In her memoir, Why Didn’t You Tell Me?, Carmen Rita Wong contends with questions of culture, race, family, and belonging, from the Harlem and Chinatown of her childhood to the almost exclusively white playgrounds of New Hampshire following her mother’s remarriage. Following Carmen from her coming of age through adulthood, when her mother’s long-held secrets

Contributed by Devon Price, PhD, author of Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity I didn’t find out I was Autistic until after I completed my PhD in psychology in my mid-20s. Aside from a few brief mentions of the disability in a graduate-level developmental psychology class, I hadn’t learned Autism in my psychology

Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian, Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. He explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled

Cathy Park Hong will be awarded the American Book Award for Minor Feelings, a ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness. With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and

Benjamine Spencer was convicted of murder in 1987—a crime he did not commit. Due to the tireless advocacy of Centurion Ministries over the past twenty years, his conviction has finally been reevaluated, and he is expected to be released after 34 years. His case is one of several that is profiled at length in Jim

Contributed by Kate Manne, author of Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women CW: This post contains descriptions of misogynistic and sexual violence On Friday May 23, 2014, I was an assistant professor just finishing up my first year of teaching at Cornell University. Scrolling through my Facebook feed, I saw reports of a horrible crime

Contributed by David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth Climate change is not a single subject, or a single story, but the theater in which all human life is now conducted, transforming and reordering nearly every aspect of modern life—our infrastructure and our migration patterns, our cities and our energy systems and our agriculture, our

In recent years, corporate profits have skyrocketed in the United States. Workers often haven’t seen the same good fortune as their employers, with wages on average remaining stagnate or seeing only slight increases after inflation. In this excerpt from Beaten Down, Worked Up, reporter Steven Greenhouse shares the struggles faced by many Americans, their stories

According to an analysis by the Williams Institute in 2016, 1.4 million adults in the United States identify as transgender, with young adults (ages 18 to 24) most likely to say they are transgender. Sociologist Arlene Stein spent a year following the lives of four transgender young adults, capturing their experiences as they transitioned from

On Friday, October 5, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it had decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2018 to Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege and Iraqi human rights activist Nadia Murad “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.” Murad recounts her extraordinary

In 2014, investigative journalist Shane Bauer took an entry-level, $9/hour job as a guard at Winn Correctional Facility, a private prison in rural Louisiana. For the next four months, he reported for work outfitted with a hidden recording device, ready to capture the reality of life in private prisons for guards and inmates alike. For

The United States’ current border issues with Mexico draw attention to the hardships of life there. CNN reports that nearly 35,000 individuals were arrested crossing the southern US border illegally in June. The separation of children from their families created public outcry and nationwide human rights protests. Read on for a selection of books about Mexico and border crossing.