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The United States has ended its 20-year war in Afghanistan, and the Taliban is back in charge. What does that mean for the future? Will the Taliban preserve any of the advances in civil liberties and womens rights made under the democratic government? Will the Afghan people fight for democracy independent of a U.S. occupation? What does the end of the war mean for American foreign policy?

Perry World House (PWH) held a hybrid panel this week to address these questions and more, featuring in-person speakers and about 50 audience members, as well as about 150 virtual attendees watching online.

Speakers included Meg K. Guliford, a Penn Vice-Provost Postdoctoral Fellow-in-residence at PWH, whose research agenda reflects an interest in political violence, conflict processes, and U.S. foreign policy; John Gans, director of communications and research at PWH, worked at the Department of Defense before coming to Penn; and Wazhmah Osman, an Afghan-American academic and filmmaker and an assistant professor in media studies and production at Temple University. The panel was moderated by Trudy Rubin, foreign affairs columnist and a member of the editorial board at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

They discussed the myth of American competence to the myth of Afghanistan as a blank slate and the idea that, whatever the U.S. does or doesnt do in Afghanistans future, there are plenty of other nations ready to fill the void.

Asked about the internal consequences of the U.S. withdrawal and the Talibans resurgence, Osman noted that Afghanistan has long been characterized as backward, and after 9/11 these racist stereotypes worsened.

I was born in Kabul, so both personally and with my academic training, I know theres actually a long history of social activism in Afghanistan, she said.

Its a colonial myth that some countries are a blank canvas and can be recreated as invading forces wish, Osman said.

She says one of the conclusions of her book Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists is that its time to start centering the voices of Afghan human rights workers, professionals, journalists, and intellectuals.

They have been risking their lives continuously on a daily basis to fight for social justice and also to lay the foundations of democracy, she said.

As for what to expect from the U.S. government in regard to Afghanistans future, Gans said its important to distill all the anger and frustration expressed during the withdrawal from Afghanistan and listen to credible voices.

I think youll find broad acceptance that America needed to change course in Afghanistan and needed to end its engagement there in some way, but I think those people were profoundly upset with the incompetent withdrawal, he said, noting that many embrace an American myth of competence.

The reality of American foreign policy is that it tries to do big, hard things sometimes and it doesnt have the worlds greatest track record of doing those things, he said. It was very disheartening for many people, who perhaps had great hopes for what America was going to do in the post-Trump era.

With the State Department gutted under the Trump administration, the Biden team has a lot of work ahead in a time of real challenges, he said.

Guliford focused on what the Taliban leaders will do now that theyve seized control of power.

This government gets to decide what type of international relationship it wants to engage in with its potential international partners, she said. The U.S. is not and has not been the only game in town. There are other major powers that may not rise to the level of our traditional great powers that are in play here. You have Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and China involved, as well as the numerous neighbors that Afghanistan has.

The West has frozen aid and Afghanistans assets and other players have stepped into the gap and provided what the country needs, she said.

The U.S. has wanted Russia and China to step up and do more in Afghanistan, and now they are, she said. The issue remains if the United States is OK with a potential loss of prestige and influence in the country. Right now were all in a holding pattern, waiting to see whats next.

Asked if other countries can influence the Taliban away from imposing severe strictures on women, Osman said other nations have to figure out a balance between punishing them for such actions and trying to work with them to prevent them.

We dont want the Taliban to entirely collapse because that can create another civil war and people have been so traumatized by 40 years of war, she said. There has to be a balance between the two, and then from there they can move forward, maybe in some kind of coalition government.

Rubin asked Gans if the Biden administration will have a coherent policy on Afghanistan going forward or if it just wants to be finished with the country.

I think the Biden administration would very much like to not have to think about, talk about, or defend Afghanistan policy in the years to come, he said. But the war was a response to 9/11 and so is politically very complex.

He noted that Biden campaigned for the Senate in the 1970s opposed to the Vietnam War, and in the 1990s he was opposed to the Gulf War but supported U.S. leadership in the Balkans.

You see a person who genuinely believes America can only do so much without people on the ground who want the same, Gans said.

As for whether the U.S. will face a terrorist threat from Afghanistan, Guliford said she thinks the immediate threat would be to Afghan civilians and the region overall rather than to the American homeland. One threat is the accuracy of any U.S. attacks on supposed targets, she said.

Now that the U.S. has removed troops on the ground, Guliford worries there will be even more strikes like the one in August that evidence suggests killed an aid worker and his family.

She finds the language the U.S. has used to describe civilian casualties particularly disturbing, like when the government said only three civilians were killed in the recent strike.

The idea of there being only three is problematic and shows us further evidence that the United States continues to discount the value of brown bodies, both internationally and domestically, she said.

The conversation is available on Perry World Houses YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iD26G3xoSk&t=129s.

Go here to see the original:
Afghanistan's future after the US withdrawal | Penn Today - Penn Today

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One of the biggest threats to public safety right now is the people who are charged with protecting it. As both the virus and the culture wars over how to end the pandemic rage, law enforcement officials continue to be some of the loudest voices among those determined to prolong the coronavirus emergency, all in the name of personal liberty of course.

My body, my choice, New Jersey police and firefighter protesters chanted earlier this month in a gross appropriation of the movement for reproductive rights. Unfortunately for those first responders, vaccination isnot a personal choice. Like their counterparts in the Im-anti-vaccine-for-political-purposes movement, police officers are framing their choice to opt out of getting vaccinated as a matter of individual freedom. Nevermind this is simply not how public health works, as this one woman who infected her 4-year-old daughter, who later died,had to find out in a very tragic way.

While there is no official database tracking vaccine stats for police officers, a quick look at the numbers city-by-city shows a much lower rate than the national one (76 percent of adults nationally have received one shot or more). In New York, 47 percent of cops were vaccinated, as of last month. In Los Angeles, where thousands of LA Police Department employees are seeking exemptions from the vaccine mandate, 54 percent of staff are vaccinated.

This all begs the question: How can an entity that routinely tramples on others individual freedom now have the audacity to claim the mantle of individual liberty?

To be clear, this isnt even really in their self interest: In the first six months of 2021, 155 police officers have been killed in the line of duty, with 71 of those deaths related to COVID-19. Its theprofessionsleading cause of death so far this year. The end-of-year numbers will inevitably be even more grim. Despite law enforcements insistence that their purpose is to keep the public safe, their refusal to police individual officers has made it abundantly clear that safety is simply not a priority.

Across the country, cops have been loudly pushing back against vaccine requirements. When Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced a vaccine mandate for city employees, the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police acted accordingly. Were in America, goddamn it. We dont want to be forced to do anything. Period, FOP president John Catanzara told the Chicago Sun-Times, without a hint of irony. Dont worry, it gets worse: This aint Nazi fucking Germany, [where they say], Step into the fucking showers. The pills wont hurt you. What the fuck? he continued. (Not that this really should need saying, but as a rule of thumb,you should never compare anything to the Holocaust, where approximately 6 million Jewish people were murdered. But you really, really shouldnt compare vaccines and public health mandates designed to save lives to a literal genocide.)

Meanwhile, out west, police officers have threatened to quit over vaccines. When Portland, Oregon, Mayor Ted Wheeler issued a vaccine mandate for all city employees, the police union balked. [M]any first responders are deeply opposed to vaccine mandates; so deeply that some will leave the profession before accepting a mandate, Anil Karia, an attorney for the Portland Police Association, wrote in an email obtained by the Willamette Weekly. In San Francisco, the Deputy Sheriffs Union vowed to quit their jobs over Mayor London Breeds vaccine requirements. [P]ublic safety of San Franciso has turned into the Wild West and will get worse when officers quit due to the vaccine mandate, the organization wrote in a Facebook post laden with grammatical errors.

Even in New York City, the virus first hotspot, cops would rather get infected and die than get vaccinatedeven when it goes against advice of the top brass. In August, the New York Police Department commissioner Dermot Shea reported that three employees had died from the virus and implored the rest of the force to get vaccinated. Do everything you can at this time to make sure that you are protected. Get vaccinated, he said. Since that start of the pandemic last year, 60 NYPD officers have died from the virus.

Anti-vaccine law enforcement is a risk to all of us, but more so for the people more likely to have interactions with them. The people they frequently make contact withlow-income people, the homeless community, and people of coloralready have a higher risk of being infected and dying from the virus and have the least amount of access to the vaccine. Law enforcements refusal to act in the interest of public health could have deadly consequences for the most marginalized among us.

The full-scale revolt against vaccines is just another instance of police officers believing theyre above the rules. Even their own. After all, take a look at some of the high-profile shootings that have occurred in the last several years. Cities will ban certain chokeholds, and police officers will still use them on alleged suspects, like in the case of Eric Garner in New York. In fact, many of the new reforms introduced after the spate of police killings in 2020 are being actively ignored by police departments across the country, as Mother Jones reported earlier this year. The list of people of color who have been stopped by or harassed by police for exercising their freedom to go shopping, ride a bike, own a gun, or drive down the street is endless. The system is simple: The arbitrary rules apply to you, but the very real rules dont apply to police.

Recently, but especially since Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, all weve heard from law enforcement is that cops are here to protect us. Anti-police brutality protests and movements to defund the police have been criticized for being anti-public safety. Its the common battle cry dispensed by pro-police groups, even after violent encounters: Who but the police can keep us safe? Now, faced with a deadly pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 666,000 people in the United States alone, countless police officers have made a decision that will clearly make more of us unsafe. Its almost as if they never cared about public safety at all.

Read more here:
Vaccine Protests Prove the Only Personal Liberties Cops Care About Are Their Own Mother Jones - Mother Jones

The maxim is trite: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But this healthy mistrust of political power undergirds Americas system of checks and balances. There would be no king in the United States to merge church and state the founders made sure of it. They understood that politics can corrupt religion. In recent years, however, a different threat looms larger. Religious yearning when expressed in politics as a substitute for religion can deform politics.

Over the past 20 years, the U.S., long the redoubt of religiosity among Western democracies, has experienced the most precipitous drop in church membership in recorded history. Though mainline Protestantism has taken the biggest hit, few congregations have been spared. But just because so many have disaffiliated doesnt mean they have lost the human desire for ultimate and transcendent meaning.

If Christianity has become less attractive to Americans, then they will find other outlets to direct their passions the most popular of which seems to be politics. But by turning politics into a place to discover ultimate purpose and communion, we have ironically made political power not something to be feared, but rather the worthiest of ends to be pursued with religious zeal.

This is one of secularizations many paradoxes. It has merely redirected the very passions that it claims to subdue.

In societies undergoing secularization, such passions in turn create a dangerous imbalance. The result is an ever larger gap between believers and nonbelievers, but also among believers themselves.

Sometimes this gap can lead to religious conservatives dominating politics, as in the Middle East. Because such societies remain religious, with large majorities saying that God is very important in their daily lives, even so-called secularists are often religiously observant and therefore still derive some meaning from their faith. Family structures largely remain cohesive and vibrant across the ideological spectrum. As a result, politics is less attractive or urgent as an outlet for the innate desire for belonging and community. Liberals and secularists in such societies simply dont need politics quite as much.

Islamists, on the other hand, believe that private religious devotion is inseparable from political action. Islam is to be applied in daily life, including in the public realm. And to fail to do so is to shirk ones obligations toward God. Faith, or at least their faith, gives them a built-in political advantage. As Shadi Taha, an Egyptian activist and liberal parliamentary candidate, once put it to me: You tell me how you can add faith to liberalism and Ill build you an organization like the Muslim Brotherhoods. Thats why religion always beats politics in any match.

Interestingly, in Western democracies, this dynamic is almost entirely reversed. Lower levels of religious observance among Democratic Party activists who are more likely to be atheists, agnostics or nones compared with their Republican counterparts means that they must find meaning elsewhere. As the newly elected atheist chaplain of Harvard University put it in The New York Times: We dont look to a god for answers. We are each others answers.

Intuitively, if members of one party are less religious and likely to have fewer children, they will have more time for and interest in political activism. And with high levels of education, they will know how to agitate and organize.

In an essay published in April, Richard Hanania argues that this excess of both passion and interest that might have otherwise been directed to private pursuits but wasnt leads to a partisan imbalance. Today, Democrats dominate American culture so thoroughly that it feels less like a war was won and more like a surrender. Mainstream institutions and other producers of culture, whether in the arts, universities, bureaucracies, media outlets, television stations or film, almost exclusively lean left.

There is nothing wrong with winning a culture war. Wars, even cold ones, must reach their own conclusions. What is odd about this state of affairs, however, is that an ascendant left, despite increasingly finding itself in power, continues to act as if it is the underdog in need of more power and protection.

And so liberals, after having won the culture wars, expanded them on new fronts, winning those as well. Corporations are increasingly woke, as well, even if this is the product of a cynical gambit to use the superficial politics of representation to distract from systemic economic inequality.

What results, per Hanania, is a two-party system where one party win(s) because they care about politics more. This increasingly lopsided gap raises the existential tenor of politics; liberals cement their hold over cultural institutions and attempt to extend hegemony over public education. Conservatives, meanwhile, assume a defensive crouch. There is no way to understand the behavior of the Republican Party in recent years without appreciating the perception of cultural siege, which has spurred them to act in increasingly anti-democratic ways.

You dont need to believe that this cultural siege is real to believe that conservatives believe it is real.

In the process, the political realm becomes theological, at least in one specific sense: It becomes the venue where ultimate judgments are made and where social opprobrium or even punishments are rendered on believers and disbelievers alike.

Now that Americans no longer have common religious touchstones or a shared understanding of God and family let alone even basic biblical literacy it makes sense that they would fight their battles over transcendent meaning in the last remaining space where everyone speaks the same language: politics and power.

What might be called political theology is not new. That it is in fact quite old and derives from such a dark provenance should give us some cause for worry.

Brilliance certainly offers little protection against extremism. Two of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt were members of the Nazi Party. Hannah Arendt, Heideggers lover for many years, tried to explain his Nazism by pointing to a spiritual playfulness that stems in part from delusions of grandeur and in part from despair.

Schmitt meanwhile wrote about the political as a kind of divine struggle, replacing religion as the domain where the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or disassociation is realized. In the religious and moral sphere, there is good and evil. In politics, this is not the relevant distinction, Schmitt posited. The primary distinction, and the only one that matters, is between friend and enemy. The political is not defined by the inevitability of conflict but by the ever present possibility of it, and thus one must ready oneself for such exceptional circumstances.

In this political realm, each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponents way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve ones own form of existence. Where in Matthew 5:44, Jesus says to love your enemies, Schmitts concept of the political allows him to argue that Jesus said to love your enemies but not to love your political enemies, and he offers the Crusades as an example. The decisive act to identify the Saracens as enemies in the political sense effectively sidelines Christs counsel in the Sermon on the Mount. Gershom Scholem once called the philosopher Walter Benjamin a theologian marooned in the realm of the profane. The same might be said of Schmitt, particularly with biblical readings such as this.

In the Schmittian mindset, we are defined by enmity, and this enmity is transcendent. Identity and belief come not from a loving God but from knowing who or what to hate. And to hate your adversary meant that he was transformed into an enemy, and to have an enemy meant to fight, because your very existence was on the line. And if you had to fight your enemies, it only made sense to win.

At times, I feel this temptation to dislike, or even hate, building in my own mind and heart. When I do, I immediately grow fearful that I might one day let myself be defined not by what I believe to be true but by what my enemies believe to be false.

Because we are broken by sin, and because we are living in history, it is difficult to imagine subduing an otherwise enduring human impulse. The impulse to have and define an enemy will remain with us as, in some sense, a testament to human deficiency.

As Kevin Rozario, author of The Culture of Calamity, has said in The New York Times: We know were in the presence of history when things are blowing up. Theres an intensification of emotions when youre living in historical times, as if its more real.

Some societies have successfully desacralized politics, although it is unclear whether these cases can be replicated elsewhere. The Atlantics Graeme Wood points to Japan as an appealing alternative of lower-stakes competition. Countries that have experienced fascist rule, military defeat or both, are more likely to accept normal politics, Wood suggests. Since neither are particularly likely in the near term on our own shores, thankfully, Americans will have to look elsewhere for inspiration.

At the same time, there is a danger in seeing excessive conviction as a character flaw. If America is a nation of believers but one where citizens no longer agree on what exactly to believe then this can be a source of strength and vitality.

The solution isnt to dispense with conviction. And it certainly isnt to tell people to hide from public view what they believe strongly in private. To ask someone to hide who they are in the name of a greater good is to ask the impossible.

We may be able to suppress our deepest commitments for a time, but not indefinitely.

And even if we could, it is not clear that this would even work. After all, ideological polarization has risen at a time when a growing number of Americans say, according to one survey, that they are not comfortable saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.

This suggests something counterintuitive: It is not so much that there is too much belief in our politics but rather that we feel threatened either by other peoples beliefs or by what they might think if they come to know our own. To frame the problem this way is to shift the conversation from a problem of conviction in politics to a problem of how to manage conviction.

Not all problems have solutions, and to think that they might may itself be the bigger issue.

Resolutions to the fact of deep difference are necessarily coercive, because they view difference as something in need of intervention, either from individuals or the state. In this sense, resisting theological politics is a question of both public attitudes and public institutions.

On the institutional level, American life has continued to trend toward centralization. This is one of those issues that by now seems both self-evident and intractable. Debates that should be local say around COVID-19 transmission rates and what precautions one should take are primarily understood through a national lens. This might work fine in countries with five or 10 million people, where everything is in effect local. But it makes little sense for a country as large and unwieldy as the U.S.

A growing chorus of writers and analysts, such as Yuval Levin, Patrick Deneen and John Inazu, have suggested localism or subsidiarity as the way forward. The intuition here is clear enough. If we, as Americans, no longer agree on what it means to be American, then let us pursue our divergent conceptions of the good in our own way, on our own terms and in our own parts of the country.

But it is unclear how exactly this vision comports with the dominance of an educated elite that appears increasingly comfortable with the use of state and corporate power to promote progressive ideas. Moreover, for many, the state appears to be more compelling when dealing with pandemics and climate change issues that appear to demand collective action.

For now, institutional change on a massive, sweeping scale is unlikely. In this sense, the very thing that could address the crisis of polarization reducing the centrality of the state, and therefore politics, in our lives is made more unlikely by that very polarization.

A more realistic place to start, then, is with ourselves our communities, workplaces and local governments. It is one thing to think that living with deep difference is a good idea. But for the idea and the aspiration to have any import, the suspension of judgment needs to be modeled and practiced in everyday life.

This is quite different than professing the need for civility or seeking consensus. These are nice-sounding things to be sure, but their flaw is that they effectively narrow the range of ideas expressed in public life. Consensus is only possible when there is already a consensus, and there rarely is. As the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe puts it, All forms of consensus are by necessity based on acts of exclusion.

In theory, we could rid the public square of objectionable ideas, but we do not agree on what is objectionable in the first place. To arbitrate what is acceptable and unacceptable requires an arbitrator which returns us to the problem of state power and coercion. The alternative is to expand the range of convictions and commitments that can be expressed in cultural and political life, without fear of retaliation.

It is helpful, here, to distinguish between unsettled and settled issues. The latter category is made up of a small set of issues that dont need to be relitigated and are effectively settled for debate, with a broad and near total consensus position forming over time. Whether slavery was good is an obvious example. These are mostly uncontroversial.

However, if a significant slice of the population objects to the notion that an issue is settled, then it isnt settled yet, and its up to citizens to convince more of their countrymen of their position. Because very few of our most charged debates are likely to be settled anytime soon, it means that political debate can and should stay as unfettered as possible.

In practice, for liberals, this would mean that the 74 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump might be wrong or misguided, but they are not beyond the pale and they are not any less American. Perhaps more controversially, conservatives who oppose gay marriage, as many still do, are not akin to thought criminals. While gay marriage may be settled by law, it is still something on which reasonable people of good faith can disagree. Orthodox believers of Christianity, Islam and Judaism will, as an article of faith, submit to what they hold as Gods teachings regardless of what secular notions of justice and equality demand.

There are obvious corollaries for conservatives. Liberals who support abortion are their fellow Americans. Abortion is perhaps the epitome of an unsettled issue in American public life. And it is unsettled for a reason because fundamentally different conceptions of the good have existed and will continue to exist without a definitive resolution.

There is a certain freedom in letting go of the need to win an argument or claim victory over ones opponents. Our fellow citizens do not need to be converted, and the world does not need to be made anew.

This, I believe, is a better way to live, even as I admit that it is not so easy to hold ones tongue (or tweets) when matters get contentious. But we can at least start by resisting that very human urge to make enemies of those who might otherwise become our friends.

Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World.

This story appears in the October issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.

A deeper dive into key issues in Utah and around the country, including investigations, profiles and solutions-based journalism.

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The problem with finding purpose in politics instead of religion | Opinion - Deseret News

Editor:As a former Rio Rancho High School principal and RRPS district administrator, I am always gratified when community members take an interest in our childrens education.

But faux concern designed to start culture wars in our community as demonstrated by Patrick Monroe Brenners Sept. 5 letter to the editor is a distraction from our solemn duty to educate our children and prepare them for success in the real world.

His ill-informed letter claims that critical race theory is part of the RRPS curriculum. Not so, says Superintendent Sue Cleveland.

He is upset that our teachers are trained in cultural competence. Adopting extremist talking points, he deliberately confuses cultural competence with critical race theory in order to scare the community.

In great contrast to his misplaced concern about a theory, I see concrete opportunities to better serve our students such as by strengthening career technical education; ensuring universal availability of high-speed, reliable broadband, which is now essential for learning; imparting financial literacy; and more.

When the extreme right wing talks about critical race theory, they are distorting an obscure academic concept to attack any acknowledgement of the existence of historic and structural racism in this country, and its echoes in the present.

In the context of education, cultural competence is the ability to understand and constructively teach students from cultures or belief systems different from those of the teacher. The focus is not on theory but on how best to engage the student in the classroom.

The letter takes offense at the very idea that implicit racial bias exists, as if coming to grips with the fact that we all have biases makes someone a racist. It does not.

You dont have to be a racist or morally flawed to harbor implicit bias or to have blind spots about the experiences of other cultures. The point is that its implicit, not deliberate, and culturally competent educators with the self-awareness of their own bias will be fair to all of their students.

Deliberately attacking cultural sensitivity is intended to muzzle educators who seek to impart a full and accurate understanding of our history and our current reality, disturbing as some of it assuredly is.

Research shows culturally competent teaching positively benefits students behaviorally, emotionally and academically. Why would any well-intentioned parent, teacher or community member object?

With some Republican support, the state legislature recognized the need for cultural competence when it passed the Black Education Act this year. The act provides for training of school personnel on racism, racial awareness and sensitivity.

It helps educators foster an equitable and culturally responsive learning environment for all students.

As educators, we have not done our job until we prepare our students to be successful in the real world and to properly fulfill their role as citizens. This means nothing less than providing a quality education conveyed in a culturally sensitive manner.

Gary TrippRio Rancho

Originally posted here:
Letter to the Observer: Cultural competence in schools helps - Rio Rancho Observer

In 2018, the Arlee Warriors, a boys high school basketball team on Montanas Flathead Indian reservation, was in the midst of a buzzing championship run as its town reeled from a cluster of suicides. Streep, who previously profiled the team for The New York Times Magazine, delves into the lives of the players, the towns collective trauma and the therapeutic power of basketball in Arlee, where the sport occupies emotional terrain somewhere between escape and religion.

Celadon Books, Sept. 7 | Read our review

In his third book, Prager sets out to tell the stories of the overlooked women behind the 1973 Supreme Court decision. Using interviews, letters and previously unseen personal papers, Prager tells the story of Roe through the life of Norma McCorvey, whose unwanted pregnancy gave way to the Supreme Court case, and three other protagonists: Linda Coffee, the lawyer who filed the original lawsuit; Curtis Boyd, a fundamentalist Christian turned abortion provider; and Mildred Jefferson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Norton, Sept. 14 | Read our review

In 1659, an Italian court heard a case against caterpillars after locals complained of them trespassing and pilfering local gardens. In the years since, humans have come up with innovative ways to deal with jaywalking moose, killer elephants, thieving crows and murderous geriatric trees. After a two-year trip across the world, Roach chronicles these methods in her latest book, covering crow blasting in Oklahoma and human-elephant conflict specialists in West Bengal. The result is a rich work of research and reportage revealing the lengths that humanity will go to keep the natural world at bay.

Norton, Sept. 14 | Read our review

Srinivasan, an Oxford professor, has developed an enthusiastic following for her shrewd writing in The London Review of Books, with topics ranging from campus culture wars to the intellect of octopuses. Her 2018 meditation on the politics of sex served as a launchpad for this highly anticipated book, which draws on and complicates longstanding feminist theory in six essays on pornography, desire, capitalism and more.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 21

Link:
11 New Works of Nonfiction to Read This Season - The New York Times