Barclay, Donald A. Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies: How to Find Trustworthy Information in the Digital Age. Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. ["Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives. • Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information. • Understand how to tell when statistics can be trusted and when they are being used to deceive. • Inoculate yourself against the logical fallacies that can mislead even the brightest among us."]
Hauke, Alexandra. "Dreaming of Leviathan: John Langan's The Fisherman and American Folk Horror." The Revenant #5 (March 2020) ["In what follows, I offer a reading of John Langan’s 2016 novel The Fisherman through this multifaceted lens of American folk horror in order to delineate the ways in which it emerges as an archive of legendary cautionary tales rooted in the (hi)stories of American fear, folklore, and literature as well as in the adversities of a contemporary American condition. A multilayered narrative whose present-day frame story is engulfed in the myriad of embedded myths that terrify both readers and protagonists, Langan’s second novel becomes a space where trauma, grief, and loneliness leave the widowed protagonists desperate, vulnerable, and thus susceptible to the dark promises of the Fisherman; the book’s eponymous source of terror turns to folk materials in an attempt to win his fight with the limits of humanity and mortality. By dipping into the principal anxieties at the core of the American culture of fear, the literary archives of the folk horror chain, and collections of mythic stories from the eastern US, The Fisherman establishes itself as a newly imagined version of the dominant American national narrative, shaped by the ‘terrible reality’ of its past (Langan 2016: 222). By reading the text within the temporal, spatial, and socio-cultural contexts of its intra- and metadiegetic worlds, I will show how this rendition of a national narrative—rooted in the horrors of the US’s colonial past and its Puritan heritage—lends itself especially well to folk horror because it speaks to the idea that folk horror constitutes not only horrors of the people but, first and foremost, horrors committed by the people. Therefore, in The Fisherman, as in American folk horror overall, the horror is and has always been the American folk themselves."]
Holland, Tom and Dominic Sandbrook. "Baghdad: Arabian Nights." The Rest is History #379 (October 2023) ["The setting for so many of the Arabian Nights, like the stories of Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, or Aladdin, Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age had a shimmering image, a dimension of mystery and wonder… Join Tom and Dominic in the final part of our series on the history of Baghdad, as they explore the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, and the city of Caliphs, Hadiths, thieves, and of course, pigeon racing!"]
Huberman, Andrew and Becky Kennedy. "Protocols for Excellent Parenting & Improving Relationships of All Kinds." The Huberman Lab (February 26, 2024) ["In this episode, my guest is Dr. Becky Kennedy, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, bestselling author, and founder of Good Inside, an education platform for parents and parents-to-be. We discuss actionable protocols for raising resilient, emotionally healthy kids and effective alternatives to typical forms of reward and punishment that instead teach children valuable skills and strengthen the parent-child bond. These protocols also apply to other types of relationships: professional, romantic, friendships, siblings, etc. We explain how to respond to emotional outbursts, rudeness, and entitlement, repair fractured relationships, build self-confidence, and improve interpersonal connections with empathy while maintaining healthy boundaries. We also discuss how to effectively communicate with children and adults with ADHD, anxiety, learning challenges, or with “deeply feeling” individuals. The conversation is broadly applicable to all types of social interactions and bonds. By the end of the episode, you will have earned simple yet powerful tools to build healthy relationships with kids, teens, adults, and oneself."]
Kapp, Steven K. Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline. Springer Singapore, 2019. ["This open access book marks the first historical overview of the autism rights branch of the neurodiversity movement, describing the activities and rationales of key leaders in their own words since it organized into a unique community in 1992. Sandwiched by editorial chapters that include critical analysis, the book contains 19 chapters by 21 authors about the forming of the autistic community and neurodiversity movement, progress in their influence on the broader autism community and field, and their possible threshold of the advocacy establishment. The actions covered are legendary in the autistic community, including manifestos such as “Don’t Mourn for Us”, mailing lists, websites or webpages, conferences, issue campaigns, academic project and journal, a book, and advisory roles. These actions have shifted the landscape toward viewing autism in social terms of human rights and identity to accept, rather than as a medical collection of deficits and symptoms to cure."]
Klemp, Nate. "Mindfulness in a Distracted World." Entitled Opinions (February 15, 2024) ["A conversation with Nate Klemp, a philosopher, writer, and founding partner at Mindfulness Magazine, on practicing mindfulness in our fast-paced, technology-dependent world. He is also co-author of the New York Times bestseller Start Here."]
Pogue, Neall W. "The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement." New Books in Religion (January 18, 2024) ["How does the Bible instruct humans to interact with the Earth? Over the last few decades, white conservative evangelical Christians have increasingly taken positions against environmental protections. To understand why, Meghan Cochran talks with Neall W. Pogue about his book The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement (Cornell University Press, 2022) in which he examines how the religious right became a political force known for hostility toward environmental legislation. Until the 1990s, theologically based, eco-friendly philosophies of Christian environmental stewardship were uncontroversial. However, when some in the evangelical community began to lean towards environmental activism in response to human caused climate change, their effort was overwhelmed by some conservative leaders who stressed a position against environmentalism. They ridiculed conservation efforts, embraced conspiracy theories, and refuted the expanding scientific literature. Pogue explains how different ideas of nature helped to construct a conservative evangelical political movement that rejected long-standing beliefs regarding Christian environmental stewardship."]
Randall, Alice. "Beyoncé country." Today, Explained (March 22, 2024) ["Beyoncé has a new country album. The first single has already broken records and drawn criticism from those who think of country music as a “white” genre. Except it’s not. Author and songwriter Alice Randall tells the story of country music’s very Black roots."]
Russell, Stuart Jonathan. Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Viking, 2019. ["A leading artificial intelligence researcher lays out a new approach to AI that will enable us to coexist successfully with increasingly intelligent machines. In the popular imagination, superhuman artificial intelligence is an approaching tidal wave that threatens not just jobs and human relationships, but civilization itself. Conflict between humans and machines is seen as inevitable and its outcome all too predictable. In this groundbreaking book, distinguished AI researcher Stuart Russell argues that this scenario can be avoided, but only if we rethink AI from the ground up. Russell begins by exploring the idea of intelligence in humans and in machines. He describes the near-term benefits we can expect, from intelligent personal assistants to vastly accelerated scientific research, and outlines the AI breakthroughs that still have to happen before we reach superhuman AI. He also spells out the ways humans are already finding to misuse AI, from lethal autonomous weapons to viral sabotage. If the predicted breakthroughs occur and superhuman AI emerges, we will have created entities far more powerful than ourselves. How can we ensure they never, ever, have power over us? Russell suggests that we can rebuild AI on a new foundation, according to which machines are designed to be inherently uncertain about the human preferences they are required to satisfy. Such machines would be humble, altruistic, and committed to pursue our objectives, not theirs. This new foundation would allow us to create machines that are provably deferential and provably beneficial."]
Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House, 2020. ["A mind-bending journey into the hidden world of fungi that will change your understanding of life on earth. "A dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing book . . . I ended it wonderstruck at the fungal world--the secrets of which modern science is only now beginning to fathom."--Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland. When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave. In Entangled Life, the brilliant young biologist Merlin Sheldrake shows us the world from a fungal point of view, providing an exhilarating change of perspective. Sheldrake's vivid exploration takes us from yeast to psychedelics, to the fungi that range for miles underground and are the largest organisms on the planet, to those that link plants together in complex networks known as the "Wood Wide Web," to those that infiltrate and manipulate insect bodies with devastating precision.
Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life's processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms--and our relationships with them--are changing our understanding of how life works."]
Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life's processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms--and our relationships with them--are changing our understanding of how life works."]
Strach, Patricia and Kathleen S. Sullivan. "The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to Clean Cities, 1890–1929." New Books in Political Science (January 18, 2024) ["Political Scientists Patricia Strach (The University at Albany, State University of New York) and Kathleen S. Sullivan (Ohio University) have written a fascinating and important exploration of trash. More precisely, this is a complex examination and analysis of the development of our municipal sanitation processes and structures, highlighting intersecting policy areas, urban and local politics, and racial, gender, and class politics. The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to Clean Cities, 1890–1929 (Cornell UP, 2023) has it all: corruption, gender and racial hierarchies, blame defection, rejection of expertise, case studies across a host of different cities around the country, and the collection of, the disposal of, and the innovations of garbage. Strach and Sullivan examine this multidimensional policy issue from an American political development perspective when the issue really took root in the United States in the latter part of the 19th century. At this point, urban areas saw demographic growth from migration from rural areas as well as the waves of immigrants who came to the U.S. Most U.S. cities found themselves facing the same problem: unsanitary living situations. The initial research found that there were three different forms of trash collection, and they highlighted the processes in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh. San Francisco had no formal municipal collection process; instead, the citizens of San Francisco contracted directly with scavengers themselves to remove the garbage. Pittsburgh, as a municipality, contracted out the responsibility—but the process there was one that fed fees back to the municipal leadership. New Orleans, awash in local government corruption, ultimately had a municipal collection program, which was generally far from effective. While these three cities were the basis for the initial research, St. Louis and Charleston were also added to the case studies, with Birmingham and Louisville as secondary examples within the study. The Politics of Trash also explores the way in which citizens need to engage with and comply with the sanitation programs. In order to urge compliance, cities often called on women’s civic organizations to model and advocate for participation in the garbage process. Obviously, these were white women’s civic organizations and while they had been advocates for sanitation processes, they were generally cut out of the development process since women were not to be too close to politics itself. Strach and Sullivan spent time with the Good Housekeeping magazine archives in order to flesh out this dimension of the analysis. The research also highlights how blame was put on immigrants and people of color when the sanitation programs failed—often because of corruption and lack of sufficient resources. The authors note throughout the text that the form that we remove and dispose of waste/garbage/trash now is the same as it was 100 years ago. And while we often separate compostables from recyclables from trash, this is not all that different than the ways that people disposed of their garbage in Pittsburgh, and Charleston, and San Francisco a century ago. And many of the same forms of removal remain in place. The Politics of Trash is a lively and fascinating analysis of a part of our lives that we often don’t consider to be political, but it is political, and has been for quite some time."]
West, Stephen. "Are You Left or Right?" Philosophize This! #50 (February 6, 2015) ["On this episode of the podcast, we discuss the contrasting political philosophies of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. First, we find out the origin of the terms “left” and “right” in relation to politics, and find out that the meanings of these terms are not as simple as they may first seem. Next, we discuss the opposing viewpoints of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine on how society should progress and implement change. Finally, we think about how their ideas relate to modern issues and consider whether or not their positions are mutually exclusive."]
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