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Reveals how small media (leaflets and audio cassettes) played an important role in the revolution that deposed the Shah of Iran.

To most Westerners, the Iranian revolution was a shocking spectacle, a distant mass upheaval suddenly breaking into the daily news. It was, in fact, a revolution of the television era, as these authors book clearly demonstrate. The first account of the role of culture and communication in the Iranian revolution, this is also the first book to consider revolution as communication in the modern world.

What is ‘social capital’? The enormous positivity surrounding it conceals the instrumental economic rationality underpinning the notion as corporations silently sell consumer data for profit. Status chasing is just one aspect of a process of transforming qualitative aspects of social interactions into quantifiable metrics for easier processing, prediction, and behavioural shaping.

A work of critical media studies, Social Capital Online examines the idea within the new ‘network spectacle’ of digital capitalism via the ideas of Marx, Veblen, Debord, Baudrillard and Deleuze. Explaining how such phenomena as online narcissism and aggression arise, Faucher offers a new theoretical understanding of how the spectacularisation of online activity perfectly aligns with the value system of neoliberalism and its data worship. Even so, at the centre of all, lie familiar ideas – alienation and accumulation – new conceptions of which he argues are vital for understanding today’s digital society.

Why is social media in southeast Italy so predictable when it is used by such a range of different people?

This book describes the impact of social media on the population of a town in the southern region of Puglia, Italy. Razvan Nicolescu spent 15 months living among the town’s residents, exploring what it means to be an individual on social media. Why do people from this region conform on platforms that are designed for personal expression?

Nicolescu argues that social media use in this region of the world is related to how people want to portray themselves. He pays special attention to the ability of users to craft their appearance in relation to collective ideals, values, and social positions, and how this feature of social media has, for the residents of the town, become a moral obligation: they are expected to be willing to adapt their appearance to suit their different audiences at the same time, which is crucial in a town where religion and family are at the heart of daily life.  

A fierce, vibrant portrait of a newspaper that refused to go up in smoke.

From 1970 to 1978, the Bugle American wasn’t just an alternative newspaper―it was the sparkplug that propelled Milwaukee’s emergence as an influential cultural hub. With its incisive political coverage, razor-sharp cartoons, and in-depth reporting on the city’s explosive music scene, the Bugle American was a lifeline for artists, activists, and readers from Milwaukee to Madison hungry for independent journalism. 

Then, on a cold night in February 1975, everything nearly ended. A firebomb ripped through the Bugle American offices, endangering the lives of staff and burning the building to the ground. The crime was never solved. But the paper didn’t die. Supported by a stunned but determined community―and high-profile allies including Leonard Cohen and George Reedy―the Bugle American rose from the ashes to publish the very next week.

In Some Things Don’t Burn: Art, Activism, and Arson at the Bugle American, author Aurore Sibley tells the full story of this influential underground paper: its founding ideals, its creative energy, its brushes with fame, and its lasting impact. With access to rare materials and family insights―her parents met at the Bugle American, and her father served as one of its editors―Sibley layers investigative research with personal narrative, exploring how revisiting the past helped her reconcile with her father’s complicated life and death. 

Featuring dozens of photographs and illustrations, including cartoons and sketches by renowned underground artist and Bugle American co-founder Denis Kitchen, this book brings readers inside the quirky, passionate, and often chaotic world of a newsroom fighting to stay alive and independent. 

A gripping story of art, activism, community, and resilience, Some Things Don’t Burn reminds us that while buildings can be destroyed, the ideals that ignite a movement are much harder to extinguish.

Exposes how emotion, memory, and national pride shape the stories we tell about science, animals, and the history of the “race to space”

Before humans ever left Earth’s atmosphere, a handful of primates paved the way—earning fame and fascination but leaving behind a complicated and often highly debated legacy. As the Cold War intensified, the US space program turned to monkeys—Able, Baker, Ham, and Enos—to test and explore the limits of human survival in space. These animals became media sensations, museum exhibits, and symbols of American ingenuity, even as their suffering was often overlooked.

With insight and empathy, Lynch unpacks the stories we tell about these primates and how they are remembered through culture and time, both modern and historically. Lynch argues that the public memory of these animals often justifies their use in the name of scientific progress. Sometimes they are portrayed as tools, other times as human stand-ins, and frequently as objects of sympathy—but rarely as subjects of critique.

Lynch shows how feelings—compassion, cuteness, patriotism, and the technological sublime—shape the stories we tell about these animals and the ethical frameworks we build around them. Each chapter focuses on a different genre of memory-making, from newspaper and photojournalism to museum exhibits, children’s literature, and fictional films.

By reframing these animal pioneers, Lynch uncovers the ethical and emotional narratives that shape how we remember science. Space Monkeys! is a vital reflection on memory, identity, and the more-than-human costs of progress. 
 

How Spanish-language television networks continue to thrive in a rapidly changing media landscape.

The US television industry has suffered blow after blow amid media convergence and the rise of streaming. Those legacy broadcasters that survive are much diminished and highly dependent on live programming—the last redoubt of old media. There is an exception, though: Spanish-language television is thriving.

Spanish-Language Television surveys the Latinx media landscape to better appreciate why Univision and Telemundo have flourished while others faltered. Manuel G. Avilés-Santiago and Jillian M. Báez show that the major Spanish-language networks are unusually flexible and open to innovation in hopes of reaching new demographics. Univision and Telemundo were early to streaming. To appeal to “billennial” audiences—bilingual millennials—who threatened to stray from TV, they rebuilt the telenovela, which now features social commentary, diverse characters, and genre crossovers. Today’s reality programs defy old norms of linguistic correctness, and the airwaves are becoming less hospitable to racism and sexism, resulting in rising ratings and ad revenues. The first book-length treatment of reception patterns in Latinx TV, Spanish-Language Television deepens our understanding of new media in a moment of transformation and possibility.

All of this information at our fingertips—and we might not need any of it

Concurrent with the compulsory connectivity of the digital age is the rise of the spoiler. The inevitability of information has changed the critical quality of modernity, leaving us with acute vertigo—a feeling that nothing new is left out there. Encompassing memes and trigger warnings, Vilem Flusser and Thomas Pynchon, Spoiler Alert wrangles with the state of surprise in post-historical times. Aaron Jaffe delivers a timely corrective to post-critical modes of reading that demonstrates the dangers of forfeiting critical suspicion.

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

The inaugural volume of the Cinemas of Asia series, this book offers a fresh perspective on South Korean director Lee Kwang-mo’s 1998 film Spring in My Hometown (아름다운 시절). Written and directed by Lee, the intensely personal film tells the story of his grandfather’s relationship with his ten-year-old father during the Korean War. This volume examines the industrial context in which Lee attempted to bring his film into production, the cinematic cycle from which it emerged, and the unique style that captivated festival juries but divided audiences. Jackson’s book offers a rare, historical insight into an important Asian cinematic industry on the verge of commercial transformation at the end of the last century.

Cinemas of Asia is the first series dedicated to the cinemas of South, Southeast, East, Central Asia, and global Asian diasporas. Each volume provides a critical analysis and interpretation of a notable film from Asian cinema and consists of thematic chapters, accessible writing, and screenshots and illustrations. Authors analyze each film from a variety of angles, including film, literary, historical, gender, post-/decolonial studies, and each volume is accessibly written, informative, and appeals to academics, students, cinephiles, and non-experts alike. 

Finalist for the 2023 Frank Luther Mott - Kappa Tau Alpha Journalism and Mass Communication Research Award

In 1935, a group of journalists and theater artists embarked on an unusual collaboration. With funds from the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a Depression-era employment initiative established by President Roosevelt’s New Deal, they set out to produce news for the theatrical stage. Over the next four years, the New York–based team created six productions, known as the Living Newspapers. Covering a variety of public issues that included affordable housing, the plight of Dust Bowl farmers, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and labor law, Living Newspaper productions would reach hundreds of thousands of spectators and inspire adaptations across the country.

Staged News interprets the Living Newspaper’s process and repertoire amid journalists’ changing conceptions of their profession. Jordana Cox spotlights marginalized “newsmakers,” particularly Black artists, who challenged the parameters of public knowledge and assumptions surrounding newsworthiness. This timely analysis reveals how a vital theatrical form sprouted from a changing news landscape and reimagined what journalism could do for people seeking democratic change.

Since the 1950s, television flooded the American soundscape with not just pictures but sounds, a constant aural stream infiltrating domestic life. In Stay Tuned, Patrick Sullivan treats network-era television sound not as background noise or auxiliary signal but as a formative texture of aesthetic life in postwar America. He theorizes how television’s sonic forms—asynchronous audiovisuals, noises, affective rhythms, what he collectively terms “network aurality”—trouble traditional aesthetic theory. Stay Tuned takes up critiques of television sound and repurposes them as evidence of a deeper philosophical discomfort: Namely, that television sound does something to aesthetic categories that they weren’t built to handle. From the laugh track to the cartoon “boinks,” from noises to the jingle, Sullivan reads television sounds not as cultural detritus but as formal interventions—forcing a redefinition of what aesthetics means when form is mass-produced, commercial, and built for syndication. What emerges is not just a new theory and history of television sound but a reimagined account of aesthetic experience itself—expanded, recalibrated, and a little wacky.

In this follow up to Stephen King on the Big Screen, Mark Browning turns his critical eye to the much-neglected subject of the best-selling author’s work in television, examining what it is about King’s fiction that makes it particularly suitable for the small screen.

By focusing on this body of work, from the highly successful The Stand and The Night Flier to the lesser-known TV films Storm of the Century, Rose Red, Kingdom Hospital, and the 2004 remake of Salem’s Lot, Browning is able to articulate how these adaptations work and, in turn, suggest new ways of viewing them. This book is the first written by a film specialist to consider King’s television work in its own right, and it rejects previous attempts to make the films and books fit rigid thematic categories. Browning examines what makes a written or visual text successful at evoking fear on a case-by-case basis, in a highly readable and engaging way. He also considers the relationship between the big and small screen. Why, for instance, are some TV versions more effective than movie adaptations and vice versa? In the process, Stephen King on the Small Screen is able to shed new light on what it is that makes King’s novels so successful and reveal the elements of style and approach that have helped make King one of the world’s best-selling authors.

In the US, the most common contraceptive methods rely on women’s time, labor, and vulnerability to risk. Comparatively few people rely on vasectomies as a means of preventing pregnancies. Something is happening rhetorically—through meaning-making symbols and the material practices they manifest—that sustains a collective disinterest in vasectomies. Jenna Vinson draws from her feminist rhetorical study of thirty-seven television and film representations, health insurance policies, and interviews with seventeen people who have experienced vasectomy, surfacing barriers to vasectomy uptake, including problematic tropes and practices that keep vasectomy unappealing, out of mind, and inaccessible. Stop Saying Snip! also illustrates tactics and circumstances that lead people to get a vasectomy, sharing real vasectomy stories and showing that women often play an important (and until now unheeded or pathologized) role in this communication process. This book intervenes in the misogynistic cultural expectation that it is women’s responsibility to endure the pain, labor, and risks of managing fertility by identifying the rhetorics that make men’s reproductive bodies seem unnatural sites for pregnancy prevention work. Fostering a persuasive vision of vasectomy is an urgent project that contributes to the movement toward reproductive justice.

No single figure embodies Cold War science more than the renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Although other scientists may have been more influential in establishing the institutions and policies of the nuclear age, none has loomed larger in the popular imagination than the “father of the atomic bomb.” Americans have been drawn to the story of the Manhattan Project Oppenheimer helped lead and riveted by the McCarthy-era politics that caught him in its crosshairs. Journalists and politicians, writers and artists have told Oppenheimer's story in many different ways since he first gained notoriety in 1945. In Storytelling and Science, David K. Hecht examines why they did so, and what they hoped to achieve through their stories.

From the outset, accounts of Oppenheimer's life and work were deployed for multiple ends: to trumpet or denigrate the value of science, to settle old scores or advocate new policies, to register dissent or express anxieties. In these different renditions, Oppenheimer was alternately portrayed as hero and villain, establishment figure and principled outsider, “destroyer of worlds” and humanist critic. Yet beneath the varying details of these stories, Hecht discerns important patterns in the way that audiences interpret, and often misinterpret, news about science. In the end, he argues, we find that science itself has surprisingly little to do with how its truths are assimilated by the public. Instead its meaning is shaped by narrative traditions and myths that frame how we think and write about it.

Street Fight is muscularly reported journalism trained on the people and events that shaped Sesame Street from the 1990s to the present. Expanding from Street Gang, Michael Davis’s acclaimed origin story of the series, this revelatory new book probes deeply into the decisions made by Sesame Workshop, the New York-based corporate non-profit that has weathered political and financial storms, all while upholding aspirational values instilled in the late-1960s. 

Hundreds of eyewitnesses provide on-the-record recollections of the show’s evolution in the narrative and a series of chapter-ending oral histories.

Interwoven are passages of time-tested alliances, courtships and marriages, the back stories of the artists who provided the show’s melodies and lyrics. That, plus plenty of dish about the performers behind Muppets of Sesame Street, and how Jim Henson, decades after his shocking passing in 1990, is a spectral figure quite powerful in spirit.

Laughter and tears – in equal measure – await readers.