A thoroughly researched look at how new analytical tools can help policymakers of all political stripes solve old problems.
This collection of essays, edited by Jolin and Medina, calls for the implementation of data-driven public policies.
The editors and authors of this book believe that the public’s faith in the efficacy of policymaking, both at the federal and state level, will be improved by harnessing modern data analytics. Taken together, these essays offer a counter to right-wing cynicism toward public interventions and the perception that progressives throw good money after bad within ineffective social programs. One example of effective policies cited in the book is the state of Maryland’s 2024 ENOUGH Act, which helped to streamline the distribution of nearly $50 million in childhood anti-poverty funding toward the most effective programs in the state’s system. In Ohio, state leaders harnessed data and quantitative analysis to better allocate resources related to its water infrastructure. Known as the H2Ohio initiative, the program has enabled the state to target phosphorus runoff from farms and to protect hundreds of wetlands. Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act mandated the use of phonics-based instruction for young readers. As a result, the state improved dramatically in its scores on national reading assessments, particularly in underprivileged communities. Collectively, the essays make a robust case for the use of data to implement evidence-based policy solutions. Rather than speaking in abstract terms about this potentially esoteric topic, the authors in this collection offer tangible examples of the ways in which different states have made use of statistical analysis to shape government interventions. In some ways, this reliance on technology is nothing new in administrative governance, and some of the essays cover the degree and specificity of data that’s now available through artificial intelligence, keeping this collection up to date. The book’s bipartisan lens will help it appeal to readers regardless of their political affiliation.
A thoroughly researched look at how new analytical tools can help policymakers of all political stripes solve old problems.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9781633311466
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Disruption Books
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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