A history of COVID-19 and the sociopolitical crises that led to the 2020 global pandemicThe COVID-19 pandemic shocked the world. It shouldn’t have. Since this century’s turn, epidemiologists have warned of new infectious diseases. Indeed, H1N1, H7N9, SARS, MERS, Ebola Makona, Zika, and a variety of lesser viruses have emerged almost annually. But what of the epidemiologists themselves? Some bravely descended into the caves where bat species hosted coronaviruses, in...

Proposes the pragmatic changes we must make to survive COVID and the worst of the new diseases on the horizonThe Trump administration’s neglect and incompetence helped put half-a-million Americans in the ground, dead from COVID-19. Joe Biden was elected president in part on the promise of setting us on a science-driven course correction, but, a little more than a year later, another half-a-million Americans were killed by the virus. What happened? In The Fault in O...

The first collection to explore infectious disease, agriculture, economics, and the nature of science togetherThanks to breakthroughs in production and food science, agribusiness has been able to devise new ways to grow more food and get it more places more quickly. There is no shortage of news items on hundreds of thousands of hybrid poultry—each animal genetically identical to the next—packed together in megabarns, grown out in a matter of months, then slaughtere...

To Prove Them InnocentBy: Donna ClementeHow do two housewives with no personal relation to the case become involved in a ten-year long battle to set three men free? To Prove Them Innocent is the true story about how their efforts, along with the fortitude of the families of the men convicted, fought to uncover and expose the truth. When three men can be sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit, it screams for reform within the justice system. The news media isn’t always...

In People Get Ready, musicians, scholars, and journalists write about jazz since 1965, the year that Curtis Mayfield composed the famous civil rights anthem that gives this collection its title. The contributors emphasize how the political consciousness that infused jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s has informed jazz in the years since then. They bring nuance to historical accounts of the avant-garde, the New Thing, Free Jazz, "non-idiomatic" improvisation, fusion, and other forms...