Freedom & Security

Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people. Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O'Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up....

New York Times bestselling author Malcolm Nance offers a chilling warning on a clear, present and existential threat to our democracy…our fellow Americans....

Best-selling author P. W. Singer and noted cyberexpert Allan Friedman team up to provide the kind of deeply informative resource book that has been missing on a crucial issue of 21st-century life....

Number one best-selling authors Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard take listeners deep inside the global war on terror, which began 20 years ago on September 11, 2001....

The Nobel Prize winner’s towering masterpiece of world literature, the searing record of four decades of terror and oppression, in one abridged volume (authorized by the author). Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum....

A never-before-told story of Virginia Hall, the American spy who changed the course of World War II, from the author of Clementine....

On February 14, 1989, Valentine's Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been "sentenced to death" by the Ayatollah Khomeini....

The inside story of the laptop that exposed the president’s dirtiest secret....

From award-winning New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions....

In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes listeners through a widening circle of antiracist ideas - from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilites - that will help listeners see all forms of racism clearly....

In The Accidental Superpower, Peter Zeihan examines how geography, combined with demography and energy independence, will pave the way for one of the great turning points in history....

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen, the untold story of the CIA's secret paramilitary units....

Singer. Actress. Beauty. Spy. During WW2, Josephine Baker, the world's richest and most glamorous entertainer, was an Allied spy in Occupied France. This is the story of her heroic personal resistance to Nazi Germany....

From the development of the U-2 to the Stealth fighter, the never-before-told story behind America's high-stakes quest to dominate the skies....

Delta Force—the US Army’s most elite top-secret strike force. They dominate the modern battlefield, but you won’t hear about their heroics on CNN.....

Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates the shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women, diving into women's lives at home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor's office, and more....

The first comprehensive oral history of September 11, 2001 - a panoramic narrative woven from the voices of Americans on the front lines of an unprecedented national trauma....

Follow the Money exposes the labyrinth of connections between D.C.’s slimiest swamp creatures - Democrat operatives, lying informants, desperate, and destructive FBI agents, Obama power brokers, CIA renegade John Brennan, George Soros, and more....

Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down....

One of the US government's leading China experts reveals the hidden strategy fueling that country's rise - and how Americans have been seduced into helping China overtake us....

The inside story of the real President Trump, by his former attorney and personal advisor - the man who helped get him into the oval office....

The Sino-American contest is driven by clashing geopolitical interests and a stark ideological dispute over whether authoritarianism or democracy will dominate the twenty-first century....

John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction: a true crime story that will terrify anyone who believes in the presumption of innocence....

Zero day: a software bug that allows a hacker to break into your devices and move around undetected....

An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships - and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom....

By the late 1970s, the fishermen of the Texas Gulf Coast were struggling. The bays that had sustained generations of shrimpers and crabbers before them were being poisoned by nearby petrochemical plants, oil spills, pesticides, and concrete. But as their nets came up light, the white shrimpers could only see one culprit: the small but growing number of newly resettled Vietnamese refugees who had recently started fishing. Turf was claimed. Guns were flashed. Threats were made. 

From renowned scholar Dr. Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory explains the centrality of race in American history and politics, and how the often mischaracterized intellectual movement became a political necessity. Ray draws upon the radical thinking of giants such as Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to clearly trace the foundations of critical race theory in the Black intellectual traditions of emancipation and the civil rights movement.

The World War II codebreaking station at Bletchley is well known and its activities documented in detail. Its decryption capabilities were vital to the war effort, significantly aiding the Allied victory. But where did the messages being deciphered come from in the first place? This is the extraordinary untold story of the Y service, a secret even more closely guarded than Bletchley Park. 'Y service' was the code for the chain of wireless intercept stations around Britain and all over the world.

Congress and the Constitution are under attack all around the world. Muzzled and muffled are the voices of virtue and reason under a medical face mask. All that remains is confusion, chaos, and COVID. 

There is a new vocabulary of injustice and inequality emerging out of society’s advances in technology. We are finding evermore outlandish ways of persecuting and violating the rights of citizens based on race, identity, and social bias. For some, the experiences of these injustices are commonplace; for others, they are completely foreign. Jim Code is a new glossary of technological injustice meant to inform and inspire the next generation of social activists and human and civil rights leaders. 

In Criminal (In)Justice, Rafael A. Mangual offers a more balanced understanding of American criminal justice, and cautions against discarding traditional crime control measures. A powerful combination of research, data-driven policy journalism, and the author's lived experiences, this book explains what many reform advocates get wrong, and illustrates how the misguided commitment to leniency places America's most vulnerable communities at risk. 

While the United States Constitution is the supreme law of the land, it is also a source of great controversy. It establishes the fundamental framework of our system of government, while differences in how to understand and interpret it often divide people. The United States Constitution: A History takes a fresh look at the Constitution, its origins, and controversies, from the founding of the country and its creation at the Constitutional Convention to the present. It examines the various controversies that divided the convention.

In March 2019, two militants were killed during a siege at a house in Nowgam, on the outskirts of Srinagar. One of them was known simply as "Idrees Bhai". The encounter was forgotten for the most part, until investigators came upon a mangled phone that had been destroyed by Idrees Bhai. When the Samsung smartphone began to reveal its secrets, investigators realized they had hit upon a motherlode. For, Idrees Bhai was none other than Umar Farooq Alvi, the mastermind of the Pulwama suicide attack of February 2019 which had killed forty CRPF personnel.

As Mark Zuckerberg once put it, "the Age of Privacy is over." But Zuckerberg and others who say "privacy is dead" are wrong. In Why Privacy Matters, Neil Richards explains that privacy isn't dead, but rather up for grabs. Richards shows how the fight for privacy is a fight for power. If we want to preserve our commitments to these precious yet fragile values, we will need privacy rules. Pithy and forceful, this is a must-listen for anyone interested in a topic that sits at the center of so many current problems. 

This book describes the turbulent lives, loves, and perilous missions of the greatest Mossad lohamot, the female warriors of the Israeli Secret Service. The stunning feats of these strong, bold women prove that they are equal to men, and often even better. Beside the nation's enemies, they had to fight a painful solitude, an awkward attitude of their male colleagues, and often give up their dream of marriage and children. And still, they brilliantly carried out their missions. 

When Valena Beety first became a federal prosecutor, her goal was to protect victims, especially women, from cycles of violence. What she discovered was that not only did prosecutions often fail to help victims, they frequently relied on false information, forensic fraud, and police and prosecutor misconduct. Seeking change, Beety began working in the Innocence Movement, helping to free factually innocent people through DNA testing and criminal justice reform. 

A sobering and fascinating study on war in the modern era, Unrestricted Warfare carefully explores strategies that militarily and politically disadvantaged nations might take in order to successfully attack a geopolitical super-power like the United States. American military doctrine is typically led by technology; a new class of weapon or vehicle is developed, which allows or encourages an adjustment in strategy. Military strategists Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui argue that this dynamic is a crucial weakness in the American military.

In 2012, an Oregon mother named Julie Keith opened up a package of Halloween decorations. The cheap foam headstones had been five dollars at Kmart, too good a deal to pass up. But when she opened the box, something shocking fell out: an SOS letter, handwritten in broken English. 

Daniel Levin was at his office when he got a call from an acquaintance with an urgent, cryptic request to meet in Paris. A young man had gone missing in Syria. No government, embassy, or intelligence agency would help. Could he? Would he? So begins a suspenseful, shocking, and at times brutal true story of one man’s search to find a missing person in Syria over twenty tense days. 

It’s easy to say that racism is wrong. But it’s surprisingly hard to agree on what it is. Does a tired stereotype in your favorite movie make it racist? Does watching it anyway mean you’re racist? Even among like-minded friends, such discussions can quickly escalate to hurt feelings all around—and when they do, we lose valuable opportunities to fight racism. Patricia Roberts-Miller is a scholar of rhetoric—the art of understanding misunderstandings. In Speaking of Race, she explains why the subject is a “third rail” and how we can do better.