Lost in a maze of underground tunnels, Jason and his friend Wayne are not only in danger of freezing to death or dying slowly of starvation, they are also at risk of being murdered by two dangerous criminals if they are caught. Danger lurks around every dark, dank corner and Jason needs all his wits about him to keep one step ahead.

My wife and I had the good fortune to be able to visit my mother several times at her assisted-living facility during her last years. While the church-run facility did an excellent job of looking after my mother during her final years, I was struck by the eventual transition of the residents from vibrant participants to frail elderly fringe beings. Within the four-month intervals between our visits, there could sometimes be stunning differences in the appearance and behavior of the residents we had come to know personally. Over the course of each passing year, multiple residents would either be moved to the adjoining nursing wing, go home to their families, and/or pass away. We witnessed how the natural aging process brought physical decline and social withdrawal to so many of the residents, despite the sincere efforts of the staff. My hope is that this book spreads awareness of the sad and inevitable ending so many seniors face. Too many spend the last years of their lives alone before taking their worldly accomplishments and contributions quietly to their grave, so often unacknowledged or underappreciated. Seniors are our personal history and most precious human resource. We, as a society, will be far richer if we love, listen to, and learn from them.

From the roles of race and gender in American politics to the 2020 elections and the global coronavirus pandemic, Politics and the Media: Intersections and New Directions examines how media and political institutions interact to shape public thinking and debates around social problems, cultural norms, and policies.

The emergence of China as a great power is perhaps the most consequential development for the world in the 21st century. Yet, what the Western world sees in this development is largely through the prism of misinterpreted ideological dichotomy and misguided geopolitical rivalry. This book offers a deep look at the Chinese Communist Party and the nation it leads at conceptual, historic, and operational levels. If Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift can be used in the social sciences, then China would represent the most significant anomaly to the dominant liberal exemplar. For students of China and of politics in general, and for the Western political and commercial elites, if they were to read one book about China to grasp the nature and weight of the Chinese phenomenon, Party Life would be it.

Reveals how presidents deploy a rhetoric that attempts to attract many racial and ethnic groups, but ultimately directs itself to an archetypal white, Middle-American swing voter. Despite major advancements in civil rights in the United States since the 1960s, racial inequality continues to persist in American society. While it may appear that presidents do not address the topic of race, it lurks in the background of presidential political speech across a range of issues, including welfare, crime, and American identity. Using a thorough approach that places textual analysis in a historical context, One America? asks what presidents say about race, how often they say it, and to whom they say it. Nathan Angelo demonstrates how presidents attempt to use rhetoric to compose a message that will resonate with the many groups that comprise the modern party system, but ultimately those alliances cause presidents to direct most of their speeches about race to an archetypical white, Middle-American swing voter, thereby restricting the issues and solutions that they discuss. While the American demographic profile is changing, rhetoric that links American identity with racially coded concepts and appeals to white voters’ racial resentments has become ubiquitous. Angelo warns us about the possible repercussions of such tactics, noting that while they may allow presidents to craft winning coalitions their use continues to legitimate a system that ignores racial inequality.

This book offers a timely and engaging account of how technologies of communication media impact nationalist challenges to global order, shedding new light on how they matter, how they have changed, and how their evolution transforms the conditions of possibility for nationalist order challengers. In the 21st century, we have become accustomed to close entanglements between resurgent nationalism and digital media. In Mediatizing the Nation, Ordering the World, Andrew Dougall shows that the relationship between media and nationalist order contestation is far older. Comparing Trump's breakthrough in the 21st century United States with a similar - but unsuccessful - movement in 19th century Britain, the book argues that communication media shaped these episodes by differently patterning the constitution and distribution of meaning on which they relied. Underpinning this argument is a novel theorization of media in world politics that draws on insights from media and communications scholarship, in addition to international relations. Among the book's key contributions are to explain how media affect vertical challenges to the structure of international orders; to reframe IR's theoretical engagement with the relationship between media and order; and to situate the internet within a longer history of this relationship, contributing to a more balanced view of its impact.