Tells the tragic story of Puerto Ricans who sought the post-Civil War regime of citizenship, rights, and statehood but instead received racist imperial governance.

A New York Times Editors' Choice • Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, Bookpage, L.A. Times What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize­­–finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of American rights, liberties, and protections. "Sharp, bracingly clear essays."—Entertainment Weekly Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth—such as national origin, race, and gender—that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today. Lalami poignantly illustrates how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation, with the result that a caste system is maintained that keeps the modern equivalent of white male landowners at the top of the social hierarchy. Conditional citizens, she argues, are all the people with whom America embraces with one arm and pushes away with the other. Brilliantly argued and deeply personal, Conditional Citizens weaves together Lalami’s own experiences with explorations of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture.

MCKINSEY TOP 5 RECOMMENDED READ 'An underground hit' – Best Politics Books, Financial Times 'Jon has one of the few big ideas that's easily applied' – Sam Conniff, Be More Pirate 'A wonderful guide to how to be human in the 21st Century' – Ece Temelkuran, How to Lose a Country: the Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship Description Citizens opens up a new way of understanding ourselves and shows us what we must do to survive and thrive as individuals, organisations, and nations. Over the past decade, Jon Alexander’s consultancy, the New Citizenship Project, has helped revitalise some of Britain’s biggest organisations including the Co-op, the Guardian and the National Trust. Here, with the New York Times bestselling writer Ariane Conrad, he shows how history is about to enter age of the Citizen. Because when our institutions treat people as creative, empowered creatures rather than consumers, everything changes. Unleashing the power of everyone equips us to face the challenges of economic insecurity, climate crisis, public health threats, and polarisation. Citizens is an upbeat handbook, full of insights, clear examples to follow, and inspiring case studies, from the slums of Kenya to the backstreets of Birmingham – and a foreword by Brian Eno. It is the perfect pick-me-up for leaders, founders, elected officials – and citizens everywhere. Organise and seize the future! Reviews 'Society is like an out of control house party – eating, drinking and consuming everything. Jon is the organiser of the campfire gathering behind the party. It’s calm and welcoming and you won’t want to leave. In Citizens, Jon and Ariane show how to leave the burning house of the Consumer Story and join the campfire that is the Citizen Story.' – Stephen Greene, CEO of RockCorps and founding Chair of National Citizen Service UK 'The belief that every single one of us has both the potential and the desire to make the world better drives me every day, in everything I do. In Citizens, Jon shows how taking that belief as a starting point really could transform our world. This is a truly powerful book, in every sense of the word.' - Josh Babarinde, Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur 'Every great transformation requires a new story. A story that reveals new possibilities and points toward an optimistic alternative to the current situation. Citizens presents just such a story.' – Tim Brown, Chair of IDEO and author of Change By Design 'The shift from consumer to citizen is a truly big idea. If you’re in a position of strategic influence, I strongly recommend you engage with this and consciously explore what it might mean for your organisation.' – Dame Fiona Reynolds DBE, Former Director General, National Trust, and Trustee, BBC 'There is such a thing as an idea whose time has come. This is that idea.' – James Perry, Board Member, B Lab Global, and Founding Partner, Snowball Investment Management About the Authors JON ALEXANDER began his career with success in advertising, winning the prestigious Big Creative Idea of the Year before making a dramatic change. Driven by a deep need to understand the impact on society of 3,000 commercial messages a day, he gathered three Masters degrees, exploring consumerism and its alternatives from every angle. In 2014, he co-founded the New Citizenship Project to bring the resulting ideas into contact with reality. In Citizens, he is ready to share them with the world. ARIANE CONRAD has built a career turning big ideas into books that change the world. Known as the Book Doula, she has co-written several New York Times bestsellers. BRIAN ENO is an artist, philosopher and Citizen who has played a critical part in British culture since the early 1970s. He is a deep believer in the power of ideas and the possibility of a better world, beliefs which manifest both in his audio and visual art, and in his deep engagement with social, political and environmental issues. Buy the book to carry on reading

Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbors—from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.” To live in data in the twenty-first century is to be incessantly extracted from, classified and categorized, statisti-fied, sold, and surveilled. Data—our data—is mined and processed for profit, power, and political gain. In Living in Data, Thorp asks a crucial question of our time: How do we stop passively inhabiting data, and instead become active citizens of it? Threading a data story through hippo attacks, glaciers, and school gymnasiums, around colossal rice piles, and over active minefields, Living in Data reminds us that the future of data is still wide open, that there are ways to transcend facts and figures and to find more visceral ways to engage with data, that there are always new stories to be told about how data can be used. Punctuated with Thorp's original and informative illustrations, Living in Data not only redefines what data is, but reimagines who gets to speak its language and how to use its power to create a more just and democratic future. Timely and inspiring, Living in Data gives us a much-needed path forward.

The "knowledge revolution" is widely accepted, but strategic leaders now talk of the logical next step: the human capital revolution and the need to manage knowledgeable people in an entirely different way. The organization of the future must be not only nimble and flexible but also self-governing and values-driven. But what will this future organization look like? And how will it be led? In this thoughtful book, organizational expert Brook Manville and Princeton classics professor Josiah Ober suggest that the model for building the future organization may lie deep in the past. The authors argue that ancient Athenian democracy was an ingenious solution to organizing human capital through the practice of citizenship. That ancient solution holds profound lessons for today's forward-thinking managers: They must reconceive today's "employees" as "citizens." Through this provocative case study of innovation and excellence lasting two hundred years, Manville and Ober describe a surprising democratic organization that empowered tens of thousands of individuals to work together for both noble purpose and hard-edged performance. Their book offers timeless guiding principles for organizing and leading a self-governing enterprise. A unique and compelling think piece, A Company of Citizens will change the way managers envision the leadership, values, and structure of tomorrow's people-centered organizations.

Government “of the people, by the people, for the people” expresses an ideal that resonates in all democracies. Yet poll after poll reveals deep distrust of institutions that seem to have left “the people” out of the governing equation. Government bureaucracies that are supposed to solve critical problems on their own are a troublesome outgrowth of the professionalization of public life in the industrial age. They are especially ill-suited to confronting today’s complex challenges. Offering a far-reaching program for innovation, Smart Citizens, Smarter State suggests that public decisionmaking could be more effective and legitimate if government were smarter—if our institutions knew how to use technology to leverage citizens’ expertise. Just as individuals use only part of their brainpower to solve most problems, governing institutions make far too little use of the skills and experience of those inside and outside of government with scientific credentials, practical skills, and ground-level street smarts. New tools—what Beth Simone Noveck calls technologies of expertise—are making it possible to match the supply of citizen expertise to the demand for it in government. Drawing on a wide range of academic disciplines and practical examples from her work as an adviser to governments on institutional innovation, Noveck explores how to create more open and collaborative institutions. In so doing, she puts forward a profound new vision for participatory democracy rooted not in the paltry act of occasional voting or the serendipity of crowdsourcing but in people’s knowledge and know-how.

How did Ichabod Crane and other characters from children’s literature shape the ideal of American citizenship? 2015 Honor Book Award, Children's Literature Association From the colonial period to the end of the Civil War, children’s books taught young Americans how to be good citizens and gave them the freedom, autonomy, and possibility to imagine themselves as such, despite the actual limitations of the law concerning child citizenship. Imaginary Citizens argues that the origin and evolution of the concept of citizenship in the United States centrally involved struggles over the meaning and boundaries of childhood. Children were thought of as more than witnesses to American history and governance—they were representatives of “the people” in general. Early on, the parent-child relationship was used as an analogy for the relationship between England and America, and later, the president was equated to a father and the people to his children. There was a backlash, however. In order to contest the patriarchal idea that all individuals owed childlike submission to their rulers, Americans looked to new theories of human development that limited political responsibility to those with a mature ability to reason. Yet Americans also based their concept of citizenship on the idea that all people are free and accountable at every age. Courtney Weikle-Mills discusses such characters as Goody Two-Shoes, Ichabod Crane, and Tom Sawyer in terms of how they reflect these conflicting ideals.