The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander · 24 Nov 2011 · 467pp · 116,902 words
metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system. Mass incarceration—not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement—is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. The popular
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racialized social control purports to be colorblind, it creates and maintains racial hierarchy much as earlier systems of control did. Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely
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in the political, social, and legal context over time. Ultimately, I believe that the similarities between these systems of control overwhelm the differences and that mass incarceration, like its predecessors, has been largely immunized from legal challenge. If this claim is substantially correct, the implications for racial justice advocacy are profound. With
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bottom of the American totem pole. This pattern, dating back to slavery, has birthed yet another racial caste system in the United States: mass incarceration. The structure of mass incarceration is described in some detail in chapter 2, with a focus on the War on Drugs. Few legal rules meaningfully constrain the police in
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legal, social, and economic boundary between “us” and “them.” Chapter 5 also explores some of the differences among slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration, most significantly the fact that mass incarceration is designed to warehouse a population deemed disposable—unnecessary to the functioning of the new global economy—while earlier systems of control were
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system without violating the law or the new limits of acceptable political discourse, by demanding “law and order” rather than “segregation forever.” The Birth of Mass Incarceration The rhetoric of “law and order” was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize
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shift in racial attitudes. The margin of support for colorblind norms has only increased since then. This dramatically changed racial climate has led defenders of mass incarceration to insist that our criminal justice system, whatever its past sins, is now largely fair and nondiscriminatory. They point to violent crime rates in
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studies indicate that the biggest problem the black community may face today is not “shamelessness” but rather the severe isolation, distrust, and alienation created by mass incarceration. During Jim Crow, blacks were severely stigmatized and segregated on the basis of race, but in their own communities they could find support, solidarity, acceptance
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to tell friends and relatives and kept the family’s suffering private. Constance is not alone. Eerie Silence David Braman’s ethnographic research shows that mass incarceration, far from reducing the stigma associated with criminality, actually creates a deep silence in communities of color, one rooted in shame. Imprisonment is considered
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along with it.”76 Nowhere is that observation more relevant in American society today than in an analysis of the culture of mass incarceration. Descriptions of the silence that hovers over mass incarceration are rare because people—whether they are social scientists, judges, politicians, or reporters—are usually more interested in speech, acts,
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It is important to keep in mind, though, that many hip-hop artists today do not embrace and perpetuate the worst racial stereotypes associated with mass incarceration. Artists like Common, for example, articulate a sharp critique of American politics and culture and reject the misogyny and violence preached by gangsta rappers.
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trying to fight crime.” That response is predictable because most people assume that racism, and racial systems generally, are fundamentally a function of attitudes. Because mass incarceration is officially colorblind, it seems inconceivable that the system could function much like a racial caste system. The widespread and mistaken belief that racial animus
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for it to operate (together with other laws, institutions, and practices) to trap them at the bottom of a racial hierarchy. In the system of mass incarceration, a wide variety of laws, institutions, and practices—ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing policies, political disenfranchisement, and legalized employment discrimination—trap African Americans
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reform in exchange for an apparent effort to put blacks back “in their place.”29 Legalized discrimination. The most obvious parallel between Jim Crow and mass incarceration is legalized discrimination. During Black History Month, Americans congratulate themselves for having put an end to discrimination against African Americans in employment, housing, public
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black men in cities across the United States are once again subject to legalized discrimination effectively barring them from full integration into mainstream, white society. Mass incarceration has nullified many of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, putting millions of black men back in a position reminiscent of Jim Crow.
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in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and electoral votes, even though they could not vote. Exclusion from juries. Another clear parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is the systematic exclusion of blacks from juries. One hallmark of the Jim Crow era was all-white juries trying black defendants
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making it easier for whites to maintain racial stereotypes about black values and culture. It also made it easier to deny or ignore their suffering. Mass incarceration functions similarly. It achieves racial segregation by segregating prisoners—the majority of whom are black and brown—from mainstream society. Prisoners are kept behind bars
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law enforcement officials charged with enforcing them. The absence of overt racial hostility is a significant difference from Jim Crow, but it can be exaggerated. Mass incarceration, like Jim Crow, was born of racial opportunism—an effort by white elites to exploit the racial hostilities, resentments, and insecurities of poor and
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compassion and caring about race and racial groups) than racial hostility—a feature it actually shares with its predecessors. All racial caste systems, not just mass incarceration, have been supported by racial indifference. As noted earlier, many whites during the Jim Crow era sincerely believed that African Americans were intellectually and morally
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United States from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration). While marginalization may sound far preferable to exploitation, it may prove to be even more dangerous. Extreme marginalization, as we have seen throughout world history
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. What follows is not a plan, but several questions and claims offered for serious consideration by those committed to racial justice and interested in dismantling mass incarceration. They are offered as conversation starters—food for thought, debate, and—I hope—collective action. Each is a challenge to conventional wisdom or traditional
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a few key principles stand out that can be briefly explored here. These principles are rooted in an understanding that any movement to end mass incarceration must deal with mass incarceration as a racial caste system, not as a system of crime control. This is not to say crime is unimportant; it is very
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claims based on the history of race discrimination in this country.” Adding to the temptation to avoid race is the fact that opportunities for challenging mass incarceration on purely race-neutral grounds have never been greater. With budgets busting, more than two dozen states have reduced or eliminated harsh mandatory minimum
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—that is, reform efforts that make institutions look good on the surface without the needed structural changes—have actually helped to facilitate the emergence of mass incarceration and interfered with the development of a more compassionate race consciousness. In earlier chapters, we have seen that throughout our nation’s history, poor
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crucial resources and energy away from dismantling the structures of racial inequality? The predictable response is that civil rights advocates are as committed to challenging mass incarceration and other forms of structural racism as they are to preserving affirmative action. But where is the evidence of this? Civil rights activists have created
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These stories “prove” that race is no longer relevant. Whereas black success stories undermined the logic of Jim Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration depends for its legitimacy on the widespread belief that all those who appear trapped at the bottom actually chose their fate. Viewed from this perspective
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America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 90. 34 Ibid., 91. 35 See Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 157; Steven Raphael, “Should Criminal History Records Be Universally Available?” (reaction essay) in Greg Pogarsky, “Criminal Records, Employment and
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University of Michigan Press, 2004), 219. 63 Ibid., 3, citing data from D.C. Department of Corrections (2000). 64 See Todd Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 121-48. 65 See, e.g., Steve Liss, No Place for Children: Voices from Juvenile
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bias in alcohol prohibition, as well as other drug wars. 16 Mary Pattillo, David F. Weiman, and Bruce Western, Imprisoning America: The Social Effect of Mass Incarceration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), 2. 17 Paul Street, The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs, and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation
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America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice , ed. Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 77 Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” 53. 78 john a. powell, Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, personal communication, Jan. 2007. Chapter 6: The
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Crime Drop in America, ed. Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 97-129; and Todd R. Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 41-48. 28 See, e.g., Todd Clear, Imprisoning Communities, 3. 29 Jeffrey Reiman makes
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Civil Rights Act (1964); Title VI civil rights advocacy, future of; changing the culture of law enforcement; collective denial by civil rights advocates; dismantling the mass incarceration system; and flawed public consensus; grassroots activism by formerly incarcerated men and women; human rights paradigm/ approach; Obama presidency; poor and working-class whites; and
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research Cohen, Cathy Cohen, Stanley Cohen, William Cole, David Coley, Rebekah Levine colorblindness; and affirmative action; and black exceptionalism; and “interracial racial caste system,”; and mass incarceration; problem of flawed pursuit of; Reagan’s racialized campaign rhetoric; resisting temptation to ignore race in advocacy; and U.S. Constitution; and whites’ reluctance to
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; and prosecutors’ extraordinary discretion; and racially discriminatory sentencing; and Reagan’s drug war crime and “get tough” policies; black support for; and Clinton administration; and mass incarceration system; and white voters crime rates; crime reduction and incarceration rates; drug crime; and joblessness; violent crime “criminalblackman,” Criminology (journal) Davis, Angela J. death
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advocacy; and Obama; racial bias in sentencing Declaration of Independence deindustrialization Democratic Party denial, collective; “birdcage” metaphor and structural racism; by civil rights advocates; and mass incarceration of black men Denton, Nancy Diallo, Amadou disenfranchisement. See voting rights dogs, drug-sniffing Doing Time on the Outside (Braman) Douglas, Justice William O. Douglass
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drug use homelessness Housing and Urban Development (HUD) housing discrimination human rights approach Human Rights Watch Hurley, Ora Lee In re Gault (1967) incarceration. See mass incarceration system indentured servitude indifference, racial inner-city economic collapse Irving, Lawrence Jackson, Jesse Jefferson, Thomas “Jena 6,” Jim Crow system: birth of; black cooperation
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with; and Civil Rights Movement; death of; and Supreme Court; voting rights and disenfranchisement; and World War II, 36. See also mass incarceration and Jim Crow (parallels/differences) Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Willie Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education juries: and felon exclusion; and peremptory
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mandatory sentencing guidelines; use by Clinton/Obama; and voting rights; white middle class users; white/black student users Marshall, Prentiss Marshall, Stanley Marshall, Justice Thurgood mass incarceration and Jim Crow (parallels/ differences); and argument that race has always influenced the criminal justice system; black support for “get tough” policies on crime; collective
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stereotypes about black men/ fathers; Supreme Court’s pattern of responding to racial caste/claims of racial bias; the symbolic production of race; white victims mass incarceration system; and absence of black men/black fathers; arguments that race has always influenced the criminal justice system; collective denial of; and colorblindness; and crime
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Southern “Redemption” campaign; structural racism; systems of control/recurring periods of transition and uncertainty. See also drug-law enforcement and racial discrimination; mass incarceration and Jim Crow (parallels/differences); mass incarceration system; post-prison release; War on Drugs Racial Formation in the United States (Omi and Winant) Racial Justice Project of the ACLU racial
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pleas/ plea bargaining; legal services /legal representation; mandatory minimum sentencing; paramilitary raids and police SWAT teams; pretext stops; and racial discrimination; traffic stops. See also mass incarceration system; police/police departments and drug-law enforcement; post-prison release (ex-offenders) War on Poverty Washington, Booker T. Washington Post Watson, Tom We Won
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States by The New Press, New York, 2010 Distributed by Perseus Distribution LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Alexander, Michelle. The new Jim Crow : mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness / Michelle Alexander. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN : 978-1-595-58530-1 1. Criminal justice, Administration
Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class
by Noam Scheiber · 6 Apr 2026 · 399pp · 120,332 words
Champlain to protest inequality with Occupy Burlington. At Siena, Murray was involved with a Black Lives Matter group and another group called Capital Area Against Mass Incarceration. When Bernie Sanders turned up in Albany for a rally in 2016, Murray was one of the volunteers onstage behind him. “It was energizing to
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job interview challenges; as QA tester; student loan debt Bush, George H. W. Buttigieg, Pete BuzzFeed News C Cadoux, Zara Cannon, Mike Capital Area Against Mass Incarceration capitalism, race, class, and Career Experience (CE) program, Apple Carmack, John Casey, Bob (senator) cashless Apple Store Castro, Yolanda CBS CBS Radford lot ChatGPT Chavez
If You See Them
by Vicki Sokolik · 23 Nov 2023 · 332pp · 104,544 words
.state.fl.us/Seal-and-Expunge-Process.aspx. 178 they would carry the stigma of being labeled a criminal: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 140–177. 178 the obstacles they already faced regarding employment, housing, and education would become
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City
by Alice Goffman · 30 Apr 2014 · 371pp · 110,641 words
chaos and emergencies of 6th Street, and a chance to think about what I was seeing. I was also learning for the first time about mass incarceration. With Devah Pager and Bruce Western both in the Sociology Department at the time, the corridors of Wallace Hall were a hotbed of activity on
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see, through Devah and Bruce’s influence and Mitch Duneier’s guidance, that my project could be framed as an on-the-ground look at mass incarceration and its accompanying systems of policing and surveillance. I was documenting the massive expansion of criminal justice intervention into the lives of poor Black families
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: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 11. Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 4–5. 12. Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), especially 191. 13
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into my phone while it was happening—the quotes should be taken only as a close approximation. CONCLUSION 1. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3, no
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
by Brian Christian · 5 Oct 2020 · 625pp · 167,349 words
unique time in history,” they write. “We are being presented with the chance of a generation, and perhaps a lifetime, to reform sentencing and unwind mass incarceration in a scientific way and that opportunity is slipping away because of misinformation and misunderstanding about [statistical risk-assessment models]. Poorly conducted research or misleading
Poverty for Profit
by Anne Kim · 384pp · 112,825 words
the bottom as they are likely to remain at the top.27 Too many Americans face structural barriers such as low-quality schools, housing segregation, mass incarceration, and lack of access to good jobs. The nation has yet to undertake systemic reforms that recognize and rectify these historic inequities. Government antipoverty programs
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stunning 1.6 million—in part because of rising crime rates but also because of the “war on drugs,” harsher sentences, and other policies encouraging mass incarceration.117 While states struggled with the influx of inmates, prison entrepreneurs saw a golden opportunity to relaunch an industry. Leading the way was Nashville-based
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sales and paid its inmate workers between $0.20 and $0.95 an hour.191 The Price of Privatized Injustice The companies that benefit from mass incarceration have made it their business to maintain the status quo. They depend on a steady supply of detainees whose wealth they can extract and whose
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Bob Sloan, “The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor,” The Nation, August 1, 2011. American Civil Liberties Union, Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 2011), 15. 131. American Civil Liberties Union, Banking on Bondage, 15. 132. In the Public Interest, Criminal: How Lockup
San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
by Michael Shellenberger · 11 Oct 2021 · 572pp · 124,222 words
and black people, the disparity between white and Latino people is driven by Latinos tending to deal outdoors.21 Violence, not stricter drug sentences, drove mass incarceration. New York is proof. For ten years after Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the state legislature increased penalties for drug use beginning in 1973, the number
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of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ethan started “bringing together people involved in marijuana legalization, psychedelics, the racist aspects of the drug war, mass incarceration, including people on the European and Australian side,” he said.50 Then the movement was infused with new funding. “Around the summer of ’92 I
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.56 If drugs were legal, and if we treated addiction as a health rather than criminal problem, there would be far less violence and no mass incarceration, I thought. There are no open-air drug markets for insulin. There are no turf wars for antidepressants. Nobody gets shot over a bottle of
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. Probation is also shown to prevent crime and decrease recidivism, while imprisonment is not.64 This suggests that an effective way to reduce crime and mass incarceration would be shorter, swifter, and more certain prison sentences, with the money saved redirected to more and improved policing, including policing capable of handling the
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becoming homeless and often incarcerated. The same kinds of people in the 1990s felt that because America had gone overboard with drug prohibition, punishment, and mass incarceration we should not pressure addicts, as they do in Portugal and the Netherlands, to get sober. And it is educated progressives in West Coast cities
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political power has grown, while voters understandably blame their local elected leaders for the crisis. Progressive advocates and policy makers alike blame the drug war, mass incarceration, and drug prohibition for the addiction and overdose crisis, even though the crisis resulted from liberalized attitudes and drug laws, first toward pharmaceutical opioids, and
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they need. California is overdue for a turn toward pragmatism and moderation when it comes to these issues. Californians do not want to return to mass incarceration nor to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. At the same time, Californians want and deserve public order, which has broken down. Assisted outpatient
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mentally ill homeless. Some may hesitate to support centralizing government mental health services, but doing so would enable efficiencies, cut government waste, and reverse the mass incarceration of the severely mentally ill, which are outcomes that should be persuasive to people with either libertarian or progressive leanings. As such, Cal-Psych, and
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plainly failed, but voters are still not being offered a genuine alternative to status quo policies. Cal-Psych offers voters an alternative between lawlessness and mass incarceration, and between chronic homelessness and chronic institutionalization. A new political vision, agenda, and leadership are needed to overcome the divisions and chaos. “The central conservative
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for Crime & Justice Policy Research, accessed December 12, 2020, www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america. 2. John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 2. 3. Ibid., 150. 4. Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: New Press
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, 2006), 33, cited in Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 6. 5. Pfaff, Locked In, 42. 6. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 101. 7. Bureau
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Addiction Crisis.” 61. Paneez Kosarian, interview by the author, February 3, 2021. 62. Anne E. Parsons, From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration After 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Antonia Hylton, “Carceral Continuities: Tracing Black Bodies from the Asylum to the Penal State,” unpublished
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Investigation, ICPSR, accessed July 21, 2021, www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/series/57?q=1960. 2. John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 3–4. 3. “Crime in the U.S.,” FBI: Uniform Crime Reporting, accessed May
The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide
by Steven W. Thrasher · 1 Aug 2022 · 361pp · 110,233 words
; it changed what the funds would be used for. Billions of dollars were slashed from public-housing and child-welfare budgets and transferred to the mass-incarceration machine. By 1996, the penal budget was twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps.” Prioritizing penal and policing budgets while simultaneously reducing
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have their health protected with the ability to work from home, accessible mental health care, guaranteed housing to keep them off the street, freedom from mass incarceration, and the right to live near friends and family (with the help of home aides, if needed) in small settings, instead of being hidden away
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America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Truman, Lyndon Johnson: Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). “action to end the AIDS crisis”: ACT UP, last modified 2019, https://actupny.org/. according to the
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South Carolina, updated February 10, 2015, https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014–01/uosc-sho010314.php. who has been arrested: Aleks Kajstura, “Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019,” Press Release, Prison Policy Initiative, October 29, 2019, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019women.html. eight thousand mostly white people: “QuickFacts
Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
by Stephen Graham · 30 Oct 2009 · 717pp · 150,288 words
their enemies automatically means they have no rights whatsoever under IHL. In both cases, it is a legal trick that has been used to legitimize mass incarceration without trial. Moreover, both states have used national laws to authorize legal practices that contravene the norms and rules of IHL, a form of ‘domesticating
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West Bank and the increasingly militarized borders and ‘shoot to kill’ zones in and around Gaza. Check-points, buffer zones, enforced identity cards, collective punishments, mass incarcerations without trial, imprisonment of suspects’ relatives, and associated bulldozings of landscapes and buildings deemed to be sheltering enemies – all smack of direct imitation of Israeli
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, rather than merely speaking on behalf of, those on the receiving end of urbicidal violence, the ruthless imposition of neoliberal fundamentalism, and the spread of mass incarceration.76 It is necessary to work against the habitual silencing of the non-Western Other because, as we have seen in this book, acts of
Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn · 14 Jan 2020 · 307pp · 96,543 words
working-class America was not inevitable but rather reflects decades of social-policy mistakes and often gratuitous cruelty: the war on drugs that led to mass incarceration, indifference to the loss of blue-collar jobs, insufficient health-care coverage, embrace of a highly unequal education system, tax giveaways to tycoons, zillionaire-friendly
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probation services, minorities targeted for traffic infractions, the homeless, the mentally ill, fathers who cannot pay child support and many others are all locked up. Mass incarceration is used to make social problems temporarily invisible and to create the mirage of something having been done. It is difficult to imagine a more
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services. The churches, schools and community organizations could not respond adequately when faced with these dark new forces, so government officials instinctively lashed back with mass incarceration that only compounded the problems. In medieval Europe, villages responded to inexplicable crop failures from the “Little Ice Age” by burning witches; in the twenty
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$20 a day, while a drug habit may cost ten times as much and is far more likely to lead to robbery or prostitution. Finally, mass incarceration for drug-related offenses broke up families and meant that millions of boys were raised without the presence of a dad or any other positive
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treatment programs can be significantly expanded and replicated in many more cities and counties, these initiatives offer a way for America to move away from mass incarceration, while helping drug offenders get treatment, counseling and jobs. Judge Musseman told us that the majority of his cases were drug related. And when women
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as they emerge from prison. There are already some signs of a shift, though. We see agreement among many on both left and right that mass incarceration has gone too far, and red states such as Texas have been leaders in reducing the number of prisoners. Overall incarceration rates in America have
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is 97 percent more likely to receive the death penalty than a white person, researchers have shown. So on top of the other problems with mass incarceration, the fundamental truth is that our justice system acts in racist ways. The bias in the judicial system is only one facet of discrimination that
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the conservatives also neglected two critical factors that have undermined families in America, particularly in low-income communities. The first of these damaging factors is mass incarceration and the sevenfold increase in the number of people in jail or prison since 1970. The strain on families has been compounded by the prison
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policy. Dan Baum, “Legalize It All,” Harper’s Magazine, April 2016. Partly because of this quote, liberals sometimes assume that the war on drugs and mass incarceration were simply a conservative plot; in fact, it’s more complicated than that, and this was a bipartisan failing. James Forman Jr. notes in his
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. 3 (September 2016): 171–205. our justice system acts in racist ways: This point has been made powerfully by Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). One way researchers measure bias: Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More
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Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier · 14 Feb 2012 · 503pp · 131,064 words
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat · 25 Feb 2020 · 324pp · 80,217 words
The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets
by Michael Blastland · 3 Apr 2019 · 290pp · 82,871 words
The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
by Joseph E. Stiglitz · 15 Mar 2015 · 409pp · 125,611 words
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
by Jill Leovy · 27 Jan 2015 · 388pp · 119,492 words
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
by Patrick Radden Keefe · 12 Apr 2021 · 712pp · 212,334 words
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
by Malcolm Gladwell · 30 Sep 2013 · 271pp · 82,159 words
"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration
by Aviva Chomsky · 23 Apr 2018 · 219pp · 62,816 words
The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
by Linsey McGoey · 14 Sep 2019
Humankind: A Hopeful History
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The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
by Charlotte Alter · 18 Feb 2020 · 504pp · 129,087 words
The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
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Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South
by Beth Macy · 17 Oct 2016 · 398pp · 112,350 words
Born in Flames
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After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back
by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles and Mehmet Cansoy · 15 Mar 2020 · 296pp · 83,254 words
The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory
by Andrew J. Bacevich · 7 Jan 2020 · 254pp · 68,133 words
Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy
by Jennifer Carlson · 2 May 2023 · 279pp · 100,877 words
The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
by Gabriel Winant · 23 Mar 2021 · 563pp · 136,190 words
10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less
by Garett Jones · 4 Feb 2020 · 303pp · 75,192 words
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
by Laurie Garrett · 31 Oct 1994 · 1,293pp · 357,735 words
Policing the Open Road
by Sarah A. Seo
Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
by Chris Hayes · 11 Jun 2012 · 285pp · 86,174 words
Dawn of Detroit
by Tiya Miles · 13 Sep 2017 · 415pp · 127,092 words
Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen · 14 Sep 2020 · 486pp · 150,849 words
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt · 14 Jun 2018 · 531pp · 125,069 words
The Broken Ladder
by Keith Payne · 8 May 2017
The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism
by Adrian Wooldridge · 7 Apr 2026 · 342pp · 129,097 words
Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement
by Amy Lang and Daniel Lang/levitsky · 11 Jun 2012 · 537pp · 99,778 words
The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell · 21 Jan 2020 · 450pp · 113,173 words
The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland
by Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham · 10 Jan 2023 · 498pp · 184,761 words
Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them
by Dan Bouk · 22 Aug 2022 · 424pp · 123,180 words
Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
by Peter Frase · 10 Mar 2015 · 121pp · 36,908 words
Democracy Incorporated
by Sheldon S. Wolin · 7 Apr 2008 · 637pp · 128,673 words
Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone
by Eric Klinenberg · 1 Jan 2012 · 291pp · 88,879 words
What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures
by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson · 17 Sep 2024 · 588pp · 160,825 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
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein · 11 Sep 2023
Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America
by Erik Baker · 13 Jan 2025 · 362pp · 132,186 words
No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age
by Jane F. McAlevey · 14 Apr 2016 · 423pp · 92,798 words
The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey · 12 Oct 2017 · 288pp · 64,771 words
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker · 13 Feb 2018 · 1,034pp · 241,773 words
Uncharted: How to Map the Future
by Margaret Heffernan · 20 Feb 2020 · 335pp · 97,468 words
Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
by Silvia Federici · 4 Oct 2012 · 277pp · 80,703 words
The Origins of the Urban Crisis
by Sugrue, Thomas J.
SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies · 15 Nov 2021 · 307pp · 88,085 words
Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
by Eric Klinenberg · 10 Sep 2018 · 281pp · 83,505 words
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
by Jane Mayer · 19 Jan 2016 · 558pp · 168,179 words
Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays
by Phoebe Robinson · 14 Oct 2021 · 265pp · 93,354 words
Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made
by Tom Wilkinson · 21 Jul 2014 · 341pp · 89,986 words
Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
by Radley Balko · 14 Jun 2013 · 465pp · 134,575 words
When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
by Jordan Thomas · 27 May 2025 · 347pp · 105,327 words
Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo
by Rebecca Walker · 15 Mar 2022 · 322pp · 106,663 words
Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live
by Nicholas A. Christakis · 27 Oct 2020 · 475pp · 127,389 words
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco · 7 Apr 2014 · 326pp · 88,905 words
The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
by Robert B. Reich · 24 Mar 2020 · 154pp · 47,880 words
The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro · 26 Jul 2021 · 309pp · 81,243 words
AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together
by Nick Polson and James Scott · 14 May 2018 · 301pp · 85,126 words
The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin · 14 Sep 2020
We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves
by John Cheney-Lippold · 1 May 2017 · 420pp · 100,811 words
Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato · 31 Jul 2016 · 370pp · 102,823 words
Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip · 9 Mar 2021 · 661pp · 156,009 words
Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley
by Jacob Silverman · 9 Oct 2025 · 312pp · 103,645 words
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
by Jonathan Crary · 3 Jun 2013 · 102pp · 33,345 words
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis · 16 Mar 2021 · 426pp · 136,925 words
$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer · 31 Aug 2015 · 261pp · 78,884 words
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
by Johann Hari · 20 Jan 2015 · 513pp · 141,963 words
Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince · 22 Aug 2022 · 302pp · 92,206 words
Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything
by Becky Bond and Zack Exley · 9 Nov 2016 · 227pp · 71,675 words
Who Is Rich?
by Matthew Klam · 3 Jul 2017 · 291pp · 92,688 words
The Liberal Moment
by Nick Clegg and Demos (organization : London, England) · 12 Nov 2009 · 92pp
El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory
by Jazmine Ulloa · 3 Mar 2026 · 395pp · 116,052 words
The New Prophets of Capital
by Nicole Aschoff · 10 Mar 2015 · 128pp · 38,187 words
Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War: 1938-1941
by Alan Allport · 2 Sep 2020 · 1,520pp · 221,543 words
The Sellout: A Novel
by Paul Beatty · 2 Mar 2016 · 271pp · 83,944 words
Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
by Adrian Shirk · 15 Mar 2022 · 358pp · 118,810 words
Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right
by Michael Brooks · 23 Apr 2020 · 88pp · 26,706 words
City on the Verge
by Mark Pendergrast · 5 May 2017 · 425pp · 117,334 words
The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World
by Peter Frankopan · 14 Jun 2018 · 352pp · 80,030 words
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard · 19 Apr 2018 · 245pp · 83,272 words
Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
by Dennis Yi Tenen · 6 Feb 2024 · 169pp · 41,887 words
A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing · 3 May 2017 · 307pp · 82,680 words
Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance
by Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge · 29 Mar 2020 · 159pp · 42,401 words
Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey · 10 Jul 2018 · 242pp · 73,728 words
McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
by Ronald Purser · 8 Jul 2019 · 242pp · 67,233 words
Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit
by Steven Higashide · 9 Oct 2019 · 195pp · 52,701 words
Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
by Don Hanlon Johnson · 10 Sep 2018 · 358pp · 106,951 words
Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze · 15 Nov 2021 · 561pp · 138,158 words
Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe · 26 Jan 2021 · 490pp · 153,455 words
If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
by Jill Lepore · 14 Sep 2020 · 467pp · 149,632 words
Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution
by Pieter Hintjens · 11 Mar 2013 · 349pp · 114,038 words
What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy)
by Noam Chomsky · 7 Dec 2015
The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin · 10 Jan 2019 · 301pp · 89,076 words
Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World
by James Miller · 17 Sep 2018 · 370pp · 99,312 words
The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson · 23 Sep 2019 · 809pp · 237,921 words
Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman · 17 Mar 2015 · 527pp · 147,690 words
Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968
by Thomas E. Ricks · 3 Oct 2022 · 482pp · 150,822 words
The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990
by Jonathan Mahler · 11 Aug 2025 · 559pp · 164,804 words
Year 501
by Noam Chomsky · 19 Jan 2016