"My American ancestral Italian village was in Waterbury, Connecticut." In this sentence, Joanna Clapps Herman raises the central question of this book: To what extent can a person born outside of Italy be considered Italian? The granddaughter of Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States in the early 1900s, Herman takes a complicated and nuanced look at the question of to whom and to which culture she ultimately belongs. Sometimes the Italian...

Over the last few decades, power, information and resources have moved from being concentrated in the hands of a few, to being disbursed across many. We need look no further than events on the world stage to see the heat signature of this & ndash; from the arrival of Wikileaks, the Arab Spring of 2011 and the Occupy movements, to the social media revolution and flashpoints such as the British Members of Parliament expenses scandal. All are examples...