Social Society

Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

If it weren't for the 57 bus, Sasha and Richard never would have met. Both were high school students from Oakland, California, one of the most diverse cities in the country, but they inhabited different worlds. Sasha, a white teen, lived in the middle-class foothills and attended a small private school. Richard, a black teen, lived in the crime-plagued flatlands and attended a large public one. Each day, their paths overlapped for a mere eight minutes. But, one afternoon, on the bus ride home from school, a single reckless act left Sasha severely burned.

La collapsologie n'est pas une prédiction messianique mais " L'exercice transdisciplinaire d'étude de l'effondrement de notre civilisation thermo-industrielle, et de ce qui pourrait lui succéder, en s'appuyant sur les deux modes cognitifs que sont la raison et l'intuition, et sur les travaux scientifiques connus. " dixit Raphael Stevens et Pablo Servigne. Comment tout peut s'effondrer, démontre la vulnérabilité de nos sociétés et le risque systémique de leur effondrement possible. Car aujourd'hui, l'utopie a changé de camp.

As we emerge (though perhaps only temporarily) from the pandemic, other crises move center stage: outrageous inequality, climate disaster, desperate refugees, mounting tensions of a new cold war. The abiding motif of our time is relentless chaos.

When a high school student started a private Instagram account that used racist and sexist memes to make his friends laugh, he thought of it as “edgy” humor. Over time, the edge got sharper. Then a few other kids found out about the account. Pretty soon, everyone knew. Ultimately no one in the small town of Albany, California, was safe from the repercussions of the account’s discovery. Not the girls targeted by the posts. Not the boy who created the account. Not the group of kids who followed it. Not the adults—educators and parents—whose attempts to fix things too often made them worse.

Surviving the Future is a story drawn from the fertile ground of the late David Fleming's extraordinary Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It. That hardback consists of 404 interlinked dictionary entries, inviting listeners to choose their own path through its radical vision. Recognizing that Lean Logic's sheer size and unusual structure can be daunting, Fleming's long-time collaborator Shaun Chamberlin has selected and edited one of these potential narratives to create Surviving the Future.

The Party is Financial Times reporter Richard McGregor's eye-opening investigation into China's Communist Party, and the integral role it has played in the country's rise as a global superpower and rival to the United States. Many books have examined China's economic rise, human rights record, turbulent history, and relations with the US; none until now, however, have tackled the issue central to understanding all of these issues: how the ruling communist government works. The Party delves deeply into China's secretive political machine.

The founder of the international Transition Towns movement asks why true creative, positive thinking is in decline, asserts that it's more important now than ever, and suggests ways our communities can revive and reclaim it.

Critique of Judgement was published in 1790 and is divided into two parts, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the Critique of Teleological Judgement. Our ‘judgements of taste’, as Kant describes our aesthetic judgements, have both a personal and a universal function: personal, because we have a subjective aesthetic response to the ‘agreeable’, the ‘beautiful’, the ‘sublime’ and the ‘good’; but also there is a ‘universal’ aspect because our aesthetic response has a ’disinterested’ element. This brings under Kant’s spotlight, for example, the concept of beauty and the perception of beauty.

Humans versus Nature tells a history of the global environment from the Stone Age to the present, emphasizing the adversarial relationship between the human and natural worlds. Nature is cast as an active protagonist rather than a mere backdrop or victim of human malfeasance. Daniel R. Headrick shows how environmental changes - epidemics, climate shocks, and volcanic eruptions - have molded human societies and cultures, sometimes overwhelming them.

Sages from Cicero to Oprah have told us that forgiveness requires us to let go of negative emotions and that it has a unique power to heal our wounds. In Failures of Forgiveness, Myisha Cherry argues that these beliefs couldn’t be more wrong—and that the ways we think about and use forgiveness, personally and as a society, can often do more harm than good. She presents a new and healthier understanding of forgiveness—one that will give us a better chance to recover from wrongdoing and move toward “radical repair.”

Enquête sur un sujet tabou : l'ensauvagement d'une nation. Chaque jour en France : 2860 violences physiques dont 360 avec arme - 660 violences sexuelles dont 300 viols et tentatives. Dans la Manche, un clandestin est jugé pour viol et agression sexuelle sur deux jeunes filles. Un " prédateur " pour la police, des " difficultés d’interprétation " selon son avocate. La cour estime que le prévenu n’a pas eu « conscience d’imposer un rapport sexuel ». Il ne mettra pas les pieds en prison. Pourquoi notre société protège-t-elle les criminels ? Dans notre pays, on agresse des pompiers à coups de marteau.

As a diplomat in turbulent 15th-century Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli knew how quickly political fortunes could rise and fall. The Prince, his tough-minded, pragmatic handbook on how power really works, made his name notorious and has remained controversial ever since. How can a leader be strong and decisive yet still inspire loyalty in his followers? When is it necessary to break the rules? Is it better to be feared than loved?

Processus électoraux, sociétés de consommation, marketing, téléréalité et réseaux sociaux, mondialisation, plus que jamais notre époque moderne plonge davantage dans cette "ère des foules" prévue par Le Bon. Un livre audio indispensable pour qui veut comprendre les ressorts des comportements collectifs.

Everything is a computer. Ovens are computers that make things hot; refrigerators are computers that keep things cold. These computers - from home thermostats to chemical plants - are all online. All computers can be hacked. And Internet-connected computers are the most vulnerable. Forget data theft: Cutting-edge digital attackers can now crash your car, your pacemaker, and the nation’s power grid. In Click Here to Kill Everybody, renowned expert and best-selling author Bruce Schneier examines the hidden risks of this new reality.

Since she can remember, Katarina's relatives have been grooming her for the family business - thieving. But when Kat tries to go straight and leave the Life for a normal life, she's promptly kicked out of her new school for stealing the headmaster's car and mounting it on the school fountain. Although she could have done it without breaking a sweat, ironically, this time, she's innocent.

Explaining Postmodernism is intellectual history with a polemical twist, providing fresh insights into the debates underlying the furor over political correctness, multiculturalism, and the future of liberal democracy.

Peter Singer is often described as the world's most influential philosopher. Now, in Ethics in the Real World, Singer shows that he is also a master at dissecting important current events in a few hundred words. In this book of brief essays, he applies his controversial ways of thinking to issues like climate change, extreme poverty, animals, abortion, euthanasia, human genetic selection, sports doping, the sale of kidneys, the ethics of high-priced art, and ways of increasing happiness.

In April 1982, ethnobotanist Wade Davis arrived in Haiti to investigate two documented cases of zombies - people who had reappeared in Haitian society years after they had been officially declared dead and had been buried. Drawn into a netherworld of rituals and celebrations, Davis penetrated the vodoun mystique deeply enough to place zombification in its proper context within vodoun culture. In the course of his investigation, Davis came to realize that the story of vodoun is the history of Haiti.

Just 70 years ago, the Gulf nation of Qatar was a backwater, reliant on pearl diving. Today it is a gas-laden parvenu with seemingly limitless wealth and ambition. Skyscrapers, museums and futuristic football stadiums rise out of the desert and Ferraris race through the streets. But in the shadows, migrant workers toil in the heat for risible amounts. Inside Qatar reveals how real people live in this surreal place, a land of both great opportunity and great iniquity.