Seek and Hide

Amy Gajda, Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy (Viking, 2022). 

Today privacy seems simultaneously under siege and surging. And that's doubly dangerous, as legal expert Amy Gajda argues. Too little privacy can mean extraordinary profits and power for people who deal in and publish soul-crushing secrets. Too much means the famous and infamous can cloak themselves in secrecy. Seek and Hide carries us from the very start, when privacy concepts first entered American law and society, to now, when the law
allows a Silicon Valley titan to destroy a media site like Gawker out of spite. Muckraker Upton Sinclair, like Nellie Bly before him, pushed the envelope of privacy and propriety and then became a privacy advocate when journalists used the same techniques against him. In the 1960s those privacy interests gave way to the glory days of investigative reporting in the era of Vietnam and Watergate. By the early 2000s we were on our way to today's full-blown crisis in the digital age, worrying that smartphones, webcams, basement publishers, and the forever internet had erased the right to privacy completely. The stories touch on the famous and the worthy but barely remembered, on presidents with secret babies, and on the evolution of a modern media emboldened to reveal the most intimate details about anyone -- and how so much of today rests on Section 230, a 1996 federal law that became privacy's downfall and then the catalyst for its rebirth.

-Publisher's Description

Discussions in Dispute Resolution

Art Hinshaw, Andrea Kupfer Schneider & Sarah Rudolph Cole, Discussions in Dispute Resolution: The Foundational Articles (Oxford University Press, 2021).

In this book, the editors have identified 16 articles published before the year 2000, four from each of the field’s primary subfields – negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and public policy. In each section, the works appear in chronological order, and for each work four commenters answer the question: why is this work a foundational piece in the dispute resolution field? The purpose in asking this simple question is four-fold: to hail the field’s foundational generation and their work, to bring a fresh look at these articles, to engage the articles’ original authors where possible, and to challenge the articles with the benefit of hindsight.

-Publisher’s Description

Black in White Space

Elijah Anderson, Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

In Black in White Space, Anderson brings his immense knowledge and ethnography to bear in this timely study  of the racial barriers that are still firmly entrenched in our society at every class level. He focuses in on symbolic racism, a new form of racism in America caused by the stubbornly powerful stereotype of the ghetto embedded in the white imagination, which subconsciously connects all Black people with crime and poverty regardless of their social or economic position. White people typically avoid Black space, but Black people are required to navigate the “White space” as a condition of their existence. From Philadelphia street-corner conversations to Anderson’s morning jogs through a Cape Cod vacation town, he probes a wealth of experiences to shed new light on how symbolic racism makes all Black people uniquely vulnerable to implicit bias in police stops and racial discrimination in our country. 

-Publisher’s Description