Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good. The moment you believe freedom is given, it is gone. There is no freedom without solidarity; freedom for you means freedom for me.
‘In these hard times for liberty, On Freedom makes the case that freedom, once explored and understood, is the way forward’ PRESIDENT ZELENSKY
From the acclaimed, bestselling author of On Tyranny comes a brilliant exploration of freedom – what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival.
Freedom is our great commitment, but we have lost sight of what it means – leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: we think we’re free if we can do and say as we please. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from, as freedom to – the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers and his own experiences, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish. Intimate yet ambitious, this book forges a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity and grace.
On Tyranny inspired millions around the world to fight for freedom; On Freedom helps us see exactly what we’re fighting for. It is a thrilling intellectual journey and a tour de force of political philosophy.
Opens a fascinating new window onto medieval and early modern life - a world where it's possible to meet the devil on the road, control the future through stars, and employ a fairy to help find gold
In Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, historian Tabitha Stanmore will transport readers to a time when magic was used day-to-day as a way to navigate life's challenges and to solve problems of both trivial and deadly importance.
Imagine: it’s 1600 and you’ve lost your precious silver spoons – or perhaps your neighbour has stolen them. Or maybe your child has a fever. Or you’re facing trial. Or you’re looking for love. Or you're hoping to escape a husband … What do you do?
In medieval and early modern Europe, your first port of call might very well have been cunning folk: practitioners of ‘service magic’. Neither feared (like witches), nor venerated (like saints), they were essential to everyday life, a ubiquitous presence in a time when the supernatural was surprisingly mundane. For people from all walks of life, practical magic was a cherished resource with which to navigate life’s many challenges.
In Tabitha Stanmore’s beguiling account, we meet lovelorn widows and dissolute nobles, selfless healers and renegade monks. We listen in on Queen Elizabeth I’s astrology readings and track treasure hunters trying to unearth buried gold without upsetting the fairies that guard it. Much like us, premodern people lived in bewildering times, buffeted by forces beyond their control; and as Stanmore reveals, their faith in magic has much to teach us about how we accommodate ourselves to the irrational in our allegedly enlightened lives today.
Told with warmth, wit and above all, empathy, these stories take us deep into people’s day-to-day lives: their hopes and desires, their fears and vulnerabilities. Charming in every sense of the word, Cunning Folk is an immersive reconstruction of a bygone world and a thought-provoking commentary on the beauty and bafflement of being human.
The long-awaited memoir by the legendary filmmaker and celebrated author. Told in Werner Herzog's inimitable voice, this is the story of his epic artistic career, as inventive and daring as anything he has done before.
Hauling a steamship over a mountain in the jungle; walking from Munich to Paris in the dead of winter; descending into an active volcano; living in the wilderness among grizzly bears - Werner Herzog has always been intrigued by extremes of human experience. Here, he illuminates the influences and ideas that have driven his creativity and shaped his unique worldview.
Herzog's life matches the drama of his famous films: the boy growing up in poverty in a small village in the Alps after the Second World War; the teenager travelling the world in search of adventure that almost cost him his life; the director trying to calm his leading actor Klaus Kinski in the Amazonian jungle. And along the way, Herzog tells of ordinary people with extraordinary stories: rural labourers, circus acrobats, child soldiers.
Every Man for Himself and God Against All is at once a personal record of one of the great self-invented lives of our time, and a masterpiece that will enthral fans old and new. In a hypnotic swirl of memory, Herzog untangles and relives his most important experiences and inspirations, telling his story for the first and only time.
Once demonised and still largely illegal, psychedelic drugs are now officially a 'breakthrough therapy', used to treat depression, trauma and addiction and to enhance well-being. But as neuropsychologist Andy Mitchell shows in this deeply serious yet wildly entertaining investigation, this approach misses what is so strange and valuable about them: the psychedelic experience itself.
In Ten Trips he takes ten different drugs in ten different settings, journeying from a neuroimaging lab in London to the Colombian Amazon via Silicon Valley and his friend's basement kitchen. His encounters with scientists and gangsters, venture capitalists and con-men, psychonauts and shamans provide a panoramic view of psychedelics today: their capacity for healing but also trauma, for transcendence and corruption, profundity and hilarity.
By removing psychedelics from their indigenous and underground cultures, we risk losing the very things we need to harness them. To make them safe or normal might ultimately destroy what makes them potent. That potential is indeed great, not as an antidote to mental illness - none exists - but as a way of changing our whole perspective on mental health and flourishing.
Ten Trips is a dazzling, perception-shifting odyssey that shows how psychedelics can re-enchant us with the world.
Our brains have distinct mechanisms for talking about thoughts, about memories, about feelings and about the future. In Praise of Talking will be about the neuroscience of how we talk about ourselves, how we disclose information, and how that activity is central to the bonds we make with each other. It draws on a wealth of the latest neurological research, some of which the author has conducted himself, on talking about ourselves to other people - how we do it and why we do it, and what our brains are up to while we do it.
We talk about ourselves so consistently and pervasively we are unaware how much talking about ourselves to others supports our intense social lives. It is the currency underlying social transactions and social life, allowing us to build trust and rapport with others. In turn, building trust and rapport with others is at the core of our mental and social well-being. Conversation depends critically on having a richly-stocked autobiographical memory that we use not just in the service of remembering, but also in negotiating our position and status with others. We talk about ourselves to change what other people think of us, feel about us, will do for us.
This novel way of thinking about talking turns our view of identity inside-out because our sense of identity arises out of what we think others think about us. We tell our stories to others, drawing on our fragile and fallible autobiographical memories, which are in turn shaped by the questions we are asked and the stories we want to tell about ourselves, and by what others tell us. And we do so to affect what others think about us - not simply to disclose ourselves to others. And this is all in the service of social belonging: to the family, to tribes, to institutions, to cultures and subcultures, to nations, to those who profess the same ideals and stories that we do.
In Praise of Talking blends expertise and a scientific journey of discovery, leavened by Shane O'Mara's warm tone and evangelical gift for transmitting the wonder of the brain to a wide readership.
A revelatory portrait of life in a great museum and the moving story of one guard's quest to find solace and meaning in art
Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase into New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. Patrick Bringley never thought he'd be one of them. But when his brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer he quit his journalism job, and sought peace in the most beautiful place he knew.
To his surprise, this temporary refuge becomes his home away from home for a decade. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and place among the lively subculture of museum guards. As his bonds with colleagues and the art grow, he learns how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns.
The traditional 'nuclear' family home is a problem: it places unfair and unnecessary burdens on women (and men too), it entrenches inequalities, it entraps us financially and it hinders certain kinds of child development. Also, it doesn't seem to make us very happy.
And yet throughout history and around the world today, forward-thinking communities have pioneered alternative ways of living - from the all-female 'beguinages' of medieval Belgium to the matriarchal ecovillages of contemporary Colombia; from the ancient Greek commune founded by Pythagoras, where men and women lived as equals and shared property, to present-day Connecticut, where new laws make it easier for extra 'alloparents' to help raise children not their own. Some of these experiments burned brightly and briefly; others are living proof of what is possible.
Everyday Utopia upends our assumptions and raises our sights by gathering these and many more inspiring examples together, arguing that many of the most important and effective ways of changing our lives and the world are to be found in the home. The result is a radically hopeful and practical vision of more connected - and contented - ways of living.
A book about how we can reclaim time from a culture that commodifies and capitalises it from the bestselling author of HOW TO DO NOTHING
A radical argument that we are living on the wrong clock, one that tells us time is money, and that embracing a new concept of time can open us up to bold, hopeful possibilities from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing.
Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it-the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by--inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time--that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible.
Drawing on fifty years of interviews and experience, Homelands tells the epic story of how Europe in the early twenty first century, having emerged from its wartime hell, recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe 'whole, free and at peace', and then faltered.
Homelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history, reportage and memoir by our greatest writer about European affairs.
Drawing on half a century of interviews and experience, Homelands tells the story of Europe in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries - how, having emerged from its wartime hell in 1945, it slowly recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe 'whole, free and at peace'. And then faltered.
Humane, expert and deeply felt, Homelands is full of encounters, conversations and anecdote. It is also highly personal: Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying and thinking about Europe and this book is full of life itself, from his father's experience on D-Day, to his teenage French exchange, to interviewing Polish dockers, Albanian guerillas and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents in the UK, Europe, and the US.
Are you a human? Do you have a mind? Then this book is for you.
Nothing is more familiar and yet less understood than the human mind. It defines the experience of being human, and yet its workings contain some of the deepest mysteries ever encountered. Written by one of the world's greatest teachers of psychology, The Human Mind provides a masterful and riveting guide to all that we have learned since modern science began probing those mysteries.
How does a three-pound lump of grey-ish meat give rise to conscious experience?
What is the function of emotions such as disgust, gratitude and shame?
How do our biases affect us and how can we overcome them?
How does the mind of a child differ from that of an adult?
How does memory work? What causes mental illness?
Are we rational? Are we all a little bit racist?
What makes us kind? What makes us cruel?
What makes us happy?
Many of these questions now have answers; many others don't yet; many widely accepted theories are probably wrong. This book takes us to the very limits of what is known. It shines new light on all that you take most for granted: everything you think and feel, everything you say and do, everything that makes you you.
How much light is too much light? The Darkness Manifesto urges us to cherish natural darkness for the sake of the environment, our own wellbeing, and all life on earth.
The world's flora and fauna have evolved to operate in the natural cycle of day and night. But constant illumination has made light pollution a major issue. From space, our planet glows brightly, 24/7. By extending our day, we have forced out the inhabitants of the night and disrupted the circadian rhythms necessary to sustain all living things. Our cities' streetlamps and neon signs are altering entire ecosystems.
As a devoted friend of the night, Johan Eklöf encourages us to appreciate natural darkness, its creatures, and its unique benefits. He ponders the beauties of the night sky, traces the paths of light-drunk moths and the dives of keen-eyed owls, and shows us the bioluminescent creatures of the deep oceans. He writes passionately about the domino effect of damage we inflict by keeping the lights on: insects failing to reproduce; birds blinded and bewildered; bats starving as they wait in vain for insects that only come out in the dark. For humans, light-induced sleep disturbances impact our hormones and weight, and can contribute to mental health problems.
Eye-opening and ultimately encouraging, The Darkness Manifesto offers simple steps that can benefit ourselves and the planet.
The light bulb - long the symbol of progress - needs to be turned off. To ensure a bright future, we must embrace the darkness.
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