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Algospeak : How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam AleksicAlgospeak is an energetic, astonishing journey into language, the internet, and what this intersection means for all of us. In it, a professional linguist uses original surveys, data, and internet archival research to usher us through this new linguistic landscape. He also illuminates how communication is changing in both familiar and unprecedented ways. From our use of emojis to sentence structure to the ways younger generations talk about sex and death (see "unalive" in English and "desvivirse" in Spanish), we are in a brand-new world, one shaped by algorithms and technology.
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The Almightier : How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin by Paul VignaIn The Almightier, journalist Paul Vigna uncovers the forgotten history of money, tracing the uneasy and often accidental alliance between wealth and religion as it developed from ancient city-states to today's secular world, where religious devotion has receded and greed has stepped in to fill the void. Through engaging anecdotes, original research, and fresh perspectives on the causes of the many challenges we face today, Vigna makes a compelling argument that money has no power apart from the power we give it. We can build a better future, where we don't need to choose between helping others and getting ahead. But we can't repair the damage that greed has done until we understand how it took over our world in the first place. |
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The Boys in the Light : An Extraordinary World War II story of Survival, Faith, and Brotherhood by Nina WillnerThe extraordinary and inspiring true story of a band of young U.S. soldiers who fought together in World War II and, in the throes of combat, rescued two survivors-one of them the author's father-from Hitler's plot to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The Boys in the Light follows the parallel journeys of Company D and Eddie Willner, the author's father, as they experience two sides of World War II.
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Dinner With King Tut : How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations by Sam KeanWhether it's the mighty pyramids of Egypt or the majestic temples of Mexico, we have a good idea of what the past looked like. But what about our other senses: The tang of Roman fish sauce and the springy crust of Egyptian sourdough? The boom of medieval cannons and the clash of Viking swords? The frenzied plays of an Aztec ballgame...and the chilling reality that the losers might also lose their lives? History often neglects the tastes, textures, sounds, and smells that were an intimate part of our ancestors' lives, but a new generation of researchers is resurrecting those hidden details, pioneering an exciting new discipline called experimental archaeology. Sam Kean joins these experimental archaeologists on their adventures across the globe, from the Andes to the South Seas. He fires medieval catapults, tries his hand at ancient surgery and tattooing, builds Roman-style roads--and, in novelistic interludes, spins gripping tales about the lives of our ancestors. |
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The Hiroshima Men : The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It by Iain MacGregorThe Hiroshima Men’s vivid narrative recounts the decade-long journey toward this first atomic attack. It charts the race for the bomb during World War II, as the Allies fought the Axis powers, and is told through several key characters: General Leslie Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project alongside Robert Oppenheimer; pioneering Army Air Force pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr.; the mayor of Hiroshima, Senkichi Awaya, who would die alongside eighty thousand fellow citizens; and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer John Hersey, who traveled to Japan for the New Yorker to expose the devastation the bomb inflicted on the city and to describe in unflinching detail the dangers posed by radiation poisoning.
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The jailhouse lawyer by Calvin DuncanCalvin Duncan was nineteen when he was incarcerated for a 1981 New Orleans murder he didn't commit. The victim of wildly incompetent public defenders and a badly compromised witness, Duncan was left to rot in the waking nightmare of confinement. Armed with little education, he took matters into his own hands. At twenty, he filed his first motion from jail: "Motion for a Law Book," which launched his highly successful, self-taught, legal career. Trapped within this wholly corrupted system, Calvin became a legal advocate for himself and his fellow prisoners as an Inmate Counsel Substitute at the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary known as Angola. During his decades of incarceration, Calvin helped hundreds of other inmates navigate their cases, offering support to individuals the state had long since written off. |
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The Knowing : How the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples Continues to Echo Today by Tanya Talaga For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being consigned to a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are. This is one of Canada’s greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment. The Knowing is the unfolding of history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of her country as only she can—through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide. Deeply personal and meticulously researched, The Knowing is a seminal unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today.
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Radical Tenderness : The Value of Vulnerability in an Often Unkind World by Gisele Barreto FettermanAs a society, we shy away from public expressions of vulnerability, mistaking it for weakness or a lack of grit. To even talk about crying, much less shed tears publicly, is seen as shameful or cringeworthy. But for Gisele Barreto Fetterman, accessibility advocate and wife of Senator John Fetterman, showing strong emotions has always been her default-at events, during speeches, in her car or even at the grocery store. Friends and family warned Gisele that the world would eat her alive if she didn't toughen up. But over the years Fetterman came to a realization: her emotional tenderness was not her downfall, but her strength-one that could be incorporated into her leadership style to show a different way to create true social and cultural change.
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Shade : The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource by Sam BlochOn a 90-degree day in Los Angeles, bus riders across the city line up behind the shadows cast by street signs and telephone poles, looking for a little relief from the sun’s glaring heat. Every summer such scenes play out in cities across the United States, and as Sam Bloch argues, we ignore the benefits of shade at our own peril. Heatwaves are now the country’s deadliest natural disasters with victims concentrated in poorer, less shady areas. Public health, mental health, and crime statistics are worse in neighborhoods without it. For some, finding shade is a matter of life and death.
Shade examines the key role that shade plays not only in protecting human health and enhancing urban life, but also looks toward the ways that innovative architects, city leaders, and climate entrepreneurs are looking to revive it to protect vulnerable people—and maybe even save the planet. Ambitious and far-reaching, Shade helps us see a crucially important subject in a new light.
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