Coming To Power

Writings surrounding the issue of S/M in the lesbian and feminist movement.

"There have always been the songs, the prayers, the stories of Native American writers. There is a wide variety of styles, themes and topics presented in the fiction of this collection of thirty authors. Their stories are evidence of the commitment made by Native American writers to express themselves in this genre of literature."--Amazon.com.

From two influential and visionary thinkers comes a big idea that is changing the way movements catch fire and ideas spread in our highly connected world. For the vast majority of human history, power has been held by the few. "Old power" is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful spend it carefully, like currency. But the technological revolution of the past two decades has made possible a new form of power, one that operates differently, like a current. "New power" is made by many; it is open, participatory, often leaderless, and peer-driven. Like water or electricity, it is most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it, but to channel it. New power is behind the rise of participatory communities like Facebook and YouTube, sharing services like Uber and Airbnb, and rapid-fire social movements like Brexit and #BlackLivesMatter. It explains the unlikely success of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign and the unlikelier victory of Donald Trump in 2016. And it gives ISIS its power to propagate its brand and distribute its violence. Even old power institutions like the Papacy, NASA, and LEGO have tapped into the strength of the crowd to stage improbable reinventions. In New Power, the business leaders/social visionaries Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms provide the tools for using new power to successfully spread an idea or lead a movement in the twenty-first century. Drawing on examples from business, politics, and social justice, they explain the new world we live in--a world where connectivity has made change shocking and swift and a world in which everyone expects to participate.

Drawing on extensive research with a diverse group of seventy teen girls, Zaslow offers a critical account of the girl power moment in which feminism and femininity are shrink-wrapped together in one market-friendly package. With a focus on pop-music and television, Zaslow skillfully explores the negotiative processes of teen girls as they make sense of girl power's new cultural narratives of femininity as well as its failure to offer strategies for real social change. Written in highly accessible language, this book charts new territory as it offers a rich account of the ways in which teen girls understand style, sexuality, motherhood, and feminism in girl power media culture, and how their desires, social experiences, and imaginings of the future are shaped in their relationship with a neoliberal girl power discourse.

Discusses and uses examples of how digital networks transform the ability of humans to gather and cooperate with one another.

How Hitler came to Power describes how, what amounted to a conspiracy of German military and industrial cliques, and in particular members of the pre-First World War Pan German League, manipulated Allied leaders and misrepresented the Treaty of Versailles to further their ambitions. It was they who created the conditions which let Hitler come to power. Economic historian Sara Moore is the author of Peace without Victory for the Allies, 1918-1932 (Berg 1994). In her new book she skilfully details how America and the Allies failure to secure an ‘unconditional surrender’ allowed factions within the German ruling elites to portray their country’s military defeat as a stab in the back by weak liberal politicians. They shared beliefs in Bismarck’s legacy of ‘blood and iron’, the ideology of the ‘master race’ and Germany’s destiny as a world power. Millions had voted for democracy and pacifism in 1928. This angered members of the Pan German League, such as newspaper magnate, Alfred Hugenberg and his former employer, Gustav Krupp. The pursued their nefarious schemes to undermine the Weimar Republic with zero regard for the human cost. Real Politik ruled. Moore reveals that Germany was world’s largest exporter in 1931 and its Reichsbank full of funds, when it pointed to the misery of its people and asked for a moratorium on its reparations payments. Foreigners worried about Germany’s huge number of unemployed and feared that the country would be overcome by Bolshevism but their fears were groundless because, unknown to them, Krupp had secretly concluded a contract in which he agreed to assist Stalin in modernising his armed forces provided that Stalin ordered the German Communists to vote with the extreme Right instead of the Left in the German Reichstag. Krupp also helped Stalin create and organise giant collectives to pay for his weaponry. Demoralised by taxation, mass unemployment and misinformation the German people finally lost their faith in democracy and in 1932 voted to support Hitler. Only a short time later Hindenburg allowed him to become dictator. Yet Krupp, Hugenberg and the Pan Germans who helped Hitler’s rise to power seem to have escaped censure for eighty years.

At the outset of the eighteenth century, many British Americans accepted the notion that virtuous sociable feelings occurred primarily among the genteel, while sinful and selfish passions remained the reflexive emotions of the masses, from lower-class whites to Indians to enslaved Africans. Yet by 1776 radicals would propose a new universal model of human nature that attributed the same feelings and passions to all humankind and made common emotions the basis of natural rights. In Passion Is the Gale, Nicole Eustace describes the promise and the problems of this crucial social and political transition by charting changes in emotional expression among countless ordinary men and women of British America. From Pennsylvania newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, correspondence, commonplace books, and literary texts, Eustace identifies the explicit vocabulary of emotion as a medium of human exchange. Alternating between explorations of particular emotions in daily social interactions and assessments of emotional rhetoric's functions in specific moments of historical crisis (from the Seven Years War to the rise of the patriot movement), she makes a convincing case for the pivotal role of emotion in reshaping power relations and reordering society in the critical decades leading up to the Revolution. As Eustace demonstrates, passion was the gale that impelled Anglo-Americans forward to declare their independence--collectively at first, and then, finally, as individuals.

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A gripping, behind-the-scenes portrait of the rise of Saudi Arabia’s secretive and mercurial new ruler “Revelatory . . . a vivid portrait of how MBS has altered the kingdom during his half-decade of rule.”—The Washington Post Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Kirkus Reviews MBS is the untold story of how a mysterious young prince emerged from Saudi Arabia’s sprawling royal family to overhaul the economy and society of the richest country in the Middle East—and gather as much power as possible into his own hands. Since his father, King Salman, ascended to the throne in 2015, Mohammed bin Salman has leveraged his influence to restructure the kingdom’s economy, loosen its strict Islamic social codes, and confront its enemies around the region, especially Iran. That vision won him fans at home and on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in Hollywood, and at the White House, where President Trump embraced the prince as a key player in his own vision for the Middle East. But over time, the sheen of the visionary young reformer has become tarnished, leaving many struggling to determine whether MBS is in fact a rising dictator whose inexperience and rash decisions are destabilizing the world’s most volatile region. Based on years of reporting and hundreds of interviews, MBS reveals the machinations behind the kingdom’s catastrophic military intervention in Yemen, the bizarre detention of princes and businessmen in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton, and the shifting Saudi relationships with Israel and the United States. And finally, it sheds new light on the greatest scandal of the young autocrat’s rise: the brutal killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul, a crime that shook Saudi Arabia’s relationship with Washington and left the world wondering whether MBS could get away with murder. MBS is a riveting, eye-opening account of how the young prince has wielded vast powers to reshape his kingdom and the world around him. Praise for MBS “Saudi Arabia is testing the extremes of tradition and innovation, of half-baked visions and intensifying repression. Ben Hubbard’s authoritative reporting on the inner sanctums of its society offers a perfect synthesis of journalism and area expertise: the best description we have at the moment of why things happen as they do in the kingdom.”—Robert D. Kaplan, author of The Return of Marco Polo’s World