John G. Turner's excellent new history of the early American separatists, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty (Yale University Press, 2020) provides a new benchmark study of Plymouth Colony. Turner provides a readable and convincing narrative of how a group of religious refugees sought to establish a home to pursue their radical Protestant faith, while struggling to extend the same liberties to Native peoples and other dissenting groups. This brilliant work of scholarship sheds light on neglected sources and models a striking balance between charitable and critical reading of this significant moment in early American history. Find out more about John Turner on his website or follow him on Twitter (@johngturner2020).
The Me Too movement, started by Black feminist Tarana Burke in 2006, went viral as a hashtag eleven years later after a tweet by white actor Alyssa Milano. Mainstream movements like #MeToo have often built on and co-opted the work of women of colour, while refusing to learn from them or centre their concerns. Far too often, the message is not ‘Me, Too’ but ‘Me, Not You’. Alison Phipps argues that this is not just a lack of solidarity. Privileged white women also sacrifice more marginalised people to achieve their aims, or even define them as enemies when they get in the way. Me, not you argues that the mainstream movement against sexual violence expresses a political whiteness that both reflects its demographics and limits its revolutionary potential. Privileged white women use their traumatic experiences to create media outrage, while relying on state power and bureaucracy to purge ‘bad men’ from elite institutions with little concern for where they might appear next. In their attacks on sex workers and trans people, the more reactionary branches of this feminist movement play into the hands of the resurgent far-right.
Dr. Phipps is the author of Women in Science, Engineering and Technology: Three Decades of UK Initiatives (Trentham Books, 2008), an examination of the mixed results of the UK’s attempts to address gender disparity STEM fields through policy and The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age (Polity Press, 2014) an award-winning look at the way feminists find themselves negotiating a very tight passage between the Scylla and Charybdis of neoconservatives and neoliberals, as well as a bevy or articles on similar issues.
Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.
What does the birth of babies whose embryos have gone through genome editing mean—for science and for all of us?
In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos—as dramatic a development in genetics as the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences in CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans (The MIT Press, 2021). Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention.
The two babies, nonidentical twin girls, were the first “CRISPR'd” people ever born (CRISPR, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is a powerful gene-editing method). Greely not only describes He's experiment and its public rollout (aided by a public relations adviser) but also considers, in a balanced and thoughtful way, the lessons to be drawn both from these CRISPR'd babies and, more broadly, from this kind of human DNA editing—“germline editing” that can be passed on from one generation to the next.
Greely doesn't mince words, describing He's experiment as grossly reckless, irresponsible, immoral, and illegal. Although he sees no inherent or unmanageable barriers to human germline editing, he also sees very few good uses for it—other, less risky, technologies can achieve the same benefits. We should consider the implications carefully before we proceed.
Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.
In this new volume, Dr. Steinberg offers both theoretical inferences and practical guidance related to the application of psychoanalysis to medical practice. Dr. Steinberg provides insight on, among many other topics, how clinicians’ awareness of their own feelings can aid in the diagnostic process and how a psychoanalytic approach can enrich patient interview.
Alec Kacew is a medical school student at the University of Chicago.
The arrival in 1532 of a small group of Spanish conquistadores at the Andean town of Cajamarca launched one of the most dramatic – and often misunderstood – events in world history. In Inca Apocalypse: The Spanish Conquest and the Transformation of the Andean World (Oxford UP, 2020), R. Alan Covey draws upon a wealth of new archaeological and archival discoveries to detail the remarkable events that ended one empire and transformed another. From this he builds a new narrative that highlights the apocalyptic mindsets of the two empires and how these shaped the interactions between the Spanish and the Inca. As Covey explains, the Spaniards arrived at a point when the Incan empire was coping with the disruptions caused by a civil war and a devastating pandemic. To the Inca and their neighbors, the Spaniards were yet another disruptive force, one that different groups in the region sought to exploit for their own purposes. The result was twenty years of political infighting and warfare, culminating in the defeat of insurrectionary Spaniards by a force of Incans fighting on behalf of the king of Spain. Though such maneuvering helped preserve a degree of status for the Inca elite, it opened the way for the gradual absorption of the Inca into the Spanish empire in a process that played out over the following century.
A scientist assesses the potential of stem cell therapies for treating such brain disorders as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease.
Stem cell therapies are the subject of enormous hype, endowed by the media with almost magical qualities and imagined by the public to bring about miracle cures. Stem cells have the potential to generate new cells of different types, and have been shown to do so in certain cases. Could stem cell transplants repair the damaged brain? In his book The Future of Brain Repair: A Realist's Guide to Stem Cell Therapy (MIT Press, 2020), neurobiologist Jack Price assesses the potential of stem cell therapies to treat such brain disorders as stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injuries.
Certainly brain disorders are in need of effective treatments. These disorders don’t just kill, they disable, and conventional drug therapies have not had much success in treating them. Price explains that repairing the human brain is difficult, largely because of its structural, functional, and developmental complexity. He examines the self-repairing capacity of blood and gut cells—and the lack of such capacity in the brain; describes the limitations of early brain stem cell therapies for neurodegenerative disorders; and discusses current clinical trials that may lead to the first licensed stem cell therapies for stroke, Parkinson’s and macular degeneration. And he describes the real promise of pluripotential stem cells, which can make all the cell types that constitute the body.
New technologies, Price reports, challenge the very notion of cell transplantation, instead seeking to convince the brain itself to manufacture the new cells it needs. Could this be the true future of brain repair?
You can find more about Jack’s work here and here.
Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.
Nutritionists tell you to eat more fish. Environmentalists tell you to eat less fish. Apparently they are both right. It's the same thing with almonds, or quinoa, or a hundred other foods. But is it really incumbent on us as individuals to resolve this looming global catastrophe? From plastic packaging to soil depletion to flatulent cows, we are bombarded with information about the perils of our food system.
Drawing on years of experience within the food industry, Anthony Warner invites us to reconsider what we think we know. In Ending Hunger: The Quest to Feed the World without Destroying It(Simon and Schuster, 2021), he uncovers the parallels between eating locally and 1930s fascism, promotes the potential for good in genetic modification and dispels the assumption that population growth is at the heart of our planetary woes.
Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People's History of Poverty (New Press, 2008), Ghettos, Tramps & Welfare Queens (Oxford, 2017), and Politics for Social Workers (Columbia, forthcoming 2021).
Journalists, scholars, politicians, and citizens often assume that calls for secession are political or historical aberrations. Our founding myth is that the Civil War divided an otherwise united nation and we soon reconstructed the United States to form a more perfect union. But Richard Kreitner’s provocative new book,
Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union (Little Brown, 2020), argues that “disunion” is the hidden thread in the history of the United States. Kreitner is a contributing writer to The Nation who has also published in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, Raritan, and The Baffler.
American politics from colonial times to the present, Break it Up argues, has always included “forces that have conspired to divide it” and Kreitner insists that we get a more nuanced and comprehensive “understanding of both our contentious past and our uncertain future” if we confront that history. Drawing on rich scholarship from multiple disciplines Break It Up argues that the United States has “always been riven by race and religion, cleaved by class and culture, sundered by section, and fragmented by geography.” The United States was always a “tentative proposition” – an “experiment that might fail at any time.” The book insists that asking questions about unity is the “prerequisite for serious discussion about what we Americans want the future to hold for ourselves and this perennially divided union.” Moreover, facing disunion assists in the work of building an inclusive, multiracial democracy capable of combating climate change or racial equality. As the book starkly puts it, the U.S. should either finish the work of Reconstruction or give up on the idea of the “united” states as currently conceived.
Break It Up uses four eras to trace the theme of disunion. “A Vast, Unwieldy Machine” deals with the colonial and Revolutionary periods with Kreitner arguing that resisting a common enemy in the British should not be mistaken for unity. For example, the process of unification was characterized by bitter disagreements over representation and the protection of enslavement in the proposed Constitution. Here, Kreitner reviews some of what is well known in the literature but also smaller (and heated) controversies that may surprise those who think they know the period well. The second era highlights the disagreements in the early Republic over the increase in land (e.g., the Louisiana Purchase) and Aaron Burr’s attempt to break off parts of the country to form an independent Empire. For Hamilton: An American Musical buffs, Kreitner challenges some of Chernow’s assumptions to create a more nuanced understanding of the first Secretary of the Treasury. Kreitner’s third era documents the increasing appetite for disunion in the years before the American Civil War – and the ultimate schism. The fourth period is less defined by chronology. “Return of the Repressed” ranges from Reconstruction to 21st century plans for secession. Kreitner argues that Reconstruction’s failure to resolve fundamental conflicts leave us with a nation perpetually split over race and class.
In the early 1970s, a new wave of public service announcements urged parents to help end an American tradition of child abuse. The message, relayed repeatedly over television and radio, urged abusive parents to seek help.
Support groups for parents, including Parents Anonymous, proliferated across the country to deal with the seemingly burgeoning crisis. At the same time, an ever-increasing number of abused children were reported to child welfare agencies, due in part to an expansion of mandatory reporting laws and the creation of reporting hotlines across the nation.
InAbusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way(University of North Carolina Press Books, 2020), Mical Raz examines this history of child abuse policy and charts how it changed since the late 1960s, specifically taking into account the frequency with which agencies removed African American children from their homes and placed them in foster care. Highlighting the rise of Parents Anonymous and connecting their activism to the sexual abuse moral panic that swept the country in the 1980s, Raz argues that these panics and policies--as well as biased viewpoints regarding race, class, and gender--played a powerful role shaping perceptions of child abuse. These perceptions were often directly at odds with the available data and disproportionately targeted poor African American families above others.
Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.
How to understand propaganda art in the post-truth era—and how to create a new kind of emancipatory propaganda art. Propaganda art — whether a depiction of joyous workers in the style of socialist realism or a film directed by Steve Bannon — delivers a message. In Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2019), Jonas Staal argues that propaganda does not merely make a political point; it aims to construct reality itself. Political regimes have shaped our world according to their interests and ideology; today, popular mass movements push back by constructing other worlds with their own propaganda.
Jonas Staal speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about his proposal for a new model of emancipatory propaganda art — one that acknowledges the relationship between art and power and takes both an aesthetic and a political position in the practice of world-making.
Jonas Staal is a scholar of propaganda and a self-described propaganda artist. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing) and the campaign New Unions (2016–ongoing). With BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, he co-founded the New World Academy (2013–16). His most recent project Collectivize Facebook exploring legal ways to return the ownership of data in its many forms to the collective ownership of the users of software platforms.
Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemprary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.
