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Analyzing a Chinese city’s dazzling rise to global megacity status

Until around 1990, Shanghai was China’s premier but sluggish industrial center. Now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the joint impact of global forces and state power has turned Shanghai into a dynamic megacity. Shanghai’s remarkable growth in economy, infrastructure, and global presence has prompted questions about the Shanghai “miracle.” This collection places the city’s unprecedented rise in a rare comparative examination of U.S. cities, as well as with Asian megacities Singapore and Hong Kong, providing a nuanced account of how Shanghai’s politics, economy, society, and space have been transformed by macro- and micro-level forces.

Can the mass media contribute to meaningful public debate in the run-up to an election?

Talk radio in the United States is said to have contributed to a political atmosphere in which the loudest, crudest, and simplest arguments prevail. Is there a different model of public talk that can contribute to a kinder, wiser, more empathetic democracy? In the run-up to the 2024 UK general election, Stephen Coleman listened to callers to the BBC’s daily phone-in show in the hope of finding answers to these questions. In this year-long study, we see the public expressing its mood, telling its stories, and testing its arguments.

Shaping Citizenship through Talk Radio argues that even in a time of democratic anxiety and rising division, people are still finding ways to talk, listen, and act together. It explains why democracies need reliable public spaces that help citizens connect and communicate across their differences. Reporting on what he found, Coleman also proposes a way forward for a more empathetic democratic discourse.

Like national politicians, state legislators all too often focus on partisanship instead of policy making, engaging themselves in rancorous debate that achieves little beyond gridlock. However, during one short period in Michigan's history, legislators stopped bickering and focused on forging compromise. Daniel Loepp's Sharing the Balance of Power chronicles the 87th Michigan Legislature (1993-1994), in which Republicans and Democrats successfully shared power.

In 1992, Michigan voters elected exactly fifty-five Republicans and fifty-five Democrats to the state house. As a result, the two parties each elected a co-speaker, and a shared power agreement was forged. Given the history of intense partisanship in the state house, political pundits predicted that any plan for shared power would disintegrate within months. What resulted instead was one of the most productive legislatures in Michigan history.

Author Daniel Loepp, chief of staff to Democratic Co-Speaker Curtis Hertel at the time, skillfully takes the reader "inside" the State Capitol, examining the key policy debates (including school finance reform), important personalities, and difficult negotiations. Loepp's balanced presentation is testimony to the two years of bi-partisan cooperation in which he took part.

In an age of public cynicism about the legislative process, Daniel Loepp offers the reader a refreshing story about two co-speakers and their 108 colleagues who came together in the spirit of bi-partisan representation to successfully serve their constituents, the people of Michigan.

Daniel Loepp is a partner in the firm of Karoub Associates, Michigan's oldest multi-client lobbying firm.

There is no more compelling and dramatic unfolding story, with more profound international ramifications, than the conflict in the Middle East.

Sharing the Land of Canaan is a critical examination of the core issues of the conflict that dares to put forward a radical but logical solution: that a shared state is the best way to achieve justice and peace for Israelis and Palestinians.

Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, a human rights activist based at Yale University, offers an overview of the issues at stake, and outlines his vision for a lasting peace based on upholding the principles of human rights for all. Tackling taboo subjects, myths and obstacles, he argues convincingly that apartheid in the form of a two-state solution is no longer a feasible way to achieve enduring peace.

At this critical time, when the 'road map' to peace looks more uncertain than ever, this book provides a refreshing counterpoint to the failed strategies of the past. It is a direct and accessible account of the history - and mythology - of the fabled 'Land of Canaan', which lays out hopeful ideas for the future of this truly multiethnic and multicultural region.

Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection is a landmark work of early American social and economic history that offers a comprehensive examination of one of the most consequential, and often misunderstood, uprisings in the history of the early American republic. Between 1786 and 1787, debt-ridden farmers across western Massachusetts, many of them veterans of the Revolutionary War, rose in armed protest against the state government's crushing tax and debt collection policies. Under the informal leadership of Daniel Shays, the rebels sought to prevent court foreclosures on their farms, demand tax relief, and reform a judicial system they saw as serving the interests of wealthy creditors at the expense of ordinary citizens. The uprising—ultimately suppressed by a privately funded state militia—sent shockwaves through the young nation, alarming leading figures including George Washington and James Madison, and powerfully accelerating the movement toward a stronger central government and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.

Szatmary frames the rebellion not as an isolated outbreak of lawlessness, but as a deeply rooted agrarian insurrection produced by the collision of two fundamentally different economic worlds in post-Revolutionary New England. His analysis begins by establishing the divergent economic realities of the region: on one side, the commercial and mercantile economy of New England's coastal towns, driven by creditors, merchants, and professional elites integrated into transatlantic trade networks; on the other, the subsistence farming communities of the interior, whose inhabitants operated largely outside the cash economy and bore a disproportionate burden of wartime debt and postwar taxation. Drawing on this structural conflict, Szatmary traces the chain of debt that left rural farmers increasingly unable to meet their obligations, the escalating cycle of court actions and property seizures that pushed them toward organized resistance, and the government's responses, ultimately military, to the protests.

The book is also attentive to the rebellion's broader political consequences, examining how Shays' Rebellion transformed the national debate about governance, federal authority, and the relationship between popular democracy and social order in the new republic. Described by one reviewer as a "well-balanced" study that "classifies Shays' Rebellion as the historical watershed it truly is," the book remains a standard reference in the historiography of the Early American Republic, the Articles of Confederation period, and the origins of the Constitutional Convention.

Winning presidential elections isn’t just about the ballot box; it is shaped by the rules of the “apportionment game.” Shifting Seats uncovers the gritty history of how politicians fought for greater legislative influence and how those decisions determined control of Congress—and sometimes the presidency. Moving beyond abstract debates, Keith L. Dougherty takes readers inside high-stakes bargaining from the Founding era, the Antebellum period, and post–Civil War struggles over representation. Within these periods, Dougherty models how legislators manipulated the building blocks of apportionment—including metrics, ratios, House sizes, and rounding methods—to maximize their state’s proportion of seats. He explains how a 1920s stalemate fixed the House’s size at 435 members and created the automatic system in use today. 

Bridging the gap between political history and formal theory, the book identifies the long-term mechanisms that stabilize or disrupt distributions of power. Further, it shows how different apportionment methods could have flipped some presidential elections. By connecting these clashes to our current polarized climate, Shifting Seats explains why some apportionment rules endure while others fail, revealing the hidden mechanics that continue to dictate the balance of power in Washington today.

A unique and engaging account of local urban decision-making within the globalizing world

High Point, North Carolina, is known as the “Furniture Capital of the World.” Once a manufacturing stronghold, most of its furniture factories have closed over the past forty years, with production shipped off to low-wage countries. Yet as manufacturing left, the city tightened its hold on a biannual global exposition that serves as the world’s furniture fashion runway. At the High Point Market, visitors from more than one hundred nations traverse twelve million square feet of meticulous design. Downtown buildings—once courthouses, movie theaters, post offices, and gas stations—are now chic showroom spaces, even as many sit empty between each exposition.

In Showroom City, John Joe Schlichtman applies an ethnographic lens to the global exposition’s relationship with High Point after it defeated rival Chicago in the 1960s and established itself as the world’s dominant furniture center. In recent decades, following trends in global finance, private equity firms were increasingly behind downtown High Point’s real estate transactions, coordinated by buyers far removed from the region. Then, in one massive transaction in 2011, a firm funded by Bain Capital purchased every major showroom building, and the majority of downtown real estate was under one owner. 

Showroom City is a story of exclusionary growth and unchecked development, of a city flailing to fill the void left by its dwindling factories. But beyond that Schlichtman engages the general lessons behind both High Point’s deindustrialization and its stunning reinvention as a furniture fashion, merchandising, and design node. With great nuance, he delves deeply to reveal how power operates locally and how citizens may affirm, exploit, influence, and resist the takeover of their community.

Rethinking life with microbes through the art of natural fermentation

Within us and around us, microbes are everywhere, constantly reshaping what it means to be human as we interact with them—sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. Singing with Invisible Worlds theorizes human–microbe relationships through a rare ethnographic account of the fermentation process at the 350-year-old Terada Honke, one of only two natural sake breweries in Japan.

Painting a vivid picture of how sake brewers collaborate with bacteria, molds, and yeasts, Maya Hey reveals that ambient microbes are not controlled but courted, cultivated, and deliberately choreographed. As the brewers adapt to shifting microbial dynamics, they engage in what Hey calls an “improvisational ethic”—a way of responding to the unknown with care and attentiveness through each phase of blooming and waning across weeks, months, and even centuries. In documenting these remarkable practices, Singing with Invisible Worlds offers an intimate, situated understanding of how we can come to know and live with microbial life, with implications for feminist theory, science and technology studies, and multispecies ethnography.

Unsettling simplistic notions of “good” or “bad” microbes, this book presents a compelling vision for planetary coexistence—one that starts not with grand solutions but with small, rhythmic acts of microscopic attunement.

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Sinn Féin is a growing force in Irish politics. Now the country's third largest party, Sinn Féin have been one of the central architects of the peace process and are increasingly setting the terms of political debate in Ireland north and south. Despite this, the party remains much misunderstood and often misrepresented.

In Sinn Féin & The Politics of Left Republicanism, Sinn Féin activist Eoin Ó Broin explores the ideological and organisational origins of the party, charts their history and recent political development and assesses their possible futures.

He argues that Sinn Féin is part of a distinct left-republican tradition in Irish society whose future lies in the globally resurgent radical democratic left.

How six groundbreaking women redefined American food—what we eat, how we eat it, and why it matters.

From wartime nutrition science to modern food activism, Six Women Who Shaped What Americans Eat examines the pivotal roles six women played in rewriting the rules of American cuisine. Michelle Mart offers a rich and accessible narrative that connects dietary trends, food marketing, and public health movements to the voices of the women who helped drive them.

Part one highlights Hazel Stiebeling’s development of dietary guidelines and RDAs, Poppy Cannon’s promotion of processed foods for convenience and gourmet meals, and Julia Child’s introduction of French cuisine with an emphasis on fresh ingredients and culinary techniques. Part two shifts the focus to women who challenged the food system itself: Frances Moore Lappé’s advocacy for vegetarianism and sustainable practices, Marion Nestle’s exposure of food corporations’ manipulative practices, and Alice Waters’s emphasis on locally sourced, organic ingredients and sustainable food systems. Thoughtful and timely, this book explores how culture, politics, and personal vision collided in the kitchens and campaigns of six food pioneers—leaving a lasting imprint on what America eats today.