The ideas upon which public education was founded in the last half of the nineteenth century were wrong. And despite their continued dominance in educational thinking for a century and a half, these ideas are no more right today. So argues one of the most original and highly regarded educational theorists of our time in 'Getting It Wrong from the Beginning'. Kieran Egan explains how we have come to take mistaken concepts about education for granted and why this dooms our attempts at educational reform.

"Amongst the Top 50 Horror Books of All Time" - Cosmopolitan Three dark and disturbing horror stories from an astonishing new voice, including the viral-sensation tale of obsession, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. For fans of Kathe Koja, Clive Barker and Stephen Graham Jones. Winner of the Splatterpunk Award for Best Novella. A whirlpool of darkness churns at the heart of a macabre ballet between two lonely young women in an internet chat room in the early 2000s—a darkness that threatens to forever transform them once they finally succumb to their most horrific desires. A couple isolate themselves on a remote island in an attempt to recover from their teenage son’s death, when a mysterious young man knocks on their door during a storm… And a man confronts his neighbour when he discovers a strange object in his back yard, only to be drawn into an ever-more dangerous game. Three devastating, beautifully written horror stories from one of the genre’s most cutting-edge voices. What have you done today to deserve your eyes?

Since the beginning of the New Deal, American liberals have insisted that the government must do more—much more—to help the poor, to increase economic security, to promote social justice and solidarity, to reduce inequality, and to mitigate the harshness of capitalism. Nonetheless, liberals have never answered, or even acknowledged, the corresponding question: What would be the size and nature of a welfare state that was not contemptibly austere, that did not urgently need new programs, bigger budgets, and a broader mandate? Even though the federal government’s outlays have doubled every eighteen years since 1940, liberal rhetoric is always addressed to a nation trapped in Groundhog Day, where every year is 1932, and none of the existing welfare state programs that spend tens of billions of dollars matter, or even exist. Never Enough explores the roots and consequences of liberals’ aphasia about the welfare state’s ultimate size. It assesses what liberalism’s lack of a limiting principle says about the long-running argument between liberals and conservatives, and about the policy choices confronting America in a new century. Never Enough argues that the failure to speak clearly and candidly about the welfare state’s limits has grave policy consequences. The worst result, however, is the way it has jeopardized the experiment in self-government by encouraging Americans to regard their government as a vehicle for exploiting their fellow-citizens, rather than as a compact for respecting one another’s rights and safeguarding the opportunities of future generations.

When liberals don't have reason, authority, or the American people on their side, they turn to the one thing they never run out of: Pity. For decades, conservatives have chafed at being called "heartless" and "uncaring" by liberals who maintain that our essential choice as a nation is between the politics of kindness and the politics of cruelty. In The Pity Party, political scientist William Voegeli turns the tables on this argument, making the case that "compassion" is neither the essence of personal virtue nor the ultimate purpose of government. Over the years, liberals have built a remarkable edifice of government programs that are justified by appeals to compassion: Head Start, immigration reform, gun control, affirmative action, and entitlements, to name only some. As Voegeli amply demonstrates, the liberals who promote these massive programs are weirdly indifferent as to whether they succeed. Instead, when the problems they are intended to solve fail to disappear, liberals double down, calling for yet more programs and ever greater expenditures in the name of "compassion." Meanwhile, conservatives who challenge the effectiveness of these programs are slandered as "heartless right-wingers." Yet rather than challenge this tendentious liberal argument, the many conservatives it intimidates feel it necessary to insist that they really do "care." However, liberal compassion's good intentions consistently fail to translate into good results. Voegeli walks the reader through a plethora of programs that have become battlefields between conservatives fighting for more efficiency and liberals fighting for more budget-busting federal programs to address an ever-expanding catalog of social ills. Along the way, he explains the underpinnings of the liberal philosophy that reinforce this misapplied ideal and shows why today's self-described compassionate liberals are ultimately unfit to govern.

Acrimony and hyperpartisanship have seeped into every part of the political process. Congress is deadlocked and its approval ratings are at record lows. America's two main political parties have given up their traditions of compromise, endangering our very system of constitutional democracy. And one of these parties has taken on the role of insurgent outlier; the Republicans have become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed to the established social and economic policy regime.In It's Even Worse Than It Looks, congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein identify two overriding problems that have led Congress -- and the United States -- to the brink of institutional collapse. The first is the serious mismatch between our political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act. Second, while both parties participate in tribal warfare, both sides are not equally culpable. The political system faces what the authors call &"asymmetric polarization," with the Republican Party implacably refusing to allow anything that might help the Democrats politically, no matter the cost.With dysfunction rooted in long-term political trends, a coarsened political culture and a new partisan media, the authors conclude that there is no &"silver bullet"; reform that can solve everything. But they offer a panoply of useful ideas and reforms, endorsing some solutions, like greater public participation and institutional restructuring of the House and Senate, while debunking others, like independent or third-party candidates. Above all, they call on the media as well as the public at large to focus on the true causes of dysfunction rather than just throwing the bums out every election cycle. Until voters learn to act strategically to reward problem solving and punish obstruction, American democracy will remain in serious danger.