Archives de catégorie : Current Issues

THE ROUTE de Molly O’Toole

An immersive reporting and investigation into the illicit criminal networks that give rise to the smuggling of human beings across the world.

THE ROUTE
by Molly O’Toole
Crown, 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Each year, thousands of refugees hailing from far-flung origins in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa pay anywhere from $20,000 to upwards of $60,000 a head to traverse the Western Hemisphere, using the Americas as a cross-continental land bridge to the U.S.-Mexico border. They all follow a nearly identical path: Beginning in Brazil; then on to Peru; then Ecuador; followed by Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala, to reach Mexico. Last stop—the United States. A broken U.S. immigration system and the largest displacement of people in modern history, with some 50 million more migrants today than even just a decade ago, have together birthed this billiondollar black market of smuggling human beings across the world to the United States’ doorstep. This is “The Route.” No journalist or writer has covered “The Route” from start to finish—Molly O’Toole will be the first to do so. THE ROUTE will tackle the inter-continental, cross-cultural, and ethical complexities of this migration phenomenon as a whole, start-to-finish—not in a vacuum, but in the context of an international system inadequate to addressing it, and Molly will take “The Route” with her own two feet, testifying to the ingenuity and resilience of the migrants who are defying the politics and the odds. By bringing readers along on THE ROUTE, Molly hopes to better inform the public about the complex intersection of U.S. security and immigration policy around the world, and by revealing the mechanisms and motives behind the migration route, to better inform more humane, sustainable solutions than each country closing its borders, building its own wall and repelling those who seek refuge.

Molly O’Toole is an immigration and security reporter based in the Los Angeles Times’ Washington, D.C., bureau. Previously, she was a senior reporter at Foreign Policy covering the 2016 election and Trump administration, a politics reporter at the Atlantic’s Defense One and a news editor at the Huffington Post. She has covered migration and security from Mexico, Central America, West Africa, the Middle East, the Gulf and South Asia for The Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New Republic, Newsweek, the Associated Press and others. She was awarded the firstever Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting in 2020 with the staff of This American Life and freelancer Emily Green for the “Out Crowd,” investigating the personal impact of the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy on asylum officers and asylum seekers. She was also a 2020 finalist for the Livingston Awards for excellence in international reporting. She is a graduate of Cornell University and NYU, but will always be a Californian.

EMOTIONAL LABOR de Rose Hackman

The deeply researched and definitive account of the invisible emotional work and mental load so often shouldered by women, and the economics of how it is devalued monetarily and socially, as it relates to the workplace, relationships, sex, family life, and much more – providing a new framework and language for a 21st-century feminism, and ideas for how to better share the load.

EMOTIONAL LABOR
by Rose Hackman
‎ Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, March 2023

“Emotional labor.” The term might sound familiar, but what does it mean exactly? Originally used to describe the unacknowledged labor flight attendants did to make guests feel welcomed and safe—on top of their actual job description—the phrase has burst through to the national lexicon in recent years. The examples, whispered among friends and posted online, are endless—a woman is tasked with organizing family functions, even without volunteering; a stranger insists you “smile more,” even as you navigate a high stress environment or grating commute. Emotional labor is essential to our society and economy, but many are asked to perform this exhausting, draining work at no extra cost. In this ground-breaking, journalistic deep-dive, Rose Hackman traces the history of the term and exposes common manifestations of the phenomenon. She describes the many ways women and girls are forced to edit the expressions of their emotions to accommodate and elevate the emotions of others. But Hackman doesn’t simply diagnose a problem—she empowers us to combat patriarchy and forge pathways for radical evolution, justice and change. This is a must-have for any feminist reader.

Rose Hackman is a British journalist based in Detroit. Her work on gender, race, labor, policing, housing and the environment – published in the Guardian – has brought international attention to overlooked American policy issues, historically entrenched injustices, and complicated social mores.

SURVEILLANCE STATE de Josh Chin & Liza Lin

A groundbreaking work of investigative nonfiction on life in China’s burgeoning surveillance state.

SURVEILLANCE STATE:
Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control
by Josh Chin and Liza Lin
St. Martin’s Press, September 2022

People living in democracies have for decades drawn comfort from the notion that their form of government, for all its flaws, is the best history has managed to produce. SURVEILLANCE STATE documents with startling detail how even as China’s Communist Party pays lip service to democracy as a core value of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” it is striving for something new: a political model that shapes the will of the people not through the ballot box but through the sophisticated―and often brutal―harnessing of data.
On the country’s remote Central Asian frontier, where a separatist movement strains against Party control, China’s leaders have built a dystopian police state that keeps millions under the constant gaze of security forces armed with AI. Across the country in the city of Hangzhou, the government is weaving a digital utopia, where tech giants help optimize the friction out of daily life. Award-winning journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin take readers on a journey through both places, and several in between, as they document the Party’s ambitious push―aided, in some cases, by American technology―to engineer a new society around the power of digital surveillance.
China is hardly alone. As faith in democratic principles wavers, advances in surveillance have upended debate about the balance between security and liberty in countries around the globe, including the US. Succeed or fail, the Chinese experiment has implications for people everywhere.

Josh Chin is Deputy Bureau Chief in China for The Wall Street Journal. He previously covered politics and tech in China for the newspaper for more than a decade. He led an investigative team that won the Gerald Loeb Award for international reporting in 2018. Born in Utah, he lives in Taiwan.
Liza Lin works as the journalist covering data use and privacy for The Wall Street Journal from Singapore. Liza was part of the Journal team that won the Loeb in 2018. Prior to the WSJ, Liza spent nine years at Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Television.

ALL ELSE FAILED de Dana Sachs

As a million displaced people sought refuge in Europe, the global relief system failed. This is the story of the volunteers who stepped forward to help.

ALL ELSE FAILED:
The Unlikely Volunteers at the Heart of the Migrant Aid Crisis
by Dana Sachs
‎ Bellevue Literary Press, March 2023
(via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

In 2015, increasing numbers of refugees and migrants, most of them fleeing war-torn homelands, arrived by boat on the shores of Greece, setting off the greatest human displacement since WWII. As journalists reported horrific mass drownings, an ill-prepared and seemingly indifferent world looked on. Those who reached Europe needed food, clothing, medicine, and shelter, but the international aid system broke down completely.
ALL ELSE FAILED is Dana Sachs’s compelling eyewitness account of the successes—and failures—of the volunteer relief network that emerged to meet the enormous need. People from around the globe pitched in to address the crisis. Yet the most dedicated and effective volunteers were often migrants themselves, including Rima, a mother of six, who cooked for four hundred refugees in an abandoned schoolhouse in Athens; Ibrahim, who managed donations flowing to the grassroots effort; and Sami, whose language skills helped fellow migrants navigate a foreign world.
Closely following the odysseys of seven individual men and women, and their families, ALL ELSE FAILED tells a story of despair and resilience, revealing the humanity within an immense humanitarian disaster.

Dana Sachs is a journalist, novelist, and cofounder of the nonprofit Humanity Now: Direct Refugee Relief, which supports grassroots teams providing aid to displaced people. A former Fulbright Scholar, she is the author of three works of nonfiction, The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam; The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam; and All Else Failed: The Unlikely Volunteers at the Heart of the Migrant Aid Crisis (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in March 2023), as well as the novels If You Lived Here and The Secret of the Nightingale Palace. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, and Mother Jones. Sachs lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

DEPORTED de Caitlin Dickerson

From an award-winning investigative reporter currently at The Atlantic and formerly of the New York Times, the definitive book to address the American deportation system.

DEPORTED: The Hidden Toll of American Expulsion
by Caitlin Dickerson
Random House, Autumn 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

Deportation is a system that pervades every aspect of American life, yet remains largely invisible. In popular discourse, it is treated as a discrete event affecting one person at a single time; in fact, the devastating ripple effect of deportation has a closer analogue in the destabilization felt by millions of Black American households when their sons and fathers are swept into our mass incarceration system. The households of deported immigrants, as well as those who live with the daily fear of expulsion, have been grappling with a similar reality on a massive and underrecognized scale.
Based on her many years of reporting on our immigration system, DEPORTED will be the definitive book to address the complexity and complicity of the American deportation system. Following the people caught in the middle of the system, it is a multi-generational story that spans cities, suburbs, and farmland and knits together an entire continent. Dickerson will reveal how the “deportation machine” has grown largely unchecked into both a multibillion dollar industry and a powerful lobbying force behind harsher policies designed to further increase profits. The narrative centers on the millions of “essential workers” we rely on every day to to pick and serve our food, to clean and build our houses, to care for our children and our elders. At its heart, DEPORTED asks: how did we come to subjugate an entire population living alongside us to a permanent lower class? What harms have resulted, and how can we begin to repair them?

Caitlin Dickerson is a staff writer at the Atlantic where she covers immigration and the American experience. She joined the Atlantic after five years at the New York Times, where she broke news about changes in deportation and detention policy and its consequences. She also served as a frequent guest and guest-host for “The Daily.” Dickerson is the winner of a Peabody and Edward R Murrow Award and three-time finalist for the Livingston Award. She lives in Brooklyn.