Since the start of the Trump era, the United States and the Western world has finally begun to wake up to the threat of online warfare and the attacks from Russia, who flood social media with disinformation, and circulate false and misleading information to fuel fake narratives and make the case for illegal warfare. The question no one seems to be able to answer is: what can the West do about it? Central and Eastern European states, including Ukraine and Poland, however, have been aware of the threat for years. Nina Jankowicz has advised these governments on the front lines of the information war. The lessons she learnt from that fight, and from her attempts to get US congress to act, make for essential reading. How to Lose the Information War takes the reader on a journey through five Western governments' responses to Russian information warfare tactics - all of which have failed. She journeys into the campaigns the Russian operatives run, and shows how we can better understand the motivations behind these attacks and how to beat them. Above all, this book shows what is at stake: the future of civil discourse and democracy, and the value of truth itself.

Beginning Apr. 1895, includes the Proceedings of the East India Association.

A New York Times Notable Book A Daily Beast Best Book of the Year A Huffington Post Best Book of the Year From elementary school on, Walter Kirn knew how to stay at the top of his class: He clapped erasers, memorized answer keys, and parroted his teachers’ pet theories. But when he launched himself eastward to an Ivy League university, Kirn discovered that the temple of higher learning he had expected was instead just another arena for more gamesmanship, snobbery, and social climbing. In this whip-smart memoir of kissing-up, cramming, and competition, Lost in the Meritocracy reckons the costs of an educational system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back—or within.

How Russia Lost Bulgaria looks at the rapid breakdown in Russo-Bulgarian relations in the years following the Russian liberation of Bulgaria in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. Initially, the Russian Empire and the Principality of Bulgaria were close allies, bound together by sentiment, by geopolitical reality, and by strong administrative links – the Bulgarian Minister of War was a Russian general on detached duty from the Imperial Army, to pick just one example. Yet by 1886, only eight years later, relations degenerated to such a point that a Russian-backed coup overthrew the Bulgarian monarch. The two countries would cut diplomatic relations for years. How Russia Lost Bulgaria argues that the behavior of Russian military and diplomatic agents in Bulgaria caused this rapid turnabout. These agents acted in a tactless, obnoxious fashion that offended the pride and sensibilities of both local Bulgarian politicians and of the German-born, Russian-appointed Prince Alexander von Battenberg. Having a Russian Consul-General refer to the leader of Bulgaria’s majority party as an “unwashed, uncombed, country bumpkin” did not improve relations, certainly. But to write off Russia’s agents in Bulgaria as bunglers and imbeciles is neither accurate nor intellectually satisfying. Underlying their actions is the fact that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was a weak and disorganized institution, and it failed to either develop a coherent policy approach to relations with Bulgaria, or to force its agents to carry out an approach once it was developed. Left to their own devices, Russian agents in Bulgaria fell back on their own ideas of how to advance the Russian Empire’s position, and in so doing they drove Russia’s relationship with a vital client state straight into the ground.