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Long ago, on a spring morning in Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate passed judgement on a mysterious preacher. Jesus of Nazareth was nailed to a cross shortly after and died in agony. The effects of this verdict have reverberated throughout the world and have shaped two millennia of history. Even so, the trial remains shrouded in mystery to this day. The New Testament Gospels are unclear about what charges Pontius Pilate judged. They portray Pilate as embracing Jesus'' innocence despite having him killed. We are left with more questions than answers. Why did Pontius Pilate condemn a man he believed innocent? What was Jesus'' crime? How should we understand Pilate''s role in Jesus'' execution? Killing the Messiah addresses these questions and analyzes Pilate''s path to crucifying Jesus. It determines why and how Pilate deemed Jesus guilty of criminal behavior and the roles played by various people in ensuring Jesus'' crucifixion. It also probes how the personal motivations and social obligations of Pilate and other authorities affected how they assessed Jesus'' criminality. To do this, it situates Jesus'' trial within the geo-political context of the Roman Middle East. In the decades before Jesus'' lifetime, and throughout the centuries that followed, Roman courts determined the outcomes of millions of trials throughout the region. Jesus'' trial took place in the same basic legal apparatus as all of these. By approaching the arrest, trial, and sentencing of Jesus from the perspective of Roman and legal history, this book sheds fresh light on the most famous conviction in world history.

Everyone wants to live a meaningful life. Long before our own day of self-help books offering twelve-step programs and other guides to attain happiness, the philosophers of ancient Greece explored the riddle of what makes a life worth living, producing a wide variety of ideas and examples to follow. This rich tradition was recast by Diogenes Laertius into an anthology, a miscellany of maxims and anecdotes, that generations of Western readers have consulted for edification as well as entertainment ever since the Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, first compiled in the third century AD, came to prominence in Renaissance Italy. To this day, it remains a crucial source for much of what we know about the origins and practice of philosophy in ancient Greece, covering a longer period of time and a larger number of figures-from Pythagoras and Socrates to Aristotle and Epicurus-than any other ancient source.

The American founding fathers were dedicated to the project of creating a government both functional and incapable of devolving into tyranny. To do this, they intentionally decentralized decision making among the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches. They believed this separation of powers would force compromise and achieve their goal of "separating to unify." In the second edition of this Very Short Introduction, Charles O. Jones delves into the constitutional roots of the American presidency to show how presidents faced the challenges of governing within a system of separation of powers.This updated edition of The American Presidency reviews crucial themes, including democratization of presidential elections, transitioning into and organizing a presidency, challenges in leading the permanent government, making law and policy, and reforming and changing the institution. It also introduces new case studies from the Obama administration, providing compelling insights into contemporary critical issues such as military power, the role of the First Lady, and the new trends in electoral campaigning-including the stunning advances in mass media and campaign technology.Jones lucidly shows that American presidents are not, and simply cannot be, as powerful as most Americans believe them to be. Accordingly, he stresses the necessity to acknowledge the president''s political status and style within the constitutional structure: the president is not the presidency, and the presidency is not the government.

Governments now routinely use AI-based software to gather information about citizens and determine the level of privacy a person can enjoy, how far they can travel, what public benefits they may receive, and what they can and cannot say publicly. What input do citizens have in how these machines thin? n Political Automation, Eduardo Albrecht explores this question in various domains, including policing, national security, and international peacekeeping. Drawing upon interviews with rights activists, Albrecht examines popular attempts to interact with this novel form of algorithmic governance so far. He then proposes the idea of a Third House, a virtual chamber that legislates exclusively on AI in government decision-making and is based on principles of direct democracy, unlike existing upper and lower houses that are representative. Digital citizens, AI powered replicas of ourselves, would act as our personal emissaries to this Third House. An in-depth look at how political automation impacts the lives of citizens, this book addresses the challenges at the heart of automation in public policy decision-making and offers a way forward.

Inequality has been soaring across the globe in the past decades. And the reproduction of inequality begins early in the life cycle: in homes and schools.In Unequal Learning, Xin Xiang analyzes the different kinds of learning that goes on in four drastically different Chinese schools: a rural school in a mountainous area; a public school in an impoverished region of an emerging city; a low-cost private school serving rural migrants; and a prestigious metropolitan public school that attracts the children of elite professionals and government officials. As she shows, the different learning opportunities available in these four communities contribute to the widening gulf between the rising metropolitan middle class and China''s working classes. Within classrooms, children in urban elite schools experience pedagogies drastically different from those in less privileged communities, despite the common preoccupation with preparing for exams. Outside classrooms, urban elite children learn to lead, collaborate, and compete through a variety of organized activities while rural children acquire competency in farm and household work.Though these particular schools are located in China, Xiang demonstrates how these four Chinese schools and communities reflect global trends as much as local peculiarities. Ultimately, addressing these pervasive and deep-rooted educational inequalities requires moving beyond the paradigms of closing ''achievement gaps'' and reducing ''learning poverty''. Xiang calls for a thorough rethinking of "whose knowledge and contribution counts" and "what good schools look like," in China and beyond. Powerfully argued and deeply researched, this will be essential reading not just for scholars of China, but anyone interested in how education systems both reproduce and exacerbate inequality.

Black women have been credited for Democratic wins in a number of recent consequential elections. Yet outside of the post-election glow, Black women''s interests tend not to attract a great deal of attention from politicians, media, or the public more broadly. In Intersectional Solidarity, Chaya Y. Crowder looks at the question of what prompts people to prioritize issues that affect Black women, and when? In particular, she challenges the notion that racial or gender consciousness alone shape political preferences and instead argues that intersectional group consciousness shapes political behavior. Crowder argues that a combination of race, gender, sexuality, and class-based consciousness influences political behavior, particularly when it comes to issues that affect individuals at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities. Further, she introduces the idea of "intersectional solidarity," informed by work in social psychology, political science, and Black feminist theory. Crowder applies intersectional solidarity to all people, regardless of their race, gender, or sexuality, but she uses it particularly to explore what groups demonstrate solidarity with Black women, and why. Intersectional Solidarity demonstrates that in order to fully understand how people come to care about issues that affect Black women, scholars are required to ask new questions.

A powerful and important exploration of how addiction functions on social, psychological and biological levels, integrated with the experience of being an addict, from an acclaimed philosopher and former addict.What is addiction? Theories about what kind of thing addiction is are sharply divided between those who see it purely as a brain disorder, and those who conceive of it in psychological and social terms. Owen Flanagan, an acclaimed philosopher of mind and ethics, offers a state-of-the-art assessment of addiction science and proposes a new ecumenical model for understanding and explaining substance addiction.Flanagan has first-hand knowledge of what it is like to be an addict. That experience, along with his wide-ranging knowledge of the philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and the ethics and politics of addiction, informs this important and novel work. He pairs the sciences that study addiction with a sophisticated view of the consciousness-brain/body relation to make his core argument: that substance addictions comprise a heterogeneous set of "psychobiosocial" behavioral disorders. He explains that substance addictions do not have one set of causes, such as self-medication or social dislocation, and they do not have one neural profile, such as a dysfunction in dopamine system. Some addictions are fun and experimentation gone awry. Flanagan reveals addiction to be a heterogeneous set of disorders, which are picked out by multifarious cultural, social, psychological, and neural features.Flanagan explores the ways addicts sensibly insist on their own responsibility to undo addiction, as well as ways in which shame for addiction can be leveraged into healing. He insists on the collective shame we all bear for our indifference to many of the psychological and social causes of addiction and explores the implications of this new integrated paradigm for practices of harm reduction and treatment. Flanagan''s powerful new book upends longstanding conventional thinking and points the way to new ways of understanding and treating addiction.

The Hand Behind Unmanned tells the fascinating story of the people, processes, and beliefs that led to the contemporary American unmanned arsenal. It takes an expansive look at automated and autonomous technologies, from mines and torpedoes, to guided bombs and missiles, satellites, and ultimately drones. Instead of asking the question: "why unmanned rather than manned," the book explains why certain types of unmanned systems became popular while others languished in research or in small pockets of the American military. In order to answer this question, Jacquelyn Schneider and Julia Macdonald use interviews of senior decisionmakers, military doctrine and writings, and historical sources to detail the proliferation of over a hundred years of unmanned weapons in the US arsenal, from mines and balloons to Reapers and Global Hawks. Their exploration reveals how multiple factors--key policy entrepreneurs, like Andy Marshall in the Office of Net Assessment; critical junctures like the fall of the USSR or the 9/11 attacks; beliefs that emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War; and US military service culture--all interacted in complex ways to form today''s unmanned arsenal. The Hand Behind Unmanned uses theories of organizational innovation and process tracing of historical cases to explain recent developments, including US precision munition shortfalls and the rise of unmanned aerial platforms. It also foreshadows where the US unmanned arsenal may be headed in the future. Ultimately, the book uses a remarkable case study to illustrate how ideas diffuse across people and organizations to build the weapons of modern warfare.

The Sleep Parent Training (SLePT) Program was developed for young children with autism spectrum disorder and co-occurring sleep disturbances and tested in clinical trials. The manual is based on behavioral analytic principles and covers approaches to address bedtime challenges, delayed sleep onset, night wakings, sleep association problems, and early morning wakings. The manualized intervention includes a therapist guide and a parent workbook. While manualized, the intervention is designed to allow for personalized tailoring based on the child''s age and skills and parent preferences. This Workbook moves through the program session by session, and includes helpful activity sheets, handouts and forms, designed to track progress. Using the exercises therapists and parents can learn about the causes of sleep disturbances and strategies to address common behavioral sleep problems experienced by autistic children, allowing them to improve their child''s sleep.

Populism, on both the right and the left, has spread like wildfire throughout Europe and the United States and is making inroads in other parts of the world. In simplest terms, populism is a political ideology that vilifies elites, minorities and foreigners while lionizing "the people." It reached its apogee in the U.S. with the election of Donald Trump but has been a force in Europe since the Great Recession and the refugee crisis. We now see the rise of leaders with populist tendencies everywhere from Brazil to Turkey.In The Populist Temptation, Barry Eichengreen places this global resurgence of populism in its historical context. Populists have always thrived, he observes, in times of poor economic performance. Populism feeds on rising inequality, which augments the ranks of those left behind and fans dissatisfaction with the economic status quo. It responds to rapid economic change that heightens insecurity. These economic developments, Eichengreen shows, give rise to populist reactions when they highlight the divergent interests of the people and the elite. Banking and financial crises are a case in point: the financiers who are the precipitating agents of such crises are card-carrying members of the elite, and are seen as profiting at the expense of the people.But populism is also a protest against the declining influence of the traditions, beliefs and community of once-dominant groups. It is a reaction against the challenge posed by immigrants and minorities to the people as a homogeneous, well-defined entity. Populists capitalizing on these feelings appeal to a glorious, mythologized past grounded in the collective traditions of that once-dominant majority. They invoke nationalism and criticize politicians who embrace diversity, open borders and equal rights. Populism has particular appeal, Eichengreen shows, when these identity politics and economic grievances come together.There is no magic solution to these concerns, but Eichengreen points to a starting place: strengthening welfare state policies that make for greater equality of opportunity and social cohesion. Comparing Europe with the United States, he shows that America''s patchwork welfare state is less well equipped to deal with the fallout from globalization and technical change and the growing distance between social groups. This reality will be hard to change, since America''s limited welfare state reflects the country''s historically-rooted suspicion of big government. It is therefore in the United States, Eichengreen concludes, where the siren song of populism is most alluring--and dangerous.

American Horizons presents an opportunity to view the nation''s history as more than a mere sequence of events for students to memorize. Although adhering to a familiar chronological organization, its narrative style and structure provide the flexibility of shifting emphasis from time to time to the global aspects of American history. Although the story of the United States is always at the center, that story is told through the movement of people, goods, and ideas into, within, or out of the United States. This unique approach provides a fully integrated global perspective that seamlessly contextualizes American events within the wider world.

Recent elections in the advanced western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges-from both the left and the right. The election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies.In Anti-System Politics, Jonathan Hopkin traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the post-war model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s. That shift entailed weakening the democratic process in favor of an opaque, technocratic form of governance that allows voters little opportunity to influence policy. With the financial crisis of the late 2000s these arrangements became unsustainable, as incumbent politicians were unable to provide solutions to economic hardship. Electorates demanded change, and it had to come from outside the system. Using a comparative approach, Hopkin explains why different kinds of anti-system politics emerge in different countries and how political and economic factors impact the degree of electoral instability that emerges. Finally, he discusses the implications of these changes, arguing that the only way for mainstream political forces to survive is for them to embrace a more activist role for government in protecting societies from economic turbulence.A deeply-rooted historical analysis of arguably the most important political phenomenon in the world at present, Anti-System Politics illuminates how and why the world seems upside down.

Suppressed for centuries, the ideas of French philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet are ever relevant today...Just as the Enlightenment was gaining momentum throughout Europe, philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Within a few short years, she became famous: she was read and debated from Russia to Prussia, from Switzerland to England, from up north in Sweden to down south in Italy. This was not just remarkable because she was a woman, but because of the substance of her contributions. While the men in her milieu like Voltaire and Kant sought disciples to promote their ideas, Du Châtelet promoted intellectual autonomy. She counselled her readers to read the classics, but never to become a follower of another''s ideas. Her proclamation that a true philosopher must remain an independent thinker, rather than a disciple of some supposedly “great man” like Isaac Newton or René Descartes, posed a threat to an emerging consensus in the Enlightenment. And that made her dangerous. After all, if young women took Du Châtelet''s advice to heart, if they insisted on thinking for themselves, they might demand a proper education--the exclusion of women from the colleges and academies of Europe might finally end. And if young women thought for themselves, rather than listening to the ideas of the men around them, that might rupture the gender-based social order itself. Because of the threat that she posed, the men who created the modern philosophy canon eventually wrote Du Châtelet out of their official histories. After she achieved immense fame in the middle of the eighteenth century, her ideas were later suppressed, or attributed to the men around her. For generations afterwards, she was forgotten. Now we can hear her voice anew when we need her more than ever. Her lessons of intellectual independence and her rejection of hero worship remain ever relevant today.

In the second edition of Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Jorge Duany unravels the fascinating and turbulent past and present of an island that is politically and economically tied to the United States, yet culturally distinct.Acquired by the United States from Spain in 1898, Puerto Rico has a peculiar status among Latin American and Caribbean countries. As a US Commonwealth, the island enjoys limited autonomy over local matters, but the US has dominated it militarily, politically, and economically for much of its recent history. Though they are US citizens, Puerto Ricans do not have their own voting representatives in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections (although they are able to participate in the primaries). In recent years, Puerto Rico''s colossal public debt sparked an economic crisis that catapulted it onto the national stage and intensified the exodus to the US, bringing to the fore many of the unresolved remnants of its colonial history.In the second edition of Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Jorge Duany provides a succinct, authoritative introduction to the island''s rich history, culture, politics, and economy, as well as its diaspora. Beginning with a historical overview of Puerto Rico, Duany covers the Spanish colonial period (1493-1898) and the first five decades of the US colonial regime. He then delves into the demographic, economic, political, and cultural features of contemporary Puerto Rico--the inner workings of the Commonwealth government and the island''s relationship to the United States. Moreover, the book explores the massive population displacement that has characterized Puerto Rico since the mid-twentieth century. New material examines the multiple issues affecting Puerto Rico in the last decade, including a prolonged recession, the devastating impact of two hurricanes, and the largest migrant wave ever recorded from Puerto Rico. While a popular tourist destination, few beyond Puerto Rico''s shores are familiar with its complex history and diverse culture. Duany takes on the task of educating readers on the most important facets of the unique, troubled, but much beloved isla del encanto.

The Suicidal State theorizes a biopolitics of suicide by mapping the entwinement between the Progressive-Era discourse of “race suicide” and period representations of literary suicide. Against the backdrop of the turn-of-the-century debates over immigration restrictions, “race suicide” suggests white Americans'' low birth rate as foretelling an immanent extinction of the white race, prefiguring the contemporary white nationalist discourse, “replacement theory.” While race suicide personified the populational subject--the “race”--as a suicidal individual, Progressive-Era literature gave birth to a microgenre of literary suicides, including works by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, and a series of Madame Butterfly texts.The Suicidal State argues that suicides in these texts literalize the fear of race suicide as they thwart the biopolitical demands for self-preservation, survival, and reproduction, articulating queer deathways that betray the nation''s reproductive imperative. Both in its figuration of race suicide and in literary suicides, self-inflected death is imagined as a uniquely agential act in its destruction of agency, offering a fertile space for the reconceptualization of biopower''s subject formation as it traverses individual and social bodies. That is, the book argues that suicide poses a limit case for the biopolitical management over life. Suicide, as it was imagined at the turn of the century, refuses, nullifies, and parries its obligatory relation to both biopower''s discipline of the individual and its management of the population, thereby forging new forms of subjectivity and ways of being in the world that sidestep the twin imperatives for preservation and procreation. In tracking these queer potentialities of suicide, The Suicidal State offers a new history of sex and race, of the relation between individual and collective, of the formation of a biopolitical state that Foucault calls a “racist State, a murderous State, and a suicidal State.”