The Cult of Smart

The Cult of Smart
Author: Fredrik deBoer
Publisher: All Points Books
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1250200385

Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.

The Brave Learner

The Brave Learner
Author: Julie Bogart
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0525505008

Publishers Weekly bestseller · A joyful and accessible homeschool guide to making learning a part of everyday life Parents who are deeply invested in their children's education can be hard on themselves and their kids. When exhausted parents are living the day-to-day grind, it can seem impossible to muster enough energy to make learning fun or interesting. How do parents nurture a love of learning amid childhood chaos, parental self-doubt, the flu, and state academic standards? In this book, Julie Bogart distills decades of experience--homeschooling her five now grown children, developing curricula, and training homeschooling families around the world--to show parents how to make education an exciting, even enchanting, experience for their kids, whether they're in elementary or high school. Enchantment is about ease, not striving. Bogart shows parents how to make room for surprise, mystery, risk, and adventure in their family's routine, so they can create an environment that naturally moves learning forward. If a child wants to pick up a new hobby or explore a subject area that the parent knows little about, it's easy to simply say "no" to end the discussion and the parental discomfort, while dousing their child's curious spark. Bogart gently invites parents to model brave learning for their kids so they, too, can approach life with curiosity, joy, and the courage to take learning risks.

Good Economics for Hard Times

Good Economics for Hard Times
Author: Abhijit V. Banerjee
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1541762878

The winners of the Nobel Prize show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of our day. Figuring out how to deal with today's critical economic problems is perhaps the great challenge of our time. Much greater than space travel or perhaps even the next revolutionary medical breakthrough, what is at stake is the whole idea of the good life as we have known it. Immigration and inequality, globalization and technological disruption, slowing growth and accelerating climate change--these are sources of great anxiety across the world, from New Delhi and Dakar to Paris and Washington, DC. The resources to address these challenges are there--what we lack are ideas that will help us jump the wall of disagreement and distrust that divides us. If we succeed, history will remember our era with gratitude; if we fail, the potential losses are incalculable. In this revolutionary book, renowned MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo take on this challenge, building on cutting-edge research in economics explained with lucidity and grace. Original, provocative, and urgent, Good Economics for Hard Times makes a persuasive case for an intelligent interventionism and a society built on compassion and respect. It is an extraordinary achievement, one that shines a light to help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world.

Schools of Thought

Schools of Thought
Author: Rexford Brown
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1993-08-10
Genre: Education
ISBN:

As a result of his visits to classrooms across the nation, Brown has compiled an engaging, thought-provoking collection of classroom vignettes which show the ways in which national, state, and local school politics translate into changed classroom practices. "Captures the breadth, depth, and urgency of education reform".--Bill Clinton.

Accessible Yoga

Accessible Yoga
Author: Jivana Heyman
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0834842394

“A treasure trove . . . what Yoga, capital Y, is all about.” —Donna Farhi “Nothing less than a gem.” —Judith Lasater “A vital tool.” —Book Riot This daring, visionary book revolutionizes yoga practice, making it truly accessible to everyone—in every body, at any age, and in any state of health Yoga practice has so much to offer us physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. But many of us feel discouraged to practice because we see young, slim, flexible, well, and able-bodied people dominating yoga spaces. Yet, yoga is truly a practice for all—conferring enormous benefits to our overall well-being as our bodies change, age, and navigate various health challenges. Jivana Heyman, founder of Accessible Yoga, views yoga as a basic human right—saying we all deserve to practice it in whatever state we find our body or mind. Accessible Yoga offers a simple, clear, and wonderfully adaptable practice for all people regardless of ability, health, and body type. Heyman has spent over twenty years sharing yoga with people of all abilities and backgrounds, and in this book, he shares his knowledge by breaking down complex yoga poses, breathing practices, meditation techniques, and yoga teachings into clearly understandable and practical tools we can use every day, regardless of our limitations or challenges.

The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth
Author: David Wallace-Wells
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2019-02-19
Genre: Science
ISBN: 052557672X

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books

Networks of Power

Networks of Power
Author: Thomas Parke Hughes
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 492
Release: 1993-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780801846144

Awarded the Dexter Prize by the Society for the History of Technology, this book offers a comparative history of the evolution of modern electric power systems. It described large-scale technological change and demonstrates that technology cannot be understood unless placed in a cultural context.

Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences

Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences
Author: Kristin Luker
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0674040384

This book is both a handbook for defining and completing a research project, and an astute introduction to the neglected history and changeable philosophy of modern social science.

Warfare in the American Homeland

Warfare in the American Homeland
Author: Joy James
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2007-07-20
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780822339236

DIVA collection of writings by prisoners and scholars that documents the extension of the violence and the repression of the prison establishment into the larger society. /div

Lovers and Executioners

Lovers and Executioners
Author: John Strand
Publisher: Dramatic Publishing
Total Pages: 164
Release: 1999
Genre: Trials (Murder)
ISBN: 9780871299109

A dramatic tale "about attempted murder and a woman's revenge concerns a husband who discovers evidence that his wife has been unfaithful. He abandons her on a desert isle, expecting her to die. But she escapes and returns three years later disguised as a man. She manages to have herself appointed judge and promptly brings her husband to trial for the murder of his wife."--Back cover