Drawing up alternate ways to “make a living” beyond capitalism

To live in this world is to be conditioned by capital. Once paired with Western democracy, unfettered capitalism has led to a shrinking economic system that squeezes out billions of people—creating a planet of surplus populations. Wageless Life is a manifesto for building a future beyond the toxic failures of late-stage capitalism. Daring to imagine new social relations, new modes of economic existence, and new collective worlds, the authors provide skills and tools for perceiving—and living in— a post-capitalist future. 

Forerunners: Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

War and the State exposes the invalid arguments employed in the unproductive debate about Realism among international relations scholars, as well as the common fallacy of sharply distinguishing between conflict among states and conflict within them. As R. Harrison Wagner demonstrates, any understanding of international politics must be part of a more general study of the relationship between political order and organized violence everywhere--as it was in the intellectual tradition from which modern-day Realism was derived. War and the State draws on the insights from Wagner's distinguished career to create an elegantly crafted essay accessible to both students and scholars.

"Possibly the most important book on international relations theory since Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics."
---James Fearon, Stanford University

"This is one of the best books on international relations theory I have read in a very long time. It is required reading for any student of modern IR theory. Once again, Wagner has shown himself to be one of the clearest thinkers in the field today."
---Robert Powell, Robson Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

"Painting on a vast canvas, and tackling and integrating topics such as state formation, domestic politics, and international conflict, R. Harrison Wagner's War and the State offers many brilliant insights into the nature of international relations and international conflict. War and the State compellingly highlights the importance of constructing rigorous and valid theorizing and sets a high standard for all students of international relations. The field has much to gain if scholars follow the trail blazed by Wagner in this book."
---Hein Goemans, University of Rochester

R. Harrison Wagner is Professor of Government at the University of Texas.

Named one of PopMatters’ Best Books of 2025! Discover a new side of the songs of Bob Dylan by exploring the virtues of rough sounds, peculiar intonation, and a raspy voice.
 
Folk troubadour, rock star, country crooner—for a musician who adopted so many personas, Bob Dylan always sounds like himself. While he’s written many of the most iconic and impactful lyrics of the past sixty years, Dylan’s music has also reshaped our sonic imagination with his ragged voice, wailing harmonica, and rough-hewn guitar.
 
Music theorist Steven Rings argues that such sonic imperfections are central to understanding Dylan’s songs and their appeal. These blemishes can invoke authenticity or persona, signal his social commitments, and betray his political shortcomings. Rings begins—where else?—with Dylan’s voice, exploring its changeability, its unmistakable features, and its ability to inhabit characters, including the female narrator of “House of the Rising Sun.” Rings then turns to Dylan as an instrumentalist, examining his infamous adoption of the electric guitar in 1965, as well as his stylistically varied acoustic playing, which borrows sounds and techniques from Black blues musicians, among other influences. Rings charts the histories audible in Dylan’s harmonica as well as piano, which has been central to his music making since his earliest days of imitating Little Richard in his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. Finally, Rings guides readers through one of Dylan’s most famous songs, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” analyzing its musical sources as well as variations in live performances. A companion website of audio and video examples helps readers notice the nuances and idiosyncrasies inherent in Dylan’s work and, even more importantly, their effects.
 
A close look at an underdiscussed but essential aspect of Dylan’s oeuvre, What Did You Hear? offers a fresh understanding of a singular performer, his musical choices, and the meanings that we can hear in his imperfect sounds. 

In What Music Did, experimental filmmaker and violinist Tony Conrad explores in depth the relationship between music and mathematics. A work of decades that was left unfinished at the time of his death in 2016, Conrad’s expansive history of the interrelationship of music and mathematics is published here for the first time. Editor Patrick Nickleson describes Conrad’s method as that of an anarchic, interarts haberdasher; much of the research comes from musty and out-of-print sources, giving the impression that Conrad followed paths opened up for him in used book shops and conversations, rather than seeking a direct scholarly argument. 

Throughout the book, readers encounter scenes from over two thousand years of history, mathematics, and music: Pythagoras using pebbles to articulate didactic number games to his disciples; Galileo fretting a hill and listening with a musician’s ear to calculate the rate of acceleration under gravity; Rameau trapping Western music in a five-limit tuning system, and what could have been if he were more adept with numbers. Even when drawing on classical sources to explore canonical figures like Saint Augustine, What Music Did offers idiosyncratic critical insights that highlight our ongoing cultural reverence when answers result in simple whole number ratios like 3:2, 4:3, or 5:4. What Music Did is Tony Conrad’s extended indictment of music’s role, from the Pythagoreans to the twentieth century, in upholding the use of number as a clandestine and circumscribed armature of power.

Why We Read Fiction offers a lucid overview of the most exciting area of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as “Theory of Mind” and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s Clarissa, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Zunshine’s surprising new interpretations of well-known literary texts and popular cultural representations constantly prod her readers to rethink their own interest in fictional narrative. Written for a general audience, this study provides a jargon-free introduction to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field known as cognitive approaches to literature and culture.

Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) serves to transfer power from a grid or storage unit to a device without the need for cable connections. This can be performed by induction, as well as by using radio or microwaves.

Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) enables power to be transferred from a grid or storage unit to a device without the need for cable connections. This can be performed by inductive coupling of magnetic fields as well as by direct radiative transfer via beams of electromagnetic waves, commonly radiowaves, microwaves or lasers. Inductive coupling is the most widely used wireless technology with applications including charging handheld devices, RFID tags, chargers for implantable medical devices, and proposed systems for charging electric vehicles. Applications of radiative power transfer include solar power satellites and wireless powered drone aircraft.

Collects key articles by Simon Schaffer, one of the most important historians of science working today.
 
Working Knowledge is the first English-language collection of essays by Simon Schaffer, coauthor of Leviathan and the Air-Pump, a landmark text in the history of science. Though the latter may be his most famous book, Schaffer is also renowned for seminal articles on Isaac Newton and the cultures of popular spectacle, nineteenth-century physics and its practices of labor discipline and standardization, the history of anthropology and collecting, and the globe-spanning cultural interactions that have shaped modern science. Working Knowledge compiles these well-known pieces alongside newer selections, making them accessible in a single place and representing the huge scope and impact of Schaffer’s oeuvre.

The Reader divides sixteen of Schaffer’s articles across five thematic sections, which take up timely issues like the turn toward global histories of science; the intersection of science and capitalism; the interaction between bodies and machines; and the connection between science, politics, and the environment. Eight new essays by notable historians such as Adrian Johns, Lissa Roberts, and Steven Shapin bring Schaffer’s pieces into discussion with current scholarship. Illustrations and brief commentaries by Schaffer and the artist Adam Lowe, a longtime collaborator, are included throughout the volume.
 
Bringing together essential articles that were previously scattered across several publications, Working Knowledge is an insightful introduction to Schaffer and his ever-relevant writing.

The World Bank is a controversial organisation. It is widely viewed with suspicion, as the international economic arm of the US, in thrall to the President who is responsible for appointing the head of the Bank.

Eric Toussaint gives a highly readable account of just why the World Bank has become so powerful. In short, clear chapters he shows how the bank operates, who funds it, and what it sets out to promote.

The Bank's main purpose is to grant loans to all the newly independent states of the developing world, to help them on their journey to recovery after colonial occupation. In reality, the conditions imposed on these states -- including enforced privatisation of all public services, and enforced neo-liberal rules on trade -- mean that the Bank has become the new colonial authority in everything but name.

This is a perfect book for anyone looking for a critical introduction to the history of the Bank and its role in world affairs.

The World Economy and National Finance in Historical Perspective is a collection of essays and lectures by the distinguished economist, Charles P. Kindleberger. The main topic is the world economy of the past, present, and future, but the author also turns his deep historical understanding on a cluster of national financial problems faced by the United States and Germany. The essays deal with the world economy and the place within it of the United States and Europe. Other topics treated include the succession of world economic leaders, and the spread of booms and crashes from one country to another, the quality of debt, financial intermediation and disintermediation, and the German inflation of 1919-23. In an important discussion of the role of the United States in the world economy, the author places special emphasis on the responsibility that a country with such a leading economic role has of bringing about and maintaining economic stability. This will appeal to economists, especially economic historians, and will be of interest to the financial community.

As the nation becomes increasingly divided by economic inequality, racial injustice, xenophobic violence, and authoritarian governance, scholars in writing studies have strived to develop responsive theories and practices to engage students, teachers, administrators, and citizens in the crisis of division and to begin the complicated work of radically transforming our inequitable institutions and society. Writing Across Difference is one of the first collections to gather scholars from across the field engaged in offering theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical resources for understanding, interrogating, negotiating, and writing across difference.
 
No text in composition has made such a sweeping attempt to place the multiple areas of translingualism, anti-racism, anticolonialism, interdisciplinarity, and disability into conversation or to represent the field as broadly unified around the concept of difference. The chapters in this book specifically explore how monolingual ideology is maintained in institutions and how translingual strategies can (re)include difference; how narrative-based interventions can promote writing across difference in classrooms and institutions by complicating dominant discourses; and how challenging dominant logics of class, race, ability, and disciplinarity can present opportunities for countering divisiveness.
 
Writing Across Difference offers writing scholars a sustained intellectual encounter with the crisis of difference and foregrounds the possibilities such an encounter offers for collective action toward a more inclusive and equitable society. It presents a variety of approaches for intervening in classrooms and institutions in the interest of focalizing, understanding, negotiating, and bridging difference. The book will be a valuable resource to those disturbed by the bigotry, violence, and fanaticism that mark our political culture and who are seeking inspiration, models, and methods for collective response.
 
Contributors: Anis Bawarshi, Jonathan Benda, Megan Callow, James Rushing Daniel, Cherice Escobar Jones, Laura Gonzales, Juan Guerra, Stephanie Kerschbaum, Katie Malcolm, Nadya Pittendrigh, Mya Poe, Candice Rai, Iris Ruiz, Ann Shivers-McNair, Neil Simpkins, Alison Y. L. Stephens, Sumyat Thu, Katherine Xue, Shui-yin Sharon Yam