What do we mean when we talk about “the State”? Multiple polls show a growing disillusionment with the State and representative government as vehicles for progressive change, and particularly as means to tame capitalism, let alone as a basis for seeing beyond it. In a quick and readable format, Eric Laursen proposes thinking about the State in an entirely new way—not simply as government or legal institutions, but as humanity’s analog to a computer operating system—opening up a new interpr...

The first biography of a remarkable intellectual: Polymath is the first biography on Alex Comfort, a British poet, novelist, biologist, cultural critic, and activist. He is the author of international bestseller, The Joy of Sex (1972).Behind The Joy of Sex: A vital contribution that covers Alex Comfort’s victory over a career-ending disability, a tumultuous second marriage, struggles with the scientific establishm...

The Duty to Stand Aside sheds new light on the background and writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a book that has been a top seller since the early 1950s but that received an enormous boost during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, when American politics suddenly began to resemble the world Orwell described. By January, when president-elect Donald Trump's aide, Kellyanne Conway, inadvertently coined a phrase that seemed to describe the new condition—“alternative facts”—

“Laursen has given us a comprehensive account of the three decade long war against Social Security. . . . This is a fascinating history that progressives must learn, not only to protect Social Security but also to understand the dynamics behind an effective long-term strategy.”—Dean Baker, author of False Profits: Recovering From the Bubble Economy“This magnificent history documents the hydra-headed campaign to cut and kill Social Security, conducted over decades by rightw...

Alex Comfort was a British poet, novelist, biologist, cultural critic, activist, and anarchist, and the author of the international bestseller, The Joy of Sex. He played a vital role in making gerontology (the study of aging) a viable branch of modern science, energizing the direct-action movement for nuclear disarmament, revitalizing anarchism as a political philosophy in the post-WWII decades, and persuading twelve million readers of his most popular book to banish guilt and anx...

Understanding the Crash starts with a simple question that still haunts us all: What has happened to the world economy? With the kind of striking precision that only graphic nonfiction can provide, Seth Tobocman and Eric Laursen explain just how we got into this mess - and how we can get out of it.Looking back across more than a quarter century, the authors outline the roots of our current economic crisis. They show how the troubles of a working-class community in Cleveland...