A surprising look at the big business of owning small businesses and what America’s franchise economy means for its workers.

Walk into a McDonald’s anywhere in the United States, and it will be identical to every other McDonald’s in the country. Yet, that particular store is almost certainly owned and operated by an “independent” franchisee. While McDonald’s presents an image of centralized uniformity to the consumer, it shows a different face to the small business owners operating its stores under its control and the workers preparing its product to its standards. How then does McDonald’s—and its big business peers—manage to be two things at once?

In this revelatory work, economist Brian Callaci shows how franchisors have altered the legal treatment of corporations in their favor through a decades-long crusade of lobbying and litigation. Their efforts subsequently unleashed a slew of legal and economic sins upon the US economy and labor force, allowing multinational corporations to control continent-spanning empires while outsourcing employment and scapegoating legal responsibilities onto small businesses. The result: the unfettered growth of some of America’s most recognizable businesses, at the aggregate expense of America’s workers.

Remarkable in both its scale and synthesis, Callaci’s story is the first chronicle of this business movement—initially resisted by US courts before experiencing a dramatic reversal of fortune after decades of campaigning by some of America’s most established entrepreneurs. An urgent and erudite history, Chains of Command reveals how the US labor market was tamed one small business at a time.

How underwater mediation has transformed deep-sea spaces into resource-rich frontiers
 

Green energy technologies such as windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles may soon depend on material found at the seabed. How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? Lisa Yin Han traces how contemporary developments in underwater sensing and imaging materially and imaginatively transmogrify the ocean bottom into a resource frontier capable of sustaining a digitally connected global future.

Set against the backdrop of climate change, energy transition, and the expansion of industrial offshore extractions, Deepwater Alchemy looks at oceanic media and its representation of the seabed in terms of valuable resources. From high-tech simulations to laboratories and archives that collect and analyze sediments, Han explores the media technologies that survey, visualize, and condition the possibility for industrial resource extraction, introducing the concept of extractive mediation to describe the conflations between resource prospecting and undersea knowledge production. Moving away from anthropocentric frameworks, she argues that we must equalize access to deep ocean mediation and include the submerged perspectives of multispecies communities.

From the proliferation of petroleum seismology to environmental-impact research on seabed mining to the development of internet-enabled seafloor observatories, Deepwater Alchemy shows us that deepwater mediation is entangled in existential hopes and fears for our planetary future. As the ocean bottom becomes increasingly accessible to people, Han prompts us to ask not whether we can tame the seafloor, but, rather, why and for whom are we taming it?

Uncovers human histories, cultures, and politics on the ocean floor.

While often characterized as an alien realm, the seabed has long been fundamental to human life. As new technologies offer ever greater access to this environment, the bottom of the ocean is key to debates about our future—and yet we are poorly equipped to understand our relation to it.

The Seabed plumbs the ocean’s depths to reveal a rich and complex history of human activity at the seafloor, a history that extends from the classical world to the present. Jimmy Packham and Laurence Publicover highlight the literary significance of the seabed, examining works by writers including Aphra Behn, Anton Chekhov, Euripides, Herman Melville, M. NourbeSe Philip, William Shakespeare, Derek Walcott, and H. G. Wells, as well as lesser-known authors who have imagined this dark and mysterious realm. Putting these in dialogue with the science writing of Rachel Carson, Sylvia Earle, and others, and with visual art, politics, and historical case studies, they show how imaginative speculations concerning the ocean floor have influenced, and continue to inform, human activity on the seabed itself. Through chapters that explore sea burial and seafloor memorials, scientific exploration, deep-sea infrastructure, salvage from the seabed, and deep-sea extraction, the book reveals that the ocean floor’s cultural visibility has fluctuated over time. But longstanding visions of the seabed continue to shape our relationship with this place, a site for undersea cables and—in the near future—deep-sea mining.

The bottom of the ocean is closer than we think. Understanding our history there is crucial to assessing the present and imagining our future.

When viewed from a quiet beach, the ocean, with its rolling waves and vast expanse, can seem calm, even serene. But hidden beneath the sea’s waves are a staggering abundance and variety of active creatures, engaged in the never-ending struggles of life—to reproduce, to eat, and to avoid being eaten.

With Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime, marine scientist Ellen Prager takes us deep into the sea to introduce an astonishing cast of fascinating and bizarre creatures that make the salty depths their home. From the tiny but voracious arrow worms whose rapacious ways may lead to death by overeating, to the lobsters that battle rivals or seduce mates with their urine, to the sea’s masters of disguise, the octopuses, Prager not only brings to life the ocean’s strange creatures, but also reveals the ways they interact as predators, prey, or potential mates. And while these animals make for some jaw-dropping stories—witness the sea cucumber, which ejects its own intestines to confuse predators, or the hagfish that ties itself into a knot to keep from suffocating in its own slime—there’s far more to Prager’s account than her ever-entertaining anecdotes: again and again, she illustrates the crucial connections between life in the ocean and humankind, in everything from our food supply to our economy, and in drug discovery, biomedical research, and popular culture.

Written with a diver’s love of the ocean, a novelist’s skill at storytelling, and a scientist’s deep knowledge, Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime enchants as it educates, enthralling us with the wealth of life in the sea—and reminding us of the need to protect it.

With piracy raging in the Indian Ocean, international disputes over undersea oil and gas, and chronic overfishing, the oceans have rarely been subject to such varied and environmentally damaging conflict outside a world war. In Who Rules the Waves? Denise Russell gives us a rare insight into these issues and how they could be resolved.

International law states that a coastal country has territorial rights for 12 miles into the sea beyond its coastline, and economic rights for 200 miles, but in practice many countries have virtually no control over their own waters, and there is no international agency powerful enough to settle disputes. Russell provides a thorough examination of the politics of the sea, showing that without a radical change in ocean governance, accelerating climate change and overuse of the sea's resources is likely to have catastrophic effects.