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Is global warming just scaremongering by climatologists conspiring to protect their jobs? Is evolution "just a theory"? Is autism caused by vaccinations? The answer to all of these questions is, of course, no. The scientific evidence is now in, and it's conclusive, on these and many more issues that are fundamental to our knowledge and wellbeing. But you'd never know this if all of your information came from the popular media or your upbringing and...
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Michael Eric Dyson delivers a provocative exploration of the politics of race and the Obama presidency. Barack Obama's presidency unfolded against the national traumas of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott. The nation's first African American president was careful to give few major race speeches, yet he faced criticism from all sides, including from African Americans. How has Obama's race affected his presidency and the...
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As Tom Nichols shows in The Death of Expertise, this rejection of experts has occurred for many reasons, including the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed...
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"Through the weaponization of social media, the internet is changing war and politics, just as war and politics are changing the internet. Terrorists livestream their attacks, "Twitter wars" produce real-world casualties, and viral misinformation alters not just the result of battles, but the very fate of nations. The result is that war, tech, and politics have blurred into a new kind of battlespace that plays out on our smartphones. P. W. Singer...
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"Often hailed as the "first freedom," free speech is the bedrock of democracy, the enemy of tyranny, and the gateway to enlightenment. Research reveals a strong correlation between freedom of speech and democracy, innovation, and advancements in human rights, as well as reductions in conflict, corruption, and discrimination. But for all its benefits, free speech remains a challenging, controversial, and often counterintuitive principle, easily subject...
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It's not just computers--hacking is everywhere. Legendary cybersecurity expert and New York Times best-selling author Bruce Schneier reveals how using a hacker's mindset can change how you think about your life and the world.
It's not just computers: hacking is everywhere. A hack is any means of subverting a system's rules in unintended ways. Schneier takes hacking out of the world of computing and uses it to analyze the systems that underpin our...
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In the long-awaited follow-up to his 2016 best-seller The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray interrogates the vicious new culture wars playing out in our media, universities, homes and perhaps the most violent place of all: online. The Madness of Crowds is a must-read polemic-a vociferous demand for a return to free speech in an age of mass hysteria and political correctness. The global conversations around sexuality, race, mental health and...
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Why are some nations rich and others poor? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of the right policies? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Based on fifteen years of original research, Acemoglu and Robinson marshall historical evidence from the...
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"American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation--the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth--and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It's endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including...
11) Nightmare scenario: inside the Trump administration's response to the pandemic that changed history
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From two reporters for the Washington Post comes an account of the Trump administration's handling, and mishandling, of the coronavirus outbreak, a once-in-a-century pandemic that upended life across the globe that resulted in hundreds of thousands of lives lost, a cratered economy, and the remaking of the U.S. as an unwieldy pariah in the global hierarchy.
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When acclaimed Washington Post writer Wil Haygood had an early hunch that Obama would win the 2008 election, he thought he'd highlight the singular moment by exploring the life of someone who had come of age when segregation was so widespread, so embedded in the culture, as to make the very thought of a black president inconceivable. He struck gold when he tracked down Eugene Allen, a butler who had served no fewer than eight presidents, from Harry...
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"Comedian Kat Timpf shares how humor has kept her going during the hardest times of her life, and confronts the cancel culture that threatens modern comedy"--
In a 2019 study, 40% of people reported censoring themselves out of fear that voicing their views would alienate them from the people they care about most. Timpf shows why much of the way we talk about sensitive subjects is wrong. We push ourselves into unnecessary conflicts when we should...
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"A startling exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Reflecting on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the blockbuster travelling exhibition called "Auschwitz," the Jewish history of the Chinese city of Harbin, and the little known "righteous-gentile" Varian Fry, Dara Horn challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, as emblematic of...
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America may be more diverse than ever coast to coast, but the places where we live are becoming increasingly crowded with people who live, think, and vote as we do. We've built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood--and church and news show--most compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this way-of-life segregation. Our country has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred, that people don't...
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With her trademark black humor, Rachel Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas along the way, and drawing a suprising conclusion about why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. She deftly shows how Russia's rich reserve of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia's rot into its rivals, its neighbors,...
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"One of our most important public intellectuals reveals the hidden history of our current global crisis. How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world--from American 'shooters' and ISIS to Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth...
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As the Supreme Court continues to rule on important issues, it is essential to understand how it operates. Based on exclusive interviews with the justices themselves and other insiders, this is a timely "state of the union" about America's most elite legal institution. From Anthony Kennedy's self-importance, to Antonin Scalia's combativeness, to David Souter's eccentricity, and even Sandra Day O'Connor's fateful breach with President George W. Bush,...
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Beginning with the absolutely critical first moments of the outbreak in China, and ending with an epilogue on the vaccine rollout and the unprecedented events between the election of Joseph Biden and his inauguration, Lawrence Wright's The Plague Year surges forward with essential information--and fascinating historical parallels--examining the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic.