By Barnes & Noble

Political books have seen a 57% sales jump compared to last year.
The data also shows that three states that voted blue in 2016 have trended toward books that are positive to President Trump, while two states that voted red lean toward buying books critical of him.
Meanwhile, the states that were most likely to buy books supporting Trump were: Texas, Florida and North Carolina. The states that were most likely to buy books critical of the president were: New York, California and Massachusetts.

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Posted on October 11, 2018

By Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg/Take Care

Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg’s book How to Save a Constitutional Democracy is out from the University of Chicago Press later this month, and will be the basis of a blog symposium on Take Care.
The confirmation process of Brett Kavanaugh has been decried by many for damaging the U.S. Senate’s norms of civility and the U.S. Supreme Court’s nonpartisan reputation. But that process, and in particular the September 27th hearing on allegations of attempted rape by Kavanaugh, has had a much more specific risk to the Court as an independent institution. This risk will cast a disabling shadow on any vote cast by Kavanaugh in a case that yields predictable partisan divisions.

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Posted on October 9, 2018

By Lotte Buch Segal/The Conversation

Munir is a Kurdish man in his forties. We met several times in his home, with his family, and in the clinic where he has been for therapy. It took him a long time to open up.
Even though his wife knew that he had received medical assistance to counter the long-term effects of physical torture under Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, she did not know the details of what had been going on in the multiple places of confinement he, as a Kurdish activist, had been detained in Iraq – least of all that he was raped at a local branch of the Mukhabarat, the regime’s infamous intelligence service.
About his time in prison, Munir stated that “I lost everything there; I lost my manhood.” Derivatively, his imprisonment had on more than one occasion resulted in a row in which his wife would wonder about his lack of desire for conjugal intimacy. In this sense both his actual time in the prison and the way in which this moment in time continuously exert pressure on his conjugal relation has turned his imprisonment into a temporal marker of emasculation because of both the rape and the way in which his wife misconceives of him.

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Posted on October 4, 2018

By SIU Press

“In this first book devoted to the genesis, failure, and lasting legacy of Ulysses S. Grant’s comprehensive American Indian policy, Mary Stockwell shows Grant as an essential bridge between Andrew Jackson’s pushing Indians out of the American experience and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s welcoming them back in.
“Situating Grant at the center of Indian policy development after the Civil War, Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians reveals the bravery and foresight of the eighteenth president in saying that Indians must be saved and woven into the fabric of American life.”

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Posted on September 28, 2018

By Muckrock

“The FBI files on Hannah Arendt, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin and a dozen famous writers have a lot of stories to tell, and over the past eight years the MuckRock team has been digging through them.
“Today, we’re excited to tell those stories in a new format: a 400-page volume that brings the most funny, frightening, poignant, and provocative tales about the intersection of surveillance and freedom to life, as told through those primary source documents.”

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Posted on September 18, 2018

By The Uptown People’s Law Center

Attorneys filed a lawsuit Thursday on behalf of historian Heather Thompson, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy was censored by Illinois prison officials.
Attorneys from Uptown People’s Law Center and Sidley Austin filed the lawsuit. It alleges that this censorship is “arbitrarily applied,” as the book was sent to three different prisons and censored only at Pontiac and Logan Correctional Centers. It argues this censorship is a violation of Thompson’s First Amendment right to communicate with incarcerated people, as such communication should only be restricted when there is a legitimate penological interest. The lawsuit also claims that Thompson’s Fourteenth Amendment right to due process was violated because she did not receive notice of this restriction, and as such was not provided an opportunity to challenge it.

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Posted on September 13, 2018

By Jessica Corbett/Common Dreams

Amid a flurry of “breathless headlines” about warnings in a new study that outlines a possible Hothouse Earth scenario, one co-author optimistically expressed his belief that “people will look back on 2018 as the year when climate reality hit.”
In an interview with the Guardian, Stockholm Resilience Center executive director Johan Rockström declared that “This is the moment when people start to realize that global warming is not a problem for future generations, but for us now.” Rockström’s study has received an “unprecedented” amount of global attention – 270,000 downloads in the first week alone.
“Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the new study, while not conclusive in its findings, warns that humanity may be just 1°C away from creating a series of dynamic feedback loops that could push the world into a climate scenario not seen since the dawn of the Helocene Period, nearly 12,000 years ago,” Common Dreams reported.

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Posted on September 11, 2018

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

Bob Woodward has a book coming out next month that details the first year-and-a-half of Donald Trump’s presidency, and excerpts published by the Washington Post and CNN on Tuesday depict a White House in the midst of a “nervous breakdown” sparked by a man who top aides have referred to as “an idiot,” a “fucking moron,” a “professional liar,” and “a goddamn dumbbell” who has the understanding of “a fifth- or sixth-grader.”
According to the Post – where Woodward has worked as a reporter and editor for decades – the “thrust” of Fear: Trump in the White House “mostly focuses on substantive decisions and internal disagreements, including tensions with North Korea as well as the future of U.S. policy in Afghanistan.”
But these substantive decisions and disagreements often produced startling moments in which the president revealed his total ignorance and lack of fitness for office.

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Posted on September 5, 2018

By Danielle Wyatt and Dale Leorke/The Conversation

In 2017, archaeologists discovered the ruins of the oldest public library in Cologne, Germany. The building may have housed up to 20,000 scrolls, and dates back to the Roman era in the second century. When literacy was restricted to a tiny elite, this library was open to the public. Located in the center of the city in the marketplace, it sat at the heart of public life.
We may romanticize the library filled with ancient books as an institution dedicated to the interior life of the mind. But the Cologne discovery tells us something else; it suggests libraries may have meant something more to cities and their inhabitants than being just repositories of the printed word.

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Posted on August 27, 2018

By Lloyd Strickland/The Conversation

The 17th and 18th centuries were a golden age when it comes to trying to prove God’s existence.
Today’s efforts are on nothing like the same scale as they were hundreds of years ago, now that secularism is as common among philosophers as it is among the general population.
And this is not the only difference to have occurred since that golden age, which is the focus of my new book, Proofs of God in Early Modern Europe.
Here are three other things that have changed over the centuries:

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Posted on August 17, 2018