Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

THE TIME OF AI de Kate Crawford

A riveting, intellectual journey through the history of artificial intelligence and how it has shaped culture and the workplace.

THE TIME OF AI
How Generative AI is Changing Culture, Work, Politics and Time
by Kate Crawford
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026
(via The Gernert Company)

A leading scholar of artificial intelligence explores the ways in which AI is shaping contemporary culture: how it will change our lives, for better and for worse, and what it means to live in this crucial, watershed moment. The book will be structured around five parts, each centered on a basic ingredient of human creation: Words, Images, Sounds, Motion, and Systems. The chapters contend with how each element is transformed by AI systems, and how the industries that depend upon it are changing, Asking what does this mean for us, as individuals and as a society, Professor Crawford posits that the best way to understand the cultural metamorphosis underway is to start with how AI makes things for us, and what we are making of it. In this way, the book speaks to changes at the foundational level of human creation, as well as addressing a dramatic series of simultaneous industrial shifts.

Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of artificial intelligence. She is a Distinguished Professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, and the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She has founded multiple research groups including FATE at Microsoft Research, the AI Now Institute at New York University, and the Knowing Machines Group at the University of Southern California. Her last book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale University Press, 2021), won multiple awards including the prestigious Sally Hacker Prize, and was described by the Financial Times and New Scientist as one of the best books of the year.

ABENTEUER OCEAN RACE de Boris Herrmann et Andreas Wolfers

Internationalsailing champion Boris Herrmann and Team Malizia tell about the adventurousround-the-world Ocean Race.

ABENTEUER OCEAN RACE
(The Ocean Race)
by Boris Herrmann and Andreas Wolfers
C.Bertelsmann/PRH Germany, November 2023

The Ocean Race is the toughest team race in the sailing calendar. It consists of seven legs that take around six months to complete, the longest of which covers an unbelievable 23,000 km, from Cape Town via Cape Horn to Itajaí in Brazil. German champion yachtsman Boris Herrmann and Team Malizia are competing against four other teams on Seaexplorer, and with five crew squeezed into such a small space you need to be able to rely on each other. In storms and lulls, everything you do has to be exactly right. Unforeseen problems like a crack on a mast 26 m up could spell the end of the race for the Seaexplorer, but the team tackles them with total professionalism. These four men and one woman are pushing their bodies and minds to the very limit, as they experience both failures and triumphs. In their new book, Herrmann and Wolfers give us a fascinating insight into the Ocean Race, and what it’s like for five people to live and work together in such exciting and unique circumstances.

Boris Herrmann, born in 1981. In 2020, he was the first German to participate in the Vendée Globe, the toughest regatta for single-handed sailors, which he completed in 80 days. He became famous around the world for sailing Greta Thunberg to the UN Climate Summit in New York on his yacht.

Andreas Wolfers, born in 1958, worked as a reporter for GEO magazine for 13 years, was head of copy at Stern and headed the Henri Nannen School of Journalism. Wolfers has been sailing since childhood and has also crossed the Atlantic.

GESTOHLENE LEBEN de Wladimir Klitschko et Tatjana Kiel

The tragic fates of the Ukrainian children abducted to Russia, their families and their rescuers.

GESTOHLENE LEBEN
(Stolen Lives)
by Wladimir Klitschko and Tatjana Kiel
Heyne/PRH Germany, September 2022

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin. The charge: the abduction of Ukrainian children to Russia. The National Information Office of Ukraine lists over 16,000 very precisely recorded cases – the actual number is probably much higher.

Dr. Wladimir Klitschko and Tatjana Kiel denounce these outrageous war tactics. Their book tells of the fates of abducted children, of torn families and desperate parents. It exposes Russia’s state-controlled, targeted campaign and sets out what we can do to fight it. Last but not least, Klitschko and Kiel introduce the courageous people who search for stolen children and bring them back home.

Dr. Wladimir Klitschko, former heavyweight boxing world champion with a doctorate in sports science, sees himself as an innovator whose knowledge and experience from 30 years of competitive sports can be applied to people’s everyday life and working world. His goal is to allow people to see problems as challenges that can be overcome through a strong sense of reality and courage.

Tatjana Kiel, as CEO of Klitschko Ventures, is in charge of developing the second career of Dr. Wladimir Klitschko, whom along with his brother Vitali she has been assisting in event management and marketing since 2006.

PREQUEL de Rachel Maddow

Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis..

PREQUEL
(An American Fight Against Fascism)
by Rachel Maddow
Crown, October 2023

Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after our troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance wasw ith the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens’ confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule.

That effort worked—tongue and groove—alongside an ultra-right paramilitary movement that stockpiled bombs and weapons and trained for mass murder and violent insurrection.

At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court.

None of it went as planned.

While the scheme has been remembered in history—if at all—as the work of fringe players, in reality, it involved a large number of some of the country’s most influential elected officials. Their interference in law enforcement efforts against the plot is a dark story of the rule of law bending and then breaking under the weight of political intimidation.

That failure of the legal system had consequences. The tentacles of that unslain beast have reached forward into our history for decades. But the heroic efforts of the activists, journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose the insurrectionists also make for a deeply resonant, deeply relevant tale in our own disquieting times.

Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award–winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, as well as the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Drift, Bag Man, and Blowout. Maddow received a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University and earned her doctorate in political science at Oxford University.

AMERICAN WOMAN de Katie Rogers

Through deep reporting and newly discovered correspondence, AMERICAN WOMAN is the first book to paint a full picture of Jill Biden while exploring how she helps answer the evolving question of what the role of the modern First Lady should be.

AMERICAN WOMAN
The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden
by Katie Rogers
Crown, February 2024

Since the Clinton era, shifts in media, politics, and pop culture have all redefined expectations of First Ladies, even as the boundaries set upon them have often remained anachronistic. With sharp insights and dozens of firsthand interviews with major players in the Biden, Obama, Trump, Bush, and Clinton orbits, including Jill Biden and Hillary Clinton, New York Times White House correspondent Katie Rogers traces the evolution of the role of the twenty-first-century First Lady from a ceremonial figurehead to a powerful political operator, which culminates in the tenure of First Lady Jill Biden.

Dr. Jill Biden began her journey toward public life in 1975 as a twenty-three-year-old who caught the eye of a widowed Senator Joe Biden. Recovering from the heartbreak of her failed first marriage, she found a man who was still grieving. She knitted his life together after unspeakable tragedy and stood by his side through three presidential campaigns.

In some ways, her legacy as First Lady was set before she ever entered the White House: She is the first presidential spouse in history to work in a paid role outside the White House, a decision that blazes the path for future first spouses. But as a prime guardian of one of the most insular operations in modern politics, she is also a central part of her husband’s presidential legacy.

Rogers is deeply sourced in the West and East Wings of the White House, and the book will include original interviews with Jill Biden, Hillary Clinton, as well as major figures in the Trump and Obama administrations.

Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent for the New York Times. She covers life in the Biden administration, Washington culture, and a mix of international and domestic policy.