Après le succès international de WHAT IF? (« Et si…? », éditions Flammarion) et THINGS EXPLAINER, le créateur de XKCD revient avec un guide éminemment scientifique qui donne des conseils extravagants sur comment faire des choses simples… de manière absurde et compliquée!
Le livre sera publié simultanément le 3 septembre 2019 par Riverhead aux Etats-Unis, John Murray au Royaume Uni, Penguin Verlag en Allemagne et Spectrum aux Pays Bas.
Cliquez ici pour voir l’article publié par Entertainment Weekly
For any task you might want to do, there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems is a guide to the third kind of approach. It’s the world’s least useful self-help book.
It describes how to cross a river by removing all the water, outlines some of the many uses for lava around the home, and teaches you how to use experimental military research to ensure that your friends will never again ask you to help them move.
With text, charts, and stick-figure illustrations, How To walks you through useless but entertaining approaches to common problems, using bad advice to explore some of the stranger and more interesting science and technology underlying the world around us.
Empathy is in short supply. Isolation and tribalism are rampant. We struggle to understand people who aren’t like us, but find it easy to hate them. Studies show that we are less caring than we were even thirty years ago. In 2006, Barack Obama said that the United States is suffering from an “empathy deficit.” Since then, things only seem to have gotten worse. It doesn’t have to be this way. In this groundbreaking book, Jamil Zaki argues that empathy is not a fixed trait—something we’re born with or not—but rather a skill that we can all strengthen through effort. Drawing on both classic and cutting-edge research, including experiments from his own lab, Zaki shows how we can harness this new mindset to overcome toxic cultural divisions. He also tells the stories of people who are living these principles—fighting for kindness in the most difficult of circumstances. We meet a former neo-Nazi who is now helping extract people from hate groups, ex-prisoners discussing novels with the judge who sentenced them, Washington police officers changing their culture to decrease violence among their ranks, and NICU nurses fine-tuning their empathy so that they don’t succumb to burnout. Written with clarity and passion, The War for Kindness is an inspiring call to action. The future may depend on whether we accept the challenge.
There are amazing things going on under water: at night the sea mysteriously sparkles, the tiniest of organisms (plankton) have the greatest power, and the fish are by no means taciturn but instead communicate loudly with one another. Marine biologist Frauke Bagusche has some fascinating tales to tell – stories of the smallest and the largest living creatures in the world. She explains where the smell comes from that tickles our nostrils while we are walking along the beach; what causes the sparkle we see in the water at night; and why the sea steers not only our emotions but also our destiny and that of the entire planet. Her account, in which she explores her own intimate relationship with the sea, is based both on the results of the latest scientific research and her personal experience. Because no matter where we are, we are bound to the blue miracle with every breath we take.
On January 10, 1999, a mobster walked into a psychiatrist’s office and changed TV history. By shattering preconceptions about the kinds of stories the medium should tell, The Sopranos launched our current age of prestige television, paving the way for such giants as Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. As TV critics for Tony Soprano’s hometown paper, New Jersey’s The Star-Ledger, Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz were among the first to write about the series before it became a cultural phenomenon.