The biggest companies are getting bigger – and it’s not just Amazon and Facebook, it is happening in field after field. Jim Bessen became interested in why this was happening as part of his research on the impact of automation. He wasn’t convinced that the factors that are typically thought to be behind this growth – mergers and acquisitions, changes in antitrust regulation, and, indeed, automation – were good explanations any longer.

His work revealed that the secret to these large firms’ dominance comes from their ability to invest in bespoke technology. And this, in turn, convinced him that we are in the midst of a profound economic change. In Walled Capitalism: The Dwindling of Disruption, he makes a compelling case for a shift in the nature of capitalism, one that has gone largely unrecognized.

Over the last twenty years, technological advances have become less of a force for disruption and more of a barrier that dominant firms employ against would-be disruptors. Walled Capitalism documents this change, explains why it has occurred and what can be done about it. The impacts are profound. The changing nature of capitalism has exacerbated social divisions, undercut average productivity growth, and threatens future innovation and economic dynamism. Understanding these changes will be key to grasping the economic and social challenges of coming decades.

Legal aid, the program through which legal assistance is made available to people who cannot otherwise afford it, has had a controversial history.  Support for providing legal services has waxed and waned.  But while it has not always received widespread acclaim, legal aid has been a legal lifeline for people who would not otherwise have access to some measure of justice.

In The People’s Champ: Legal Aid from Slavery to Mass Incarceration, legal scholar Shaun Ossei-Owusu provides a broad history of legal aid in America.  He locates its origins much earlier than has typically been assumed, looking back to the antebellum period when abolitionists actively sought legal rights for fugitive slaves and the white citizens who gave them assistance.

This sweeping narrative of America’s legal aid efforts also reveals how central race was, and continues to be, to the delivery of legal services.  While the conventional assumption is that legal aid was focused on the poor, irrespective of race, Ossei-Owusu shows how race has always been central to the way in which legal aid programs operated.  This perspective illuminates another angle on the history of discrimination, incarceration, and the delivery of social justice in this country.

The United States has a prison problem. Many of the statistics are, by now, well known: the country’s prison population has grown by more than 500 percent since 1973. Today, more than 2.2 million people are incarcerated in over 6,000 jails, prisons, and detention centers nationwide. Another five million live under some form of correctional supervision or control. Almost everyone who is incarcerated, and millions who once were, cannot vote or access other public services. Most of them are poor, and an overwhelming number of them are Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and/or suffering from a physical or mental disability. The United States stands alone among industrialized nations in retaining the death penalty, the widespread use of long-term solitary confinement, and the incarceration of juveniles in adult prisons. From preventable deaths to popular disenfranchisement, this carceral archipelago shapes the whole country.

Prison: An American History tells the story of the country through its enduring use of incarceration. Forced confinement enabled European settlers and their descendants to take Indigenous land, and it was a fundamental component of slavery—both the transatlantic slave trade and its domestic equivalent made widespread use of chains and cages. In the century after the Civil War, incarcerated people industrialized much of the country while prison development strengthened both federal and state local government. Since World War II, successive wars on communism, crime, drugs, gangs, and terror have made the country through prison. Nearly every moment in the country’s history can be understood through its reliance on captivity. From matters of labor discipline to political activism and beyond, prison helps explain the rise of the United States. 

Zoharah Robinson Simmons grew up in Memphis. She was raised by her grandmother, who told vivid stories of her own mother’s enslavement and kept her granddaughter focused on the importance of graduating from college. Zoharah – who was known as Gwendolyn as a girl – took the advice to heart and headed for Spelman College, but would end up following a somewhat different path than her grandmother had imagined, leaving their Baptist tradition for Sufi Islam and becoming an activist in the cause of human rights, where her work wove in and around the Black Freedom movement.

Her husband, Michael Simmons, was raised in Philadelphia, where his brothers were early followers of Malcolm X. He, too, would becaome a global human rights activist, after serving time in prison for refusing to serve in the military during the Vietnam War. Both Michael and Zoharah would be leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at the height of the civil rights movement, and would work in international human rights for the American Friends Service Committee. Their interwoven stories offer a narrative of the Black freedom struggle’s evolution from slavery to Black Lives Matter.

Stayed on Freedom weaves the history of organizations from SNCC and AFSC to the Nation of Islam and the National Independent Black Political Party together with interviews with Zoharah, Michael, and their daughter, the film maker Aishah Shahidah Simmons.

The arc of this story stretches beyond the history of the civil rights movement, and reaches farther than any one organization or issue. Rather, the Black freedom struggle is a movement of movements – and Stayed on Freedom braids the personal and the collective into a story of the Black freedom movement’s longevity.

At least at first blush, the idea of forgiveness is pretty simple. When society forgives, it makes a judgment that a person should be accepted back into the fold after having violated its norms. But almost everything about this idea is more complex than it seems.

There is more to forgiveness than we may have thought. On the one hand, it is a universal experience, which makes these dilemmas instantly recognizable: everyone has asked to be forgiven, and everyone has been asked to forgive. On the other hand, it is also political. Forgiveness depends on unstated value judgments that society makes without conscious awareness, including our perception of the person who seeks it, the person wronged, the norm violated, etc. Like any social benefit, the prize is doled out unevenly. In Can You Forgive Me? The Politics of Forgiveness in an Angry Age, Joseph Margulies hopes to get people thinking about the hidden politics of a universal experience.

By revealing that there is a politics of forgiveness, Can You Forgive Me? requires us to grapple not only with the idea of forgiveness, but the corollary notion that a person can be unforgiveable and cast permanently beyond the pale. Buy telling stories of people who committed supposedly “unforgiveable” acts, the book compels readers to question what that label means and to consider the transformative potential of looking at forgiveness differently.