Archives de catégorie : London 2022 Nonfiction

FREIHEIT FÜR ALLE de Richard David Precht

How will we work in the future – and why should we work at all?

FREIHEIT FÜR ALLE
(Freedom For All)
by Richard David Precht
‎ Goldmann/PRH Verlagsgruppe, March 2022

It’s a given that, as far as work is concerned, nothing these days is a given. The Second Machine Age of self-teaching computers and robots will revolutionise not only the job market, but also redefine what ‘work’ is in the first place, and why we still do it. What happens when machines do so much of the work that economies no longer need to rely on human productivity? Without the old wage labour society of the First Machine Age, our conception of work as defined by the nineteenth century will become a mere appendix – useless and outdated. The big prize we aim for will no longer be full-time work, but self-realisation, and the raffle tickets will change accordingly: society will cease to think of employment as the be-all and end-all, and place greater value on high-quality jobs and workplace conditions.
Richard David Precht shows how changes in the world of work are also affecting our lives, our culture, our approach to education, and ultimately society itself – and the enormous challenges that lie ahead for politicians, who have to createnew policies in line with these changes, including restructuring our welfare systeminto a system based on universal basic income.

Richard David Precht, born in 1964, is a philosopher, journalist, and author, and one of the most distinctive intellectuals in German-speaking countries. He is an honorary professor of philosophy at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg and at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin. His books Wer bin ich – und wenn ja wie viele? (Who Am I and If So How Many?), Liebe: Ein unordentliches Gefühl (Love: A Disorderly Emotion) and Die Kunst, kein Egoist zu sein (The Art of Not Being an Egoist) are international bestsellers and have been translated into 40 languages. Since 2012 he has been the moderator of the philosophy program ‘Precht’ on the ZDF television network.

Netflix diffusera bientôt un documentaire adapté de l’autobiographie de Jens Söring

Soering, une série documentaire de True Crime en cinq parties sur l’affaire Jens Söring et le meurtre des Haysom, sera diffusée courant 2022 sur Netflix. Elle est tirée du livre RÜCKKEHR INS LEBEN paru en septembre 2021 chez C. Bertelsmann/PRH Verlagsgruppe, dans lequel Jens Söring parle de sa lutte pour retrouver une vie normale après avoir passé plus de trois décennies en prison aux États-Unis dans les conditions les plus sévères.

Condamné à perpétuité pour le meurtre particulièrement brutal des parents de sa petite amie de l’époque, Elizabeth Haysom, ce fils de diplomate a été incarcéré dès 1986. À ce jour, les doutes concernant sa culpabilité persistent : d’après lui, croyant bénéficier de l’immunité diplomatique, il est passé aux aveux uniquement pour éviter à sa petite amie la peine de mort. Il avait 19 ans lorsqu’il est entré en prison, et a vécu derrière les barreaux pendant presque toute sa vie d’adulte. Après avoir été libéré sur parole en décembre 2019, il est retourné en Allemagne à l’âge de 53 ans.

D’après Netflix, la série s’intéresse à « l’un des drames judiciaires les plus passionnants de notre époque. Le producteur de documentaires Arne Birkenstock, plusieurs fois récompensé, a eu accès à Jens Söring en exclusivité et, avec les réalisateurs Lena Leonhardt et Andre Hörmann, ouvre de nouvelles perspectives sur cette affaire criminelle spectaculaire qui continue de captiver les gens dans le monde entier. »

Les droits de langue française sont toujours disponibles.

ATTENTION SPAN de Gloria Mark

A book on the crisis of focus, by Dr. Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research, and a leading expert in the fields of attention, multitasking, and human-computer interaction.

ATTENTION SPAN:
The Surprising Science of How We Focus, Why That’s Changing, and How Rhythm Became the New Flow
by Gloria Mark
Hanover Square Press, early 2023
(via Park & Fine)

Psychologist Gloria Mark began researching how technology affects human attention when the first personal computers were beginning to arrive in offices. Over the last 30 years, she has tracked changes in our attention spans, stress levels, and the fundamental way our brains process information.
Now in ATTENTION SPAN, Dr Mark shows how much of what we think we know about attention is wrong. She explores the current crisis of focus and productivity that is so deeply entwined with rising rates of anxiety and depression, and investigates what we might be able to do about it. Delving into the newly celebrated concept of ‘kinetic attention’, she introduces a more balanced understanding of the rhythm between deep focus and less focused states, which may actually serve to make us happier and more productive in the long term.

« Gloria Mark is the definitive expert on distraction and multitasking in our increasingly digital world. Her book is a must-read for anyone concerned about our diminishing attention span. » —Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of A World Without Email and Deep Work

Dr. Gloria Mark is Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research, and a leading expert in the fields of attention, multitasking, and human-computer interaction. Dr. Mark has spoken on stages that include SXSW, Talks at Google, Microsoft Faculty Summit, and the Aspen Ideas Festival, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR, Quartz, Slate, and more.

THE URGE de Carl Erik Fisher

An authoritative, illuminating, and deeply humane history of addiction—a phenomenon that remains baffling and deeply misunderstood despite having touched countless lives—by an addiction psychiatrist striving to understand his own family and himself.

THE URGE: Our History of Addiction
by Carl Erik Fisher
Penguin Press, January 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

Even after a decades-long opioid overdose crisis, intense controversy still rages over the fundamental nature of addiction and the best way to treat it. With uncommon empathy and erudition, Carl Erik Fisher draws on his own experience as a clinician, researcher, and alcoholic in recovery as he traces the history of a phenomenon that, centuries on, we hardly appear closer to understanding—let alone addressing effectively.
As a psychiatrist-in-training fresh from medical school, Fisher was soon face-to-face with his own addiction crisis, one that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of the condition that had plagued his family for generations, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that the current quagmire is only the latest iteration of a centuries-old story: humans have struggled to define, treat, and control addictive behavior for most of recorded history, including well before the advent of modern science and medicine.
A rich, sweeping history that probes not only medicine and science but also literature, religion, philosophy, and sociology, THE URGE illuminates the extent to which the story of addiction has persistently reflected broader questions of what it means to be human and care for one another. Fisher introduces us to the people who have endeavored to address this complex condition through the ages: physicians and politicians, activists and artists, researchers and writers, and of course the legions of people who have struggled with their own addictions. He also examines the treatments and strategies that have produced hope and relief for many people with addiction, himself included. Only by reckoning with our history of addiction, he argues—our successes and our failures—can we light the way forward for those whose lives remain threatened by its hold.
THE URGE is at once an eye-opening history of ideas, a riveting personal story of addiction and recovery, and a clinician’s urgent call for a more expansive, nuanced, and compassionate view of one of society’s most intractable challenges.

Carl Erik Fisher is an addiction physician and bioethicist. He is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he works in the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry. He also maintains a private psychiatry practice focusing on complementary and integrative approaches to treating addiction. His writing has appeared in Nautilus, Slate, and Scientific American MIND, among other outlets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his partner and son.

LAID AND CONFUSED de Maria Yagoda

Sex columnist Maria Yagoda’s LAID AND CONFUSED is a blend of personal narrative, research, and cultural analysis exploring why the most sex-positive generation in history is still having mediocre-to-actively-bad sex, and how the so-called « sex recession » can make space for us to discover what we truly want and what actually satisfies us.

LAID AND CONFUSED:
Why We Still Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop
by Maria Yagoda
St. Martin’s Press, May 2023
(via Dystel Goderich & Bourret)

Far more alarming than the “sex recession,” the phenomenon of young people having less sex than generations before them, is that we are in the middle of a bad sex epidemic that all generations are suffering from, and no one is talking about it. In the age of swiping apps and sliding into DMs, there’s still so much bad sex. Even for Maria Yagoda, a professional sex writer who gives well-researched advice on maximizing pleasure, communicating with partners, and feeling sexually confident, most sex lands somewhere between passable and “huh.” In LAID AND CONFUSED: Why We Still Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop, Yagoda proposes that the way out of this pickle is to embrace less sex, because less sex leads to better sex. Saying no to unsatisfying sex allows us to say yes to ourselves, to make space to discover what we truly want and what actually satisfies us. And therein lies the magic. With the blend of wit, vulnerability, and expertise that has built her an avid following, Yagoda sketches a better path forward, offering research-based insights to empower readers to say yes to less sex, reconnect with themselves, and, ultimately, craft the deeply pleasurable sex lives they deserve.

Maria Yagoda is a reporter, editor, and essayist specializing in food, sex, and culture. Her popular Vice sex column, Sex Machina, explored the intersection of sex and technology and was translated into French, Italian, Greek, and Spanish. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, People, Glamour, Time, Vice, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Hairpin, BuzzFeed, and more. She lives in Brooklyn with her chihuahua Bucatina.