New Books & Media: New Books

The United States has the most extensive immigration detention system in the world, expanding from a capacity of less than 5,000 detainees per day in the 1980s to 52,000 by 2019. While the most vociferous anti-immigrant rhetoric may be attributed to Republicans, US detention infrastructure has grown exponentially regardless of the political party in power as reports of abysmal detention conditions pile up. Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon provide a damning exposé of the ways immigration detention generates income. At the same time, those detained are starved, sickened, and exploited as a matter of routine detention operations. Drawing on over a decade of research focusing on detention centers in New Jersey and New York, the authors map public-private financial relationships and trace how detention contracts for food, medical care, and in-facility stores are fought over to the penny. By dissecting the inner workings of immigration detention, they show a system governed by a capitalist logic that produces sickening and corrupting dependencies in communities across the US. Coming at a pivotal social and political moment, Immigration Detention Inc. makes the case for dismantling immigration detention regimes everywhere.

The real truth behind the original fake news with this in-depth history of beloved humor publication, The Onion. In 1988, a band of University of Wisconsin-Madison undergrads set out to publish a free weekly newspaper with no editorial stance other than "You Are Dumb," and-over the course of twenty years-changed the way we consume both our comedy and our news. The Onion served as a hilarious and brutally perceptive satire of the absurdity and horrors of late twentieth century American life and grew into a global phenomenon. Now, for the first time, the full history of the publication is told by one of its original staffers, author and historian Christine Wenc. Wenc charts The Onion's rise, its position as one of the first online humor sites on the internet, and the way it influenced television programs like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report through dozens of interviews. Funny Because It's True peels back the layers to reveal how a group of young misfits from flyover country unintentionally created a cultural phenomenon.

An entrancing collection of myths and legends of the sea. The sea is beautiful and alluring, but it is also dangerous and deadly. Above all, it is unknowable and untamable. Storytelling offered our ancestors a means to understand and interact with the natural world, and in time these stories coalesced into the mythological systems of the world. And the ocean features in every mythological system in history [...] Gerry Smyth gathers together myths and folktales from cultures around the world: Native American, Caribbean, Polynesian, Persian, Indian, Scandinavian, and European. Just as these stories have been passed down through generations, he brings his own narrative interpretation with additional discussion on their meaning. [...] Origin Stories; Gods and Humans; Voyages; Lost Places, Imagined Spaces; Weather and Nature; Down to the Sea in Ships; and Fabulous Beasts--and embellished with artworks, paintings, medieval illuminations, maps, and sailor sketches drawn from the wide-ranging collections of the British Library.

We are often told that social media well-being is simply the result of individual users making healthy digital choices. All it takes is a little self-discipline. In this book, Niall Docherty looks closely at this belief and exposes the complex relations of power expressed through its articulation and enactment. Docherty creatively and empirically shows how the discourses, designs, and habits of online well-being push user conduct in certain directions, at the expense of others. This is a contingent mode of governance that combines logics of neoliberalism, practices of psychologized person-making, and persuasive capitalist interfaces. By highlighting the damaging effects of this current arrangement, Healthy Users charts a path that will change how we understand and study social media well-being in the future.

Actress and content creator Dylan Mulvaney's honest account of her journey through girlhood--an instant New York Times bestseller! When Dylan Mulvaney came out as a woman online, she was a viral sensation almost overnight, emerging as a trailblazing voice on social media. Dylan's personal coming-out story blossomed into a platform for advocacy and empowerment for trans people all over the world. Through her "Days of Girlhood" series, she connected with followers by exploring what it means to be a girl, from experimenting with makeup to story times to spilling the tea about laser hair removal, while never shying away from discussing the transphobia she faced online. Nevertheless, she was determined to be a beacon of positivity. [...] It's both laugh-out-loud funny and powerfully honest--and is a love letter to everyone who stands up for queer joy.

From the acclaimed author of the young adult graphic novel Flamer comes a heartwarming story following four gay Asians navigating love, identity, and friendship--a celebration of queer chosen family. When AJ moves to Seattle in the early aughts, he's ready to reinvent himself as a gay Asian man--but his dreams hit reality fast with no friends, no job, and an apartment so far out, "not even lesbians live there." Then a spilled drink at a bar introduces him to K, a glamorous drag queen; John, a shy gamer and Steven, a reckless flirt. AJ's "Boy Luck Club" helps him find love, pride, and belonging--until a brutal attack tests everything they know about friendship and family. Meticulously observed and gorgeously illustrated, Gaysians is a fierce, funny, and tender story of queer resilience and self-discovery. "I've been hunting for books like this my whole life; this story broke my heart and healed it."--Maia Kobabe, author of Gender Queer

Scholars have long recognized that interpersonal networks play a role in mobilizing social movements. Yet, many questions remain. This Element addresses these questions by theorizing about three dimensions of ties: emotionally strong or weak, movement insider or outsider, and ingroup or cross-cleavage. The survey data on the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests show that weak and cross-cleavage ties among outsiders enabled the movement to evolve from a small provocation into a massive national mobilization. In particular, the authors find that Black people mobilized one another through social media and spurred their non-Black friends to protest by sharing their personal encounters with racism. These results depart from the established literature regarding the civil rights movement that emphasizes strong, movement-internal, and racially homogenous ties. The networks that mobilize appear to have changed in the social media era. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

In her New York Times bestseller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice. Focusing on the aftermath of Shelby, Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. In a powerful new afterword, she examines the repercussions of the 2018 midterm elections. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans.

Enshittification: it's not just you--the internet sucks now. Here's why, and here's how we can disenshittify it. We're living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It's frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying. Enshittification identifies the problem and proposes a solution. [...]The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users--and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. In the end, the platforms die. Doctorow's argument clearly resonated. Once named, it became obvious that enshittification is everywhere, so much so that the American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year, and was cited as an inspiration for the 2025 season of Black Mirror. [...] He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and--most important--how they can be undone.

Michael Dressel, born in East Berlin in 1958, is a wanderer between American and German culture. His regular journeys between his home towns on the American West Coast and Berlin have sensitized him to recognize the social changes of recent decades more clearly than most locals. His second book shows his view of American society on the eve of a historic election. The Americans have a choice between sanity and madness, between an orderly civiln state and increasing decay and chaos. From a Central European perspective, the choice seems clear, but to get a sense of the current state of mind of Americans, it helps to look at this book with its end-time title. Dressel's impressive images show a society on the edge of the abyss, marked by extreme nationalism, political polarization, religious fanaticism, gun mania coupled with paranoia and pervasive poverty and moral decay. His portraits are complemented by landscape photographs that speak their own gloomy language.