Automating Inequality

Picador
Paperback
288 pages • $18.00
ISBN: 9781250215789

How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

Virginia Eubanks

Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award

“Riveting (an accomplishment for a book on technology and policy). Its argument should be widely circulated, to poor people, social service workers and policymakers, but also throughout the professional classes. Everyone needs to understand that technology is no substitute for justice.”

—The New York Times Book Review

The State of Indiana denied one million applications for health care, food stamps, and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interpreted any application mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect. Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health care, and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on economic inequality and democracy in America. Full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, Automating Inequality is a deeply researched and passionate book that could not be timelier.

Virginia Eubanks is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Digital Dead End and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around. For two decades, Eubanks has worked in community technology and economic justice movements. Today, she is a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project and a Fellow at New America. She lives in Troy, New York.

Automating Inequality has been adopted for the First-Year Experience programs at:

Ivy Tech Community College – Indianapolis (IN); North Idaho College; University of Albany’s Rockefeller College

The Undying

Picador
Paperback
320pages • $18.00
ISBN: 9781250757982

Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

Anne Boyer

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“Boyer’s book, ambitious in scope, is honed to a precision
that feels hard-won. The politics of illness—how the profit
motive determines life and damage and death; how victim
blaming is enshrined; how social norms can disable and kill—have rarely been limned with such clarity and grace.”

—Lidija Haas, Harper’s Magazine

A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck, this catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. More than just a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying also explores the experience of sickness from the digital age back to ancient Rome, weaving in dream diarists, John Donne, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, corporate lies, pro-pain “dolorists,” the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of the ubiquitous pink ribbon while also diving into the long line of literary women writing about their own illnesses. The Undying will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show the contemporary United States to be a place both desperately ill and, occasionally, perversely glorious.

Anne Boyer is a poet and an essayist who lives in Kansas City. Her honors include the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, a 2018 Whiting Award in nonfiction/poetry, and the 2018-2019 Judith E.Wilson Fellowship in poetry at Cambridge University. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including the 2016 CLMP Firecracker Award-winning Garments Against Women and a book of fables, essays, and ephemera titled A Handbook of Disappointed Fate.

Wolfpack

Celadon Books
Hardcover
112 pages • $20.00
ISBN: 9781250217707

How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game

Abby Wambach

“Wolfpack is a must-read for all of us determined to teach our kids there are no limits. It’s a manifesto for everyone trying to lead—whether it’s a team, a company, a family, or a meaningful life.”

—Serena Williams

Abby Wambach became a champion because of her incredible talent as a soccer player. A two-time Olympic gold medalist, she holds the world record for international goals for both female and male soccer players. She became an icon because of her remarkable wisdom as a leader. As the co-captain of the 2015 Women’s World Cup Champion Team, Abby created a culture not just of excellence but of honor, commitment, resilience, and sisterhood. She helped transform a group of individual women into one of the most successful, powerful, and united Wolfpacks of all time. In Wolfpack, Abby’s message to women is: You were never Little Red Riding Hood. You were always the Wolf. We must venture off the path and blaze a new way, together! She insists we let go of Old Rules that were never meant to include us. Abby delivers 8 New Rules to help women change the landscape of their lives and world. With this rally cry, Abby inspires each of us to know the power of our Wolf and the strength of our pack.

Abby Wambach is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, FIFA World Cup Champion, and the highest all-time international goal scorer for male and female soccer players. She is an activist for equality and inclusion and The New York Times bestselling author of Forward: A Memoir. Abby is co-founder of Wolfpack Endeavor, which is revolutionizing leadership development for women in the workplace and beyond. Abby lives in Florida with her wife and three children.

The Book of Beautiful Questions

Bloomsbury
Paperback
288 pages • $18.00
ISBN: 9781632869562

The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead

Warren Berger

“Berger delves further into ‘beautiful questions,’ which are powerful tools that can transform people’s thinking . . . This practical work is designed to prompt action and get results.”

—Library Journal

When confronted with almost any demanding situation, the act of questioning can help guide us to smart decisions. By asking questions, we can analyze, learn, and move forward in the face of uncertainty. But “questionologist” Warren Berger says that the questions must be the right ones; the ones that cut to the heart of complexity or enable us to see an old problem in a fresh way. Drawn from the insights and expertise of psychologists, innovators, effective leaders, and some of the world’s foremost creative thinkers, he presents the essential questions readers need to make the best choices when it truly counts, with a particular focus in four key areas: decision-making, creativity, leadership, and relationships. The powerful questions in this book can help you: identify opportunities in your career or industry; generate fresh ideas in your own creative pursuits; check your biases so you can make better judgments and decisions; and do a better job of communicating and connecting with the people around you. In The Book of Beautiful Questions, Berger shares illuminating stories and compelling research on the power of inquiry.

Warren Berger, an expert on design thinking and innovation, is the author of The Book of Beautiful Questions and A More Beautiful Question—both published by Bloomsbury. Berger also writes for Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and was a longtime contributing editor at Wired magazine. He has appeared on NBC’s Today Show, ABC World News, many times on CNN, and as a frequently-used expert source on NPR’s All Things Considered. He lives in New York.

The Book of Beautiful Questions has been adopted for First-Year Experience programs at:

University of Vermont’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Learning Community

The Moment of Lift

Flatiron Books
Paperback
304 pages • $17.99
ISBN: 9781250257727

How Empowering Women Changes the World

Melinda Gates

“Drawing on her vast experiences meeting women in far-flung corners of the developing world, Gates’ book is a heartfelt memoir about stepping out of her comfort zone, as well as a manifesto of sorts about the transformative power of broadening women’s rights.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

For the last twenty years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift a society up, you need to stop keeping women down. Melinda shares lessons she’s learned from the inspiring people she’s met during her work and travels around the world. Her moving and compelling narrative is backed by startling data as she presents the issues that most need our attention—from child marriage to lack of access to contraceptives to gender inequity in the workplace. And, for the first time, she writes about her personal life and the road to equality in her own marriage. Throughout, Melinda shows how there has never been more opportunity to change the world—and ourselves. Writing with emotion, candor, and grace, she introduces us to remarkable women and shows the power of connecting with one another. When we lift others up, they lift us up, too.

Melinda Gates is a philanthropist, businesswoman, and global advocate for women and girls. As the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinda sets the direction and priorities of the world’s largest philanthropy. She is also the founder of Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company working to drive social progress for women and families in the United States. Melinda grew up in Dallas, Texas and lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband, Bill. They have three children, Jenn, Rory, and Phoebe. For more information, please visit momentoflift.com.

Binti

Tor.com
Paperback
96 pages • $9.99
ISBN: 9780765385253

Nnedi Okorafor

Winner of the Hugo Award
Winner of the Nebula Award

“Binti is a compact gem of adventure, bravery and other worlds. Nnedi Okorafor efficiently and effectively uses the short format to create a visual, suspenseful ride. And the heroine, Binti, invites us along to participate in her secret mission. From the start she is special and destined for greater things, but without knowing the tests that will challenge her resilience. As a result, her heroism and vulnerabilities grab our attention, holding tight until the end.”

—USA Today

Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs. Knowledge comes at a cost, one that Binti is willing to pay, but her journey will not be easy. The world she seeks to enter has long warred with the Meduse, an alien race that has become the stuff of nightmares. Oomza University has wronged the Meduse, and Binti’s stellar travel will bring her within their deadly reach. If Binti hopes to survive the legacy of a war not of her making, she will need both the gifts of her people and the wisdom enshrined within the University, itself—but first she has to make it there, alive.

Nnedi Okorafor born to Igbo Nigerian parents in Cincinnati, Ohio, won the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa for her children’s book, Long Juju Man. Her adult novel, Who Fears Death, was a James Tiptree, Jr. Honor List book. She is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at the University at Buffalo.

Binti has been adopted for First-Year Experience programs at:

Owensboro Community and Technical College (KY); San Juan College (CA); Stockton University (NJ)

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Sharks in the Time of Saviors

Picador
Paperback
400 pages • $17.00
ISBN: 9781250787316

A Novel

Kawaii Strong Washburn

Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award

“With prose that can be breathy and sweaty in one paragraph before gliding softly and tenderly into the next, this passionate writer cries out for us to see Hawai’i in its totality: as a place of proud ancestors and gods and spirits, but also of crumbling families and hopelessness and poverty. Of mystery and beauty at every corner.”

—Imbolo Mbue, The New York Times Book Review

In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawai’i, on a rare family vacation, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard a cruise ship into the Pacific Ocean. When a shiver of sharks appears in the water, everyone fears for the worst. But instead, Noa is gingerly delivered to his mother in the jaws of a shark, marking his story as the stuff of legends. Nainoa’s family, struggling amidst the collapse of the sugarcane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favor from ancient Hawaiian gods—a belief that appears validated after he exhibits puzzling new abilities. But as time passes, this supposed divine favor begins to drive the family apart: Nainoa, working now as a paramedic on the streets of Portland, struggles to fathom the full measure of his expanding abilities; further north in Washington, his older brother Dean hurtles into the world of elite college athletics, obsessed with wealth and fame; while in California, risk-obsessed younger sister Kaui navigates an unforgiving academic workload in an attempt to forge her independence from the family’s legacy. When supernatural events revisit the Flores family in Hawai’i—with tragic consequences—they are all forced to reckon with the bonds of family, the meaning of heritage, and the cost of survival.

Kawaii Strong Washburn was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai’i. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other outlets. He was a 2015 Tin House Summer Scholar and 2015 Bread Loaf workstudy scholar. Today, he lives with his wife and daughters in Minneapolis.

Permission to Feel

Celadon Books
Paperback
304 pages • $17.99
ISBN: 9781250212832

Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive

Marc Brackett, Ph.D.

“A compelling and complete journey that delivers on its promise of giving us permission to feel. Marc Brackett shows us that emotional intelligence is not a gift but a skill—one that we can all learn, and benefit from immensely.”

—Angela Duckworth, bestselling author of Grit

In his twenty-five years as an emotion scientist, Marc Brackett has developed a remarkably effective plan to improve the lives of children and adults—a blueprint for understanding our emotions and using them wisely so that they help, rather than hinder, our success and well-being. The core of his approach is a legacy from his childhood, from an astute uncle who gave him permission to feel. He was the first adult who managed to see Marc, listen to him, and recognize the suffering, bullying, and abuse he’d endured. In the decades since, Marc has led large research teams and raised tens of millions of dollars to investigate the roots of emotional well-being. His prescription for healthy children (and their parents, teachers, and schools) is a system called RULER, a high-impact and fast-effect approach to understanding and mastering emotions. RULER has been proven to reduce stress and burnout, improve school climate, and enhance academic achievement. This book is the culmination of Marc’s development of RULER and his way to share the strategies and skills with readers around the world. It is tested, and it works.

Marc Brackett, Ph.D., is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center at Yale University. Marc has received numerous awards and is on the board of directors for the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). He is co-founder of Oji Life Lab, a digital emotional intelligence learning system for businesses. Marc also consults regularly with corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google on integrating emotional intelligence principles into employee training and product design.

The Stressed Years of Their Lives

St. Martin’s Griffin
Paperback
352 pages • $17.99
ISBN: 9781250113146

Helping Your Kid Survive and Thrive During Their College Years

B. Janet Hibbs, Ph.D., M.F.T and Anthony Rostain, M.D., M.A.

“I can think of no better guide than The Stressed Years of
Their Lives for overwhelmed parents and stressed-out kids for navigating these turbulent times. This is required reading for the college set.”

—Brigid Schulte, author of The New York Times bestselling Overwhelmed

With campus hazards like binge drinking and sexual assault making routine headlines and the skyrocketing rate of college mental health problems, parents are rightly concerned about “letting go.” The transitional years of late adolescence and young adulthood are a time when mood disorders, substance abuse, and other serious mental health challenges emerge. When family psychologist Dr. Hibbs’s own son came home from college mired in a dangerous depressive spiral, she turned to Dr. Rostain, a nationally recognized expert in child and adolescent psychiatry. He understands the arcane rules governing privacy and parental involvement in students’ mental health care on college campuses—the same rules that sometimes hold parents back from getting good care for their kids. Now these two doctors have combined their expertise in adolescent and young adult mental health care. From their years of clinical and personal experience, they have assembled a practical and compassionate guide for every parent of a college or college-bound student who wants to know what’s normal, what’s not, and how to help and intervene before it’s too late.

B. Janet Hibbs, Ph.D., M.F.T. has held faculty positions for more than 15 years in graduate programs for psychologists and marital and family therapists. She is the author of Try to See It My Way: Being Fair in Love and Marriage.

Anthony Rostain, M.D., M.A. is a nationally-recognized expert in child and adolescent psychiatry, and a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).

Just Us

Graywolf Press
Paperback
360 pages • $20.00
ISBN: 9781644450215

An American Conversation

Claudia Rankine

“Claudia Rankine has once again written a book that feels both timely and timeless, and an essential part of the conversations all Americans are having (or should be having) right now.”

—Refinery29

As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect. This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend’s explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.

Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Just Us completes her groundbreaking trilogy, following Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen. She is a MacArthur Fellow and teaches at Yale University.