline’, The New York Times, 10 July 2020; @realDonaldTrump (verified account), Twitter, 29 May 2020. 12Quoted in Erik Ortiz, ‘“I chose my city

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Confederate monument, faces state lawsuit’, NBC News, 3 June 2020. 13Andrew Buncombe, ‘“We’re not going anywhere”: Why Portland is still protesting 100 days after George Floyd’s killing’, Independent, 4 September 2020. 14‘George Washington Bush’, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/people/georgewashingtonbush.htm. 15Greg Nokes, ‘Black Exclusion Laws

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

by Michael Shellenberger  · 11 Oct 2021  · 572pp  · 124,222 words

June that a group of people had taken over a neighborhood in downtown Seattle, ostensibly in response to the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, by a police officer in Minneapolis, I couldn’t understand what had happened. It wasn’t like a bunch of heavily armed anarchists had erected

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her in counseling forever.”1 In the spring of 2020, a white police officer in Minneapolis kneeled on the neck of a black man named George Floyd for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. A bystander filmed the event on her smartphone.2 Twenty times Floyd said he could not breathe. Floyd

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, especially among people who have had negative experiences with the police. “I wish to God I didn’t watch that video,” said Vickie about the George Floyd video. “When stuff like that happens, I flip so quick back to the other side where I hate police. It’s just, ‘Oh, I hate

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for days on end. There wasn’t no road map. We just had to work through it and figure it out. Then, the killing of George Floyd happened.”53 Because of COVID-19, Best said, “A lot more people had the availability to come out and to engage in what happened to

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George Floyd, which was quite beautiful.” But a small group of people within the crowd started to behave violently. “Within that large group of people who were

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, Vickie felt compelled to stand up to the anarchists. “You’re not going to do this in my neighborhood!” she shouted. “How dare you disrespect George Floyd and his family! We don’t protest like this. Stop using Black Lives Matter to tear up the city.” Vickie at one point shoved a

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just not used to.”8 In the spring of 2021 anarchists created yet another autonomous zone, this time in Minneapolis, at the intersection near where George Floyd was killed. Local black-owned businesses suffered because customers were unwilling to enter the zone.9 Many of the occupiers were not from the community

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, and one of the men died. The mayor of Minneapolis initially said police would not move to break up the zone until the trial of George Floyd’s killer is completed but then reversed himself.11 Some have protested elected officials at their homes. In San Francisco, radical left activists protested Mayor

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chief of police said the loss of officers was due to “low morale resulting from anti-police sentiment in New York since the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis officers.”78 Mayors forced out other police chiefs. Tempe’s police chief, who was hired in 2016 as a reformer

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the author, January 7, 2021. 2. Audra D. S. Burch and John Eligon, “Bystander Videos of George Floyd and Others Are Policing the Police,” New York Times, updated May 29, 2020, www.nytimes.com. 3. “George Floyd: What happened in the final moments of his life,” BBC, July 16, 2020, www.bbc.com. 4

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Paint ‘Defund the Police’ Right Next to D.C.’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural,” Washington Post, June 7, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com. 5. Chase DeFeliciantonio, “George Floyd Protest Briefly Shuts Down Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 6, 2020, www.sfchronicle.com; Matthias Gaffni, Matt Kawahara, Tatiana Sanchez

…

, Accurate Coverage of Occupation Outside ‘Red House’ in N. Portland,” Oregonian, December 11, 2020, www.oregonlive.com. 9. Andrea Blackstone, “Black-Owned Businesses Struggle at George Floyd Square, Plead for Financial Help,” Black Enterprise, April 23, 2021, www.blackenterprise.com. 10. “NewsNation Goes Inside Minneapolis ‘Autonomous Zone’ Called

…

George Floyd Square,” NewsNation Now, March 17, 2021, YouTube video, 8:19, www.youtube.com. 11. “Man shot and killed near George Floyd Square in Minneapolis,” AP News, March 7, 2021, www.apnews.com; “NewsNation goes inside Minneapolis ‘autonomous

…

zone’ called George Floyd Square”; Danielle Wallace, “FBI to monitor Minneapolis ‘autonomous zone’ in George Floyd Square amid Derek Chauvin trial,” Fox News, March 18, 2021, video, 4:44, www.foxnews.com; Jared Goyette, “Amid Complaints of Violence, Minneapolis

…

Moves to Reopen Intersection Where George Floyd Was Killed,” Washington Post, March 18, 2021, www.washingtonpost.com. 12. Lizzie Johnson, Trisha Thadani, and Kevin Fagan, “Tensions High in SF, Oakland in

…

George Floyd Protests; Looting Spreads to Walnut Creek,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 2, 2020, www.sfchronicle.com. 13. Kelly Kruger, interview by the author, October 1, 2020.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent

by Ben Shapiro  · 26 Jul 2021  · 309pp  · 81,243 words

the Revolutionary Impulse of identity politics could achieve victory. USING THE SYSTEM TO TEAR DOWN THE SYSTEM In July 2020, in the midst of the George Floyd protests alleging widespread and systemic American racism, the National Museum of African American History and Culture—a project of the Smithsonian Museum, a taxpayer-funded

…

. They were, in short, more interested in The ScienceTM than in science itself. That became perfectly clear at the end of May. On May 25, George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old black man, died in the custody of Minneapolis police. Floyd was a career criminal with a serious record; the police

…

the most tangential and irrelevant companies chimed in. Ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s issued a statement: “We must dismantle white supremacy. . . . What happened to George Floyd was not the result of a bad apple; it was the predictable consequence of a racist and prejudiced system and culture that has treated black

…

!”13 Even corporate heads weren’t immune from the pressure: CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman was forced to resign from his company after controversial comments about George Floyd; two officials from the Poetry Foundation stepped down after their pro-BLM statement was considered too mealy-mouthed; the editor in chief of Bon Appétit

…

, too. Chapter 6 The Radicalization of Entertainment In September 2020—in the midst of the supposed racial “reckoning” sweeping the nation after the death of George Floyd—the Academy Awards announced it would shift the standards for its golden statuettes. No longer would films be selected on the basis of quality. Instead

…

network—and the leagues—had already been renormalized. It was simply too late to pull out of the tailspin. By 2020, after the killing of George Floyd in police custody resulted in nationwide protests, virtually every sports league mandated wokeness. The NBA festooned its sidelines with the phrase “BLACK LIVES MATTER”—a

…

is only one true moral side in American politics. In the summer of 2020, that truth became crystal clear. In response to the death of George Floyd while in police custody, massive protests involving millions of Americans broke out in cities across America. Never mind that even the circumstances surrounding Floyd’s

…

, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in US History,” NYTimes.com, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html. 6. Craig Mauger and James David Dickson, “With little social distancing, Whitmer marches with protesters,” DetroitNews.com, June 4, 2020, https

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to ask people if they’ve attended a protest,” BusinessInsider.com, June 15, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-contact-tracers-not-asking-people-attend-george-floyd-protest-2020-6. 15. “COVID-19 Hospitalization and Death by Age,” CDC.gov, August 18, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data

…

/entertainment/archive/2019/08/dave-chappelle-doubles-down-sticks-and-stones/596947/. 39. Jordan Hoffman, “Dave Chappelle Releases a Passionate and Raw Comedy Set, Making George Floyd Protests Personal,” VanityFair.com, June 12, 2020, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/06/dave-chappelle-releases-a-passionate-and-raw-comedy-set-making

…

-george-floyd-protests-personal. 40. Lorraine Ali, “Review: Dave Chappelle’s new special isn’t stand-up. It’s an anguished story of violence,” June 12, 2020,

…

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-06-12/dave-chappelle-846-youtube-netflix-george-floyd. 41. David Sims, “Hillybilly Elegy Is One of the Worst Movies of the Year,” TheAtlantic.com, November 23, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive

…

-decline-points-to-broader-trouble-in-tv-watching. CHAPTER 7: THE FAKE NEWS 1. Richard Read, “Attorney for Minneapolis police officer says he’ll argue George Floyd died of an overdose and a heart condition,” LATimes.com, August 20, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-08-20

…

/george-floyd-derek-chauvin-defense. 2. “988 people have been shot and killed by police in the past year,” WashingtonPost.com, Updated January 26, 2021, https://www.

…

March into Beverly Hills, Loot Stores on Rodeo Drive,” CBSLocal.com, May 30, 2020, https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2020/05/30/rodeo-drive-protest-looting-george-floyd/. 4. Jonathan Lloyd, “Dozens of Businesses Damaged at Flashpoint of Violence in the Fairfax District,” NBCLosAngeles.com, May 31, 2020, https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news

…

-leaves-downtown-l-a-stunned. 6. “NYC Protests Turn Violent,” NYTimes.com, May 31, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/nyregion/nyc-protests-george-floyd.html. 7. Isaac Stanley-Becker, Colby Itkowitz, and Meryl Kornfield, “Protests mount and violence flares in cities across US, putting the nation on edge,” WashingtonPost

…

protests will cost insurance $2 billion after violence erupted in 140 cities in the wake of George Floyd’s death,” DailyMail.co.uk, September 16, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8740609/Rioting-140-cities-George-Floyds-death-cost-insurance-industry-2-BILLION.html. 12. Lois Beckett, “At least 25 Americans were

…

31, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-killed-protests-political-unrest-acled. 13. Ebony Bowden, “More than 700 officers injured in George Floyd protests across US,” NYPost.com, June 8, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/06/08/more-than-700-officers-injured-in

…

-george-floyd-protests-across-us/. 14. https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1267877443911778306. 15. Virginia Allen, “New York Times Mum on ‘1619 Project’ Creator Calling ‘1619 Riots’ Moniker

…

.theblaze.com/news/chris-cuomo-protests-peaceful-constitution. 18. Andrew Kerr, “Here Are 31 Times the Media Justified or Explained Away Rioting and Looting After George Floyd’s Death,” DailySignal.com, September 4, 2020, https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/09/04/here-are-31-times-the-media-justified-or-explained-away-rioting

…

-and-looting-after-george-floyds-death/. 19. Tonya Mosley, “Understand Protests as ‘Acts of Rebellion’ Instead of Riots, Marc Lamont Hill Says,” WBUR.org, June 2, 2020, https://www.wbur

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright  · 7 Jun 2021  · 391pp  · 112,312 words

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business

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Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future

by Jean M. Twenge  · 25 Apr 2023  · 541pp  · 173,676 words

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It

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The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider

by Michiko Kakutani  · 20 Feb 2024  · 262pp  · 69,328 words

Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable

by Joanna Schwartz  · 14 Feb 2023  · 422pp  · 114,817 words

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order

by Colin Kahl and Thomas Wright  · 23 Aug 2021  · 652pp  · 172,428 words

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

by Victor Davis Hanson  · 15 Nov 2021  · 458pp  · 132,912 words

The Stolen Year

by Anya Kamenetz  · 23 Aug 2022  · 347pp  · 103,518 words

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland

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Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

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Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968

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Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy

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Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis

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Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life

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The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It

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Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

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Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

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Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

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It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO

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Pandora's Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV

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Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)

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Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

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The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire

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On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

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Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children

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The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

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We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation

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Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America

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Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter's Soul

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Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

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Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History

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Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress--And How to Bring It Back

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The Passenger

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The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War

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Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy

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The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World

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An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

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Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America

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Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

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Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

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The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

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The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation

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Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination

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News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World

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There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

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Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster

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When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm

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Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge

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Health and Safety: A Breakdown

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There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

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Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia

by Adrian Shirk  · 15 Mar 2022  · 358pp  · 118,810 words

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

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Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac  · 17 Sep 2024

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire

by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson  · 14 Apr 2020  · 491pp  · 141,690 words

Bad Company

by Megan Greenwell  · 18 Apr 2025  · 385pp  · 103,818 words

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays

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American Marxism

by Mark R. Levin  · 12 Jul 2021  · 314pp  · 88,524 words

The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism

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After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes  · 1 Jun 2021  · 342pp  · 114,118 words

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

by Jeffrey Toobin  · 1 May 2023  · 357pp  · 130,117 words

American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15

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Flight of the WASP

by Michael Gross  · 562pp  · 177,195 words

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice

by Jamie K. McCallum  · 15 Nov 2022  · 349pp  · 99,230 words

Born in Flames

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Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader

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Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

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Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul: How to Change the World in Quiet Ways

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Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them

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Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers

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Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology

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The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It

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In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us

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Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life

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Billionaires' Row: Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World's Most Exclusive Skyscrapers

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Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

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Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

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The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans

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Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

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Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet

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Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

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Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet

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Risk: A User's Guide

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Four Battlegrounds

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Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

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Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream

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The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future

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England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight

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The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America

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The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future

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Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

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System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

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Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

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Chokepoint Capitalism

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Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

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Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food

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The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality

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The Day the World Stops Shopping

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The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future

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Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

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Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix

by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski  · 18 Apr 2022  · 414pp  · 117,581 words

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Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

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Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

by Kurt Andersen  · 14 Sep 2020  · 486pp  · 150,849 words

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis

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May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do About It

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Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

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Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

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by Sergey Young  · 23 Aug 2021  · 326pp  · 88,968 words

Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America

by Charles Murray  · 14 Jun 2021  · 147pp  · 42,682 words

No One Succeeds Alone

by Robert Reffkin  · 4 May 2021  · 210pp  · 62,278 words

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect

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Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis

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Equality

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This Land: The Struggle for the Left

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City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways

by Megan Kimble  · 2 Apr 2024  · 430pp  · 117,211 words

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News

by Eliot Higgins  · 2 Mar 2021  · 277pp  · 70,506 words

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All

by Laura Bates  · 2 Sep 2020  · 364pp  · 119,398 words

Your Computer Is on Fire

by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip  · 9 Mar 2021  · 661pp  · 156,009 words

Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside - Finding Home in an English Country Garden

by Marchelle Farrell  · 2 Aug 2023  · 217pp  · 76,056 words

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil

by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt  · 10 May 2021  · 291pp  · 80,068 words

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism

by Rick Wartzman  · 15 Nov 2022  · 215pp  · 69,370 words

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World

by Dambisa Moyo  · 3 May 2021  · 272pp  · 76,154 words

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

by Elle Reeve  · 9 Jul 2024

Happy-Go-Lucky

by David Sedaris  · 30 May 2022  · 206pp  · 64,212 words

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

by Adrian Hon  · 14 Sep 2022  · 371pp  · 107,141 words

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt

by Sinan Aral  · 14 Sep 2020  · 475pp  · 134,707 words

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

by Devon Price  · 4 Apr 2022  · 456pp  · 101,959 words

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today

by Jane McGonigal  · 22 Mar 2022  · 420pp  · 135,569 words

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman  · 9 Aug 2021  · 206pp  · 68,757 words

This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help

by New Scientist and Helen Thomson  · 7 Jan 2021  · 442pp  · 85,640 words

Alive

by Gabriel Weston  · 15 Aug 2025  · 177pp  · 59,831 words

Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

by Vauhini Vara  · 8 Apr 2025  · 301pp  · 105,209 words

Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets That Launched a Second Space Age

by Eric Berger  · 23 Sep 2024  · 375pp  · 113,230 words

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation

by Kevin Roose  · 9 Mar 2021  · 208pp  · 57,602 words

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World

by David Sax  · 15 Jan 2022  · 282pp  · 93,783 words

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back

by Jacob Ward  · 25 Jan 2022  · 292pp  · 94,660 words

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo

by Rebecca Walker  · 15 Mar 2022  · 322pp  · 106,663 words

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley

by Atsuo Inoue  · 18 Nov 2021  · 295pp  · 89,441 words

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything

by Martin Ford  · 13 Sep 2021  · 288pp  · 86,995 words

Re-Educated: Why It’s Never Too Late to Change Your Life

by Lucy Kellaway  · 30 Jun 2021  · 184pp  · 60,229 words

Don't Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape From Big Tech

by Claire Stapleton  · 3 Aug 2026  · 299pp  · 89,604 words

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World

by Mo Gawdat  · 29 Sep 2021  · 259pp  · 84,261 words