political essay books

50 Must-Read Books about American Politics

Sarah S. Davis

Sarah S. Davis holds a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master's of Library Science from Clarion University, and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Sarah has also written for Electric Literature, Kirkus Reviews, Audible, Psych Central, and more. Sarah is the founder of Broke By Books blog and runs a tarot reading business, Divination Vibration . Twitter: @missbookgoddess Instagram: @Sarahbookgoddess

View All posts by Sarah S. Davis

I wasn’t always a politics junkie, but over the last fifteen years, I’ve definitely become totally addicted to following politics and current affairs. During that time, and especially during the last ten years, sweeping changes have affected America. In an era where the news cycle is measured in hours, not days or weeks, it can be challenging to keep up to date on the underlying issues that have shaped American political history past and present. This epic list of 50 must-read books about American politics explores topics from a broad range of voices and perspectives, from feminism to fascism, parties to polling, and tribalism to globalism. These 50 best books should help you get up to speed with American politics.

The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate  by George Lakoff

“The ALL NEW   Don’t Think of an Elephant!  picks up where the original book left off—delving deeper into how framing works, how framing has evolved in the past decade, how to speak to people who harbor elements of both progressive and conservative worldviews, how to counter propaganda and slogans, and more.” (Amazon)

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America  by Colin Woodard

“An endlessly fascinating look at American regionalism and the eleven nations that continue to shape North America. According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations , he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future.” (Amazon)

Bad Feminist: Essays   by Roxane Gay

“In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman ( Sweet Valley High ) of color ( The Help ) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years ( Girls, Django in Chains ) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.” (Amazon)

Because of Sex: One Law, Ten Cases, and Fifty Years That Changed American Women’s Lives at Work  by Gillian Thomas

“Gillian Thomas’s  Because of Sex  tells the story of how one law, our highest court, and a few tenacious women changed the American workplace forever. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act revolutionized the lives of America’s working women, making it illegal to discriminate ‘because of sex.’ But that simple phrase didn’t mean much until ordinary women began using the law to get justice on the job—and some took their fights all the way to the Supreme Court. These unsung heroines’ victories, and those of the other women profiled in  Because of Sex , dismantled a Mad Men world where women could only hope to play supporting roles, where sexual harassment was ‘just the way things are,’ and where pregnancy meant getting a pink slip.” (Amazon)

Citizen: An American Lyric  by Claudia Rankine

“Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media…The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry,  Citizen  is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named ‘post-race’ society.” (Amazon)

A Colony in a Nation  by Chris Hayes

“In  A Colony in a Nation ,  New York Times  best-selling author and Emmy Award–winning news anchor Chris Hayes upends the national conversation on policing and democracy. Drawing on wide-ranging historical, social, and political analysis, as well as deeply personal experiences with law enforcement, Hayes contends that our country has fractured in two: the Colony and the Nation. In the Nation, the law is venerated. In the Colony, fear and order undermine civil rights. With great empathy, Hayes seeks to understand this systemic divide, examining its ties to racial inequality, the omnipresent threat of guns, and the dangerous and unfortunate results of choices made by fear.” (Amazon)

The Best and the Brightest   by David Halberstam

“ The Best and the Brightest  is David Halberstam’s masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy. Using portraits of America’s flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them,  The Best and the Brightest  reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country’s recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam and why did it lose? As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It’s an American classic.” (Goodreads)

Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right   by Jane Mayer

“In a riveting and indelible feat of reporting, Jane Mayer illuminates the history of an elite cadre of plutocrats—headed by the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Olins, and the Bradleys—who have bankrolled a systematic plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. Mayer traces a byzantine trail of billions of dollars spent by the network, revealing a staggering conglomeration of think tanks, academic institutions, media groups, courthouses, and government allies that have fallen under their sphere of influence. Drawing from hundreds of exclusive interviews, as well as extensive scrutiny of public records, private papers, and court proceedings, Mayer provides vivid portraits of the secretive figures behind the new American oligarchy and a searing look at the carefully concealed agendas steering the nation.” (Amazon)

Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World   by Jennifer Palmieri

“Framed as an empowering letter from former Hillary Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri to the first woman president, and by extension, to all women working to succeed in any field,  Dear Madam President  is filled with forward-thinking, practical advice for all women who are determined to seize control of their lives-from boardroom to living room.” (Amazon)

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America   by Nancy MacLean

“Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter  the  rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did.  Democracy in Chains  names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.” (Amazon)

Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom   by Condoleezza Rice

“From the former secretary of state and bestselling author—a sweeping look at the global struggle for democracy and why America must continue to support the cause of human freedom.” (Amazon)

Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics   by Cathy J. Cohen

“In  Democracy Remixed , award-winning scholar Cathy J. Cohen offers an authoritative and empirically powerful analysis of the state of black youth in America today. Utilizing the results from the Black Youth Project, a groundbreaking nationwide survey, Cohen focuses on what young Black Americans actually experience and think—and underscores the political repercussions…Through their words, these young people provide a complex and balanced picture of the intersection of opportunity and discrimination in their lives.  Democracy Remixed  provides the insight we need to transform the future of young Black Americans and American democracy.” (Amazon)

Dreams from My Father   by Barack Obama

“In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.”

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power   by Rachel Maddow

“Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow’s  Drift  argues that we’ve drifted away from America’s original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war. To understand how we’ve arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today’s war in Afghanistan, along the way exploring Reagan’s radical presidency, the disturbing rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight our constant wars for us, and even the changing fortunes of G.I. Joe. ” (Amazon)

Fascism: A Warning   by Madeleine Albright

“The twentieth century was defined by the clash between democracy and Fascism, a struggle that created uncertainty about the survival of human freedom and left millions dead. Given the horrors of that experience, one might expect the world to reject the spiritual successors to Hitler and Mussolini should they arise in our era. In  Fascism: A Warning , Madeleine Albright draws on her experiences as a child in war-torn Europe and her distinguished career as a diplomat to question that assumption.” (Amazon)

From the Corner of the Oval: A Memoir   by Beck Dorey-Stein

“In 2012, Beck Dorey-Stein is working five part-time jobs and just scraping by when a posting on Craigslist lands her, improbably, in the Oval Office as one of Barack Obama’s stenographers. The ultimate D.C. outsider, she joins the elite team who accompany the president wherever he goes, recorder and mic in hand. On whirlwind trips across time zones, Beck forges friendships with a dynamic group of fellow travelers—young men and women who, like her, leave their real lives behind to hop aboard Air Force One in service of the president.”

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics   by Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, Minyon Moore, and Veronica Chambers

“The four most powerful African American women in politics share the story of their friendship and how it has changed politics in America. The lives of black women in American politics are remarkably absent from the shelves of bookstores and libraries.  For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics  is a sweeping view of American history from the vantage points of four women who have lived and worked behind the scenes in politics for over thirty years—Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore—a group of women who call themselves The Colored Girls.” (Amazon)

A Girl’s Guide to Joining the Resistance: A Feminist Handbook on Fighting for Good   by Emma Gray

“So—the presidential election of 2016 happened. You cried, you ranted, you marched. But how do you stay engaged for the long term? How do you keep fighting while also continuing your real life? How do you get involved when you feel far from the action? How do you stay vigilant without being furious all. the. time? Needing to take action after the election, Emma Gray, Executive Women’s Editor at  HuffPost , put on her journalist hat and set out to get answers to these questions from some of the most prominent thought leaders and activists of our time. She spoke with march organizers, and senators, long-time activists, and newcomers across political movements to find out the best ways to listen to those who have been doing this for a while, join in, and create sustainable action. In all of her conversations, one theme came up again and again: young women are essential to the resistance.” (Amazon)

The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency by Chris Whipple

“Through extensive, intimate interviews with eighteen   living chiefs (including Reince Priebus) and two former presidents, award-winning journalist and producer Chris Whipple pulls back the curtain on this unique fraternity. In doing so, he revises our understanding of presidential history, showing us how James Baker’s expert managing of the White House, the press, and Capitol Hill paved the way for the Reagan Revolution—and, conversely, how Watergate, the Iraq War, and even the bungled Obamacare rollout might   have been prevented by a more effective chief. Filled with shrewd analysis and never-before-reported details,  The Gatekeepers  offers an essential portrait of the toughest job in Washington.” (Amazon)

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s America by Rebecca Traister

“With eloquence and fervor, Rebecca tracks the history of female anger as political fuel—from suffragettes marching on the White House to office workers vacating their buildings after Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Here Traister explores women’s anger at both men and other women; anger between ideological allies and foes; the varied ways anger is perceived based on its owner; as well as the history of caricaturing and delegitimizing female anger; and the way women’s collective fury has become transformative political fuel—as is most certainly occurring today. She deconstructs society’s (and the media’s) condemnation of female emotion (notably, rage) and the impact of their resulting repercussions.” (Amazon)

How to Be an American: A Field Guide to Citizenship   by Silvia Hidalgo

“The current political climate has left many of us wondering how our government actually operates. Sure, we learned about it in school, but if put to the test, how many of us can correctly explain the branches of government? The history of politics? The differences and connections between local government and federal government? Enter  How to Be an American.  While author and illustrator Silvia Hidalgo was studying for her citizenship test, she quickly found that the materials provided by the government were lacking. In order to more easily absorb the information, Hidalgo started her own illustrated reference to civics facts and American history essentials. She’s collected her findings in How to Be an American , a freshly designed and illustrated two-color guide to all things America.” (Amazon)

Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment   by Francis Fukuyama

“The  New York Times  bestselling author of  The Origins of Political Order  offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of state.” (Amazon)

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America , edited by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding

“When 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump’s America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.” (Amazon)

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness   by Michelle Alexander

“Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement.  The New Jim Crow  is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as ‘brave and bold,’ this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that ‘we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.'” (Amazon)

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court  by Jeffrey Toobin

“Acclaimed journalist Jeffrey Toobin takes us into the chambers of the most important—and secret—legal body in our country, the Supreme Court, revealing the complex dynamic among the nine people who decide the law of the land. An institution at a moment of transition, the Court now stands at a crucial point, with major changes in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, and church-state relations. Based on exclusive interviews with the justices and with a keen sense of the Court’s history and the trajectory of its future, Jeffrey Toobin creates in  The Nine  a riveting story of one of the most important forces in American life today.” (Amazon)

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America   by Rick Perlstein

“Told with vivid urgency and sharp political insight,  Nixonland  recaptures America’s turbulent 1960s and early 1970s and reveals how Richard Nixon rose from the political grave to seize and hold the presidency of the United States. Perlstein’s epic account begins in the blood and fire of the 1965 Watts riots, nine months after Lyndon Johnson’s historic landslide victory over Barry Goldwater appeared to herald a permanent liberal consensus in the United States. Yet the next year, scores of liberals were tossed out of Congress, America was more divided than ever, and a disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback: Richard Nixon. Between 1965 and 1972 America experienced no less than a second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know now was born.” (Amazon)

On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope   by DeRay McKesson

“In August 2014, twenty-nine-year-old activist DeRay Mckesson stood with hundreds of others on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to push a message of justice and accountability. These protests, and others like them in cities across the country, resulted in the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, in his first book, Mckesson lays down the intellectual, pragmatic, and political framework for a new liberation movement. Continuing a conversation about activism, resistance, and justice that embraces our nation’s complex history, he dissects how deliberate oppression persists, how racial injustice strips our lives of promise, and how technology has added a new dimension to mass action and social change. He argues that our best efforts to combat injustice have been stunted by the belief that racism’s wounds are history, and suggests that intellectual purity has curtailed optimistic realism. The book offers a new framework and language for understanding the nature of oppression. With it, we can begin charting a course to dismantle the obvious and subtle structures that limit freedom.” (Amazon)

One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy   by Carol Anderson

“In her  New York Times  bestseller  White Rage , Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With  One Person ,  No Vote , she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the  Shelby  ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice.” (Amazon)

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century   by Timothy Snyder

“Timothy Snyder is one of the most celebrated historians of the Holocaust. In his books  Bloodlands  and  Black Earth , he has carefully dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With  Twenty Lessons , Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, ‘Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.’  Twenty Lessons  is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.” (Goodreads)

A People’s History of the United States   by Howard Zinn

“Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research,  A People’s History   of the United States  is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of—and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country’s greatest battles—the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women’s rights, racial equality—were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.

“Covering Christopher Columbus’s arrival through President Clinton’s first term,  A People’s History of the United States  features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history.” (Amazon)

The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage  by Jared Yates Sexton

“The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore  is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 Presidential Election and the cultural forces that powered Donald Trump into the White House. Featuring in-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton’s book is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. It is also a sobering chronicle of our democracy’s political polarization—a result of our self-constructed, technologically-assisted echo chambers.” (Goodreads)

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism   by Steve Kornacki

“In  The Red and the Blue , cable news star and acclaimed journalist Steve Kornacki follows the twin paths of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, two larger-than-life politicians who exploited the weakened structure of their respective parties to attain the highest offices. For Clinton, that meant contorting himself around the various factions of the Democratic party to win the presidency. Gingrich employed a scorched-earth strategy to upend the permanent Republican minority in the House, making him Speaker… With novelistic prose and a clear sense of history, Steve Kornacki masterfully weaves together the various elements of this rambunctious and hugely impactful era in American history, whose effects set the stage for our current political landscape.” (Amazon)

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion   by Jonathan Haidt

“Drawing on his twenty five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns. In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts.” (Amazon)

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

“Through deep access to insiders from the top to the bottom of the campaign, political writers Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have reconstructed the key decisions and unseized opportunities, the well-intentioned misfires and the hidden thorns that turned a winnable contest into a devastating loss. Drawing on the authors’ deep knowledge of Hillary from their previous book, the acclaimed biography  HRC ,  Shattered  offers an object lesson in how Hillary herself made victory an uphill battle, how her difficulty articulating a vision irreparably hobbled her impact with voters, and how the campaign failed to internalize the lessons of populist fury from the hard-fought primary against Bernie Sanders.” (Amazon)

So You Want to Talk about Race by Ijeoma Oluo

“In  So You Want to Talk About Race,  Editor at Large of The Establishment Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the ‘N’ word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don’t dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans.” (Amazon)

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right   by Arlie Russell Hochschild

“In  Strangers in Their Own Land , the renowned sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country—a stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she famously champions, Russell Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground and quickly warms to the people she meets—among them a Tea Party activist whose town has been swallowed by a sinkhole caused by a drilling accident—people whose concerns are actually ones that all Americans share: the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for their children.” (Goodreads)

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln   by Doris Kearns Goodwin

“Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Abraham Lincoln’s political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president.” (Goodreads)

Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House   by April Ryan

“Veteran White House reporter April Ryan thought she had seen everything in her two decades as a White House correspondent. And then came the Trump administration. In  Under Fire , Ryan takes us inside the confusion and chaos of the Trump White House to understand how she and other reporters adjusted to the new normal. She takes us inside the policy debates, the revolving door of personnel appointments, and what it is like when she, as a reporter asking difficult questions, finds herself in the spotlight, becoming part of the story.” (Amazon)

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America   by George Packer

“American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In  The Unwinding , George Packer tells the story of the past three decades by journeying through the lives of several Americans, including a son of tobacco farmers who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money, and a Silicon Valley billionaire who arrives at a radical vision of the future.” (Amazon)

War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence   by Ronan Farrow

“Drawing on newly unearthed documents, and richly informed by rare interviews with warlords, whistle-blowers, and policymakers—including every living former secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton to Rex Tillerson— War on Peace  makes a powerful case for an endangered profession. Diplomacy, Farrow argues, has declined after decades of political cowardice, shortsightedness, and outright malice—but it may just offer America a way out of a world at war.” (Amazon)

We Should All Be Feminists   by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“In this personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from the much-admired TEDx talk of the same name—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century, one rooted in inclusion and awareness. Drawing extensively on her own experiences and her deep understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics, here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman now—and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.” (Amazon)

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy   by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“‘We were eight years in power’ was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s ‘first white president.'”(Amazon)

What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton

“In this ‘candid and blackly funny’ ( The New York Times ) memoir, Hillary Rodham Clinton reveals what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential elections in history. She takes us inside the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger-than-fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules.” (Amazon)

What It Takes: The Way to the White House   by Richard Ben Cramer

An American Iliad in the guise of contemporary political reportage, What It Takes penetrates the mystery at the heart of all presidential campaigns: How do presumably ordinary people acquire that mixture of ambition, stamina, and pure shamelessness that makes a true candidate? As he recounts the frenzied course of the 1988 presidential race—and scours the psyches of contenders from George Bush and Robert Dole to Michael Dukakis and Gary Hart—Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer comes up with the answers, in a book that is vast, exhaustively researched, exhilarating, and sometimes appalling in its revelations.” (Amazon)

What You Should Know about Politics… But Don’t: A Nonpartisan Guide to the Issues That Matter by Jessamyn Conrad

“In a world of sound bites, deliberate misinformation, and a political scene colored by the blue versus red partisan divide, how does the average educated American find a reliable source that’s free of political spin?  What You Should Know About Politics…But Don’t  breaks it all down, issue by issue, explaining who stands for what, and why—whether it’s the economy, income inequality, Obamacare, foreign policy, education, immigration, or climate change. If you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or somewhere in between, it’s the perfect book to brush up on a single topic or read through to get a deeper understanding of the often mucky world of American politics.” (Amazon)

What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank

“ What’s the Matter with Kansas?  unravels the great political mystery of our day: Why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests? With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank answers the riddle by examining his home state, Kansas—a place once famous for its radicalism that now ranks among the nation’s most eager participants in the culture wars.” (Amazon)

Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House   by Alyssa Mastromonaco

“Alyssa Mastromonaco worked for Barack Obama for almost a decade, and long before his run for president. From the then-senator’s early days in Congress to his years in the Oval Office, she made Hope and Change happen through blood, sweat, tears, and lots of briefing binders… Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?  is an intimate portrait of a president, a book about how to get stuff done, and the story of how one woman challenged, again and again, what a ‘White House official’ is supposed to look like.” (Amazon)

The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote   by Elaine Weiss

“Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade…Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, along with appearances by Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Frederick Douglass, and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Woman’s Hour is an inspiring story of activists winning their own freedom in one of the last campaigns forged in the shadow of the Civil War, and the beginning of the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.” (Amazon)

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order   by Richard Haass

“An examination of a world increasingly defined by disorder and a United States unable to shape the world in its image, from the president of the Council on Foreign Relations… A World in Disarray  is a wise examination, one rich in history, of the current world, along with how we got here and what needs doing. Haass shows that the world cannot have stability or prosperity without the United States, but that the United States cannot be a force for global stability and prosperity without its politicians and citizens reaching a new understanding.” (Amazon)

Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump by Dan Pfeiffer

“From Obama’s former communications director and current co-host of  Pod Save America  comes a colorful account of how politics, the media, and the Internet changed during the Obama presidency and how Democrats can fight back in the Trump era.” (Amazon)

Looking for more books about American politics and current events? Check out our Reading List for the 2018 Midterm Elections , guide to 4 Books to Get You Started on Contemporary International Politics , list of  5 Reasons to Read Outside Your Political Ideology , and  23 Resistance Poems to Express Your Rage .

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Nonfiction Books » Politics & Society » The Best Politics Books of 2022, recommended by David Edgerton

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The Best Politics Books of 2022, recommended by David Edgerton

Last updated: May 08, 2024

THE 2023 ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING

David Edgerton , chair of the judging panel , talks us through the ten finalists for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, awarded for a nonfiction book. From the dawn of humanity to the Covid crisis, from a study in power to the plight of the powerless, these are books that break through the mendacities of politics and rise to the challenge of our times, he explains.

Q. What kind of books were you trying to pick out?

David Edgerton: We have a pretty broad definition of what counts as political writing. We're certainly not a prize for political science or for political journalism or instant history. So, we have on our shortlist books by poets and philosophers, archaeologists and anthropologists, scientists and lawyers, historians and journalists. What we were looking for was books that change our minds about something important, that have a certain sense of urgency, that peer beneath the surface. They're political in the sense that they want to make us think in new ways or draw attention to things that are perhaps not obvious.

We're also very definitely the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. We're not interested in apologias, or clichéd political positioning. We're interested in work that gets through the mendacities of politics, that rises to the challenge of our times. To reverse a cliché, the need now is not to speak truth to power but to tell the truth about power. So, while we think of political writing as a very broad category, what we're looking for is wonderfully written, insightful and unusual books. We think the best political writing surprises us.

These are all wonderful, wonderful books:

Behind Closed Doors: Why We Break Up Families and How to Mend Them

By polly curtis.

“Behind Closed Doors uncovers the grim realities of children being taken away from parents in Britain today. This is a story that is actually very difficult to get at because of legal restrictions on what you can report from family courts. The book uncovers a profoundly disfunctional system in which the state is prepared to spend money on taking children away from their parents, but not prepared to spend money on helping parents to look after their children properly. It is an oppressive state, no longer trusted by citizens, and one incapable of navigating the multiple complexities of poverty, gender, and race. The book is also an extraordinary study of the way in which class, race and gender interact in profoundly negative ways.

It’s a wonderful example of very long-form investigative reporting into something that people either don’t want investigated or by its nature is difficult to investigate. It’s a very subtle examination of what is a very, very difficult issue. This isn’t a book that is coming up with easy answers: it’s a book that really explains why the issue is so intractable.”

Read expert recommendations

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

By david graeber & david wengrow.

“This book is extraordinarily ambitious. It genuinely is a new history of humanity. One of the most notable things about it is that it wants to free up our political imaginations from being trapped in very particular stories about our prehistorical origins. It is really a very powerful critique of what you might call evolutionary “Just So Stories” about the human fall from grace with the rise of agriculture and stage theories of history more generally. The authors want to say that the human past was much more varied, much more open than archaeologists, anthropologists, political sociologists and philosophers have wanted us to believe. It’s a celebration of human freedom and possibility, based on a reexamination of prehistory, opening up the past to make new futures possible.”

Spike: The Virus vs. The People - the Inside Story

By jeremy farrar & with anjana ahuja.

“The politics of science is one of those topics that tends to be dealt with in clichés, often self-serving clichés: truth versus lies, reason versus magic, etc. But this is an exceptional account of the politics of science which deals with the messy realities of scientific diplomacy and scientific politics. It’s a very rare, frank account by a scientist about the realities of science-state relations, of science-policy relations.

It’s concerned with Covid, with the World Health Organization, with China, and above all British politics and Covid. One of the things it exposes in relation to the UK is the systemic mediocrity of British government, with very, very rare exceptions which are celebrated. This mediocrity led, according to this book, to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. It is a serious intervention in our understanding of the politics of Covid, as well the epidemiology, the science, the vaccines and so on.”

My Fourth Time, We Drowned

By sally hayden.

***🏆  A  Five Books  Book of the Year ***

***Winner of the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing ***

“My Fourth Time, We Drowned is another extraordinary investigation of a topic which people want to keep hidden, in this case the reality of the lives of migrants trying to get into Europe across the Mediterranean who have travelled there from many parts. It tells the story of extraordinary suffering that families go through to send family members to Europe, and of the migrants themselves, at the hands of traffickers, of militias and, indeed, indirectly, at the hands of international organizations that haven’t cared as much as they should have about their well-being.

What is especially rich about the book is that the migrants themselves speak not after the fact, but during their ordeals. So, although they are very much out of sight when it comes to television and the usual forms of journalism, the individual stories are told through often secret exchanges on social media. And they’re told extraordinarily compellingly.

The book is a critique of the EU and the UN for their policies, for keeping these migrants out, and their systematic indifference to their suffering. It’s very much—as many of these books are—a book for our time.”

“The subtitle is ‘seeking refuge on the world’s deadliest migration route’—that being the route from North Africa, across the Mediterranean, to Europe. All the books on the shortlist have a topicality and the ways in which they are topical are very varied and interesting. This is a book about events that are unfolding right now, as we’re speaking. We know they’re happening, but somehow we manage to push them away and not think about them. But migration is one of the huge issues of our time and this book really makes you feel it.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist

Caroline Sanderson , Journalist

Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire

By kojo koram.

“Uncommon Wealth is a very powerful reminder that the legacies of the British imperial and global pasts are not merely cultural but also, though less obviously, political economic. The overall argument is that the British Empire had an important role in creating a kind of globalized capitalism which was profoundly undemocratic and destructive of national development of not only the United Kingdom’s former colonies, but more generally too. It essentially links what happened in the UK in the recent past—for example, privatization and outsourcing, the offshoring of finance to tax havens—to policies that were pioneered for decolonised parts of the world. The argument is that the UK today is living under a financial political regime long known to many of its former colonies.”

Things I Have Withheld

By kei miller.

“This is a series of beautifully written essays by a poet. They say in a few words what whole books try to say. The book is a meditation on identity, on belonging, on the pain of not belonging, on the way in which communities are imagined and overlap and don’t overlap with each other. It’s also a study of the impact and nature of violence, especially racial violence. It’s about what’s said and what’s unsaid, when it is possible to talk about race, but not racism, and what the implications of not saying things and saying things are for our understanding. It focuses on the experience of being black in Jamaica, Africa, the US and the UK, and on the particular specificities of being black, but it speaks to everybody’s experience, everybody’s history, in extraordinary, limpid prose.”

Orwell's Roses

By rebecca solnit.

“ Orwell’s Roses says something fresh about George Orwell. It discovers Orwell as gardener, as the grower of fruit and vegetables as well as roses. It is also about Orwell’s family and its engagement with slavery and sugar in the Caribbean, and opium and imperialism in India. The book also deals with Orwell’s interest in the politics of genetics and his engagement with the politics of science in the Soviet Union and, indeed, in the UK.

But from there we get a much, much broader story about Orwell as an optimist, as somebody who’s concerned with aspects of life that are often hidden or don’t come to the surface, and a broader discussion of pleasure and nature and their place in the politics of the left. One particular theme concerns production and nature, following Orwell into the study of work, into the hidden worlds where things are made, including roses in Colombia, the conditions of the workers, the factory-like sheds where refrigerated roses are prepared for air freighting to the United States and Europe.”

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

By amia srinivasan.

“The Right to Sex is a collection of philosophical essays on sex, including reflections on teaching clever undergraduates about the politics of sex. Inquisitive and subtle, it is in part a recovery of themes characteristic of older feminisms. It is a powerful example of the need to think clearly about the complex relations of politics of gender to class and race. It shows just how wrong it is to isolate just one of those modes of analysis. What issues lie behind the incel phenomenon, claims of false accusations, questions of consent, and sex with students are some of the subjects this book illuminates in ways which surprise and challenge.”

Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

By adam tooze.

“Shutdown is a study by an economic historian of the extraordinary financial, economic and political response of governments around the world to Covid. It is a study of the significance of 2020 from China to Trump, in what was potentially a very much greater economic as well as medical crisis than it turned out to be. It is a counter to the view that Covid was going to push the world in a more progressive direction. It compares the interventions with those occasioned by the great financial crisis of 2008. It asks itself a powerful question to which we don’t yet have an answer: why was it that governments were able to spend trillions on supporting economies—everything from banks to people’s salaries—but were not prepared to spend even a fraction of this on ensuring that the whole world was vaccinated? Why, it asks with an eye to the coming climate crisis, are some major interventions possible, and others not? It is an indispensable guide to thinking about the crises of our time.”

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad

By michela wrong.

“ Do Not Disturb is a study of power. It’s about how it is exercised by a very particular group of people, led by Paul Kagame, in Rwanda. It’s about the Tutsis who were exiled in Uganda and then invaded Rwanda at the time of the Tutsi massacres and took over the country. She tells the story of how these extraordinarily able politicians turned on themselves, killing opponents both Hutu and Tutsi, and yet, at the same time, remain the darlings of the international media, international donors, and Western powers more generally.

She tells much of the story through the life and actions of the intelligence chief of Rwanda for many years, who was murdered by the Kagame regime in a hotel room in South Africa. It’s a remarkable study of systematic mendacity in politics and of the exercise of power in general so that although it’s closely tied to the particular case of Rwanda, it is also very much a story of modern global politics. It is a  study in repression, of the nature of secret services. It is also a study of multiple differentiations and how they affect politics: ethnic differences, those between pastoralists and farmers, Protestants and Catholics, anglophones and francophones, and the politics of the left and national liberation movements.

It’s also relevant now because we have a British government program of sending migrants to Rwanda. The Kagame regime is essentially going to make money out of taking on responsibility for these migrants.”

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The Top Ten Most-Read Essays of 2021

In 2021, democracy’s fortunes were tested, and a tumultuous world became even more turbulent. Democratic setbacks arose in places as far flung as Burma, El Salvador, Tunisia, and Sudan, and a 20-year experiment in Afghanistan collapsed in days. The world’s democracies were beset by rising polarization, and people watched in shock as an insurrection took place in the United States. In a year marked by high political drama, economic unrest, and rising assaults on democracy, we at the  Journal of Democracy  sought to provide insight and analysis of the forces that imperil freedom. Here are our 10 most-read essays of 2021:

Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez Nayib Bukele has developed a blend of political tactics that combines populist appeals and classic autocratic behavior with a polished social-media brand. It poses a dire threat to the country’s democratic institutions.

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The Friday Cover

What politicos are reading this summer, in the waning days of working from home, we asked 16 heavy hitters what book is on display in their zoom backgrounds—and what they’re really planning to read on vacation, when no one is looking..

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Welcome to Zoom mode.

Washington is a city of readers, but it’s also a city where people want you to know what they’re reading. At a time when people’s Zoom backgrounds have become signifiers of their aesthetics and values, POLITICO Magazine asked some of the most interesting people in politics—not just in Washington but across the country—what they’re reading and proudly displaying on their bookshelf for all to see. The selections span a variety of genres and forms, from history to thriller to memoir. One person even picked a book written by another person on our list. Read on for all the recommendations.

Want to see what these same people are taking to read at the beach? Swap modes with the toggle in the top right.

Welcome to the beach.

Everyone has those books they display on their bookshelf for others to see. But what do they read when no one is looking? POLITICO Magazine asked 16 of the most interesting writers, activists, lawmakers and scholars what book they’re planning to read for enjoyment when they’re on vacation (or at least off camera). One person described a collection of essays as the “perfect guilty pleasure,” while more than one highlighted essayist Lauren Oyler’s debut novel Fake Accounts . Read on for all the recommendations.

Want to see what’s on the Zoom bookshelves of these politicos? Swap modes with the toggle in the top right.

Deb Haaland is U.S. secretary of the Interior.

Firekeeper’s Daughter , by Angeline Boulley. I like thrillers, and I am anxious to read one from an Ojibwe perspective. From the first page, the main character, Daunis Fontaine, relies on Indigenous knowledge that has been handed down to her through the generations. Also, the book jacket is stunning for a bookshelf!

The Ministry for the Future , by Kim Stanley Robinson. This book was recommended to me. I don’t often read science fiction, but the author’s writing is praised, and good writing, I can’t pass up. The mix of human spirit and climate change is a book I’ll appreciate.

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Bari Weiss is the writer of the newsletter Common Sense , author of How to Fight Anti-Semitism and host of the podcast “Honestly.”

For months, all of my smartest friends have been talking about Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous . In the way that every woman under 30 in Brooklyn is allergic to gluten, I am allergic to books longer than 600 pages. But I’m going to make an exception for this one, and, I hope, Akhil Amar’s The Words That Made Us , a history of the American constitution.

My friend Lisa Taddeo wrote a book called Three Women that I devoured a few years ago. Now comes her first novel, Animal . It takes place in Los Angeles, which is where I’ll be reading it this summer, ideally by a pool.

Stacey Abrams is a voting rights activist, former Georgia state representative and author, most recently, of While Justice Sleeps: A Novel .

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev , by Dawnie Walton. Shared with me by a young friend in publishing, the fictionalized “true story” of a defunct rock band as told to a rising reporter sounds riveting. Walton’s story tackles complicated issues of race and success using music as its crucible—and the fractious 1970s as a galvanizing point.

These Truths: A History of the United States , by Jill Lepore. Coming off a complex election and in the midst of an assault on democracy via voter suppression, this book is a recommendation from a savvy journalist who also studies international politics. I look forward to Lepore’s investigation of America’s promise and our current status.

Carlos Lozada is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic at the Washington Post and author of What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era .

My Zoom backdrop is a wall packed with books I’ve reviewed in the Washington Post or elsewhere over the years. Among the more current works I hope someone would spot over my shoulder is The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War , by Louis Menand, a rare book of 800-plus pages that I wish had just kept on going. Among the many Trump-themed titles on the bookshelf, I’d highlight Unmaking the Presidency , by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes.

I usually bring books I have long been meaning to read. (Last year it was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road —not your standard summer fare but extraordinary in any season.) This year I’m packing Negroland , by Margo Jefferson, El pez en el agua , by Mario Vargas Llosa (which, as a native Peruvian, I’m ashamed I still have not read) and the more recent Homeland Elegies , by Ayad Akhatar. I have young kids, so, realistically, I might finish one of the three. Two, if I’m diligent—but why be diligent at the beach?

Matthew Yglesias is the writer of the newsletter Slow Boring , a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and author, most recently, of One Billion Americans .

I’m enjoying The Cruelty is the Point , by Adam Serwer, which really helps us make sense of the past few years of politics.

I don’t get to much fiction, but Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts is a hilarious and brilliant look at life in our extremely online times.

Adam Kinzinger is a Republican U.S. representative for Illinois’ 16th congressional district.

Unstable Majorities , by Morris P. Fiorina. And then because I’m a Boehnerlander, I was also going to say On the House 😊but it’s also a great audiobook, ha.

Fighter Pilot , by Robin Olds.

Ibram X. Kendi is a professor and the founding director of the Center for Antiracism Research at Boston University, an author of several New York Times -bestselling books and host of the podcast “Be Antiracist with Ibram X. Kendi.”

I just picked up from a local Barnes & Noble On Juneteenth , by one of my favorite historians and writers, Annette Gordon-Reed.

I definitely need to read Tiya Miles’ new book, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake .

Elizabeth Bruenig is a staff writer at the Atlantic . She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2019.

For conversation, I’ll be working on Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon . It came out in 2019, and it’s taken me about this long to begin to develop a good sense of it (owing to how sweeping and complex it is!), so now is as good a time as any to start chatting about it.

For fun, The Great Leveler , by Walter Scheidel. No time like the bleary-eyed blinking after a plague, right? I’m also intrigued by Nancy Jo Sales’ Nothing Personal , a memoiresque account of the types of love and sex you can find on apps. I missed the dating apps by a few years, so I’ve been curious for a while about what that’s all about. Oh! And Rachel Cusk has a new novel out, Second Place , which sounds like a trip, and I’m still not over Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts .

Cory Booker is a Democratic U.S. senator from New Jersey.

The New Jim Crow , by Michelle Alexander.

Food Fix , by Mark Hyman.

Bill Kristol is director of Defending Democracy Together and editor at large of The Bulwark.

My somewhat respectable choice is Donald Westlake’s series of 24 noir-ish thrillers featuring a criminal named Parker (written under the pseudonym Richard Stark). They’re compulsively readable, but because they’re noir-ish, even the literary critics appreciate them, so it’s OK to be seen reading them.

My somewhat less respectable choice is Donald Westlake’s series of 14 comic mystery capers featuring a criminal named John Dortmunder (written under Westlake’s own name). They’re also compulsively readable, but because they’re LOL funny, they’re less appreciated by critics, who dislike laughter and also have forgotten that comedy is more philosophic than tragedy.

Charlotte Clymer is a transgender rights activist and writer of the newsletter Charlotte’s Web Thoughts .

I have on my bookshelf Jazz Jennings’ Being Jazz: My Life As a (Transgender) Teen , a remarkable and optimistic memoir that will leave any good-faith reader with a simple conclusion: that trans children are valid and deserve the love and affirmation we would expect for any child.

You couldn't do better this year than Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing , by Lauren Hough, a new New York Times -bestselling book of essays that talks about, among other things, growing up in (and escaping) a fundamentalist cult, serving in the military and (reluctantly) being Dick Cheney’s cable guy. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard reading a book about such serious true stories. Hough offers the perfect guilty pleasure reading: the musings of a sardonic Texas lesbian who is more than happy to share her joint while she tells you her darkest personal tales and won’t judge you for laughing at the most gnarly bits.

Min Jin Lee is author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller Pachinko .

Every Zoom credibility bookshelf and American requires a copy of How the Word Is Passed , by Clint Smith—an excellent and worthy read. Smith has taught me that poets should write history more often.

This summer, I’m looking forward to reading Shaker , the debut novel by Scott Frank, the famed screenwriter and director who made “The Queen’s Gambit” and the films Get Shorty and Minority Report .

John M. Barry is a historian and author, including of the New York Times bestseller The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History .

Crowds and Power , by Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, an extraordinarily provocative book. Walter Isaacson’s new book about CRISPR, The Code Breaker , is also on my bookshelf, as well as David Blight’s Frederick Douglass , which I started a while ago but haven’t finished (no reflection on the book, which is outstanding).

I read And Quiet Flows the Don , a magnificent novel by Nobel laureate Mikhail Sholokhov, and will pick up the second part of that, The Don Flows Home to the Sea . He and his novels are particularly interesting because he was a committed communist and personally quite close to Stalin, yet wrote very sympathetically about the Whites.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a writer, lawyer and author, most recently, of Felon: Poems .

I'm making sure folks see Kiese Laymon’s Long Division . The cover is vibrant and funky, and the sentences match the book’s beauty.

I’m grabbing Libertie , by Kaitlyn Greenidge, which is just one of those books that grabs you from the first sentence and won’t let you go.

Rev. William J. Barber II is the president of Repairers of the Breach, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and author, most recently, of We Are Called to Be a Movement .

In addition to my own, I have three books on the shelf behind me in every Zoom meeting and TV hit: Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist , Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s Revolution of Values and The Poverty & Justice Bible . We’ve got to remake the systems that continue to reproduce racial disparities, which Kendi’s work highlights. But we’ll never do that without shifting the moral narrative to center the voices of poor and marginalized people. That’s what Wilson-Hartgrove’s book is about.

For the well-being of my own soul, I read the prophets and Jesus in the Bible. Their words about love, justice and mercy are highlighted in The Poverty & Justice Bible . I also keep a copy of Frederick Douglass’ speech after the Dred Scott decision, Mother Teresa’s poem “Do It Anyway” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Where Do We Go From Here?

Ben Smith is the media columnist for the New York Times .

Make sure to include on your shelf Far From the Tree , by Andrew Solomon, which both looks like the sort of book you ought to have read and is stunning.

Actually read Trust Exercise , by Susan Choi, which I recently finished and is a delight.

Last updated 20/06/24: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident

Locke: Political Essays

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We know more about the development of John Locke's ideas than we do about almost any other philosopher's before modern times. This book brings together a comprehensive collection of the writings on politics and society that stand outside the canonical works which Locke published during his lifetime. In the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688 the three works by which he is chiefly known appeared: the Two Treatises of Government, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and A Letter Concerning Toleration,…

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Key features

• A most comprehensive collection of John Locke's essays on politics, morality, and the law of nature
• Contains 5 major essays and 70 shorter essays and fragments, including government memoranda, lectures and philosophical meditations
• Excellent bibliography, suggestions for further reading and biography of Locke's life

About the book

• DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511810251
• Series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
• Subjects British History after 1450, History, History of Ideas and Intellectual History, Politics and International Relations, Texts in Political Thought
• Publication date: 25 September 1997
• ISBN: 9780521478618
• Dimensions (mm): 216 x 138 mm
• Weight: 0.625kg
• Page extent: 456 pages
• Availability: Available
• Publication date: 12 September 2018
• ISBN: 9780511810251

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• Mark Goldie, Churchill College, Cambridge

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The Human Rights Reader

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The third edition of The Human Rights Reader presents a variety of new primary documents and readings and elaborates the exploration of rights in the areas of race, gender, refugees, climate, Artificial Intelligence, drones and cyber security, and nationalism and Internationalism. In the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, it addresses human rights challenges reflected in and posed by global health inequities. Each part of the reader corresponds to five historical phases in the history of human rights and explores the arguments, debates, and issues of inclusiveness central to those eras. This edition is the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of essays, speeches, and documents from historical and contemporary sources, all of which are placed in context with Micheline Ishay’s substantial introduction to the Reader as a whole and context-setting introductions to each part and chapter.

New to the Third Edition

• 60 new readings and documents cover subjects ranging from human rights in the age of globalization and populism, debates of the rights of citizens versus those of refugees and immigrants, transgender rights, the new Jim Crow, and the future of human rights as they relate to digital surveillance, the pandemic, and bioengineering
• Part I has been reorganized into three chapters: the Secular Tradition, Asian and African Religions and Traditions, and the Monotheistic Religions
• Part V has been significantly updated and expanded with the addition of an entirely new chapter — "Debating the Future of Human Rights."
• Each of the six parts in the book is preceded by an editorial introduction and, in four of the parts, a separate selection providing the reader with a general background on the history and themes represented in the readings that follow
• Each part and several chapters conclude with new Questions for Discussion authored by the volume editor
• An extensive new online resource includes 62 key human rights documents ranging from the Magna Carta to the United Nations Glasgow Climate Pact

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter | 8  pages, introduction, part i | 82  pages, the origins secular, asian, and monotheistic traditions, chapter 1 | 27  pages, the secular tradition, chapter 2 | 23  pages, asian and african religions and traditions, chapter 3 | 24  pages, monotheistic religions, part ii | 96  pages, the legacy of early liberalism and the enlightenment, chapter 4 | 32  pages, liberal visions of human rights, chapter 5 | 33  pages, how to promote a liberal conception of human rights, chapter 6 | 29  pages, human rights for whom, part iii | 98  pages, the socialist contribution and the industrial age, chapter 7 | 31  pages, challenging the liberal vision of rights, chapter 8 | 35  pages, how to promote a socialist perspective of human rights, chapter 9 | 24  pages, part iv | 55  pages, the right to self-determination and the imperial age, chapter 10 | 49  pages, on the national question, part v | 265  pages, human rights in the era of globalization and populism, chapter 11 | 40  pages, redefining rights, chapter 12 | 67  pages, how to protect and promote human rights, chapter 13 | 86  pages, chapter 14 | 56  pages, debating the future of human rights, part vi | 65  pages, human rights and legal documents: a brief historical narrative, chapter 15 | 59  pages, selected international human rights documents.

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A Brief History of the Political Essay

From swift to woolf, david bromwich considers an evolving genre.

The political essay has never been a clearly defined genre. David Hume may have legitimated it in 1758 when he classified under a collective rubric his own Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. “Political,” however, should have come last in order, since Hume took a speculative and detached view of politics, and seems to have been incapable of feeling passion for a political cause. We commonly associate political thought with full-scale treatises by philosophers of a different sort, whose understanding of politics was central to their account of human nature. Hobbes’s Leviathan , Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws , Rousseau’s Social Contract , Mill’s Representative Government , and, closer to our time, Rawls’s Theory of Justice , all satisfy that expectation. What, then, is a political essay? By the late 18th century, the periodical writings of Steele, Swift, Goldsmith, and Johnson had broadened the scope of the English essay for serious purposes. The field of politics, as much as culture, appeared to their successors well suited to arguments on society and government.

A public act of praise, dissent, or original description may take on permanent value when it implicates concerns beyond the present moment. Where the issue is momentous, the commitment stirred by passion, and the writing strong enough, an essay may sink deep roots in the language of politics. An essay is an attempt , as the word implies—a trial of sense and persuasion, which any citizen may hazard in a society where people are free to speak their minds. A more restrictive idea of political argument—one that would confer special legitimacy on an elite caste of managers, consultants, and symbolic analysts—presumes an environment in which state papers justify decisions arrived at from a region above politics. By contrast, the absence of formal constraints or a settled audience for the essay means that the daily experience of the writer counts as evidence. A season of crisis tempts people to think politically; in the process, they sometimes discover reasons to back their convictions.

The experience of civic freedom and its discontents may lead the essayist to think beyond politics. In 1940, Virginia Woolf recalled the sound of German bombers circling overhead the night before; the insect-like irritant, with its promise of aggression, frightened her into thought: “It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death.” The ugly noise, for Woolf, signaled the prerogative of the fighting half of the species: Englishwomen “must lie weaponless tonight.” Yet Englishmen would be called upon to destroy the menace; and she was not sorry for their help. The mood of the writer is poised between gratitude and a bewildered frustration. Woolf ’s essay, “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” declines to exhibit the patriotic sentiment by which most reporters in her position would have felt drawn. At the same time, its personal emphasis keeps the author honest through the awareness of her own dependency.

Begin with an incident— I could have been killed last night —and you may end with speculations on human nature. Start with a national policy that you deplore, and it may take you back to the question, “Who are my neighbors?” In 1846, Henry David Thoreau was arrested for having refused to pay a poll tax; he made a lesson of his resistance two years later, when he saw the greed and dishonesty of the Mexican War: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” But to Thoreau’s surprise, the window of the prison had opened onto the life of the town he lived in, with its everyday errands and duties, its compromises and arrangements, and for him that glimpse was a revelation:

They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village inn,—a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I had never seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.

Slavery, at that time, was nicknamed “the peculiar institution,” and by calling the prison itself a peculiar institution, and maybe having in mind the adjacent inn as well, Thoreau prods his reader to think about the constraints that are a tacit condition of social life.

The risk of political writing may lure the citizen to write—a fact Hazlitt seems to acknowledge in his essay “On the Regal Character,” where his second sentence wonders if the essay will expose him to prosecution: “In writing a criticism, we hope we shall not be accused of intending a libel.” (His friend Leigh Hunt had recently served two years in prison for “seditious libel” of the Prince Regent—having characterized him as a dandy notorious for his ostentation and obesity.) The writer’s consciousness of provocative intent may indeed be inseparable from the wish to persuade; though the tone of commitment will vary with the zeal and composition of the audience, whether that means a political party, a movement, a vanguard of the enlightened, or “the people” at large.

Edmund Burke, for example, writes to the sheriffs of Bristol (and through them to the city’s electors) in order to warn against the suspension of habeas corpus by the British war ministry in 1777. The sudden introduction of the repressive act, he tells the electors, has imperiled their liberty even if they are for the moment individually exempt. In response to the charge that the Americans fighting for independence are an unrepresentative minority, he warns: “ General rebellions and revolts of an whole people never were encouraged , now or at any time. They are always provoked. ” So too, Mahatma Gandhi addresses his movement of resistance against British rule, as well as others who can be attracted to the cause, when he explains why nonviolent protest requires courage of a higher degree than the warrior’s: “Non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment.” In both cases, the writer treats the immediate injustice as an occasion for broader strictures on the nature of justice. There are certain duties that governors owe to the governed, and duties hardly less compulsory that the people owe to themselves.

Apparently diverse topics connect the essays in Writing Politics ; but, taken loosely to illustrate a historical continuity, they show the changing face of oppression and violence, and the invention of new paths for improving justice. Arbitrary power is the enemy throughout—power that, by the nature of its asserted scope and authority, makes itself the judge of its own cause. King George III, whose reign spanned sixty years beginning in 1760, from the first was thought to have overextended monarchical power and prerogative, and by doing so to have reversed an understanding of parliamentary sovereignty that was tacitly recognized by his predecessors. Writing against the king, “Junius” (the pen name of Philip Francis) traced the monarch’s errors to a poor education; and he gave an edge of deliberate effrontery to the attack on arbitrary power by addressing the king as you. “It is the misfortune of your life, and originally the cause of every reproach and distress, which has attended your government, that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth, until you heard it in the complaints of your people.”

A similar frankness, without the ad hominem spur, can be felt in Burke’s attack on the monarchical distrust of liberty at home as well as abroad: “If any ask me what a free Government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so; and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.” Writing in the same key from America, Thomas Paine, in his seventh number of The Crisis , gave a new description to the British attempt to preserve the unity of the empire by force of arms. He called it a war of conquest; and by addressing his warning directly “to the people of England,” he reminded the king’s subjects that war is always a social evil, for it sponsors a violence that does not terminate in itself. War enlarges every opportunity of vainglory—a malady familiar to monarchies.

The coming of democracy marks a turning point in modern discussions of sovereignty and the necessary protections of liberty. Confronted by the American annexation of parts of Mexico, in 1846–48, Thoreau saw to his disgust that a war of conquest could also be a popular war, the will of the people directed to the oppression of persons. It follows that the state apparatus built by democracy is at best an equivocal ally of individual rights. Yet as Emerson would recognize in his lecture “The Fugitive Slave Law,” and Frederick Douglass would confirm in “The Mission of the War,” the massed power of the state is likewise the only vehicle powerful enough to destroy a system of oppression as inveterate as American slavery had become by the 1850s.

Acceptance of political evil—a moral inertia that can corrupt the ablest of lawmakers—goes easily with the comforts of a society at peace where many are satisfied. “Here was the question,” writes Emerson: “Are you for man and for the good of man; or are you for the hurt and harm of man? It was question whether man shall be treated as leather? whether the Negroes shall be as the Indians were in Spanish America, a piece of money?” Emerson wondered at the apostasy of Daniel Webster, How came he there? The answer was that Webster had deluded himself by projecting a possible right from serial compromise with wrong.

Two ways lie open to correct the popular will without a relapse into docile assent and the rule of oligarchy. You may widen the terms of discourse and action by enlarging the community of participants. Alternatively, you may strengthen the opportunities of dissent through acts of exemplary protest—protest in speech, in action, or both. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. remain the commanding instances in this regard. Both led movements that demanded of every adherent that the protest serve as an express image of the society it means to bring about. Nonviolent resistance accordingly involves a public disclosure of the work of conscience—a demonstrated willingness to make oneself an exemplary warrior without war. Because they were practical reformers, Gandhi and King, within the societies they sought to reform, were engaged in what Michael Oakeshott calls “the pursuit of intimations.” They did not start from a model of the good society generated from outside. They built on existing practices of toleration, friendship, neighborly care, and respect for the dignity of strangers.

Nonviolent resistance, as a tactic of persuasion, aims to arouse an audience of the uncommitted by its show of discipline and civic responsibility. Well, but why not simply resist? Why show respect for the laws of a government you mean to change radically? Nonviolence, for Gandhi and King, was never merely a tactic, and there were moral as well as rhetorical reasons for their ethic of communal self-respect and self-command. Gandhi looked on the British empire as a commonwealth that had proved its ability to reform. King spoke with the authority of a native American, claiming the rights due to all Americans, and he evoked the ideals his countrymen often said they wished to live by. The stories the nation loved to tell of itself took pride in emancipation much more than pride in conquest and domination. “So,” wrote King from the Birmingham City Jail, “I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.”

A subtler enemy of liberty than outright prejudice and violent oppression is the psychological push toward conformity. This internalized docility inhabits and may be said to dictate the costume of manners in a democracy. Because the rule of mass opinion serves as a practical substitute for the absolute authority that is no longer available, it exerts an enormous and hidden pressure. This dangerous “omnipotence of the majority,” as Tocqueville called it, knows no power greater than itself; it resembles an absolute monarch in possessing neither the equipment nor the motive to render a judgment against itself. Toleration thus becomes a political value that requires as vigilant a defense as liberty. Minorities are marked not only by race, religion, and habits of association, but also by opinion.

“It is easy to see,” writes Walter Bagehot in “The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration,” “that very many believers would persecute sceptics” if they were given the means, “and that very many sceptics would persecute believers.” Bagehot has in mind religious belief, in particular, but the same intolerance operates when it is a question of penalizing a word, a gesture, a wrongly sympathetic or unsympathetic show of feeling by which a fellow citizen might claim to be offended. The more divided the society, the more it will crave implicit assurances of unity; the more unified it is, the more it wants an even greater show of unity—an unmistakable signal of membership and belonging that can be read as proof of collective solidarity. The “guilty fear of criticism,” Mary McCarthy remarked of the domestic fear of Communism in the 1950s, “the sense of being surrounded by an unappreciative world,” brought to American life a regimen of tests, codes, and loyalty oaths that were calculated to confirm rather than subdue the anxiety.

Proscribed and persecuted groups naturally seek a fortified community of their own, which should be proof against insult; and by 1870 or so, the sure method of creating such a community was to found a new nation. George Eliot took this remedy to be prudent and inevitable, in her sympathetic early account of the Zionist quest for a Jewish state, yet her unsparing portrait of English anti-Semitism seems to recognize the nation-remedy as a carrier of the same exclusion it hopes to abolish. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a widened sense of community is the apparently intuitive—but in fact regularly inculcated—intellectual habit by which we divide people into racial, religious, and ethnic identities. The idea of an international confederation for peace was tried twice, without success, in the 20th century, with the League of Nations and the United Nations; but some such goal, first formulated in the political writings of Kant, has found memorable popular expression again and again.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “Of the Ruling of Men” affords a prospect of international liberty that seems to the author simply the next necessary advance of common sense in the cause of humanity. Du Bois noticed in 1920 how late the expansion of rights had arrived at the rights of women. Always, the last hiding places of arbitrary power are the trusted arenas of privilege a society has come to accept as customary, and to which it has accorded the spurious honor of supposing it part of the natural order: men over women; the strong nations over the weak; corporate heads over employees. The pattern had come under scrutiny already in Harriet Taylor Mill’s “Enfranchisement of Women,” and its application to the hierarchies of ownership and labor would be affirmed in William Morris’s lecture “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil.” The commercial and manufacturing class, wrote Morris, “ force the genuine workers to provide for them”; no better (only more recondite in their procedures) are “the parasites” whose function is to defend the cause of property, “sometimes, as in the case of lawyers, undisguisedly so.” The socialists Morris and Du Bois regard the ultimate aim of a democratic world as the replacement of useless by useful work. With that change must also come the invention of a shared experience of leisure that is neither wasteful nor thoughtless.

A necessary bulwark of personal freedom is property, and in the commercial democracies for the past three centuries a usual means of agreement for the defense of property has been the contract. In challenging the sacredness of contract, in certain cases of conflict with a common good, T. H. Green moved the idea of “freedom of contract” from the domain of nature to that of social arrangements that are settled by convention and therefore subject to revision. The freedom of contract must be susceptible of modification when it fails to meet a standard of public well-being. The right of a factory owner, for example, to employ child labor if the child agrees, should not be protected. “No contract,” Green argues, “is valid in which human persons, willingly or unwillingly, are dealt with as commodities”; for when we speak of freedom, “we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying.” And again:

When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves.

Legislation in the public interest may still be consistent with the principles of free society when it parts from a leading maxim of contractual individualism.

The very idea of a social contract has usually been taken to imply an obligation to die for the state. Though Hobbes and Locke offered reservations on this point, the classical theorists agree that the state yields the prospect of “commodious living” without which human life would be unsocial and greatly impoverished; and there are times when the state can survive only through the sacrifice of citizens. May there also be a duty of self-sacrifice against a state whose whole direction and momentum has bent it toward injustice? Hannah Arendt, in “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” asked that question regarding the conduct of state officials as well as ordinary people under the encroaching tyranny of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Citizens then, Arendt observes, had live options of political conduct besides passive obedience and open revolt. Conscientious opposition could show itself in public indications of nonsupport . This is a fact that the pervasiveness of conformism and careerism in mass societies makes harder to see than it should be.

Jonathan Swift, a writer as temperamentally diverse from Arendt as possible, shows in “A Modest Proposal” how the human creature goes about rationalizing any act or any policy, however atrocious. Our propensity to make-normal, to approve whatever renders life more orderly, can lead by the lightest of expedient steps to a plan for marketing the babies of the Irish poor as flesh suitable for eating. It is, after all—so Swift’s fictional narrator argues—a plausible design to alleviate poverty and distress among a large sector of the population, and to eliminate the filth and crowding that disgusts persons of a more elevated sort. The justification is purely utilitarian, and the proposer cites the most disinterested of motives: he has no financial or personal stake in the design. Civility has often been praised as a necessity of political argument, but Swift’s proposal is at once civil and, in itself, atrocious.

An absorbing concern of Arendt’s, as of several of the other essay writers gathered here, was the difficulty of thinking. We measure, we compute, we calculate, we weigh advantages and disadvantages—that much is only sensible, only logical—but we give reasons that are often blind to our motives, we rationalize and we normalize in order to justify ourselves. It is supremely difficult to use the equipment we learn from parents and teachers, which instructs us how to deal fairly with persons, and apply it to the relationship between persons and society, and between the manners of society and the laws of a nation. The 21st century has saddled persons of all nations with a catastrophic possibility, the destruction of a planetary environment for organized human life; and in facing the predicament directly, and formulating answers to the question it poses, the political thinkers of the past may help us chiefly by intimations. The idea of a good or tolerable society now encompasses relations between people at the widest imaginable distance apart. It must also cover a new relation of stewardship between humankind and nature.

Having made the present selection with the abovementioned topics in view—the republican defense against arbitrary power; the progress of liberty; the coming of mass-suffrage democracy and its peculiar dangers; justifications for political dissent and disobedience; war, as chosen for the purpose of domination or as necessary to destroy a greater evil; the responsibilities of the citizen; the political meaning of work and the conditions of work—an anthology of writings all in English seemed warranted by the subject matter. For in the past three centuries, these issues have been discussed most searchingly by political critics and theorists in Britain and the United States.

The span covers the Glorious Revolution and its achievement of parliamentary sovereignty; the American Revolution, and the civil war that has rightly been called the second American revolution; the expansion of the franchise under the two great reform bills in England and the 15th amendment to the US constitution; the two world wars and the Holocaust; and the mass movements of nonviolent resistance that brought national independence to India and broadened the terms of citizenship of black Americans. The sequence gives adequate evidence of thinkers engaged in a single conversation. Many of these authors were reading the essayists who came before them; and in many cases (Burke and Paine, Lincoln and Douglass, Churchill and Orwell), they were reading each other.

Writing Politics contains no example of the half-political, half-commercial genre of “leadership” writing. Certain other principles that guided the editor will be obvious at a glance, but may as well be stated. Only complete essays are included, no extracts. This has meant excluding great writers—Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill, among others—whose definitive political writing came in the shape of full-length books. There are likewise no chapters of books; no party manifestos or statements of creed; nothing that was first published posthumously. All of these essays were written at the time noted, were meant for an audience of the time, and were published with an eye to their immediate effect. This is so even in cases (as with Morris and Du Bois) where the author had in view the reformation of a whole way of thinking. Some lectures have been included—the printed lecture was an indispensable medium for political ideas in the 19th century—but there are no party speeches delivered by an official to advance a cause of the moment.

Two exceptions to the principles may prove the rule. Abraham Lincoln’s letter to James C. Conkling was a public letter, written to defend the Emancipation Proclamation, in which, a few months earlier, President Lincoln had declared the freedom of all slaves in the rebelling states; he now extended the order to cover black soldiers who fought for the Union: “If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Lincoln was risking his presidency when he published this extraordinary appeal and admonition, and his view was shared by Frederick Douglass in “The Mission of the War”: “No war but an Abolition war, no peace but an Abolition peace.” The other exception is “The Roots of Honour,” John Ruskin’s attack on the mercenary morality of 19th-century capitalism . He called the chapter “Essay I” in Unto This Last , and his nomenclature seemed a fair excuse for reprinting an ineradicable prophecy.

__________________________________

From Writing Politics , edited by David Bromwich. Copyright © 2020 by David Bromwich; courtesy of NYRB Classics.

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Oxford Political Review is a quarterly publication, with each issue centred on a specific theme or topic. Calls for submissions are announced on our website and social media platforms, and we encourage submissions to be made well before the deadline.

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in Cuba
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Humboldt’s is one of the founding texts of nineteenth-century Cuba. For Humboldt, Cuba was a microcosm of the New World. Foreseeing the social problems to come, his book called for social and economic reform. Because he adopted , the book became the in its day.

HiE’s edition of the is the only complete English edition of Humboldt’s revised work on Cuba. Our is based on the freestanding edition of the . See the ’s .

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Does anyone have a recommendation of political essays/books/kindle singles that are shorter in length?

Preferably ones I could get on a kindle? It doesn't matter what the topic is, how old it is, or the viewpoint being expressed. I'm just looking for short books or essays that can be read either in a day or two, in between larger books I am reading.

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A Chinese military buff inadvertently bought 4 books of military secrets for under $1

FILE - Military delegates chat before the closing session of the National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Monday, March 11, 2024. Chinese state media said Thursday, June 13, 2024, that a military history buff found a collection of confidential documents related to the country’s military in a pile of old papers he bought for under $1. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)

A man past by a mural calling for Military Civilian Unity in Beijing, Thursday, June 13, 2024. Chinese state media say that a military history buff found a collection of confidential documents related to the country’s military in a pile of old papers he bought for under $1. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

A municipal worker collects scrap cardboard near a mural calling for Military and Civilian Unity in Beijing, Thursday, June 13, 2024. Chinese state media say that a military history buff found a collection of confidential documents related to the country’s military in a pile of old papers he bought for under $1. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

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BEIJING (AP) — A military history buff in China appears to have made an alarming discovery after picking up four discarded books for less than $1 at a neighborhood recycling station: They were confidential military documents.

The country’s Ministry of State Security told the story in a social media post on Thursday, praising the retired man for calling a hotline to report the incident. It identified him only by his family name, Zhang, and did not say what the documents were about.

“Mr. Zhang thought to himself that he had ‘bought’ the country’s military secrets and brought them home,” the post reads, “but if someone with ulterior motives were to buy them, the consequences would be unimaginable!”

The post, which was reposted on at least two popular Chinese news websites, was the latest in a series by the powerful state security agency that appears to be trying to draw in new audiences with dramatic stories. Some have been told in comic-book style.

The campaign seems designed to raise awareness of the importance of national security at a time when confrontation with the U.S. is rising and both countries are increasingly worried about the possible theft or transfer of confidential and secret information.

The post describes Zhang as a former employee of a state-owned company who likes to collect military newspapers and periodicals. It says he found two bags of new books at the recycling station and paid 6 yuan (about 85 cents) for four of them.

State security agents rushed to the station after Zhang reported what had happened, the post says. After an investigation, they found that two military employees charged with shredding more than 200 books instead got rid of them by selling them to a recycling center as paper waste — 30 kilograms (65 pounds) in all — for about 20 yuan ($2.75).

The agents seized the books and the military has closed loopholes in the handling of such material, the post says.

China’s opaque state security bodies and legal system often make it difficult to tell what is considered a state secret.

Chinese and foreign consultancies operating within the country have been placed under investigation for possessing or sharing information about the economy in an apparent broadening of the definition of a state secret in recent years.

Associated Press video producer Penny Wang in Bangkok and researcher Wanqing Chen in Beijing contributed.

Too gay? Too political? Ron Nyswaner leaned into it all with ‘Fellow Travelers’

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I began the pitch for “Fellow Travelers,” my adaptation of Thomas Mallon’s beautiful novel, with a piece of personal history. Growing up in a small Pennsylvania town in the 1960s, I never heard the word “homosexual” spoken aloud. There were no gay characters in movies, books or on television. I grew up believing that my hidden self was evil. Unspeakable.

I was captivated by Mallon’s story of Hawkins (Hawk) Fuller and Timothy Laughlin, two vastly different men conducting a passionate affair in 1950s Washington, D.C., during the government’s crusade against homosexuals. Hawk is selfish and confident. Tim is religious and sensitive. They struggle to love while hiding the part of themselves that allows them to love.

I was advised this story would be impossible to sell for three reasons: It was period, political and gay.

Being rebellious by nature, I decided to lean into the elements of the story that were deemed challenging. A period piece is problematic? In our scripts, every detail will be meticulously researched and much of the dialogue will come from historical records.

That time Meryl Streep reached out and said she wanted to work with me

‘We were given the gift of a dream cast for a half-hour television comedy with mysterious twists and turns,’ writes ‘Only Murders’ showrunner John Hoffman. ‘We decided to triple down on the shot we were given.’

June 5, 2024

Rather than avoid politics, we’ll turn our political characters into flesh-and-blood antagonists, illuminating the dark secrets behind their destructive deeds. The whole thing is just too gay? We’ll create a gay love story with sex scenes that are passionate, tense and rough. We’ll take you on a gay sex tour through the decades, from park restrooms to backroom bars. In the end, we’ll break your heart.

We sold the show and made it. I have to acknowledge the executives at Fremantle and Showtime who embraced our “balls-out” approach (the expression seems apt) and my intrepid executive producers: Robbie Rogers, Dan Minahan and Matt Bomer.

We knew we needed to wrap our challenging elements inside a story that is universal and modern. The paranoia of the McCarthy era felt remote, and Mallon’s book ends in 1957. But I’d lived through the early days of AIDS, known the terror as those around me fell ill and died, and witnessed the hatred directed at my community.

I realized the AIDS crisis could serve as a bookend to the Lavender Scare. Tim would live in San Francisco, an activist, in the early days of the epidemic. Hawk will travel to Tim, seeking forgiveness, giving Tim power over Hawk in a reversal of their former roles. And these timelines will alternate throughout the show.

But the wheels of my mind kept turning. How might I bring Hawk and Tim together one or two more times? Again, I turned to personal history.

In high school, I was known as the sissy kid with liberal politics who loved Jesus. I protested the Vietnam War and refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance because the United States hadn’t yet achieved “liberty and justice for all.” When I was banished to the last row of desks in my homeroom, I considered it a badge of honor.

The sixth episode of the series, “Beyond Measure,” is set in 1968. Tim’s passionate anticommunist politics have morphed into antiwar politics. His Christianity, like mine in my youth, addresses his need to be exalted, to live and love “beyond measure.” In my teen years, my religious fervor offered what my peers found in sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

I came out in the late 1970s, drinking, snorting and tumbling into bed with sweaty strangers after nights of dancing to Donna, Thelma and Grace. It was glorious. We had a few gay heroes but none more inspiring than Harvey Milk, the first nationally prominent gay politician. His murder was a shock and a wake-up call, reminding us that we’d only begun to win our freedom.

Want to do a solo show? Grab a friend or two first, says Alex Edelman

The Jewish stand-up comedian worked his interactions with white nationalists into “Just for Us,” an act that found its way to HBO.

May 29, 2024

Episode 7 of “Fellow Travelers,” “White Nights,” is set in 1979. Hawk and Tim reunite on Fire Island. They splash in the ocean, visit the “meat rack” and sweat on the dance floor. They seem free, until Hawk is forced to face excruciating grief. We placed our second set of lovers, Marcus and Frankie, in San Francisco, for the “explosion of gay rage” that followed the trial of Harvey Milk’s murderer, Dan White, and its obscene, lenient sentence.

Hawk’s grief, and his yearning to lose himself in drugs and sex, was informed by my own descent into alcoholism and addiction. The candlelight march honoring Milk that ends the episode is coupled with Hawk’s decision to return home. Twenty-five years ago, I began my own way home, finding a sober way to live.

The series ends at the National Mall in 1987 with the first display of the AIDS Quilt. Hawk kneels at Tim’s quilt square and gives words to the truth he’s carried in his heart for 3½ decades: “He was the man I loved.” Hawk finds redemption in speaking the unspeakable.

I know how he feels.

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Get the Envelope newsletter for exclusive awards season coverage, behind-the-scenes stories from the Envelope podcast and columnist Glenn Whipp’s must-read analysis.

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Amy Coney Barrett Sounds Fed Up with Clarence Thomas’ Sloppy Originalism

This is part of  Opinionpalooza , Slate’s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court this June. Alongside  Amicus , we kicked things off this year by explaining  How Originalism Ate the Law . The best way to support our work is by joining  Slate Plus . (If you are already a member, consider a  donation  or  merch !)

A minor dispute over a trademark registration erupted into a heated battle over originalism at the Supreme Court last week, splintering the justices into warring camps over the value and practicality of history in constitutional analysis. No surprise there—as the term accelerates toward a contentious finale, the tensions roiling major cases are bound to spill over into littler ones. What’s remarkable is who seized on this squabble over intellectual property to launch a scathing salvo against the conservative majority’s “laser-like focus” on “supposed history and tradition”: Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative who presented as a true believer in originalism when joining the Supreme Court four years ago. Barrett’s latest opinion exudes disenchantment with the methodology, at least as it’s used by this court; it also suggests she has buyer’s remorse about signing on to Bruen , a significant expansion of the Second Amendment that’s arguably the most radical and unworkable “originalist” opinion she’s joined so far.

We will know soon enough. Last week’s squabble reads like shadowboxing over a much bigger decision to come: U.S. v. Rahimi , a follow-up to the Bruen decision. Rahimi gives the court an opportunity to walk back the most disastrous and lethal aspects of its Second Amendment extremism. Barrett now seems like she may be eager to take it.

Vidal v. Elster , last Thursday’s decision, is not the kind of case that usually makes headlines. Steve Elster is a labor lawyer who wanted to trademark the phrase “Trump too small,” inspired by Sen. Marco Rubio’s crude debate joke about Donald Trump’s hands in 2016. The Patent and Trademark Office, however, refused to register the trademark, citing a law that bars trademarks made up of a name “identifying a particular living individual except by his written consent.” (Needless to say, the former president did not give his consent.) Elster sued, alleging a violation of the First Amendment. He pointed out that the Supreme Court has held that two similar provisions of federal law violate free speech, one that bars disparaging trademarks and another that bars “ immoral or scandalous ” trademarks. So, he argued, the prohibition against trademarks that use other people’s names—the so-called names clause—should also be declared unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Elster, upholding the statute. But the justices fractured badly on the reason why, dividing more or less into a 5–4 split. Writing for the five men, Justice Clarence Thomas relied exclusively upon history (or his version of it) to resolve the case. Typically, he explained, laws that discriminate on the basis of content—that is, their “topic,” “idea,” or “message”—are subject to heightened scrutiny under the First Amendment. And by targeting trademarks that reference other people, the “names clause” is a “content-based regulation of speech.” But Thomas then declared that the law is not constitutionally suspect because it aligns with the “history and tradition” of the nation “since the founding.” Trademark restrictions “have always turned on a mark’s content” yet “have always coexisted with the First Amendment,” so they represent an exception to the usual constitutional limitations. Embarking upon a grand journey from the 1700s through today, Thomas presented a smattering of comparable laws from the past to demonstrate this “historical rule.” In short, he concluded, it has always been done, so it always may be done. Case closed.

In a separate opinion, Barrett agreed with Thomas’ bottom line but sharply disagreed with pretty much everything else. His history-only approach, she wrote, was “wrong twice over”: Thomas both botched the relevant history and failed to make a persuasive case for its use in the first place. Start with “the court’s evidence.” Thomas’ law-office history , Barrett explained, consists of “loosely related cases from the late-19th and early-20th centuries” that do not “establish a historical analogue for the names clause.” His analysis of these cases is shallow and often dubious; Barrett highlighted unfounded inferences in Thomas’ skim of the historical record, questioning his generalizations from a handful of archaic decisions. She also noted that Thomas declined to “fully grapple with countervailing evidence,” citing old decisions that cut against his conclusory assertions.

Clearly, Barrett is growing tired of her colleague’s bogus originalism: She also criticized his highly selective frolic through the archives in last term’s Samia v. U.S. , questioning his reliance on a somewhat random “snapshot” of history to cut back protections of the Sixth Amendment. “The court overclaims,” the justice wrote then, risking “undermining the force of historical arguments when they matter most.”

But this time, Barrett’s critique cuts much deeper: Thomas, she wrote, “never explains why hunting for historical forebears on a restriction-by-restriction basis is the right way to analyze the constitutional question.” The majority “presents tradition itself as the constitutional argument,” as though it is “dispositive of the First Amendment issue,” without any “theoretical justification.” In a passage that must have made the liberal justices proud, Barrett continued: “Relying exclusively on history and tradition may seem like a way of avoiding judge-made tests. But a rule rendering tradition dispositive is itself a judge-made test. And I do not see a good reason to resolve this case using that approach rather than by adopting a generally applicable principle.” Plucking out historical anecdotes, ad libbing some connective tissue, then presenting the result as a constitutional principle “misses the forest for the trees.” When applying “broadly worded” constitutional text, “courts must inevitably articulate principles to resolve individual cases.” This approach brings sorely needed “clarity to the law.”

Barrett sketched out a better path: assessing the “names clause” within a framework “grounded in both trademark law and First Amendment precedent.” When the government “opens its property to speech,” she wrote, restrictions are permissible so long as they aren’t cover for the “official suppression of ideas.” Thus, courts should uphold trademark laws if they “are reasonable in light of the trademark system’s purpose.”

Why did Barrett spill so much ink repudiating Thomas’ opinion when the two justices landed in the same place? Her opinion reads like a rebuttal of Bruen , Thomas’ 2022 decision establishing a novel right to carry guns in public—which Barrett joined in full. Bruen marked a sea change because it upended the way courts looked at firearm restrictions. Previously, the courts of appeals applied heightened scrutiny to gun laws, asking whether the regulation was carefully drawn to further public safety. SCOTUS applies this test in countless other contexts, including the First Amendment and equal protection. It requires judges to balance the interests on both sides, a well-worn tool of judicial review. Yet Thomas spurned this “means-ends scrutiny,” demanding that courts rely exclusively on the nation’s “history and tradition”: A gun restriction, he wrote, is only constitutional if it has a sufficient number of “historical analogues” from the distant past.

This brand-new test has flummoxed the lower courts and led to ludicrous outcomes —partly because judges are not historians and have no reliable way to produce a complete historical record, and also because American society has evolved to the point that a great deal of “tradition” now looks barbaric . This term, the Supreme Court has been confronted with the fallout from Bruen in a follow-up called Rahimi , which asks whether domestic abusers have a right to bear arms . During oral arguments in Rahimi , Barrett sounded deeply uncomfortable with what her court had wrought. Rahimi has not yet been decided. But Barrett’s concurrence in Elster reads like a preview of her opinion in that case. The justice seems to have second thoughts about pinning constitutional interpretation entirely on a court’s amateur historical analysis; she now seems to see the immense value in “adopting a generally applicable principle” that courts can apply across cases.

The liberal justices were right there alongside Barrett in Elster , gladly signing on to her more sensible approach to the case. Justice Sonia Sotomayor also wrote a separate concurrence raising many of Barrett’s objections, taking more explicit aim at Bruen and the “confusion” it has caused. And some of Barrett’s Elster concurrence echoes a recent opinion by Justice Elena Kagan—which Barrett notably joined—that offered an alternative to Thomas’ rigid focus on founding-era history in a case upholding the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This shadowboxing foreshadows a bitter split in Rahimi , though with Barrett and the liberals appear poised to wind up on the winning side. There’s no doubt that Barrett is still a Second Amendment enthusiast , but with one more vote, this bloc is well positioned to walk back the excesses of Bruen . What’s certain right now is that the justice, at a minimum, has serious doubts about the legitimacy and workability of this Supreme Court’s sloppy, results-oriented originalism . That doesn’t mean Barrett has abandoned her broader commitment to the conservative legal movement’s cause. But it does signal a disillusionment with conservative orthodoxies that could put her vote up for grabs in cases much more important than a trademark dispute.

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Biden’s Strategy: Help Immigrants in the U.S., but Stop Others From Arriving

President Biden’s recent actions on immigration put his approach to one of the most divisive issues in the 2024 election into focus.

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By Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Zolan Kanno-Youngs has covered immigration policy and politics during both the Trump and Biden administrations. He reported from Washington.

There are hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the United States who have been living in the country illegally for years, working and making a living, starting families and sending their children to school. President Biden says they can stay.

And then there are the more recent arrivals, who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in record numbers, seeking protection from poverty and persecution. They will have to wait.

Mr. Biden has taken two major actions on immigration this month, expanding legal protections for undocumented spouses of American citizens while also sealing the border to most people seeking asylum in the United States.

Taken together, the decisions put Mr. Biden’s approach to one of the most polarizing issues of the 2024 campaign into sharp focus: He will help immigrants who are already here, but try to keep the border shut to those trying to get in.

The strategy, described by one former White House official as a “border-in vs. border-out” approach, is a reflection of the political complexity of immigration, a top concern for voters of both parties in the 2024 presidential campaign. Polls show that American voters see the situation at the southern border as a problem and that more tend to trust former President Donald J. Trump to handle it than trust Mr. Biden .

Democrats hope that Mr. Biden’s actions this month will help neutralize the issue. Matt A. Barreto, a Biden campaign pollster focusing on Latino politics, said Americans draw a distinction between “long term, undocumented immigrants” and “new arrivals.”

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