"Latino Fathers"

New from NYU Press: Latino Fathers: What Shapes and Sustains Their Parenting by Fatima Suarez.

About the book, from the publisher:

The contemporary meaning of Latino fatherhood

What does fatherhood mean in the lives of Latino men? In Latino Fathers, Fatima Suarez shifts the attention from how father involvement affects Latine children to how Latino men experience fatherhood and what being a father means to them. Suarez brings attention to the social forces shaping, sustaining, and undermining Latino men’s parenting, how their views and behaviors uphold, challenge, negotiate, and transform culturally dominant ideas of fatherhood, and the lessons they teach us about the reproduction of inequality in family life.

Suarez focuses on the many different facets of fatherhood, including work-life balance, parenting challenges, and empathy and resentment for their own fathers. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 60 Latino fathers in California, Suarez highlights Latino fathers’ familial stories of joy, sorrow, humor, pain, uncertainty, and hope. Latino Fathers provides a compassionate, intimate account of a group of fathers challenging the myths about them, wrestling with the tensions they experience as they negotiate cultural ideas of good fathering, and the structural realities that make it both possible and difficult to meet those expectations.

Visit Fatima Suarez's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Power and Powerlessness"

New from Oxford University Press: Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty-First Century by Edward Hall.

About the book, from the publisher:

Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty-First Century examines whether the liberalism of fear - the negative and cautionary vein of liberal thinking, most famously articulated by Judith Shklar, which urges us to prioritize the avoidance of public cruelty - can effectively orient our political thinking in the twenty first century.

Hall systematically engages with Shklar's writings to offer a defence of liberalism in these terms, and also methodically works through a variety of practical political issues - torture, policing, immigration control, and hate speech. In so doing, Hall upends the suggestion that the liberalism of fear is an outdated species of Cold War Liberalism, arguing that as long as some people are invested with coercive power to exercise over others, there is a likelihood for public cruelty to emerge. Moreover, by examining some central features of politics in the twenty-first century, the book offers a series of vital and original recommendations about how we can respond to public cruelty, here and now.

Edward Hall is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield. He works on three main research areas: political ethics, liberal political thought, and realist political theory.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Means of Prediction"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits) by Maximilian Kasy.

About the book, from the publisher:

An eye-opening examination of how power—not technology—will define life with AI.

AI is inescapable, from its mundane uses online to its increasingly consequential decision-making in courtrooms, job interviews, and wars. The ubiquity of AI is so great that it might produce public resignation—a sense that the technology is our shared fate.

As economist Maximilian Kasy shows in The Means of Prediction, artificial intelligence, far from being an unstoppable force, is irrevocably shaped by human decisions—choices made to date by the ownership class that steers its development and deployment. Kasy shows that the technology of AI is ultimately not that complex. It is insidious, however, in its capacity to steer results to its owners’ wants and ends. Kasy clearly and accessibly explains the fundamental principles on which AI works, and, in doing so, reveals that the real conflict isn’t between humans and machines, but between those who control the machines and the rest of us.

The Means of Prediction offers a powerful vision of the future of AI: a future not shaped by technology, but by the technology’s owners. Amid a deluge of debates about technical details, new possibilities, and social problems, Kasy cuts to the core issue: Who controls AI’s objectives, and how is this control maintained? The answer lies in what he calls “the means of prediction,” or the essential resources required for building AI systems: data, computing power, expertise, and energy. As Kasy shows, in a world already defined by inequality, one of humanity’s most consequential technologies has been and will be steered by those already in power.

Against those stakes, Kasy offers an elegant framework both for understanding AI’s capabilities and for designing its public control. He makes a compelling case for democratic control over AI objectives as the answer to mounting concerns about AI's risks and harms. The Means of Prediction is a revelation, both an expert undressing of a technology that has masqueraded as more complicated and a compelling call for public oversight of this transformative technology.

--Marshal Zeringue

"For a Spell"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: For a Spell: Sissie Collectivism and Radical Witchery in the Southeast by Jason Ezell.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the Southeastern United States of the late 1970s, a regional network of radical communal gay households formed in the face of rising New Right terror. Consisting of primarily white, self-described sissies, the Southeast Network, as it came to be known, spanned from the Ozarks, to New Orleans, to Appalachian Tennessee. Though this network was short-lived, its legacy lives on today through Short Mountain Sanctuary, a thriving member of the international Radical Faerie movement. Jason Ezell’s intimate account of the formation and dissolution of these sissie houses reveals a little-known history of Southern gay liberation, nonbinary gender expression, and radical feminism and femininity.

Drawing on journals, letters, oral histories, collective manifestos, and newsletters, Ezell illustrates how these gay households nurtured their community through lesbian feminist practices such as collectivism, consciousness-raising, witchcraft rituals, and rural gatherings. As people and practices traveled from one house to another, these linked houses attempted to conjure underground sanctuaries for queer Southerners. Preserving their moving stories, Ezell details the visions, experiments, and shortfalls of these radical households in their attempts to build solidarity, resist mounting right-wing violence, and sustain their revolutionary dreams for queer movements yet to come.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Actual Art of Governing"

New from Oxford University Press: The Actual Art of Governing: Justice Robert H. Jackson's Concurring Opinion in the Steel Seizure Case by Gerard N. Magliocca.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since the adoption of the US constitution, there has been ongoing calibration of the power balance between the three branches of government, often in the face of rapidly changing social and political contexts. In 1952, US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson took up this debate in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer, a watershed case that barred President Harry S. Truman from seizing privately operated steel mills during the Korean War. Concurring with the majority decision, Jackson penned an opinion that would become the authoritative source on the constitutional boundary between congressional and executive authority.

In The Actual Art of Governing, eminent legal historian Gerard N. Magliocca takes a close look at this landmark opinion, providing a deep reading of the decision and the context surrounding it, and explaining its lasting influence. Magliocca skillfully shows how Justice Jackson's opinion broke free of the rules for judicial writing, taking a pragmatic approach to constitutional interpretation that drew on personal experience and historical examples, rather than sticking strictly to the text, judicial doctrine, and original public meaning. The framework that Jackson proposed took on crucial significance during the fallout of Richard Nixon's Watergate abuses and has continued to be relied upon in controversies involving the reach of the US President's power, including actions taken by Donald Trump. Magliocca concludes by arguing that a proper reading of Jackson's Youngstown concurrence would lead to significant curbs on emergency powers, the discretion of the federal courts, and presidential authority.

The Page 99 Test: The Tragedy of William Jennings Bryan: Constitutional Law and the Politics of Backlash.

The Page 99 Test: American Founding Son.

The Page 99 Test: Washington's Heir.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sovereignty Disrupted"

New from Stanford University Press: Sovereignty Disrupted: Spinoza and the Disparity of Reality by Gilah Kletenik.

About the book, from the publisher:

Anthropocentrism, white supremacy, and cishetsexism remain with us. The intransigence of such oppressions, this book proposes, is stayed by the unrecognized force that sovereignty maintains across the domains of "Western" philosophy. To corroborate this original thesis, the book uncovers how the rationales of sovereignty secure dominant "Western" theories about the nature of reality, the promise of reason, and the status of humans. Such approaches rely on properties of sovereignty that essentialize difference, naturalize hierarchy, and valorize autonomy. To redress these models and the supremacies they promote, Gilah Kletenik turns to Spinoza. Through a fresh reading of his Ethics, Kletenik develops an egalitarian alternative that starts with denaturalizing sovereignty. It is not a coincidence that Spinoza critiques the hegemonic rationales of "Western" philosophy nor that his doing so has eluded analysis. This is because his insurrection against "Western" sovereignties is sparked by the scintillas of immanence that he inherits from medieval Jewish and Islamic naturalism, the very philosophies that Christian, "Western" thought has repressed. This book recovers these marginalized voices, exposing centuries of interpretations that assimilate Spinoza's program to the sovereignties he disrupts. Kletenik thinks with Spinoza to unmask the supremacies of colonialism, neoliberalism, and cishetsexism alongside the sovereignties anchoring contemporary theory. In critiquing "Western" philosophy, Kletenik limns a more ethical alternative, oriented by immanence and disparity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Second Estate"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy by Ray D. Madoff.

About the book, from the publisher:

A revelatory book that lifts the curtain on America’s most consequential public deception: how the rich get richer using tools the government gave them.

Amid conflicting narratives about the drivers of wealth and inequality in the United States, one constant hovers in the background: the US tax code. No political force has been more consequential—or more utterly opaque—than the 7,000-page document that details who pays what in American society and government. Most of us have a sense that it’s an unfair system. But does anyone know exactly how it’s unfair?

Legal scholar Ray D. Madoff knows. In The Second Estate, she offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of America’s byzantine system of taxation, laying bare not only its capacity to consolidate wealth but also the mechanisms by which it has created two fundamentally separate American societies: the working Americans who pay and the ultra-rich who benefit.

This is not a story of offshore accounts or secret tax havens. In The Second Estate, Madoff shows that the US system itself has, over time, been stripped and reconstituted such that it now offers a series of secret paths, hidden in plain sight, for wealthy people in the know to avoid taxation altogether. Through the strategic avoidance of traditional income, leveraging of investments and debt, and exploitation of rules designed to promote charitable giving, America’s wealthy do more than just pay less than their share; they remove themselves from the tax system entirely. Wealth becomes its own sovereign state, and the living is surprisingly—and maddeningly—cheap.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Wars of the Roses"

New from Oxford University Press: The Wars of the Roses: War and Martial Culture in England, 1455–1487 by David Grummitt.

About the book, from the publisher:

The series of rebellions against royal authority and the violent clashes between aristocratic families that occurred in England between 1455 and 1487 have long been characterized as the 'Wars of the Roses'. Yet, far from being a continuous period of civil war, the Wars of the Roses were in fact an intermittent series of minor clashes, pitched battles, and sieges. These occurred against the backdrop of a demilitarization of the English aristocracy in the final years of the Hundred Years War.

Drawing on extensive archival research and a wide-ranging synthesis of the secondary literature, David Grummitt here reconsiders the nature of war and the martial culture of the English in the second half of the fifteenth century. He places these experiences within the peculiar legal, constitutional, and political culture of late Lancastrian and Yorkist England, to reexamine in depth the motivation for fighting, the raising and equipping of armies, the experience of battle and its aftermath, and the ways in which civil conflict was rationalized and memorialized. These experiences are compared and contrasted to that in its continental neighbours in an age of expanding royal authority, gunpowder weapons, and emergence of standing, professional armies. The book's conclusions offer a new interpretation of the evidence for the size of armies and scale of conflict during these years, the weaponry and tactics employed, and the wider importance of war, chivalry, and martial culture in late medieval England.

In so doing, and by drawing on a range of new conceptual approaches in the fields of the history of emotions, material culture, and conflict archaeology, alongside other more traditional disciplinary approaches to military history, the book offers a thorough and fulsome history of the Wars of the Roses, one that properly integrates war and marital culture into our understanding of the political and cultural history of fifteenth-century England, and late medieval European military history more generally.

--Marshal Zeringue

"From Vice to Nice"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS by René Esparza.

About the book, from the publisher:

Shifting the focus of AIDS history away from the coasts to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, this impressive book uncovers how homonormative political strategies weaponized the AIDS crisis to fuel gentrification. During the height of the epidemic, white gay activists and politicians pursued social acceptance by assimilating to Midwestern cultural values. This approach, René Esparza argues, diluted radical facets of LGBTQ activism, rejected a politics of sexual dissidence, severed ties with communities of color, and ushered in the destruction of vibrant queer spaces.

Drawing from archival research, oral histories, and urban studies from the 1970s through the 1990s, Esparza illustrates how the onset of the AIDS epidemic provided a pretext for further criminalization of perceived sexual deviance, targeting sex workers, “promiscuous” gay men, and transgender women. More than the criminalization of people and behaviors, this time period also saw increased targeting of urban venues such as bathhouses, adult bookstores, and public parks where casual, anonymous encounters occurred. Cleansing the city of land uses that undermined gentrification became a protective measure against AIDS, and the most marginalized bore the brunt of the ensuing surveillance and displacement. From Vice to Nice illuminates how, despite purporting seemingly progressive values, LGBTQ Midwestern politics of conformity leveraged the AIDS crisis to further instigate racial and sexual exclusion and fundamentally alter the urban landscape.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students' Networks by Janice M. McCabe.

About the book, from the publisher:

Draws attention to the importance of support networks for students as they make, keep, and lose friends throughout college and beyond.

We’re all familiar with the sentiment that “college is the best time of your life.” Along with a newfound sense of freedom, students have a unique opportunity to forge lifelong friendships at a point in life when friendship is particularly important. Why is it, then, that so many college students are falling victim to what the US Surgeon General termed an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation”? How do different aspects of college life help or hinder students’ ability to form deep connections?

In Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students’ Networks, sociologist Janice M. McCabe shows that the way a college is structured—whether students live in dorms or commute, study abroad or stay close to campus, have plentiful common areas for clubs to meet or not—can either encourage or hinder the making of meaningful friendships. Based on interviews with 95 students on three distinct campuses—a small private college (Dartmouth College), a large public university (University of New Hampshire), and a non-residential community college (Manchester Community College)—McCabe captures a wide range of experiences and discovers how features of the campuses make it easier or harder for students to make and keep friends. She shows how and why, across all three institutions, some students thrive in deep and lasting friendships with their peers.

As McCabe’s research reveals, we need to look at the structures of students’ networks, the institutions they attend, and the importance of their identities in these places if we are to truly uncover and address the loneliness epidemic facing today’s young adults.

--Marshal Zeringue