NBN Book of the Day

Neither capitalism nor central planning, this is the future for socialism.
Capitalism isn’t working. But is there a plausible alternative? The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World (Verso, 2026) lays one out: a system where workers control every lever of production, and competitive markets and state planning coexist side by side. Drawing on the history of socialist experiments and the economic debate over planning and markets, The Blueprint confronts the hardest questions about what went wrong in the past—and why it can go right in the future. The result is a socialism worthy of the twenty-first century.
Mike Beggs is senior lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on the history of macroeconomic and monetary thinking and policy.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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From maps of colonial empires to charts of national trade, data visualization has long been used to consolidate knowledge and power. But just as often, it has been used to uncover oppression and bring about change. Data by Design: Visualization and Power from Abolition to the Dawn of Data Science (MIT Press, 2026), journeys across continents and over centuries to expose the power of visualization—and to show how it can be wielded back. A group of British antislavery activists who created a diagram of captives in the hold of a ship, accelerating support for the abolitionist cause. A Ñudzahui (Mixtec) painter who designed a map for a king, testifying to his people’s sovereignty and claims to the land. These are but two stories of many, each expertly analyzed and illustrated in full-color detail, that confirm how visualization can lead to a more liberatory world. A set of new images, created by Lauren Klein and her research team—also viewable on an interactive website—further expands our sense of what visualization, when used with intention and care, can achieve. A book for those who love charts and graphs, and for those who create them, Data by Design offers historical grounding, ethical clarity—and the inspiration we need—to envision a more just future.

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Digging Beneath Bones, teri elam’s debut poetry collection, travels through memory, lineage, rupture, and return, illuminating the body that navigates this rite of passage—a Black, Southern woman of a certain age—moving through the comfort and discomfort of relationships, dysfunction, family, truth, and self. It explores memory as a concept, a need, and a loss. A portrait of caretakers, aunties, nieces, and Black boy joy, it highlights meaning through music, television, myth, prayer, and the small altars of daily life. Above all, it is a love letter to a mother from a daughter, looking through their kaleidoscope, shining light on the broken bits of colored glass that create an infinite number of shapes, holding their testimony and memory.
teri elam is a poet, essayist, and screenwriter. She has been a Two Sylvias Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize and Perugia Press finalist. Her poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, The Future of Black: Afrofuturism and Black Superheroes, Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology, and Kwame Alexander’s This Is The Honey. Her poem “Counterpoint,” about legendary jewel thief Doris Payne, received honorable mention in december magazine’s Jeff Marks Memorial Prize contest. A Cave Canem and The Watering Hole Graduate Poetry Fellow, elam has film and poetry reviews and artist interviews in Birmingham Poetry Review, Heavy Feather Review, Callaloo, The Rumpus, Incluvie, and Rough Draft Atlanta. You can find teri at her website and on Instagram.
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Tablet computers appear commonplace today, yet for decades they represented an ambitious—and often unrealized—vision of personal computing. The Tablet Computer: The Idea of a Machine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026) traces the long history of this idea, from early conceptual designs in the 1970s to the consumer devices of the twenty-first century. Dr. Elizabeth R. Petrick examines the tablet as a shifting concept shaped by expectations about learning, productivity, accessibility, and human–computer interaction.
Across multiple generations of failed prototypes, partial successes, and rebranded technologies, developers imagined tablets as book-sized, portable, networked computers operated through touch. These visions promised to transform education, support workers of various kinds, and redefine how humans interact with machines—promises that were repeatedly revised or deferred. Approaching the subject through intellectual history, Dr. Petrick follows how engineers, designers, corporations, and users debated what a tablet should be, who it was for, and what role it might play in everyday life. Projects such as the Dynabook, personal digital assistants, and early consumer tablets reveal how technological futures are shaped as much by aspiration and failure as by market success.
The Tablet Computer offers a fresh perspective on the history of computing by showing how devices are built from ideas that evolve over time. It will appeal to historians of technology, media scholars, and readers interested in how familiar machines carry the traces of unrealized futures.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Jeremy Adelman’s The Capitalist Era: The Making—and Unmaking—of the Global Mind (Princeton University Press, 2026) puts the world’s current unwinding in much-needed historical perspective. Combining political, economic, intellectual, and environmental history, the book tells the epic story of the forces that, since the late eighteenth century, have transformed the world into a single but fractured survival unit that is integrated by exchange and flow, yet divided by suspicion and fear. It is a story of hopes for universal peace, panic over planetary destruction, and debates, policies, and media that have shaped how people view one another across distances and borders.

The Capitalist Era chronicles how global integration compelled people from different parts of the world to reckon with what it means to need each other for resources or recognition without knowing one another, and it describes the confrontations and experiments that have shaped the world through periods of integration and disintegration over the past two centuries. Rejecting simplistic determinisms about inevitable peace or inescapable doom, this book illuminates the brittle unity of today’s world.
The author, Jeremy Adelman, is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University and the Director of the Global History Lab at Cambridge University.
The host, Elisa Prosperetti, is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore. She is the author of An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

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