The Best Current Events & Public Affairs Books of 2024

Just before the presidential election last year, my twelve year old told me they were feeling really nervous about the outcome. I was nervous, too. I think we all were. So that’s the first thing I told her—that the entire nation was nervous, but about half of the population was worried about what would happen to the country we all love if the candidate I was going to vote for won. Then I told this wonderful child that it was okay to be nervous, but that it would also be okay. I told her that their great grandparents had grown up during the Great Depression and came of age at a time when fascism was sweeping across Europe. That my grandfather was a paratrooper in the war, jumped out of an airplane over Normandy on D-Day and took out a Nazi machine gun nest before he was shot in both legs, captured by the German army, and eventually ended up in the hands of the Red Cross and sent to England to recover from his wounds. But he survived, I told her, which is the reason we’re alive at all. We’d be okay. I told her how my father, her grandfather, born three years after D-Day, was a teenager when his teacher turned on the radio on a Friday afternoon and he learned that his first political hero, President John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated. As a catholic schoolboy in a small town, he’d grown up idolizing Kennedy. But he would come to have other heroes like Martin Luther King Jr. and John’s younger brother Bobby to inspire him as a young man. He was in college and a volunteer on the younger Kennedy’s presidential campaign the year those two heroes were assassinated within just two months of each other. A year later, he found himself stationed in Korea after being drafted into the army as a war raged in Vietnam and claimed the lives of nearly 60,000 American men his age. I told her this because I want her to know that America—and our family—had been through tumultuous times before and made it through them. I told her this because I wanted her to know, and wanted to believe, that we’d be okay. I told them that some of the families we are closest to in our community arrived on this continent long before our family did, endured and overcame things far worse than ours. And yet here we all are, together, creating a life and community and country together.  

Current events are always made up of our individual stories, even if they’re left untold in the larger narrative and grand scheme of things. We are a part of the fabric of the times we live in, and the tighter we weave ourselves together with others in our community, the stronger we will be. Regardless of what happened on election day, we were going to wake up in the same community, part of the same shared history, the next day. Which we did, and I dropped my kids off at school on went to work, as always. As generations before us had. 

Economically, the work Americans did during and after World War II built the world’s most productive economy and a thriving middle class, led to the construction of national infrastructure like the interstate highway system and the creation of an international postwar order that still survives (although a little shakily) today. Even amidst the social discord and unrest of the 1960s, a vision that John F. Kennedy gave the country before his assassination was realized when American astronauts landed on the moon. And as Charles Fishman wrote in his book One Giant Leap, that momentous undertaking “helped unleash all the forces of the technological age in which we live.” We as a country have been through tumultuous times before and have always used them as a catalyst to do big things. The question I had on my way to work the morning after election day, indeed in the days and months leading up to it, as I was reading a mountain of books about the times we’re living in, is if we are still capable of it.     

While reading books for the Current Events & Public Affairs category this year, the theme that kept recurring to me was infrastructure—not just physical infrastructure, though there is plenty on that, but the infrastructure of ideas, human hands action, and organization, movement of goods and people, the rules and norms we live by, and the intellectual and ecological infrastructure that supports it all. Some of that may be a little abstract, but it led me to look for what practical steps we can take and what we need to physically build to create a more resilient, sustainable, and just economy for the generations that follow, to support people in our country and life on this planet.  

We live in a time in which human activity and what we build is perhaps the most important determinant of what happens to the planet we inhabit. The positive side of that is that the greatest challenges we face today offer some of our greatest opportunities for growth. We just need the civic imagination and collective will to seize them, to build new things and embrace new approaches. The books below all address that need in some way.

Build: Investing in America's Infrastructure by Sadek Wahba, Georgetown University Press   

Sadek Wahba opens his book with the story of a panicked phone call he received from his daughter on June 24, 2021. A twelve-story building had collapsed in Miami Beach. You may remember the incident because it was national news, but it was closer to home for Wahba and his daughter—and not only because they lived close by. As someone who has spent decades investing in infrastructure projects around the world, Wahba is an expert in how things are constructed, and how they could potentially collapse. But to his daughter, it was even more personal. She had a friend in the building who they later learned was one of the ninety-eight people who lost their lives that day.  

People wondered how this could possibly happen in the richest country in the world, but infrastructure failures have become alarmingly common occurrences in America. We’ve seen bridges collapse in Minneapolis and elsewhere, children poisoned by the drinking water in Flint and the citizens of Jackson lose running water altogether. Clearly, something is wrong with how we are maintaining our nation’s infrastructure. In Wahba’s estimation, it is that we are overly reliant on tax-funded investment and municipally owned facilities and delivery. So, the opening chapter of his book makes “The Case for a New Old Approach” of funding infrastructure—allowing, and indeed encouraging, more private sector investment and management.  

You might be skeptical at first, as I was, about the motives of someone who invests in infrastructure telling us we should allow more private investment. As in Milwaukeean, I live in a place where the so-called “sewer socialists” created municipally owned and operated systems in the early 1900s and laid the foundation for the city to become a beacon of good government and an industrial powerhouse for decades after. As Milwaukee’s Deep Tunnel project makes clear, cities are still capable of large-scale infrastructure work. Still, as a pragmatist, I have to admit that not all municipalities are in the same place and that even in Milwaukee, roughly 65,000 homes are still plagued by lead laterals. Mine is one of them. 

Sabha shows us that, historically, infrastructure was built and maintained much differently, and it still is in many if not most other places today. In fact, Wahba’s firm I Squared Capital owns and operates wastewater concessions, data centers, solar and district energy plants in a place you might not expect: 

It’s a remarkable fact: in an economy overseen by the Chinese Communist Party, in the largest cities in the second largest economy in the world, privately owned utility operators manage municipal infrastructure. 

In a wide-ranging look at infrastructure that takes us “deep into the inner workings of city halls and statehouses across the country, as well as into the decision-making processes of many economies around the world,” chock-full of insightful historical perspective and current cases, Sabha shows us that the way we fund infrastructure here in America isn’t the only way, or maybe even the best way. If nothing else, with the dire need we have in this country, I think we need to be open to the Wahba’s suggestion that: 

Throughout history, what constitutes the public and private spheres has changed, and today the practical needs of society call for the line demarcating public and private arenas to shift once again. 

Public institutions are important. Protecting democratic norms is paramount. So is remaining adaptable, dynamic, and open to change. In considering the proper roles of government and the private sector, it is instructive to remember that some of the things that we now consider institutional, or as ideal forms of functioning, are in fact artifacts of our nation’s particular history. Not accidents, exactly, as they were put in place deliberately, but not necessarily meant to endure as—or as long as—they have. Wahba’s book should prompt an honest and important debate, offer ideas for private-public partnerships, and help policy makers and businesses alike think about the best way to tackle the current backlog of projects that desperately need doing. 

How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain by Peter S. Goodman, Mariner Books 

Peter Goodman provides, if not a counterargument, then at least something a counterweight to the ideas in Sadek Wahba’s book. Goodman’s book is an examination of how the crucial infrastructure that currently is the purview of the private sector—namely the global supply chain—failed us during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to the critical supply shortages and skyrocketing inflation that followed. In late 2021, Goodman tells us:   

By one estimate, the ships waiting off Southern California’s two largest ports were collectively loaded with more than $25 billion worth of goods. And this was a mere fraction of the wares stranded by a global breakdown that had reached staggering proportions. Nearly 13 percent of the world’s container shipping fleet was floating off ports from China to North America to Europe. Upward of $1 trillion worth of product was caught in the congestion. 

All of this stuff was supposed to be somewhere else. 

It was, in Goodman’s estimation “nothing less than the breakdown of globalization.” A seasoned journalist, he doesn’t look only at the companies and machines that move things around the world or the infrastructure it moves along. He gets on the ground and tells the stories of the human beings on the front lines of the supply chain. From factories to farms, from meat packing plants to container ships, from the nation’s dockworkers to the decisions made by two different presidential administrations, Goodman takes us on a journey of how and why we seemed to run out of everything. He explains why even the most critical supplies—personal protective equipment for healthcare workers, baby formula for infants, and the computer chips needed in everything from home appliances to automobiles—seemed to disappear during a global pandemic. 

The history of how we ended up in such dire straits runs deep. Goodman writes, for example about how Gilded Age railroad companies bilked the country by, in the words of robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt himself, “building railroads from nowhere to nowhere at public expense” to gobble up the “grants of land running alongside newly installed lengths of track along with long-term loans.” When they could no longer live off that government largesse, they turned to decades of corporate cost cutting, specifically by squeezing their workers. As Goodman writes: 

American railroads had been looted from the inside. Their corporate owners had compromised the capacity of their networks through ruthless budget cutting as a means of freeing up cash for shareholders. Cargo shipments were stuck at choke points across the country in part because the railroads could not hire enough maintenance workers—a direct consequence of decades of cold-blooded exploitation. 

The railroads are just one part of a larger global supply chain that pursued profits and relied on exploited labor to the point of operational precarity, leaving no margin for error or incentive for workers to enlist when an inevitable crisis hit. At a time when we needed them to function at their best, key pieces of the supply chain weren’t functioning properly because they couldn’t hire enough of the essential workers they relied on. “The trucking industry complained that it could not hire enough drivers,” explains Goodman. “Warehouse were stuffed to the rafters and short of workers.”  

This almost total breakdown also belied the notion that industry consolidation results in greater efficiency, proving instead that it results in greater supply chain fragility and economic precarity. When only a handful of companies control entire industries, there is nowhere to turn when they fail to operate efficiently, as so many did.  

We can hang on to our technological gains and our social progress while still resurrecting crucial policies that were dismantled over decades by monopolists in pursuit of fairer profits.  

The global supply chain is, in many ways, a modern marvel. But when we allow it to be controlled by a handful of dominant entities who want to squeeze as much profit as possible out of it, it squeezes workers and the ability of the supply chain itself to operate efficiently when we need it most. “It is time,” Goodman suggests, “for broader interests to gain a say over how we receive the goods that land at our doors.” Or in the words of our previous author, perhaps “the practical needs of society call for the line demarcating public and private arenas to shift once again.” 

Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net by Jessica Calarco, Portfolio   

So far, we’ve looked at mostly physical infrastructure. But when it comes to how we care for the most vulnerable members of our society—young children, the elderly, and those with special needs—we can’t use rivets and steel and fiberoptic cables; we must use human hands and hearts. More often than not, the human hands and hearts providing that care belong to women. More often than it should be, that work is unpaid. 

The United States once created some the critical care infrastructure we need to support working families. When women were needed in the workforce to keep the factories from closing and the economy from collapsing during World War II, the government found that there was one thing keeping them from joining the effort: a lack of childcare. As Jessica Calarco relates in the Preface of her book: 

Katharine Lenroot, chief of the US Children’s Bureau, saw an opportunity to convince Congress that funds from the Lanham Act, which were meant to go toward housing and other infrastructure projects in key defense-producing centers, could also be used for childcare.  

It took almost two years to from the time Lenroot proposed the idea to Congress for them to get on board and start allocating funds, and even then it didn’t cover every community, but as Calarco notes, “In the wake of those changes, and by the end of the war, labor force participation among US mothers with young children had risen from one in thirty to one in six.” 

As many of our allies built more robust social safety nets for their citizens after the war, we abandoned ours. That has created what Calarco calls a “DIY society” in which everyone is left to fend for themselves even as the staggering rise in income inequality over the decades has left most of us with less resources to do that with. Calarco’s original goal was to write a book on parenting, but it turned into a book about the absence of comprehensive public programs or support for things like childcare and eldercare, and how women are left holding it all together. And, as she notes: 

The problem, of course, is that when women prove they can hold it together, we thank them by giving them more to hold. 

Holding it Together takes us into the intimate lives of women and the decisions they are forced to make in a country that doesn't offer much support to families, in which women are relied upon to be the social safety net. The “up-close, unflinching” accounts of the women she got to know in her interviews and study, the stories of struggle they shared, are most likely familiar to you. No matter where you live or what income bracket you are in, you’ll probably find someone or a situation in the book that reflects your reality, that you can relate to. You’ll learn how childcare has come to be so prohibitively expensive to so many that they drop out of the workforce, even while the workers who provide childcare are barely scraping by. You’ll learn how the myth of meritocracy and our DIY culture have left so much resting on women’s shoulders, and what we as a society must do distribute that weight. And you’ll learn how that will not only benefit women, but all of us, and create a more just economy to boot. 

The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers by Zeke Hernandez, St. Martin's Press  

When one thinks of immigration infrastructure, one might think of “the wall,” or perhaps the cages that immigrant children were kept in after being separated from their families under the government's family separation policy from the middle of 2018 until the end of 2019. Zeke Hernandez’s new book points to a more positive possibility—the businesses immigrants build, the struggling communities they help repopulate and keep alive, the jobs they not only do, but create. His book helps flip the xenophobic script to point our all the positives that immigrants bring to our country and economy. As he writes:  

Those who manipulate public opinion create fear of newcomers by telling us lies about their similarities and differences. They claim that immigrants compete economically with locals because of their similarities, such as wanting the same jobs as native workers. They also claim that foreigners fail to socially assimilate because of their differences, including their unassimilable cultures.  

But you’ll see just the opposite! Newcomers bring enduring economic benefits because of their differences and integrate successfully to our communities because of their similarities. 

You wouldn’t know it by the debate in the mainstream media, but immigration is remarkably popular. “A clear majority of American (70 percent) view immigration as a ‘good thing’ for the country." And they are correct, as Hernandez shows through the book, citing the best available evidence of immigrants’ effects on our economy, our communities, and even our individual lives—the last of which most of us know for ourselves already. He also explains that the crisis of illegal immigration is the direct result of our immigration policy. Comparing it to speed limits, he writes:  

The default principle in road design is that cars are a good thing and thus should move. Therefore, speed limits should be set close to their natural limits and updated periodically.  

In contrast, the default principle of our immigration system is that immigrants’ movements should be restricted. This has led us to set limits for immigration far below the country’s capacity to accept them, not to mention its natural need for the good they bring. And that system hasn’t been updated in decades. Its poor, archaic design has created a host of problems, including the crisis of illegal immigration. 

Even as we’ve restricted people from coming to our country, we have spent a lot of money trying to lure foreign companies. Hernandez shares an example from our home state of Wisconsin, where just to our south in Racine County people were put out of their homes to make way for Chinese manufacturing giant Foxconn to come in, lured by $4 billion in tax incentives from the state. But Foxconn never really did come in. The $10 billion they promised to invest and the jobs they promised to create never materialized. By contrast, Hernandez documents how foreign people do create cross-border flows of capital and investment in our communities. As Hernandez writes:   

Investment done right is a human activity, not a transactional exchange of capital for tax breaks. 

The data is clear. If you want more investment in your community and a stronger economy, you want to attract more immigrants.   

What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, One World 

Addressing climate change is going to require cross-disciplinary and collaborative effort, and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson sets a hopeful example in her interviews with 20 people from “across the spectrum of expertise” in climate solutions. Because the problem is so big and confronting it can feel so daunting, Johnson’s approach—bringing so many voices and viewpoints, so much expertise and experience from others to bear on the problem—makes the work we all need to do feel less lonely. There is something each of us can do, some way we can lend our unique talents, an individual climate purpose available to each of us, but it is important to know that we’re not alone, and what we’re aiming at. As Johnson notes: 

Before we fully commit our brains and our brawn, before we go all-in, it’s reasonable to want some indication of what success looks like, some sense of what all this change will mean for our lives. 

So it helps us have insight into what others are working on, a look at some of the small wins and big visions to inspire our own entry into the fray. That makes the interview format Johnson take particularly powerful here. And yet, my favorite passages in the book are the moments in between and around the interviews when she is writing directly to us rather than talking to others. Take this, for example, this passage about the importance of moral clarity.  

Some people might tell you that seeing stark right and wrong is naive. It is tempting to succumb to endless compromise as the norm. Resist. And let’s be clear: Moral clarity is not the same thing as naivete. 

It is naive to expect governments and corporations will do the right thing with our insistence, or that someone will handle it. It it naive to focus only on what we can do as individuals, instead of what we can do together, in community. It is naive to assume that the needs of poor communities, communities of color, and Indigenous communities will be taken care of, unless we ensure that they are prioritized. It is naive to think we “solve” or “stop” climate change. It is also naive to give up. 

[…] 

What if we enter the rest of our lives with as much simplicity and moral clarity as we can muster? What if we get that right? 

Phil Ochs once wrote that “In an ugly time, the true protest is beauty.” Living in an increasingly complex and fast-paced world, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s prescription for entering the rest of our lives with simplicity and moral clarity may be the new true protest. If we can back it with individual action and wider implementation of some of the ideas and solutions contained in this book, it may also be one of the most productive.  

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