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"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...
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Dostoevsky studies the psychological impact upon Raskolvikoc, a desperate and impoverished student, when he murders a despicable pawnbroker. He transgresses moral law, thinking he ultimately benefits humanity. Crime and Punishment takes the reader on a journey into the darkest recesses on the criminal and depraved mind, and exposes the soul of a man possessed by both good and evil and who cannot escape his own conscience.
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"A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Abraham Lincoln was president when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions inextricably bound up with money, power, race, identity, and faith. He was hated and hailed, excoriated and revered. In Lincoln we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. At once familiar...
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"Technology and increasing levels of education expose people to more information than ever before. These gains, however, also fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that derails debates on numerous issues. With only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be as informed as doctors and diplomats. All voices demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary...
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Aldous Huxley's tour de force, Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a "utopian" future--where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order. A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations, it remains remarkably relevant to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying entertainment.
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Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography, or perhaps ignorance of the right policies? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. In this book the authors 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, they marshall...
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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 society: from tax laws to financial markets to politics. If you can take advantage of loopholes -- hacks -- the rules no longer apply to you. Once you learn how to notice hacks, you'll start seeing them everywhere -- and you'll...
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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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Senator Kamala Harris's commitment to speaking truth is informed by her upbringing. The daughter of immigrants, she was raised in an Oakland, California community that cared deeply about social justice; her parents--an esteemed economist from Jamaica and an admired cancer researcher from India--met as activists in the civil rights movement when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Growing up, Harris herself never hid her passion for justice, and...
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With the rise of the Tea Party and the election of Donald Trump, many middle- and lower-income white Americans threw their support behind conservative politicians who pledged to make life great again for people like them. But as Dying of Whiteness shows, the right-wing policies that resulted from this white backlash put these voters' very health at risk--and, in the end, threaten everyone's well-being. Physician and sociologist Jonathan M. Metzl travels...
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A journalist who has followed the rise of QAnon explains what it is, how it has gained a mainstream following among Republican lawmakers and ordinary citizens, the threat it poses to democracy, and how we can reach those who have embraced the conspiracy and are disseminating its lies.
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The first full-scale biography of the "father of the atomic bomb," the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the fire of the sun for his country in time of war. After Hiroshima, he became the most famous scientist of his generation--an icon of modern man confronting the consequences of scientific progress. He created a radical proposal to place international controls over atomic materials, opposed the development of the hydrogen...
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"We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives--where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance--are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated. But as Cathy O'Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models...
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THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Winner of the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award * Bronze Medal, Arthur Ross Book Award (Council on Foreign Relations)
"Written in the hot, propulsive prose of a spy thriller" (The New York Times), the untold story of the cyberweapons market-the most secretive, government-backed market on earth-and a terrifying first look at a new kind of global warfare.
Zero-day:...
"Written in the hot, propulsive prose of a spy thriller" (The New York Times), the untold story of the cyberweapons market-the most secretive, government-backed market on earth-and a terrifying first look at a new kind of global warfare.
Zero-day:...
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"The coronavirus disease COVID-19 emerged in November 2019. By March 2020, cities all around the world closed schools, offices, restaurants, and other public spaces deemed "non-essential" in an attempt to contain the fast-spreading virus. People struggled to follow government orders, stay indoors, and limit contact with others. But the virus that caused one of the world's deadliest pandemics eventually killed over two million people worldwide. This...