High Public

Burning fossil fuels will cause catastrophic global warming: this is what top American oil executives were told by scientists in 1959. But they ignored that warning. Instead, they developed one of the biggest, most polluting oil sources in the world—the oil sands in Alberta, Canada. As investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki reveals in this explosive book, the decades-long conspiracy to keep the oil sands flowing into the US would turn out to be one of the biggest reasons for the world's failure to stop the climate crisis.

Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu to the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the 1930 "parrot fever" pandemic, through the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last one hundred years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms.

Small Wars, Big Data provides groundbreaking perspectives for how small wars can be better strategized and favorably won to the benefit of the local population.

With the decline of traditional journalism, there are precious few inquiring eyes watching government and the public service. How can any of us know how our tax dollars are being spent? But there is good news. For at least the past decade, governments at all levels have been busy publishing truckloads of data representing official policies and their outcomes. For the most part, that data is available in the public domain and just sits there, waiting for us to come and get it. This book was written with the hope and expectation that sophisticated data analytics tools can tame those ...

In We're Still Here, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain, place, and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Silva reveals how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. The routines and rhythms of traditional working-class life such as manual labor, unions, marriage, church, and social clubs have diminished.

In the vein of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Dorothy Roberts's Fatal Invention, Infected is the epic story of white supremacists, compromised doctors, racist politicians, and the heroes who challenged them.

A good idea not shared or understood by others is a shame. A brilliant idea not shared and understood is a tragedy. Public speaking is so much more than the courage to stand in front of a group and talk. For a presentation to be powerful, it must have the right amount of content, organized in a memorable way for both speaker and audience, delivered with power, warmth, and charisma, and it must be spoken in the language of the audience.

The Digital Age was expected to usher in an era of clean production, an alternative to smokestack industries and their pollutants. But as environmental journalist Elizabeth Grossman reveals in this penetrating analysis of high tech manufacture and disposal, digital may be sleek, but it's anything but clean. Deep within every electronic device lie toxic materials that make up the bits and bytes, a complex thicket of lead, mercury, cadmium, plastics, and a host of other often harmful ingredients.

Parler en public, voilà un exercice que beaucoup redoutent. Entre la peur de ne pas être à la hauteur, de cafouiller et d'être jugé par son auditoire, les sources de stress sont multiples. Pourtant, il est impossible d'y échapper dans le monde professionnel actuel. Alors pour que l'exercice devienne un plaisir, préparez-vous-y sans plus attendre !

Well that certainly wasn’t in the benefits package. I’m staring at my grumpy boss’s package while getting passed over for yet another promotion. I want to unwrap it. My sex drive has been pedal to the metal since this whole hotwife thing started, and I can’t seem to pump the brakes. I want everyone I can get my hands on, even the jerk who runs the company I work for. Parker’s always been gorgeous, the type of gorgeous that should have had me pushing kids out of the bounce house at the company picnic and finding a better use for it, despite my husband standing right there. But come...

Dispatches from the AIDS Pandemic is a unique firsthand account from three public health leaders of CDC's early response to AIDS. Drawing in part on interviews from the CDC's AIDS oral history project, the authors trace the evolution of AIDS from newly recognized disease to pandemic.

As television began to overtake the political landscape in the 1960s, network broadcast companies, bolstered by powerful lobbying interests, dominated screens across the nation. Yet over the next three decades, the expansion of a different technology, cable, changed all of this. 24/7 Politics tells the story of how the cable industry worked with political leaders to create an entirely new approach to television, one that tethered politics to profits.

From colonial times into the 20th century, our laws and court cases ignored atheism, assuming that all good Americans were religious. Only in the 20th century, with the passage of laws allowing for conscientious objection to war, did nonbelief enter debates about religious liberty. Still, today every one of the 20 states has God written into its constitution. God is everywhere in American public life. R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick explore both God's omnipresence and the dramatic rise in nonbelievers that has led to an "atheist awakening" intent on holding the country to its secular principles.

In Developing Scholars, Domingo Morel explores the history and political factors that led to the creation of college access programs for students of color in the 1960s. Through a case study of an existing community-centered affirmative action program, Talent Development, Morel shows how protest, including violent protest, has been instrumental in the maintenance of college access programs.

Dive into the pulsating heart of modern China with "Urban Alchemy", a vivid and robust exploration of life in the country's sprawling megacities. Seize this opportunity to peel back the curtain and glimpse the exciting world lying just beyond the headlines and tourist guidebooks. Through twenty enthralling chapters, "Urban Alchemy" uncovers the twisted alleyways and shimmering skyscrapers that form the canvas of China's urban tapestry. From the subtle machinations of urban planning to the thriving street food culture, this eBook challenges your preconceptions and unveils the multi-faceted ...

In The Gifted Generation, historian David Goldfield examines the generation immediately after World War II and argues that the federal government was instrumental in the great economic, social, and environmental progress of the era. Following the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation, the returning vets and their children took the unprecedented economic growth and federal activism to new heights. This generation was led by presidents who believed that federal legislation, by encouraging individual opportunity, would help the entire nation.

The recent coronavirus pandemic proved that the time-old notion seems now truer than ever: that science and politics represent a clash of cultures. But why should scientists simply "stick to the facts" and leave politics to the politicians when the world seems to be falling down around us? Drawing on his experience as both a research scientist and an expert advisor at the center of government, Ian Boyd takes an empirical approach to examining the current state of the relationship between science and politics.

Journalist, doctor, professor, and CDC-trained disease detective Seema Yasmin, driven by a need to set the record straight, dissects some of the most widely circulating medical myths and pseudoscience. Exploring how epidemics of misinformation can spread faster than microbes, Dr. Yasmin asks why bad science is sometimes more believable and contagious than the facts.

Propelled by the belief that government has slipped out of the hands of ordinary citizens, a surging wave of populism is destabilizing democracies around the world. As John Matsusaka reveals in Let the People Rule, this belief is based in fact. Over the past century, while democratic governments have become more efficient, they have also become more disconnected from the people they purport to represent. The solution Matsusaka advances is familiar but surprisingly underused: direct democracy, in the form of referendums.

Queen Victoria's reign was an era of breathtaking social change, but it did little to create a platform for women. But not so within the social sphere of the seance - a mysterious, lamp-lit world on both sides of the Atlantic, in which women who craved a public voice could hold their own. Out of the Shadows tells the stories of the enterprising women whose supposedly clairvoyant gifts granted them fame, fortune, and, most important, influence, as they crossed rigid boundaries of gender and class as easily as they passed between the realms of the living and the dead.