Modern Politics

Acclaimed sports writers Jessica Luther and Kavitha A. Davidson tackle the most pressing issues in sports, why they matter, and how we can do better. For the authors, "sticking to sports" is not an option - not when our taxes are paying for the stadiums, and college athletes aren't getting paid at all. But simply quitting a favorite team won't change corrupt and deplorable practices, and the root causes of many of these problems are endemic in our wider society.

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.

AI expert Yorick Wilks takes a journey through the history of artificial intelligence up to the present day, examining its origins, controversies, and achievements, as well as looking into just how it works. He also considers the future, assessing whether these technologies could menace our way of life and how we are all likely to benefit from AI applications in the years to come.

Matthew Friedman provides an up-to-date overview of human trafficking, a largely ignored present-day evil, and recounts true stories of enslavement in Asia today. Former United Nations and USAID expert Matthew Friedman obtained in-depth first-hand knowledge with boots-on-the-ground work over 30 years throughout Asia. Human trafficking exists in nearly every nation on earth and Friedman has personally interviewed hundreds of freed slaves and imprisoned traffickers throughout South and Southeast Asia.

Precariously positioned between China and India, Burma's population has suffered dictatorship, natural disaster, and the dark legacies of colonial rule. But when decades of military dictatorship finally ended and internationally beloved Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from long years of house arrest, hopes soared. As historian, former diplomat, and presidential advisor, Thant Myint-U saw the cracks forming. In this insider's diagnosis of a country at a breaking point, he dissects all of the elements that came together to challenge the incipient democracy.

Born in China’s northwestern province, Sayragul Sauytbay trained as a doctor before being appointed a senior civil servant. But her life was upended when the Chinese authorities incarcerated her. Her crime? Being Kazakh, one of China’s ethnic minorities. The northwestern province borders the largest number of foreign nations and is the point in China that is the closest to Europe. In recent years, it has become home to more than 1,200 penal camps - modern-day gulags that are estimated to house three million members of the Kazakh and Uyghur minorities.

Once solely the province of ivory-tower professors and college classrooms, contemporary philosophy was finally emancipated from its academic closet in 2010, when "The Stone" was launched in The New York Times. First appearing as an online series, the column quickly attracted millions of readers through its accessible examination of universal topics like the nature of science, consciousness, and morality while also probing more contemporary issues such as the morality of drones, gun control, and the gender divide.

In this eye-opening study, Sidney W. Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry. He discusses the production and consumption of sugar and reveals how closely interwoven sugar's origins are as a "slave" crop grown in Europe's tropical colonies, with its use first as an extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then as a staple of the diet of the new industrial proletariat.

In this groundbreaking book, Aldon D. Morris’ ambition is truly monumental: to help rewrite the history of sociology and to acknowledge the primacy of W. E. B. Du Bois’ work in the founding of the discipline. Calling into question the prevailing narrative of how sociology developed, Morris, a major scholar of social movements, probes the way in which the history of the discipline has traditionally given credit to Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago, who worked with the conservative Black leader Booker T. Washington to render Du Bois invisible.

One of the most unique aspects of anarchism as a political philosophy is that it seeks to abolish the state. But what exactly is “the state”? The State is like a vast operating system for ordering and controlling relations among human society, the economy, and the natural world, analogous to a digital operating system. Anyone concerned with entrenched power, income inequality, lack of digital privacy, climate change, the response to COVID-19, or military-style policing will find eye-opening insights into how states operate and build more power for themselves—at our expense.

Twenty-seven years ago, Matthieu Ricard gave up a promising career as a scientist to study Tibetan Buddhism - not as a detached observer but by immersing himself in its practice under the guidance of its greatest living masters. Years later, this project was born, and Richard met with his father, Jean-Francois Revel - a French philosopher who became world famous for his challenges to both Communism and Christianity. At an inn, these two profoundly thoughtful men explored questions that have occupied humankind throughout its history.

"The meaning of life is the most urgent of questions", said the existentialist thinker Albert Camus. And no less a philosopher than Woody Allen has wondered: "How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?" The essays in Movies and the Meaning of Life look at popular and cult movies, examining their assumptions and insights on meaning-of-life questions....

From kelly green to millennial pink, our world is graced with a richness of colors. But our human-made colors haven’t always matched nature’s kaleidoscopic array. To reach those brightest heights required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between science and craft that’s allowed for the most luminous manifestations of our built and adorned world. In Full Spectrum, Rogers takes us on that globe-trotting journey, tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future.

From behavioral scientists to besties, Kate draws upon the extraordinary research from academics, scientists, and psychotherapists, and stories from friends of friends, strangers from the Internet, and her “squad” to get to the bottom of these and other facets of friendship. For fans of Susan Cain’s Quiet and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, The Friendship Cure is a fascinating blend of accessible “smart thinking,” investigative journalism, pop culture, and memoir for anyone trying to navigate this lonely world, written with the wit, charm, and bite of a fresh voice.

Start your listening journey today. “Meditations” provides not just philosophical wisdom, but a roadmap to living a fulfilling and thoughtful life. Let this journey of self-discovery enrich your life.

In his groundbreaking and controversial book The DIM Hypothesis, Dr. Leonard Peikoff casts a penetrating new light on the process of human thought and thereby on Western culture and history. In this far-reaching study, Peikoff identifies the three methods people use to integrate concrete data into a whole, as when connecting diverse experiments by a scientific theory, separate laws into a constitution, or single events into a story.

Sex Matters tracks the price we have paid for denying sex differences and stoking the war of the sexes - family breakdown, declining female happiness, aimlessness among men, and increasing inequality. Marshaling copious social science research as well as her own experience as a professional as well as a wife and mother, Mona Charen calls for a sexual ceasefire for the sake of women, men, and children.

The Will to Power is an audiobook of notes compiled from the literary remains of Friedrich Nietzsche. The title derives from a work that Nietzsche himself had intended to write. The "will to power", a prominent concept in his philosophy, describes what Nietzsche believed to be the main driving force in humans.

Much has been written about the storied New Hollywood of the 1970s, but while Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola were making their first classic movies, a parallel universe of directors gave birth to the modern horror film - aggressive, raw, and utterly original. Based on unprecedented access to the genre's major players, New York Times critic Jason Zinoman's Shock Value delivers the first definitive account of horror's golden age.

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