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From precocious sportswriter to Federal Prisoner #01150-134: The intersection of sports and the revolutionary 1970s, with one ambitious young man caught in the middle

Jay Weiner was an aspiring teenage sportswriter when he met Jack Scott, the charismatic, activist journalist who would become his mentor, immersing him in the political and social issues roiling sports—and so much else—in the late 1960s and 1970s. Weiner became a zealous student of Scott, joining a new tradition of sports journalism that interrogated questions of race, power, and politics alongside the games themselves. But his blind devotion took a treacherous turn when Scott took Weiner, as a surprise for his twentieth birthday, to a secluded Pennsylvania farmhouse where heiress-turned-FBI-most-wanted Patty Hearst was hiding out with her Symbionese Liberation Army kidnappers-turned-comrades.

A More Dangerous Game is Weiner’s story of coming of age in a shocking fashion. A wild mosaic of sports, journalism, betrayal, justice, courage, and redemption, his memoir charts the meeting of sports and the radical left in the 1970s, with Weiner unwittingly caught in the middle and left behind by his mentor. In the engaged, edgy style of a seasoned sportswriter, Weiner describes the fallout after that fateful encounter with the country’s most wanted fugitives: three years of federal subpoenas, impossible decisions, and, ultimately, four months in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury.

With exhaustive background reporting, Weiner fits together the seemingly disparate pieces of his unlikely journey from young sportswriter to frightened FBI target to emboldened Federal Prisoner #01150-134. From its examination of the life and work of Jack Scott to its surprising angle on the well-chronicled saga of Patty Hearst, A More Dangerous Game is the engrossing story of a time when examining sports as a mirror of society put a writer on the cutting edge of one of the most notorious stories of a generation.

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A critical examination of the complex system of college pricing—how it works, how it fails, and how fixing it can help both students and universities.

How much does it cost to attend college in the United States today? The answer is more complex than many realize. College websites advertise a sticker price, but uncovering the actual price—the one after incorporating financial aid—can be difficult for students and families. This inherent uncertainty leads some students to forgo applying to colleges that would be the best fit for them, or even not attend college at all. The result is that millions of promising young people may lose out on one of society’s greatest opportunities for social mobility. Colleges suffer too, losing prospective students and seeing lower enrollments and less socioeconomic diversity. If markets require prices to function well, then the American higher-education system—rife as it is with ambiguity in its pricing—amounts to a market failure.

In A Problem of Fit, economist Phillip B. Levine explains why institutions charge the prices they do and discusses the role of financial aid systems in facilitating—and discouraging—access to college. Affordability issues are real, but price transparency is also part of the problem. As Levine makes clear, our conversations around affordability and free tuition miss a larger truth: that the opacity of our current college-financing systems is a primary driver of inequities in education and society. In a clear-eyed assessment of educational access and aid in a post-COVID-19 economy, A Problem of Fit offers a trenchant new argument for educational reforms that are well within reach.

A study of how the climate crisis is changing human communication from a celebrated rhetorician.
 
Why is it difficult to talk about climate change? Debra Hawhee argues that contemporary rhetoric relies on classical assumptions about humanity and history that cannot conceive of the present crisis. How do we talk about an unprecedented future or represent planetary interests without privileging our own species? A Sense of Urgency explores four emerging answers, their sheer novelty a record of both the devastation and possible futures of climate change. In developing the arts of magnitude, presence, witness, and feeling, A Sense of Urgency invites us to imagine new ways of thinking with our imperiled planet.

A summer job turns serious when a young woman takes the reins on a remote farm—and learns far more than how to herd sheep

In May 1972, Liese Greensfelder arrived in the small Norwegian town of Øystese to startling news: Johannes, the farmer who hired her for the summer, had just been hospitalized after a stroke. Could she please watch over his place for a month or so, until he got back on his feet? Twenty years old and with no farming experience, Liese was dropped off the next day at a centuries-old mountain farm at the end of a dirt road high above the magnificent Hardanger Fjord—with 115 sheep, two cows, one calf, a draft horse, and a Norwegian herding dog to care for.

Armed with a command of Danish that enabled rudimentary communication, Liese began learning from neighbors who spoke an ancient Norwegian dialect—how to feed the animals, milk by hand, and supervise her first lambing. The farm was run in the old way: horses and wagons instead of tractors, haymaking in the rain, and hikes into the mountains to check on the sheep that ranged free over those wild peaks all summer. And, she was quick to discover, the farm was on the brink of ruin, for Johannes was a heartless man who had abused his animals and neglected his buildings and equipment for decades.

Although her employer had alienated his neighbors, they immediately welcomed the American newcomer and offered her help. As “a month or so” stretched to a year and Liese struggled for the survival of the farm, she joined this tight-knit enclave of farmers, learning their stories and history, adopting their dialect, and growing intimately familiar with the grass-based farming practices that had sustained them for generations.

From moments of levity, such as sampling a neighbor’s fruit wines, Christmas parties, and skiing; to soul-battering challenges, including the directive to kill a fox, sending sheep to slaughter, rotten silage, and vicious weather; to the yearnings of a young woman awash in a sea of masculinity, Accidental Shepherd is a candid account of Liese’s year in a remote farmhouse. Confronted with dangers and obstacles for which she was utterly unprepared, she tells a story of remarkable resilience and records the fascinating but rapidly vanishing traditions of the community that took her in.

A summer job turns serious when a young woman takes the reins on a remote farm—and learns far more than how to herd sheep

In May 1972, Liese Greensfelder arrived in the small Norwegian town of Øystese to startling news: Johannes, the farmer who hired her for the summer, had just been hospitalized after a stroke. Could she please watch over his place for a month or so, until he got back on his feet? Twenty years old and with no farming experience, Liese was dropped off the next day at a centuries-old mountain farm at the end of a dirt road high above the magnificent Hardanger Fjord—with 115 sheep, two cows, one calf, a draft horse, and a Norwegian herding dog to care for.

Armed with a command of Danish that enabled rudimentary communication, Liese began learning from neighbors who spoke an ancient Norwegian dialect—how to feed the animals, milk by hand, and supervise her first lambing. The farm was run in the old way: horses and wagons instead of tractors, haymaking in the rain, and hikes into the mountains to check on the sheep that ranged free over those wild peaks all summer. And, she was quick to discover, the farm was on the brink of ruin, for Johannes was a heartless man who had abused his animals and neglected his buildings and equipment for decades.

Although her employer had alienated his neighbors, they immediately welcomed the American newcomer and offered her help. As “a month or so” stretched to a year and Liese struggled for the survival of the farm, she joined this tight-knit enclave of farmers, learning their stories and history, adopting their dialect, and growing intimately familiar with the grass-based farming practices that had sustained them for generations.

From moments of levity, such as sampling a neighbor’s fruit wines, Christmas parties, and skiing; to soul-battering challenges, including the directive to kill a fox, sending sheep to slaughter, rotten silage, and vicious weather; to the yearnings of a young woman awash in a sea of masculinity, Accidental Shepherd is a candid account of Liese’s year in a remote farmhouse. Confronted with dangers and obstacles for which she was utterly unprepared, she tells a story of remarkable resilience and records the fascinating but rapidly vanishing traditions of the community that took her in.

Middle-class Americans know two things about legal practice: law is complicated, and lawyers are expensive. So expensive, in fact, that only large companies and the wealthy can generally afford to hire them—and yet US law is often so complex that ordinary people cannot hope to represent themselves successfully. Sheldon Krantz draws on his long and varied career as a lawyer and scholar to show how the legal system has denied the majority of Americans equal access to justice and offers productive, practical reforms to address the problem. Through case studies and a comprehensive overview of relevant legal policy and practices, Krantz charts the real impacts of the current system’s inadequacies and highlights creative solutions, some that are currently in use and others that should be implemented. Affording Justice is essential reading for anyone concerned about access to justice in today’s America.

The athletes of the Alaska Native games aren’t just returning to their roots. They’ve never left them. In this beautifully illustrated book, readers learn the history of twenty-five Native games that have been handed down through generations, how each one relates to the subsistence lifestyle, and how you can try them yourself, regardless of where you live.

As Tricia Nuyaqik Brown shows, even though today’s competitions are a big media event in Alaska, the games themselves are really no different from those of long ago. Ancestral communities once pitted their strongest, their most agile, their fastest men and women against those from neighboring villages or tribal groups. Those games never died, but rather than gathering in a sod meeting place, competitions are now held in gyms and arenas. Each game today can be linked to some aspect of surviving in a harsh environment, of drawing sustenance from the land and sea. From the Seal Hop to the Bench Reach to the Four-Man Carry, these ancient games still require athletes to be in top physical condition and possess sharp mental focus. They hold dear the traditional Native values of honoring the elders, responsibility to tribe, sportsmanship, humor, patience, and hunter success. This book offers an engaging introduction to these games and their history, inviting people to jump in and try them for themselves!

Most observers agree that the global arena is in the midst of multiple changes. The elements that create and intensify global interdependencies have been expanding rapidly, generating questions about the viability of the state and the viability of the state-centric system that has existed for over 500 years, as well as what sorts of structures and behaviors might replace them. And yet much of the analysis is not helpful in understanding the condition of the international system because it either fails to define the meaning of terms such as interdependence and order or treats these as new problems ignoring many important ideas that have developed over the years about international politics. One of our most accomplished scholars in international affairs, Harvey Starr offers a fresh and original analysis of the nature of the international system. Starr argues that the global system can best be understood as the consequence of states adapting to changing interdependencies. States do remain important in this system, but the reality they adapt to is changing. Thus the environment surrounding states is important not because it is "anarchic," as argued by structural realists such as Waltz, but because environmental conditions have changed, thereby changing the meaning and significance of such structural characteristics as "anarchy." Starr argues that we must recognize that the modes by which states adapt to change in the international system lead to changes in both the states themselves and in their environment. This book will appeal to scholars of international relations in political science and economics as well as to policy makers and analysts interested in understanding change in the international system.