Find books worth reading and ideas worth discussing.

Book cover

History & Society

The Color of Law

A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

By

The book presents a historical and constitutional argument about residential segregation in the United States. Richard Rothstein disputes the familiar description of metropolitan segregation as merely de facto—that is, arising through private prejudice, household preference, economic inequality, or market behavior without decisive government involvement. He argues that federal, state, and local authorities repeatedly imposed, reinforced, or protected racial separation, making much of the resulting geography de jure segregation. ([guides.loc.gov](https://guides.loc.gov/real-estate-industry-sources/residential/fair-housing?utm_source=openai)) Rothstein builds this case through connected examples rather than a single-city history. He examines racially explicit zoning, segregated public housing, discriminatory federal mortgage policy, suburban development restricted to white purchasers, tax and land-use decisions, official tolerance of violence against integrating families, and public act…

View The Color of Law

Book cover

History & Society

Invisible Women

Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

By

Invisible Women examines what happens when institutions treat male bodies, routines, and experiences as the human norm. Caroline Criado Perez calls attention to a “gender data gap”: missing, unreported, or insufficiently separated information about women. Her central argument is not merely that women are absent from datasets. It is that decisions made from incomplete evidence can turn that absence into material disadvantages—including unsuitable products, ineffective public services, distorted economic measurements, and avoidable health and safety risks. The book moves from ordinary environments to increasingly consequential systems. Its six parts address daily life, employment, design, medicine, public life, and disasters. Examples involving transportation, toilets, unpaid care, workplace practices, protective equipment, phones, medical research, government spending, refugee assistance, and disaster recovery allow the same underlying pattern to be observed across otherwise unrelated…

View Invisible Women

Book cover

History & Society

The Jakarta Method

Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World

By

Vincent Bevins presents a transnational history of Cold War anticommunist violence, placing the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966 at the center of a much larger story. Rather than treating Indonesia as a peripheral episode in a contest dominated by Washington and Moscow, he argues that the destruction of Indonesia’s organized left was a major geopolitical turning point. The book traces connections among decolonization, the Non-Aligned Movement, the 1964 Brazilian military coup, the Indonesian Army’s rise under Suharto, and later campaigns of repression in Latin America and elsewhere. The phrase “Jakarta Method” describes more than one operation or fixed doctrine. In the book, it becomes a framework for recognizing a recurring political pattern: communist, socialist, labor, peasant, or reform movements are portrayed as existential threats; military and conservative forces receive encouragement or assistance; targeted people are detained, disappeared, or killed; and the resulting po…

View The Jakarta Method