On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and a former White House senior advisor, a deeply reported manual about how anyone can defy an authoritarian – based on original interviews with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and theorists across the world. The United States is only the latest country to face a leader who wields fear as a weapon, punishes political enemies, disappears people off the street, and undermines free and fair elections. Today nearly three out of four people on earth live under authoritarianism, the highest rate since the late 1970s.
But even under repressive conditions, each of us holds the power to help defeat autocrats. Based on their acclaimed The New Yorker essay “So You Want to Be a Dissident?,” veteran reporter Julia Angwin and political strategist Ami Fields-Meyer give us a captivating – and profoundly hopeful – guide to courage in an age of fear.
Meet a student from Hong Kong who risked everything for democracy. A mom in a working-class neighborhood of Caracas who broke with the political movement that raised her. Cairo twentysomethings who staged a gutsy stunt to help bring down a dictator. A mild-mannered immigrant fighting to save a landmark U.S. civil rights law. People throughout the United States and across five continents who faced serious risks for dissenting in their workplace, their community, or their country. On Courage is the story of how they did it anyway – and how you can do it, too.
Blending rich, previously untold narratives with history, spirituality, and movement research, Angwin and Fields-Meyer deliver a highly accessible book full of practical lessons – an inspiring resource for anyone, anywhere, who feel the walls of history closing in on them. On Courage is a roadmap to political courage and a powerful case for how taking personal risks can help save the free world.
Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance
We are being watched. We see online ads from websites we’ve visited, long after we’ve moved on to other interests. Our smartphones and cars transmit our location, enabling us to know what’s in the neighborhood but also enabling others to track us. And the federal government, we recently learned, has been conducting a massive data-gathering surveillance operation across the Internet and on our phone lines.
In Dragnet Nation, Julia Angwin of The Wall Street Journal reports from the front lines of America’s surveillance economy, a revelatory and unsettling look at how the government, private companies, and even criminals use technology to indiscriminately sweep up vast amounts of our personal data.
In a world where we can be watched in our own homes, where we can no longer keep secrets, and where we can be impersonated, financially manipulated, or even placed in a police lineup, Angwin argues that the greatest long-term danger is that we start to internalize the surveillance and censor our words and thoughts, until we lose the very freedom that makes us unique individuals. Appalled at such a prospect, Angwin conducts a series of experiments to try to protect herself, ranging from quitting Google to carrying a “burner” phone, showing how difficult it is for an average citizen to resist the dragnets’ reach.
Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (Times Books, 2014) is a cautionary tale for all of us, with profound implications for our values, our society, and our very selves.
Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America
Stealing MySpace chronicles the rise and fall of the website that made social networking a household name.
MySpace was the unlikeliest of ventures—barely funded, technologically inept, conceptually derivative and driven by rivalries. Award winning journalist Julia Angwin traces MySpace’s history from its humble beginnings as a spam and spyware distributor, as it stumbled its way to the top. It is a surprising story that features an all-star cast of characters including pinup star Tila Tequila, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and rock star Bono.
Central to the MySpace story is an epic battle for control that climaxed when MySpace was secretly sold to Murdoch behind the backs of founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson.
Meticulously reported with extensive endnotes, Stealing MySpace is a fast-moving business narrative reminiscent of Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools and Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate.