An investigation of the literary influences behind the most popular role-playing games.Drawing upon the original list of “inspirational reading” provided by Gary Gygax in the first Dungeon Master's Gu
Collected essays, interviews, and reviews by the late French philosopher and mathematician. This rich collection brings together a set of newly translated essays, dialogues, and reviews by Gilles Ch
How we can achieve healthy growth--more regenerative than destructive, restoring equity rather than exacerbating inequalities.In Tomorrow's Economy, Per Espen Stoknes reframes the hot-button issue of economic growth. Going beyond the usual dialectic of pro-growth versus anti-growth, Stoknes calls for healthy growth. Healthy economic growth is more regenerative than destructive, repairs problems rather than greenwashing them, and restores equity rather than exacerbating global inequalities. Stoknes--a psychologist, economist, climate strategy researcher, and green-tech entrepreneur--argues that we have the tools to achieve healthy growth, but our success depends on transformations in government practices and individual behavior. Stoknes provides a compass to guide us toward the mindset, mechanisms, and possibilities of healthy growth.
The bestselling author and recipient of the 2018 Holberg Prize, Cass R. Sunstein, explores how more information can make us happy or miserable, and why we sometimes avoid it--but sometimes seek it out.How much information is too much? Do we need to know how many calories are in the giant vat of popcorn that we bought on our way into the movie theater? Do we want to know if we are genetically predisposed to a certain disease? Can we do anything useful with next week's weather forecast for Paris if we are not in Paris? In Too Much Information, Cass Sunstein examines the effects of information on our lives. Policymakers emphasize “the right to know,” but Sunstein takes a different perspective, arguing that the focus should be on human well-being and what information contributes to it. Government should require companies, employers, hospitals, and others to disclose information not because of a general “right to know” but when the information in question would significantly improve people'
In a novel written on the eve of World War I, H. G. Wells imagines a war “to end all wars” that begins in atomic apocalypse but ends in an enlightened utopia.Writing in 1913, on the eve of World War I’s mass slaughter and long before World War II’s mushroom cloud finale, H. G. Wells imagined a war that begins in atomic apocalypse but ends in a utopia of enlightened world government. Set in the 1950s, Wells’s neglected novel The World Set Free describes a conflict so horrific that it actually is the war that ends war. Wells―the first to imagine a “uranium-based bomb”―offers a prescient description of atomic warfare that renders cities unlivable for years: “Whole blocks of buildings were alight and burning fiercely, the trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in comparison with the full-bodied crimson glare beyond.” Drawing on discoveries by physicists and chemists of the time, Wells foresees both a world powered by clean, plentiful atomic energy―and the destr
When a plague wipes out most of the world’s male population and civilization crumbles, women struggle to build an agrarian community in the English countryside.Imagine a plague that brings society to a standstill by killing off most of the men on Earth. The few men who survive descend into lechery and atavism. Meanwhile, a group of women (accompanied by one virtuous male survivor) leave the wreckage of London to start fresh, establishing a communally run agrarian outpost. But their sexist society hasn’t permitted most of them to learn any useful skills―will the commune survive their first winter? This is the bleak world imagined in 1913 by English writer J. D. Beresford―one that has particular resonance for the planet’s residents in the 2020s. This edition of A World of Women offers twenty-first century readers a new look at a neglected classic. Beresford introduces us to the solidly bourgeois, prim and proper, Gosling family. As once-bustling London shuts down―Parliament closes, fa
A collection of science fiction stories from the early twentieth century by authors ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle to W. E. B. Du Bois.This collection of science fiction stories from the early twentieth century features work by the famous (Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes), the no-longer famous (“weird fiction pioneer” William Hope Hodgson), and the should-be-more famous (Bengali feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain). It offers stories by writers known for concerns other than science fiction (W. E. B. Du Bois, author of The Souls of Black Folk) and by writers known only for pulp science fiction (the prolific Neil R. Jones). These stories represent what volume and series editor Joshua Glenn has dubbed “the Radium Age”―the period when science fiction as we know it emerged as a genre. The collection shows that nascent science fiction from this era was prescient, provocative, and well written. Readers will discover, among other delights, a feminist utopia predating Charlotte P
In the first-ever novel about a cyborg, a machine-enhanced man from a multiverse of the far future visits 1920s England.In 1920s England, a strange being crashes a village cricket game. After some glitchy, jerky attempts to communicate, this creature reveals that he is a machine-enhanced human from a multiverse thousands of years in the future. The mechanism implanted in his skull has malfunctioned, sending him tumbling through time onto the green grass of the cricket field. Apparently in the future, at the behest of fed-up women, all men will be controlled by an embedded “clockwork,” camouflaged with hats and wigs. Published in 1923, The Clockwork Man―the first cyborg novel―tells the story of this odd time traveler’s visit. Spending time with two village couples about to embark upon married life, the Clockwork Man warns that because men of the twentieth century are so violent, sexist, and selfish, in the not-too-distant future they will be banned from physical reality. They will inh
An illustrated guide to the amazingly multifarious sex lives of animals, from elephants and bonobos to butterflies and bedbugs.There may be nothing unnatural in nature, but nature still encompasses much that seems fantastically strange―the amazingly multifarious sex lives of animals, for example. Sexus Animalis tells us everything we never dreamed we wanted to know about the reproductive systems, genital organs, and sexual practices of animals, from elephants (who masturbate with their trunks) to fruit flies (who produce spermatozoa twenty times their size). In the animal kingdom we find heterosexual, lesbian, gay, and bisexual behavior, as well as monogamy, polygamy, and polyandry, not to mention fellatio and many varieties of erections and orgasms. Emmanuelle Pouydebat, a natural history researcher, tells us about gutter penises, double penises, detachable penises, and corkscrew-shaped penises, as well as vaginas built for storage and clitorises with thorns. (Perhaps unsurprisingly
A devastating, compelling account of the federal government's leading role in bringing about today's climate crisis.In 2015, a group of twenty-one young people sued the federal government in Juliana v. United States for violating their constitutional rights by promoting climate catastrophe and thereby depriving them of life, liberty, and property without due process and equal protection of law. They Knew offers evidence supporting the children's claims, presenting a devastating and compelling account of the federal government's role in bringing about today's climate crisis. James Gustave Speth, tapped by the plaintiffs as one of twenty-one preeminent experts in their climate case, analyzes how administrations from Carter to Trump―despite having information about the impending climate crisis and the connection to fossil fuels―continued aggressive support of a fossil fuel based energy system. What did the federal government know and when did it know it? Speth asks, echoing another famous
An optimistic--but realistic and feasible--action plan for fighting climate change while creating new jobs and a healthier environment: electrify everything.Climate change is a planetary emergency. We have to do something now―but what? Saul Griffith has a plan. In Electrify, Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint―optimistic but feasible―for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. Griffith’s plan can be summed up simply: electrify everything. He explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households to make this possible. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, will stay and fight for the future. Griffith, an engineer and inventor, calls for grid neutrality, ensuring that households, businesses, and utilities operate as equals; we will have to rewrite regulations that were created for a fossil-fue
An early novel by Rose Macaulay about a government program of compulsory selective breeding in a dystopian future England.In a near-future England, a new government entity―the Ministry of Brains―attempts to stave off idiocracy through a program of compulsory selective breeding. Kitty Grammont, who shares author Rose Macaulay’s own ambivalent attitude, gets involved in the Ministry’s propaganda efforts, which the novel details with an entertaining thoroughness. (The alphabetical caste system dreamed up by Macaulay for her nightmare world would directly influence Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopia Brave New World.) But when Kitty falls in love with the Minister for Brains, a man whose genetic shortcomings make a union with her impossible, their illicit affair threatens to topple the government. Because it ridiculed wartime bureaucracy, the planned 1918 publication of What Not was delayed until after the end of World War I.
How the way we perceive our bodies plays a critical role in the way we perceive ourselves: stories of phantom limbs, rubber hands, anorexia, and other phenomena.The body is central to our sense of identity. It can be a canvas for self-expression, decorated with clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, tattoos, and piercings. But the body is more than that. Bodily awareness, says scientist-writer Moheb Costandi, is key to self-consciousness. In Body Am I, Costandi examines how the brain perceives the body, how that perception translates into our conscious experience of the body, and how that experience contributes to our sense of self. Along the way, he explores what can happen when the mechanisms of bodily awareness are disturbed, leading to such phenomena as phantom limbs, alien hands, and amputee fetishes. Costandi explains that the brain generates maps and models of the body that guide how we perceive and use it, and that these maps and models are repeatedly modified and reconstructed. Drawing
Stories from the ER: a doctor shows how empathy, creativity, and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care.To be an emergency room doctor is to be a professional listener to stories. Each patient presents a story; finding the heart of that story is the doctor’s most critical task. More technology, more tests, and more data won’t work if doctors get the story wrong. Empathy, creativity, and imagination are the cornerstones of clinical care. In Tornado of Life, ER physician Jay Baruch offers a series of short, powerful, and affecting essays that capture the stories of ER patients in all their complexity and messiness. Patients come to the ER with lives troubled by scales of misfortune that have little to do with disease or injury. ER doctors must be problem-finders before they are problem-solvers. Cheryl, for example, whose story is a chaos narrative of “and this happened, and then that happened, and then, and then and then and then,” tells Baruch she is "stuck in a tornado of li
An exhilarating, genre-bending exploration of curiosity’s powerful capacity to connect ideas and people.Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what’s left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems―the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other. Zurn and Bassett―identical twins who write that their book “represents the thought of one mind and two bodies”―harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. Traipsing across literatures of antiquity and medieval science, Vi
The exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness experienced under digital capitalism, explored through works by contemporary artists, writers, and performers.Sometimes, interacting with digital platforms, we want to be passive―in those moments of dissociation when we scroll mindlessly rather than connecting with anyone, for example, or when our only response is a shrugging “lol.” Despite encouragement by these platforms to “be yourself,” we want to be anyone but ourselves. Tung-Hui Hu calls this state of exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness digital lethargy. This condition permeates our lives under digital capitalism, whether we are “users,” who are what they click, or racialized workers in Asia and the Global South. Far from being a state of apathy, however, lethargy may hold the potential for social change. Hu explores digital lethargy through a series of works by contemporary artists, writers, and performers. These dispatches from the bleeding edge of digital culture includ
A series of photographic diptychs that investigate the behavior of images and offer an account of American precarity.Ambulance Chasers offers a series of photographic diptychs by the artist Abraham Adams: on the left, the faces of personal injury lawyers photographed from roadside billboards; on the right, the landscapes they survey. The gesture is a double rotation: each photograph is imagined as the spectator of the other, and in each pairing, the exorbitant promises of the animated lawyers are deflated by their juxtaposition with an often featureless roadside landscape. The ambulance chasers smile, grin, grimace, scowl; their hair is neatly coiffed, slicked back, unnaturally dark. They gaze at country roads, busy highways, empty intersections, blue skies, building sites, and parking lots. They offer assistance―at a price. Adams’s conceptual performance and art historian David Joselit’s text tell a story of American precarity. Joselit’s text unrolls alongside the photographs like a l
How politicians’ digital strategies appeal to the same fantasies of digital connection, access, and participation peddled by Silicon Valley.Smartphones and other digital devices seem to give us a direct line to politicians. But is interacting with presidential tweets really a manifestation of digital democracy? In Selfie Democracy, Elizabeth Losh examines the unintended consequences of politicians’ digital strategies, from the Obama campaign’s pioneering construction of an online community to Trump’s Twitter dominance. She finds that politicians who use digital media appeal to the same fantasies of digital connection, access, and participation peddled by Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, smartphones and social media don’t enable participatory democracy so much as they incentivize citizens to perform attention-getting acts of political expression. Losh explores presidential rhetoric casting digital media as tools of democracy, describes the conflation of gender and technology that contributed
