Recommended reading for right now
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting social distancing we have composed a recommended reading list focused around books that will engage, fascinate, and delight.
Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime, A MusiComic Manifesto »
Do you want to embrace your creative side? Try Artful Design. What we make, makes us. This is the central tenet of Artful Design, a photorealistic comic book that examines the nature, purpose, and meaning of design. Using music as a universal phenomenon that has evolved alongside technology, this book breaks down concrete case studies in computer-mediated toys, tools, games, and instruments, including the best-selling app Ocarina. Ge Wang implores us to both embrace and confront technology, not purely as a means to an end, but in its potential to enrich life.
Interested in this book? Consider tuning in every Wednesday 1 PM for Artful Design Television an online, multi-format weekly series encompassing artful design, music, coding, critical making with helpings of history and philosophy. No experience needed; it's free and all are welcome. For details or to register please visit the Artful Design TV page.
Silver in the Graphic Novel/Drawn Book - General category in the 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards
The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism »
Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, the book offers a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.
"A profound exploration of how the ceaseless extraction of information about our intimate lives is remaking both global markets and our very selves. The Costs of Connection represents an enormous step forward in our collective understanding of capitalism's current stage, a stage in which the final colonial input is the raw data of human life. Challenging, urgent, and bracingly original."
—Naomi Klein, Gloria Steinem Chair of Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies, Rutgers University
Thinking about what it means to be a parent? Try Motherhood. What if Augustine's Confessions had been written not by a man, but by a mother? How might her tales of desire, temptation, and transformation differ from his? In this memoir, Natalie Carnes describes giving birth to a daughter and beginning a story of conversion strikingly unlike Augustine's—even as his journey becomes a surprising companion to her own.
The challenges Carnes recounts will be familiar to many parents. She wonders what and how much she should ask her daughter to suffer in resisting racism, patriarchy, and injustice.
Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice »
Do you have a passion for stories everyone should know? Try Skimmed. Born into a tenant farming family in North Carolina in 1946, Mary Louise, Mary Ann, Mary Alice, and Mary Catherine were medical miracles. Annie Mae Fultz, a Black-Cherokee woman who lost her ability to hear and speak in childhood, became the mother of America's first surviving set of identical quadruplets. They were instant celebrities. Their White doctor named them after his own family members. He sold the rights to use the sisters for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company. The girls lived in poverty, while Pet Milk's profits from a previously untapped market of Black families skyrocketed. Over half a century later, baby formula is a seventy-billion-dollar industry and Black mothers have the lowest breastfeeding rates in the country. In Skimmed, Andrea Freeman tells the riveting story of the Fultz quadruplets while uncovering how feeding America's youngest citizens is awash in social, legal, and cultural inequalities.
"Skimmed provides a powerful portrait of how racism fuels the disparity between who breastfeeds in the U.S. Freeman shows that race continues to matter, even when it comes down to our children's first food, despite many Americans' belief that we are beyond race."
—Khiara M. Bridges, University of California, Berkeley
Regulating Human Research: IRBs from Peer Review to Compliance Bureaucracy »
Institutional review boards (IRBs) are panels charged with protecting the rights of humans who participate in research studies ranging from biomedicine to social science. Regulating Human Research provides a fresh look at these influential and sometimes controversial boards, tracing their historic transformation from academic committees to compliance bureaucracies: non-governmental offices where specialized staff define and apply federal regulations.
"Beautifully done. Sarah Babb adroitly explains IRBs as but one expression of a general feature of distributed governance in the United States. Like it or not, this is what happens to ethics in complex systems."
—Mitchell Stevens, Stanford University
The Woman Who Read Too Much: A Novel Much »
Do you need a captivating historical novel to while away the hours?Gossip was rife in the capital about the poetess of Qazvin. Some claimed she had been arrested for masterminding the murder of the grand Mullah, her uncle. Others echoed her words, and passed her poems from hand to hand. Everyone spoke of her beauty, and her dazzling intelligence. But most alarming to the Shah and the court was how the poetess could read. As her warnings and predictions became prophecies fulfilled, about the assassination of the Shah, the hanging of the Mayor, and the murder of the Grand Vazir, many wondered whether she was not only reading history but writing it as well. Was she herself guilty of the crimes she was foretelling?
"'History is filled with screams that are best ignored,' Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes in The Woman Who Read Too Much. Yet this mordant and seethingly intelligent story of palace intrigue in late 19th-century Persia echoes with the cries of the forgotten dead - and good luck ignoring them."
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
Permanent Revolution: Reflections on Capitalism »
Looking for an animated, bite-sized book on capitalism? We recommend Permanent Revolution. This book concisely describes the development and workings of capitalism and its influence on the broader society. In this book, Wyatt Wells examines the development of economic innovation, the role of financial markets, the business cycle, the ways markets operate, and the position of labor in capitalist economies, as well as the effects of capitalism on law, politics, religion, and even the arts.
"A wonderful outline of how capitalism works and a spirited defense of its classical principles. This is a text of great use both to those who celebrate the achievements of capitalism and those who want to critique its basic tenets."
—O.A. Westad, Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs, Yale University
Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan »
In the 1930s, a cohort of professional human scientists coalesced around a common and particular understanding of objectivity as the foundation of legitimate knowledge, and of fieldwork as the pathway to objectivity. Into the Field is the first collective biography of this cohort, evocatively described by one contemporary as the men of one age.
"A very refreshing look at race, culture, and objectivity in modern Japan. This engaging book considers critical issues of the twentieth century: historical continuity, power and knowledge in the empires and the Cold War, and the politics of generations. Sophisticated yet lucidly written, it is accessible and highly stimulating for academics and non-academics alike."
—Hiromi Mizuno, University of Minnesota
The Cult of the Constitution »
In this controversial and provocative book, Mary Anne Franks examines the thin line between constitutional fidelity and constitutional fundamentalism. The Cult of the Constitution reveals how deep fundamentalist strains in both conservative and liberal American thought keep the Constitution in the service of white male supremacy. The conservative fetish for the Second Amendment (enforced by groups such as the NRA) provides an obvious example of constitutional fundamentalism; the liberal fetish for the First Amendment (enforced by groups such as the ACLU) is less obvious but no less influential. But the Constitution itself contains the antidote to fundamentalism. The Cult of the Constitution lays bare the dark, antidemocratic consequences of constitutional fundamentalism and urges readers to take the Constitution seriously, not selectively.
Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award in Legal Studies, sponsored by the Association of American Publishers.
Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Excellence in Social Sciences, sponsored by the Association of American Publishers.
Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London »
Longing to travel? Live vicariously through Vanishing Streets. This book reveals an American writer's twenty-year love affair with London. Beguiling and idiosyncratic, obsessive and wry, it offers an illustrated travelogue of the peripheries, retracing some of London's most curious locations. As J. M. Tyree wanders deliriously in "the world's most visited city," he rediscovers and reinvents places that have changed drastically since he was a student at Cambridge in the 1990s. Tyree stumbles into the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock, Graham Greene, and the pioneers of the British Free Cinema Movement. He offers a new way of seeing familiar landmarks through the lens of film history, and reveals strange nooks and tiny oddities in out-of-the-way places, from a lost film by John Ford supposedly shot in Wapping to the beehives hidden in Tower Hamlets Cemetery, an area haunted by a translation error in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz.
"Tyree's lyrical prose is distinctly cinematic, describing sweeping landscapes interspersed with tight shots, close-ups, and all the drama and symbolism of character quests with director's commentary, resulting a fresh portrait of London and an intriguing travelogue."
—Publishers Weekly
Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance »
Are you baffled by the foolish behavior of other people? What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology—the study of ignorance—provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about "how we know" to ask: Why don't we know what we don't know? The essays assembled in Agnotology show that ignorance is often more than just an absence of knowledge; it can also be the outcome of cultural and political struggles.
Agnotology rescues ignorance from the no-mans-land of unexamined social phenomena. It makes us ask what is at stake when we dont know things that are plainly before our eyes. This is a book for every thinking citizen."
—Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard University
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