In the closing months of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Japanese, mostly civilians, died in a final outburst of violence from the air. American planes were beginning to run low on plausible targets when it was decided to use two atomic weapons in a final, terrible flourish to try to end the war.
Richard Overy’s remarkable new book rethinks how we should regard this last stage of the war and the role of the bombing. This book explores the way in which the willingness to kill civilians and destroy cities became normalized in the course of a horrific war as moral concerns were blunted and scientists, airmen, and politicians followed a strategy of mass destruction they would never have endorsed before the war began. But it also engages with the new scholarship that shows how complex the effort to end the war was in Japan, where ‘surrender’ was entirely foreign to Japanese culture.
From philosopher Agnes Callard, one of today’s leading public intellectuals, comes a new and vibrant understanding of Socrates, his work, and his unique approach to learning
The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, perhaps the single most important figure in Western culture, is hidden in plain view. If his claim that 'the unexamined life is not worth living' has ceased to shock us, that is not because we know how to live examined ones; we speak of 'the Socratic method' in ignorance of just how much that method demands of us. In Open Socrates, acclaimed philosopher Agnes Callard takes us deeper into Socrates’ thought than any modern writer has.
As she shows, Socrates noticed that the most important questions start off closed: before a person even has a chance to ponder how she should live, her bodily desires or the forces of social conformity have already answered on her behalf. Is it even possible to ask a question that you think you have already answered? Callard answers yes — but we can’t do it alone. She argues that the true ambition of the Socratic method is to reveal what one human being can be to another. You can use another person in many ways — for survival, for pleasure, for comfort — but you are engaging them to the fullest when you call on them to help answer your own questions, and challenge your own answers.
How should we manage romantic love? What is the right way to think about one’s own death? What form should our politics take? These were the most intractable questions back in Socrates’ time, and that continues to be true, 2,500 years later. Callard shows us how Socrates' method allows us to make progress in answering them — and, in the process, gives us nothing less than a new ethics to live by.
After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents in many countries around the world deteriorated suddenly in the early 2010s. Why have rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide risen so sharply, more than doubling in many cases?
In this book, Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the decline of free-play in childhood and the rise of smartphone usage among adolescents are the twin sources of increased mental distress among teenagers.
Haidt delves into the latest psychological and biological research to show how, between 2010 and 2015, childhood and adolescence got rewired. As teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones packed with social media apps, time online soared while time engaging face-to-face with friends and family plummeted, and so did mental health. This profound shift took place against a backdrop of diminishing childhood freedom, as parents over-supervised every aspect of their children’s lives offline, depriving them of the experiences they most need to become strong and self-governing adults.
A deeply humane and revolutionary new framework for understanding and treating addiction
What causes addiction, and how should we treat it? Today it is understood primarily as a brain disease, yet in this bold reimagining of addiction, pioneering psychiatrist Elias Dakwar argues that this is false. It fails to explain, among other things, why many people can enjoy drugs without developing a dependency on them. Despite decades of neuroscientific research, we aren’t much closer to truly understanding the nature of addiction, nor to addressing it effectively.
In The Captive Imagination, Dakwar argues that addiction is an existential challenge, requiring a more philosophical and multidisciplinary approach, as well as a lens through which we can better understand ourselves. Addiction stems from our desire for happiness: whether addicts or not, we all struggle against meaninglessness, and resort to false solutions to our despair. Dakwar also shows how our individual capacity for self-delusion relates to our collective self-inflicted crises, from environmental destruction to social injustice.
Drawing on vivid stories of his own patients, path-breaking research, and decades of clinical experience, The Captive Imagination offers a novel framework for understanding and overcoming addiction, as well as human suffering more generally.
How can you fight something if you don’t know it exists?
We live under an ideology that preys on every aspect of our lives: our education and our jobs; our healthcare and our leisure; our relationships and our mental wellbeing; the planet we inhabit – the very air we breathe. So pervasive has it become that, for most people, it has no name. It seems unavoidable, like a natural law.
But trace it back to its roots, and we discover that it is neither inevitable nor immutable. It was conceived, propagated, and then concealed by the powerful few. Our task is to bring it into the light—and to build a new system that is worth fighting for.
Neoliberalism. Do you know what it is?
Whether we like it or not, the AI revolution is coming to education. In Brave New Words, Salman Khan, the visionary behind Khan Academy, explores how artificial intelligence and GPT technology will transform learning, offering a roadmap for teachers, parents, and students to navigate this exciting (and sometimes intimidating) new world.
A pioneer in the world of education technology, Khan explains the ins and outs of these cutting-edge tools and how they will forever change the way we learn and teach. Rather than approaching the ChatGPT revolution with white-knuckled fear, Khan wants parents and teachers to embrace AI and adapt to it (while acknowledging its imperfections and limitations). He emphasizes that embracing AI in education is not about replacing human interaction but enhancing it, so that every student can complement the work they're already doing in profoundly new and creative ways, to personalize learning, adapt assessments, and support success in the classroom, preparing students for an increasingly digital future.
But Brave New Words is not just about technology - it's about what this technology means for our society, and the practical implications for administrators, guidance counsellors, and hiring managers who can harness the power of AI in education and the workplace. Khan also delves into the ethical and social implications of AI and GPT, offering thoughtful insights into how we can use these tools to build a more accessible education system for students around the world.
A powerful and urgent explanation and vindication of our human rights and freedoms
After the devastation of World War Two, the international community came together to enshrine fundamental rights to refuge, health, education and living standards, for privacy, fair trials and free speech, and outlawing torture, slavery and discrimination. Their goal was greater global justice, equality, and peace. That settlement is now in danger, attacked by opponents from across the political spectrum and populist and authoritarian movements worldwide. We are threatened by wars, inequality, new technologies and climate catastrophe, and we need our human rights now more than ever. In this powerful, accessible book, Shami Chakrabarti, lawyer, parliamentarian and leading British human rights defender, shows us why human rights are essential for our future.
Outlining the historic national and international struggles for human rights, from the fall of Babylon, to the present day, Chakrabarti is an indispensable guide to the law and logic underpinning human dignity and universal freedoms. Her intervention will engage both sceptics and supporters, equipping believers in the battle of ideas and persuading doubters to think again. For human rights to survive, they must be far better understood by everyone.
Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.
Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled.
In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.
'The women of the world are serving notice. We want wages for every dirty toilet, every indecent assault, every painful childbirth, every cup of coffee and every smile. And if we don’t get what we want, we will simply refuse to work any longer!'
Across the globe in the 1970s, a network of feminists distilled their struggles into a single demand: Wages for Housework! Today, it remains a provocative idea, and an unfulfilled promise.
Here historian Emily Callaci tells the story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators, tracing their wildly creative political vision over the past five decades: from the early 1970s, when Selma James, a working-class political organizer, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a scholar-activist, started laying the foundations of Wages for Housework in London and Italy; through philosopher Silvia Federici reframing the campaign in the context of New York City’s fiscal crisis; to Wilmette Brown, lesbian poet and anti-war activist, and Margaret Prescod, community organizer, who brought the insights of Black feminism to the movement.
Drawing on new archival research and extensive interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the movement as it reached across Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. For these women, the wage was more than a demand for money: it was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it, imagining potential futures under capitalism – and beyond. Then as now, Wages for Housework poses profound questions. What would it be like to live in a society that prioritizes care rather than production? How would this change our relationship with the natural world? And what would women do with their lives if they had more time?
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