Published

When Susan Barry first wrote to Oliver Sacks, she never expected a response, let alone the deep friendship that blossomed over ten years of letters. Now, she is sharing those letters for the first time. Dear Oliver: An Unexpected Friendship with Oliver Sacks is an intimate and inspiring book, that explores the joy and complexity of adult friendships.

It began when Sue—a neuroscientist—wrote to share an extraordinary development in her medical history. Severely cross-eyed since birth, Sue had been told she would never acquire stereovision—the ability to see in 3D—and yet she did, a development at odds with decades of research. Within days, Oliver replied, “Your letter fills me with amazement and admiration.”

In a painful twist of fate, as Sue’s vision improves, Oliver’s declines. And as it becomes harder for him to see, his characteristic small type shifts to handwritten letters. Sue later recognizes this to be early signs of the cancer that ultimately ends his life. These letters are a joyful celebration of, as Oliver writes, a “deep and stimulating friendship” that “has been a wonderful and unexpected addition to my life.”

The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture – a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind.

The Gutenberg Parenthesis traces the epoch of print from its fateful beginnings to our digital present – and draws out lessons for the age to come. It reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass – mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on – that came to dominate the public sphere.

Brimming with broad implications for today’s debates over communication, authorship, and ownership, Jarvis’ exploration of print on a grand scale is also a complex, compelling history of technology and power.

Most research on poverty focuses on the damage caused by persistent unemployment. But what happens when jobs are plentiful and workers are hard to come by? A timely investigation into sustained tight labor markets, Moving the Needle examines how very low unemployment boosts wages at the bottom, improves benefits, lengthens job ladders, and pulls the unemployed into a booming job market.

Drawing on over seventy years of quantitative data, as well as interviews with employers, jobseekers, and longtime residents of poor neighborhoods, Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs highlight the most durable positive consequences of tight labor markets.

Moving the Needle is an urgent and original call to implement policies that will maintain the current momentum and prepare for potential slowdowns that may lie ahead

The conventional wisdom about globalization is wrong.

Over the past forty years as companies, money, ideas, and people went abroad, they increasingly looked regionally rather than globally. In The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter, Shannon O’Neil details this transformation and the rise of three major regional hubs in Asia, Europe, and North America.

Current technological, demographic, and geopolitical trends look only to deepen these regional ties. O’Neil argues that this has urgent implications for the United States. Regionalization has enhanced economic competitiveness and prosperity in Europe and Asia. It could do the same for the United States, if only it would embrace its neighbors.

The United States is the product of border dynamics—not just at international frontiers but at the boundary that runs through its first heartland. The story of the Mason-Dixon Line is the story of America’s colonial beginnings, nation building, and conflict over slavery.

Acclaimed historian Edward Gray offers the first comprehensive narrative of the America’s defining border. Formalized in 1767, the Mason-Dixon Line resolved a generations-old dispute that began with the establishment of Pennsylvania in 1681. Rivalry with the Calverts of Maryland—complicated by struggles with Dutch settlers in Delaware, breakneck agricultural development, and the resistance of Lenape and Susquehannock natives—had led to contentious jurisdictional ambiguity, full-scale battles among the colonists, and ethnic slaughter. In 1780, Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery inaugurated the next phase in the Line’s history. Proslavery and antislavery sentiments had long coexisted in the Maryland–Pennsylvania borderlands, but now African Americans—enslaved and free—faced a boundary between distinct legal regimes. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the Mason-Dixon Line became a federal instrument to arrest the northward flow of freedom-seeking Blacks. Only with the end of the Civil War did the Line’s significance fade, though it continued to haunt African Americans as Jim Crow took hold.

Mason-Dixon tells the gripping story of colonial grandees, Native American diplomats, Quaker abolitionists, fugitives from slavery, capitalist railroad and canal builders, US presidents, Supreme Court justices, and Underground Railroad conductors—all contending with the relentless violence and political discord of a borderland that was a transformative force in American history.