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In Love, Inc., Laurie Essig argues that love is not all we need. As the future became less secure—with global climate change and the transfer of wealth to the few—Americans became more romantic. Romance is not just what lovers do but also what lovers learn through ideology. As an ideology, romance allowed us to privatize our futures, to imagine ourselves as safe and secure tomorrow if only we could find our "one true love" today. But the fairy dust of romance blinded us to what we really need: global movements and structural changes. By traveling through dating apps and spectacular engagements, white weddings and Disney honeymoons, Essig shows us how romance was sold to us and why we bought it. Love, Inc. seduced so many of us into a false sense of security, but it also, paradoxically, gives us hope in hopeless times. This book explores the struggle between our inner cynics and our inner romantic.

Consent is threadbare for sexual-justice politics, argues author Joseph Fischel. Spotlighting sex on the periphery, Screw Consent takes aim at the sex imagined at the center of our moral universe: adult, consensual. Each chapter turns another “screw” on consent, interrogating sex that is unfamiliar, atypical, or weird. Consent, shows Fischel, is alternatively insufficient, inapposite, or riddled with scope contradictions. It therefore cannot scaffold a democratically hedonic sexual culture. Access and autonomy, the author suggests, are more promising idioms for our sexual politics.

Life-sentenced prisoners are a growing proportion of America’s incarcerated population. Too Easy to Keep provides a thorough assessment of the consequences of this monumental shift. It examines the implications of growing numbers of life sentences for both prisoners serving that sentence and the prisons that house them. It draws upon extensive interviews with life-sentenced prisoners and prison staff in two Washington facilities. The data demonstrate that many lifers build lives of considerable purpose and meaning, and devote themselves to improving the circumstances of others. They become, in prison terms, “easy keepers,” and provide considerable stability to the institutions that house them. Yet as they age and decline, life-sentenced prisoners prove harder to accommodate. Prison staff thus struggle to meet the needs of this rapidly-growing population. Too Easy to Keep reviews the challenges that aging prisoners will pose, and thereby provides much cause for a reconsideration of America’s punishment policies.

The world is witnessing a rapid rise in the number of victims of human trafficking and of migrants—voluntary and involuntary, internal and international, authorized and unauthorized. In the first two decades of this century alone, more than 65 million people have been forced to escape home into the unknown. The slow-motion disintegration of failing states with feeble institutions, war and terror, demographic imbalances, unchecked climate change, and cataclysmic environmental disruptions have contributed to the catastrophic migrations that are placing millions of human beings at grave risk. Humanitarianism and Mass Migration fills a scholarly gap by examining the uncharted contours of mass migration. Exceptionally curated, it contains contributions from Jacqueline Bhabha, Richard Mollica, Irina Bokova, Pedro Noguera, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, James A. Banks, Mary Waters, and many others. The volume’s interdisciplinary and comparative approach showcases new research that reveals how current structures of health, mental health, and education are anachronistic and out of touch with the new cartographies of mass migrations. Envisioning a hopeful and realistic future, this book provides clear and concrete recommendations for what must be done to mine the inherent agency, cultural resources, resilience, and capacity for self-healing that will help forcefully displaced populations.

Lost Childhoods focuses on the life-course histories of thirty young men serving time in the adult prison system in Pennsylvania for crimes they committed when they were minors. The narratives of these young men, their friends, and relatives reveal the invisible yet deep-seated connection between the childhood traumas they suffered and the violent criminal behavior they committed during adolescence. By living through domestic violence, poverty, the crack epidemic, and other circumstances, these men were forced to grow up fast, while familial ties that should have sustained them were broken at each turn. The book connects large-scale social policy decisions and their effect on family dynamics, and it demonstrates the limits of punitive justice.

How could Northern California, the wealthiest and most politically progressive region in the United States, become one of the earliest epicenters of the foreclosure crisis? How could this region continuously reproduce racial poverty and reinvent segregation in old farm towns one hundred miles from the urban core? This is the story of the suburbanization of poverty, the failures of regional planning, urban sprawl, NIMBYism, and political fragmentation between middle-class white environmentalists and communities of color. As this book shows, the responsibility for this newly segregated geography lies in institutions from across the region, state, and political spectrum, even as the Bay Area has never managed to build common purpose around the making and remaking of its communities, cities, and towns. The book closes by presenting paths toward a new politics of planning and development that weave scattered fragments into a more equitable and functional whole.

Over the last quarter of a century, no other city like Miami has rapidly transformed into a global city. This book charts the social tensions and unexpected consequences of this remarkable process of change. Acting as a follow-up to City on the Edge, this book examines Miami in the context of globalization and scrutinizes its newfound place as a stellar international city. The book examines Miami's rise as a finance and banking center without parallel in the US South to the simultaneous emergence of a highly diverse but contentious ethnic mosaic. The book serves as a case study of Miami's present cultural, economic, and political transformation, and describes how its future course can provide key lessons for other metropolitan areas throughout the world.

In the first comprehensive academic treatment of the emerging social, medical, and psychological category of the transgender child, ethnographer Tey Meadow introduces readers to a generation of parents who actively facilitate gender nonconformity in their children. Whereas previous generations of parents sent such children for psychiatric treatment aimed at a cure, these families call their children new names, allow them to wear whatever clothing they choose, and even approach the state to alter their legal gender. Drawing from sociology, philosophy, psychology, and sexuality studies, Meadow depicts the intricate social processes that shape gender acquisition. Whereas once atypical gender expression was considered a failure of gender, now it is a form of gender. It is a form that underscores both the centrality of ever more particular configurations of gender in psychic life and the increasing embeddedness of personal identities in social institutions.

In The Chosen Ones, sociologist and feminist scholar Nikki Jones shares the compelling story of a group of Black men living in San Francisco's historically Black neighborhood, the Fillmore. Against all odds, these men work to atone for past crimes by reaching out to other Black men, young and old, with the hope of guiding them towards a better life. Yet despite their genuine efforts, they struggle to find a new place in their old neighborhood. With a poignant yet hopeful voice, Jones illustrates how neighborhood politics, everyday interactions with the police, and conservative Black gender ideologies shape the men’s ability to make good and forgive themselves—and how the double-edged sword of community shapes the work of redemption.

Since the 1980s, a particular definition of the United States and the global economy as being “capitalist” has become hegemonic. In this view, a capitalist economy is autonomous and coherent, and it needs to be regulated by its own internal laws. This view is an illusion. The reality is that economies organized around the pursuit of private profit are contradictory, incoherent, and heavily intertwined with politics and governmental action. But the illusion remains hugely consequential, because it has been embraced by political and economic elites who are convinced that they are powerless to change this system. The reality is that the continuing vitality of the United States and the world economy requires a new period of major reforms on the scale of the New Deal and the building of new global institutions after World War II.