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The follow-up to Pinker's groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Nature presents the big picture of human progress: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against...
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"Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style--thorough, yet riveting--famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old...
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Today's modern age of globalization is creating commonalities throughout the people of the world: Chinese food is eaten in South America, Fanta is enjoyed in South Africa, and Australians can purchase Swedish furniture. Western influences, particularly from American culture, have seeped into other countries and changed local standards, tastes, and preferences. While some may believe this homogenization is a good thing, others are concerned that it...
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Friedman discusses how the key to understanding the 21st century is understanding that the planet's three largest forces -- Moore's law (technology), the market (globalization) and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loos) -- are accelerating all at once. And these accelerations are transforming the five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community. Friedman posits that we should purposely "be late" -- we should...
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The author of Undoing Depression presents an effective guide to modern anxiety, and shows how you can recognize—and rescue yourself from—its effects.
Twenty-first-century life evolves at a breakneck pace—and with it, stress seems to multiply by the day. We work long, harrowing hours. We fret over our families and finances. Our e-mail beeps and our cell phones ring. But our nervous systems were never meant to handle...
Twenty-first-century life evolves at a breakneck pace—and with it, stress seems to multiply by the day. We work long, harrowing hours. We fret over our families and finances. Our e-mail beeps and our cell phones ring. But our nervous systems were never meant to handle...
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Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out. Bill McKibben's groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization...
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"A writer and mom with decades of experience working in Silicon Valley, Jessica Carew Kraft grew fed up with her life filled with digital screens and deep anxieties about the future of humanity and nature. She quit her job and set out to learn about "rewilding" from people who reject the comforts and convenience of civilization to live in nature using Stone Age tools and skills. A suburbanite with a husband, kids, and a mortgage, she learned to turn...
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"'The Memory Chalet' is a memoir unlike any you have ever read before. Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the divergent sex politics of Europe, before concluding that his generation 'was a revolutionary...
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"Hope Jahren is an award-winning geobiologist, a brilliant writer, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. The Story of More is her impassioned open letter to humanity as we stand at the crossroads of survival and extinction. Jahren celebrates the long history of our enterprising spirit--which has tamed wild crops, cured diseases, and sent us to the moon--but also shows how that spirit has created excesses that are quickly...
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"In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere,...
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In "Ill Fares The Land," Tony Judt, one of our leading historians and thinkers, reveals how we have arrived at our present dangerously confused moment and offers the language we need to address our common needs, rejecting the nihilistic individualism of the far right and the debunked socialism of the past. To find a way forward, Judt argues that we must look to our not so distant past and to social democracy in action: to re-enshrining fairness over...
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""A book of rare wisdom, genuinely profound in depth and scope." -Diana Butler Bass, author of Christianity After Religion "As rich and thoughtful as all of Brian McLaren's work, but with a particular urgency!" -Bill McKibben A deeply insightful exploration of how to live with wisdom, resilience and love in our turbulent times For the last quarter-century, author and activist Brian D. McLaren has been writing at the intersection of religious faith...
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A systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations.
Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a
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American Life in the 2000s takes a look at the major events that occurred throughout this decade and offers information on the demographics of the United States at the time. Readers will gain an understanding of the politics, conflicts, science, inventions, pop culture, fashion, and sports of the decade, and they will learn about the legacy the 2000s left behind. Features include a glossary, a timeline, references, websites, source notes, and an index....
17) Arch of Triumph
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This wartime drama is based on Erich Maria Remarque's 1945 novel. It stars Anthony Hopkins as Ravic, a German who helped Jews escape Nazis. He has left his country and now, in 1939, lives without documents in Paris, under a false name. There he starts a romance with the beautiful Joan Madou. Also starring Lesley-Anne Down and Donald Pleasence. Directed by Waris Hussein. (94 minutes)
18) Beijing
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Amid Beijing’s dizzying economic, urban and cultural transformation, four artists respond to the region's relentless evolution with urgency and ambition, all the while contending with many centuries of Chinese cultural traditions. Featuring artists Guan Xiao, Liu Xiaodong, Song Dong, Xu Bing, and Yin Xiuzhen.
19) Art and China
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Go behind the scenes of the highly anticipated Art and China exhibition at New York's Guggenheim museum to discover contemporary art produced in China between 1989 and 2008.