Archives de catégorie : London 2022 Nonfiction

PESTS de Bethany Brookshire

An engrossing and revealing study of why we deem certain animals “pests” and others not—from cats to rats, elephants to pigeons—and what this tells us about our own perceptions, beliefs, and actions, as well as our place in the natural world

PESTS: How Humans Create Animal Villains
by Bethany Brookshire
Ecco Press/HarperCollins, December 2022
(via The Martell Agency)

A squirrel in the garden. A rat in the wall. A pigeon on the street. Humans have spent so much of our history drawing a hard line between human spaces and wild places. When animals pop up where we don’t expect or want them, we respond with fear, rage, or simple annoyance. It’s no longer an animal. It’s a pest.
At the intersection of science, history, and narrative journalism, Pests is not a simple call to look closer at our urban ecosystem. It’s not a natural history of the animals we hate. Instead, this book is about us. It’s about what calling an animal a pest says about people, how we live, and what we want. It’s a story about human nature, and how we categorize the animals in our midst, including bears and coyotes, sparrows and snakes. Pet or pest? In many cases, it’s entirely a question of perspective.
Bethany Brookshire’s deeply researched and entirely entertaining book will show readers what there is to venerate in vermin, and help them appreciate how these animals have clawed their way to success as we did everything we could to ensure their failure. In the process, we will learn how the pests that annoy us tell us far more about humanity than they do about the animals themselves.

Bethany Brookshire is a science writer and a podcast host on the podcast Science for the People, where she interviews scientists and science writers about the science that will impact people’s lives. Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Science News magazine, Science News for Students, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Slate and other outlets. Bethany has a PhD in Physiology and Pharmacology from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the College of William and Mary. She was a 2019-2020 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.

THE BLACK BOX de Paul Scharre

An award-winning defense expert tells the story of the new great power rivalry to control artificial intelligence—and how this powerful technology is shaping national power relationships and geopolitics in the 21st century.

THE BLACK BOX
by Paul Scharre
W.W. Norton, January 2023
(via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

Artificial intelligence is bringing a new digital order—it is changing war, surveillance, and disinformation, with profound effects on human freedom, global security, and power dynamics. THE BLACK BOX takes us inside the immensely competitive global struggle to lead in the four key elements of AI advantage: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. A world expert in AI-enabled weapons, Paul Scharre examines the strengths and weaknesses of today’s major superpowers, including China, the United States, Europe, and the Big Tech corporations that control the global supply of data and compute.
With unique access to the world of automated warfare and surveillance—including on-site visits with major Chinese players and Pentagon startups—national security expert Paul Scharre guides readers through the alarming ways the AI revolution is reshaping the world, and the challenges democracies must overcome if they hope to maintain their global edge.

Paul Scharre is is the author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, which won the 2019 Colby Award and was named one of Bill Gates’ top five books of 2018. A former Army Ranger, he is a senior fellow and director of the 20YY Future of Warfare Initiative at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), based in Washington, DC. From 2008 to 2013, he worked in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense on policies for robotics, autonomy, and other emerging weapons technologies. He led the drafting of the official U.S. Department of Defense policy on autonomous weapons.

SAVING TIME de Jenny Odell

A radical argument that we are living on the wrong clock—one that tells us time is money—and that there are other ways of experiencing time that offer bold, hopeful possibilities for ourselves and the planet from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing.

SAVING TIME:
Discovering A Life Beyond the Clock
by Jenny Odell
Random House, March 2023
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn’t built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it—the way we experience time itself—and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by–inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time–that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible.
In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding. The stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal from injuries–physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives–or the life of the planet–is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, “saving” time—recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature—could also mean that time saves us.

JENNY ODELL is the author of How To Do Nothing, which was a NYT bestseller and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2019. Odell’s writing has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The Believer, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s. Her work as a visual artist has been exhibited locally and internationally. She teaches digital art at Stanford University.

PERMISSION TO SPEAK de Samara Bay

An exploration of how we speak and why, as well as a guide to help those who have been historically silenced—think women and people of color—own their voices, from a high profile speech and dialect coach and podcast host.

PERMISSION TO SPEAK:
How to Use Your Voice to Get What You Want
by Samara Bay
Crown, February 2023

Anyone who has ever been told “You should speak up!” during a presentation at the office, a group project at school, or even a conversation among friends can attest to the misunderstanding at the heart of that demand. For those of us—women, people of color, immigrants, outsiders—who find it hard to speak up, the issue is not just about willpower. Many of us have internalized the same messages since birth: that because of the pitch of our voice, the accent we possess, or the slang we use, we will not be taken seriously. Power, we’re told, sounds like the mostly white, straight, wealthy men who wield it.
Samara Bay has made it her mission to change that, and with PERMISSION TO SPEAK she presents a fun and practical road map for making big cultural change while embracing our natural strengths. Bay is one of the most in-demand speech and dialect coaches in Hollywood, and here she draws on her extensive experience and the latest research in public speaking, linguistics, and social science to identify tools for unlocking the potential in each of our voices—whether you’re an entrepreneur, a new political candidate, a creative type, or a mom going back to work. Through writing that crackles and hums with her conviction that the voice is an endlessly manipulable instrument, she shows us that we can—with awareness and intention—become a catalyst for personal and societal revolution.
You’ll learn how to practice enough that you’re prepared but think on your feet so you can pivot in the moment; how to seem confident enough to be credible yet human enough to be believed; and how to have fun but speak with the gravitas your subject requires. Giving yourself permission means more than landing your message—it’s about finding all of the joy in speaking to your public.
With simple tools, big ideas, and a whole lot of heart, PERMISSION TO SPEAK offers a revolutionary take on public speaking and a new definition of what power sounds like. Namely, you.

Samara Bay is a content developer and Hollywood communication coach who helps creatives, businesspeople, scientists, and brands tell their story. She hosts the Permission to Speak podcast on iHeartRadio. Samara is also a moderator at Silicon Beach tech conferences, a member of the leadership council for the UN’s first ever summit on the role of the media in promoting social causes, a workshop teacher with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, and a dialect/speech coach to actors in Hollywood. Recent projects include: Netflix’s Red Notice with her client Gal Gadot and Amazon Prime’s Hunters, Season 2.

THIS IS WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE de Susan Rogers

A legendary record-producer–turned–brain-scientist explains why you fall in love with music.

THIS IS WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE:
What the Music You Love Says About You
by Dr. Susan Rogers & Dr. Ogi Ogas
W.W. Norton, September 2022
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

When you listen to music, do you prefer lyrics or melody? Intricate harmonies or driving rhythm? The “real” sounds of acoustic instruments or those of computerized synthesizers? Drawing from her successful career as a music producer (engineering hits like Prince’s “Purple Rain”), professor of cognitive neuroscience Susan Rogers reveals why your favorite songs move you. She explains that we each possess a unique “listener profile” based on our brain’s reaction to seven key dimensions of any record: authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre. Exploring this profile will deepen your connection to music, refresh your playlists, and uncover aspects of your personality. Rogers takes us behind the scenes of record-making, using her insider’s ear to illuminate the music of Prince, Frank Sinatra, Lana Del Rey, and many others. Told in a lively, inclusive style, this book will change the way you listen to music.

« A revelation. Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas offer extraordinary insights about music, emotion, and the brain and they deliver them with great flair and flow. For all I thought I knew about these subjects, I learned a lot from this book―and was entertained at every turn, both by the ideas and the poetry of their expression. An instant classic, THIS IS WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE should be read by anyone who has ever been moved by a piece of music―in other words, everyone. » ― Dr. Daniel J. Levitin, New York Times bestselling author of This Is Your Brain on Music and The Organized Mind

Susan Rogers, PhD, is a cognitive neuroscientist and a professor at Berklee College of Music, as well as a multiplatinum record producer. She resides in Boston, Massachusetts.
Ogi Ogas, PhD, was a Department of Homeland Security Fellow at the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University and a research fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He coauthored Dark Horse, The End of Average, and Shrinks, which was longlisted for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.