11 minute read
General Interest
AVERTING CATASTROPHE
Decision Theory for COVID-19, Climate Change, and Potential Disasters of All Kinds CASS R. SUNSTEIN
Best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein examines how to avoid worst-case scenarios
The world is increasingly confronted with new challenges related to climate change, globalization, disease, and technology. Governments are faced with having to decide how much risk is worth taking, how much destruction and death can be tolerated, and how much money should be invested in the hopes of avoiding catastrophe. Lacking full information, should decision-makers focus on avoiding the most catastrophic outcomes? When should extreme measures be taken to prevent as much destruction as possible? Averting Catastrophe explores how governments ought to make decisions in times of imminent disaster. Cass R. Sunstein argues that using the “maximin rule,” which calls for choosing the approach that eliminates the worst of the worst-case scenarios, may be necessary when public officials lack important information, and when the worstcase scenario is too disastrous to contemplate. He underscores this argument by emphasizing the reality of “Knightian uncertainty,” found in circumstances in which it is not possible to assign probabilities to various outcomes. Sunstein brings foundational issues in decision theory in close contact with real problems in regulation, law, and daily life, and considers other potential future risks. At once an approachable introduction to decision-theory and a provocative argument for how governments ought to handle risk, Averting Catastrophe offers a definitive path forward in a world rife with uncertainty.
Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. He is the author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler), Conformity: The Power of Social Influences, How Change Happens, and Too Much Information: Understanding What You Don’t Want to Know.
Also of Interest!
Conformity The Power of Social Influences by Cass R. Sunstein
Now available in paperback. Read more on page 39.
April 2021 176 pages • 5 x 8 Cloth • 9781479808489 • $19.95T(£15.99)
Current Events
GROWING UP BANK STREET
A Greenwich Village Memoir DONNA FLORIO
Donna Florio is a lifelong resident of Bank Street in Greenwich Village. Nurtured by colorful, eccentric neighbors who taught her to “never wonder about life from the outside. Jump in!” Donna has, over the years, worked as an opera singer, a TV producer, a Wall Street executive, and an educator, and has backpacked around the world.
March 2021 240 pages • 5.5 x 8.5 30 black & white illustrations Cloth • 9781479803200 • $24.95T(£19.99)
Memoir | New York City Washington Mews Books A vivid memoir of life in one of New York City’s most dynamic neighborhoods
Growing Up Bank Street is an evocative, tender account of life in Greenwich Village, on a unique street that offered warmth, support, and inspiration to an adventurous and openhearted young girl. Bank Street, a short strip of elegant brownstones and humble tenements in Greenwich Village, can trace its lineage back to the yellow fever epidemics of colonial New York. In the middle of the last century, it became home to a cast of extraordinary characters whose stories intertwine in this spirited narrative. Growing up, Donna Florio had flamboyant, opera performer parents and even more free-spirited neighbors. As a child, she lived among beatniks, artists, rock musicians, social visionaries, movie stars, and gritty blue-collar workers, who imparted to her their irrepressibly eccentric life rules. The real-life Auntie Mame taught her that she is a divine flame from the universe. John Lennon, who lived down the street, was gracious when she dumped water on his head. Sex Pistols star Sid Vicious lived in the apartment next door, and his heroin overdose death came as a wake-up call during her wild twenties. An elderly Broadway dancer led by brave example as Donna helped him comfort dying Villagers in the terrifying early days of AIDS, and a reclusive writer gave her a path back from the brink when, as a witness to the attacks of 9/11, her world collapsed. These vibrant vignettes weave together a colorful coming of age tale against the backdrop of a historic, iconoclastic street whose residents have been at the heart of the American story. As Greenwich Village gentrifies and the hallmarks of its colorful past disappear, Growing Up Bank Street gives the reader a captivating glimpse of the thriving culture that once filled its storied streets.
GILDED AGE COCKTAILS
History, Lore, and Recipes from America's Golden Age CECELIA TICHI
A delightful romp through America’s Golden Age of Cocktails
The decades following the American Civil War burst with invention—they saw the dawn of the telephone, the motor car, electric lights, the airplane—but no innovation was more welcome than the beverage heralded as the “cocktail.” The Gilded Age, as it came to be known, was the Golden Age of Cocktails, giving birth to the classic Manhattan and martini that can be ordered at any bar to this day. Scores of whiskey drinks, cooled with ice chips or cubes that chimed against the glass, proved doubly pleasing when mixed, shaken, or stirred with special flavorings, juices, and fruits. The dazzling new drinks flourished coast to coast at sporting events, luncheons, and balls, on ocean liners and yachts, in barrooms, summer resorts, hotels, railroad train club cars, and private homes. From New York to San Francisco, celebrity bartenders rose to fame, inventing drinks for exclusive universities and exotic locales. Bartenders poured their liquid secrets for dancing girls and such industry tycoons as the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and the railroad king “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt. Cecelia Tichi offers a tour of the cocktail hours of the Gilded Age, in which industry, innovation, and progress all take a break to enjoy the signature beverage of the age. Gilded Age Cocktails reveals the fascinating history behind each drink as well as bartenders’ formerly secret recipes. Though the Gilded Age cocktail went “underground” during the Prohibition era, it launched the first of many generations whose palates thrilled to a panoply of artistically mixed drinks.
Cecelia Tichi is an award-winning author and Professor of American literature and culture at Vanderbilt University. Her books include Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America and What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age. Cecelia currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee.
April 2021 176 pages • 5.5 x 8 31 black & white illustrations Cloth • 9781479805259 • $19.95T(£15.99)
History | Lifestyle Washington Mews Books
THE PORNIFICATION OF AMERICA
How Raunch Culture Is Ruining Our Society BERNADETTE BARTON
Bernadette Barton is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Morehead State University, and the author of Stripped: More Stories from Exotic Dancers and Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays.
An up-close look at how porn permeates our culture
Pictures of half-naked girls and women can seem to litter almost every screen, billboard, and advertisement in America. Pole-dancing studios keep women fit. Men airdrop their dick pics to female passengers on planes and trains. To top it off, the First Lady has modeled nude and the “leader of the free world” has bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy.” This pornification of our society is what Bernadette Barton calls “raunch culture.” Barton explores what raunch culture is, why it matters, and how it is ruining America. She exposes how internet porn drives trends in programming, advertising, and social media, and makes its way onto our phones, into our fashion choices, and into our sex lives. From twerking and breast implants, to fake nails and push-up bras, she explores just how much we encounter raunch culture on a daily basis—porn is the new normal. Drawing on interviews, television shows, movies, and social media, Barton argues that raunch culture matters not because it is sexy, but because it is sexist. She shows how young women are encouraged to be sexy like porn stars, and to be grateful for getting cat-called or receiving unsolicited dick pics. As politicians vote to restrict women’s access to birth control and abortion, The Pornification of America exposes the double standard we attach to women’s sexuality.
March 2021 224 pages • 6 x 9 63 black & white illustrations Cloth • 9781479894437 • $24.95T(£19.99)
Current Events
MISOGYNOIR TRANSFORMED
Black Women’s Digital Resistance MOYA BAILEY
Where racism and sexism meet—an understanding of anti-Black misogyny
When Moya Bailey first coined the term misogynoir, she defined it as the ways anti-Black and misogynistic representation shape broader ideas about Black women, particularly in visual culture and digital spaces. She had no idea that the term would go viral, touching a cultural nerve and quickly entering into the lexicon. Misogynoir now has its own Wikipedia page and hashtag, and has been featured on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time. In Misogynoir Transformed, Bailey delves into her groundbreaking concept, highlighting Black women’s digital resistance to anti-Black misogyny on YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, and other platforms. At a time when Black women are depicted as more ugly, deficient, hypersexual, and unhealthy than their non-Black counterparts, Bailey explores how Black women have bravely used social-media platforms to confront misogynoir in a number of courageous—and, most importantly, effective— ways. Focusing on queer and trans Black women, she shows us the importance of carving out digital spaces, where communities are built around queer Black webshows and hashtags like #GirlsLikeUs. Bailey shows how Black women actively reimagine the world by engaging in powerful forms of digital resistance at a time when anti-Black misogyny is thriving on social media. A groundbreaking work, Misogynoir Transformed highlights Black women’s remarkable efforts to disrupt mainstream narratives, subvert negative stereotypes, and reclaim their lives.
Moya Bailey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies and the program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and an MLK Visiting Scholar at MIT.
“I coined the term “misogynoir” to describe the anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience, and to my surprise, it went viral. In Misogynoir Transformed I argue that Black women’s digital resistance to misogynoir, through the creation of new content and digital practices, is a form of self-preservation and harm reduction, one that attempts to redress the negative impact of stereotypes in their lives and on their health.” —Moya Bailey
May 2021 256 pages • 6 x 9 Cloth • 9781479865109 • $28.00A(£21.99) In Intersections
African American Studies | Media Studies
READ AVIDLY. THINK BOLDLY.
Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, each volume in the Avidly Reads series brings to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Building on the popular online magazine Avidly, founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle and supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books, Avidly Reads continues the Avidly project of encouraging experts to offer original, surprising, and entertaining explorations of how it feels to try and understand the world. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life. “It is a truth too rarely acknowledged that there is nothing better than being both smart and fun: how lucky for us, then, that Avidly Reads books are both. To delve into them is to engage new ideas without having to sacrifice pleasure for knowledge, or feeling for thinking.” —Naomi Fry, staff writer at the New Yorker
AVIDLY READS GUILTY PLEASURES
ARIELLE ZIBRAK
"My guilty pleasure wasn’t just reading lowbrow fiction or even female-authored fiction, it was being femme itself."
What is it about ribald romance novels, luxurious interior design, and frothy wedding dresses that often make women feel their desires come with a shadow of shame? In Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures, Arielle Zibrak considers the specifically pleasurable forms of feminine guilt and desire stimulated by supposedly “lowbrow” aesthetic tendencies. She takes up the overwhelming preoccupation with the experience of being humiliated, dominated, or even abused that has pervaded the stories that make up women’s culture—from eighteenth-century epistolary novels to popular twentieth-century teen magazine features to present-day romantic comedies. In three chapters—“Rough Sex,” “Expensive Sheets,” and “Saying Yes to the Dress”—that mirror the plot structures of feminine fictions themselves, this book tells the story of the desires that only the guiltiest of pleasures evoke. Zibrak reexamines documents of femme culture long dismissed as “trash” to reveal the surprisingly cathartic experiences produced by tales of domination, privilege, and the material trappings of the heteropatriarchy. Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the singular blend of personal memoir and cultural criticism featured in the series, Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures reclaims women’s experiences for themselves.
Arielle Zibrak is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wyoming. Her work has appeared in The Baffler, The Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s, and The Toast.
May 2021 176 pages • 4.37 x 7 Paper • 9781479807093 • $14.95T(£11.99) Cloth • 9781479807079 • $79.00X (£65.00)
