In White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, MacArthur fellow and activist-pastor William J. Barber II makes the logical but nonetheless surprising point that, even though poverty has a disproportionately high impact on Black Americans, there is a vastly greater number of white people living in poverty, leading lives of unacknowledged despair in plain view. Yet we often equate poverty with Black communities, and as a result, poverty and all its ills are seen as a “Black problem.” 

Barber argues that this equation is based on four racist myths that deliberately divide poor white people from poor Black people, and prevent them from uniting against the policies and structures that favor the rich and powerful. These myths—among them that all white people share common ground, regardless of economic and social status—both justify and perpetuate our malign neglect of the poor. His examination of each myth, from its cause to its effect, exposes that what we were told were fundamental truths about poverty were actually dog whistles and racist tropes. 

But, important as this lesson is, Barber’s most powerful message is that if these myths are dismissed, and if poor white people recognize that they have far more in common with poor Black people, they could unite to demand living wages, access to health care and safe housing. Barber calls this union a “moral fusion,” and his descriptions of the power that is unleashed when Black and white poor people discover their common ground are the most hopeful and powerful passages in White Poverty. For example, a queer, poor, white woman named Lakin gave testimony at a Black church about the debilitating isolation of white poverty and the fear it engenders. By exposing the wounds of white poverty, Lakin created a space for empathy and understanding—and action.

White Poverty resonates like a powerful sermon. Like Jeremiah, Amos and other Old Testament prophets, Barber condemns the injustice perpetrated on the poor. And also like them, Barber offers a hopeful way forward to a more just and equitable society.

Audrea Lim’s spirited Free the Land: How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos nudges readers to reconsider our deeply ingrained ideas about land ownership. Private property, especially the commodification of land, has been a fundamental component of the American project, even though, by design, it has never been available to all. But as issues of social justice become more pressing and climate change looms as an existential threat to our species and immediate threat to others, it is doubtless time to reexamine many of our foundational principles.

In the contemporary United States, “private property mirrors our core social value, individualism,” Lim writes in the magnificent opening section of her book. Yet the concept of owning land is not wired into our genes, but rather an idea that came out of Europe in the Middle Ages. Indigenous cultures had different principles of land tenure. “In none of these tenure systems were individual land rights perpetual—lasting forever—or unconditional,” writes Lim. European settlers mistook Native concepts for an absence of Native ownership and assumed the land was theirs for the taking.

This is just one of dozens of insights that begin to illuminate the way that private land ownership relates to dispossession, inequality, racial and economic discrimination and environmental collapse. Lim has been thinking long and deeply about these issues, and her research has taken her to Native reservations, Puerto Rico, crumbling New York City neighborhoods and aspirational communities in Minnesota and Georgia. Her meetings and interviews with people exploring alternative ways of thinking about land ownership make for fascinating reading.

In her view, community and commercial land trusts, usually held by a nonprofit and stakeholders, offer potential antidotes to some of our land-related ills. One of the earliest of these was established in Burlington, Vermont, with the help of then-Mayor Bernie Sanders. These trusts allow people to buy, sell and pass on houses while the land itself remains in trust. This provided a path for poorer people to be homeowners and build family wealth.

Land trusts are not perfect mechanisms, Lim readily acknowledges. Neither are any of the other alternatives she explores. “There is no pure, single-shot solution,” she writes. But she is optimistic, and that optimism radiates throughout this provocative, enticing call for a changed relationship to land.

Although the smooth veneer of AI might gleam with a new-car sheen, the rough edges below the surface reveal its inherent inequalities. Madhumita Murgia, the first artificial intelligence editor for the Financial Times, writes in her probing Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI that generative AI “is altering the very experience of being human.”

Murgia illustrates the ways that AI affects all areas of our society from health care and policing to business and education. “Our blindness to how AI systems work means we can’t properly comprehend when they go wrong or inflict harm—particularly on vulnerable people,” she writes. Drawing on deep research and interviews with individuals around the world, Murgia humanizes this claim by introducing readers to the people at risk, as well as to those endangering them.

Sama, a U.S. company that outsources digital work to East Africa, promises financial and social mobility to people living in poverty. Daniel, a South African migrant, was told he would be working with marketing content. But when he got to work, he discovered that his job was to spend hours viewing images of “human sacrifice, beheadings, hate speech and child abuse,” all for a salary of $2.20 per hour. Officially, he was flagging graphic and illegal content, but he was also training Facebook’s algorithms to identify this sort of content on their own. Daniel sued Sama and Meta, telling Murgia, “These companies are only interested in profit and not in the lives of the people whom they destroy.” His lawyer, Mercy, is even more pointed about the inequities of the AI industry: “‘All revolutions are built on the backs of slaves. So if AI is the next industrial revolution, then those who are working in AI training and moderation, they are the slaves for this revolution.”

Murgia also shows the promise of AI. In western India, Ashita, a doctor, uses an app called Qure.ai to help screen for diseases like tuberculosis in rural areas that lack access to health care, allowing her to deliver lifesaving care more quickly. Her usage data and communication with developers improved the software so that it could be rolled out more widely, and tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment shot up 35% in the region.

Code Dependent is full of such bracing, complicated stories throughout as it uncovers the perils and promise of AI.”

The last decade of American political terror isn’t some accidental phenomenon. As award-winning journalist Elle Reeve intimately conveys, the “alt-right” movement is the result of several racist and misogynistic hate groups born in the least moderated parts of the internet, who have aligned with powerful Republicans and whose primary focus is white supremacy. Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics is Reeve’s investigation into the network and ideologies of the alt-right’s most key players. Some of them have left the extremist organizations that once consumed them; others are still pulling the strings. 

Her profiles of Matt Parrott and Matt Heimbach, the neo-Nazi co-founders of the Traditionalist Worker Party and one of the driving forces behind the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, are among the most illuminating. The men lament their middle-class upbringings, their feelings of alienation, their crumbling personal and professional lives, their hatred of their dads and even their diagnoses of autism. But these qualities, Reeve contends, are not an excuse for facism and hatred. 

Rather, Reeve shows, QAnon followers, Proud Boys and other extremist groups share the opinion that they’re somehow being cheated out of what is “owed” to them—money, women, sex, power, respect—and that failure to obtain their desires is the failure of the nation. It’s not just that they think they’re losing to minorities, women and leftists: They think the soul of the nation is lost, too. This fear is not new, but the digital space has made white supremacist content easier to access, build community around and impact the political landscape in dangerous ways.

Reeve is a phenomenally skilled interviewer, able to motivate her subjects to reveal more than they probably should. She offers what they went online to find in the first place—an open ear to share their unbridled opinions, no matter how bigoted. Some of the people Reeve interviews distance themselves from the hate groups they called home—Parrott, Heimbach and Richard Spencer among them. But Black Pill also makes clear that once you’re in, it’s hard to get out. “The movement,” Reeve writes, “will get you punched, sued, jailed, divorced, bankrupt. But it will never let you go.” 

“You get to a certain point where everything is just like that Springsteen song, ‘Glory Days,’” a rueful Heimbach tells Reeve. “You just sit around like, Man, remember 2015?” Still, Black Pill doesn’t ask for our sympathy—just a willingness to peer into the dark.