A sweeping intellectual history of games and their importance to human progress.
We play games to learn about the world, to understand our minds and the minds of others, and to practice making predictions about the future. Games are thought to be older than written language, and have now become the dominant cultural media―bigger than movies, TV, music, and literature combined. They are also fun. But as neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy argues, it’s time we started taking them more seriously.
In Playing With Reality, she chronicles the riveting and hidden history of games since the Enlightenment, weaving an unexpected path through military theory, biology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and the future of democracy. Games, Clancy shows us, have been deeply intertwined with the arc of history. War games shaped the outcomes of real wars in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. Game theory warped our understanding of human behaviour and brought us to the brink of annihilation―yet still underlies basic assumptions in economics, politics, and technology. We used games to teach computers how to learn for themselves, and now we are designing games that will determine the shape of society and future of democracy. Games also inform the basic systems that govern our daily lives: the social media and technology that can warp our preferences, polarise us, and manufacture our desires.
Lucid, thought-provoking, and masterfully told, Playing With Reality makes the bold argument that the human fascination with games is the key to understanding our nature.
A gripping account of the past and future of Taiwan
In the overwhelming chaos across Asia at the end of the Second World War, one relatively minor issue was the future of the Japanese colony of Taiwan, a large island some one hundred miles off the coast of Fujian. Handed to the Kuomintang-ruled Republic of China, in 1949 it suddenly became the focus of global attention as a random cross-section of defeated Nationalists, including President Chiang Kai-shek, fled there from Mao's triumphant Communist forces.
The Struggle for Taiwan is a balanced and convincing account of the sequence of events that has left Taiwan for generations as a political anomaly, with issues around its status and future continuing to threaten war. With deepening democratization, Taiwan further goads Beijing, remaining functionally independent from China even as Xi Jinping clamours for unification.
This invaluable book allows readers to understand the complex story of this unique place and its role in international relations. With its striking economic dynamism and commitment to democracy, can Taiwan continue - as Hong Kong once did - to thrive, or will China conquer it? And will the world be able to maintain peace across the Taiwan Strait or will it stumble into war?
For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She's been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not.
Blending intimate stories with trenchant analysis, Manne shows why fatphobia matters, now more than ever. Over the last decades, bias has waned in every category except one: body size. Here she examines how anti-fatness operates – how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person's attractiveness, fortitude and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect and poor educational outcomes. It is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential. Fatphobia is a social justice issue.
In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of ‘body reflexivity’ -- a radical re-evaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size.
The Performer explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical dimensions of performing, rather than on words. Richard Sennett is particularly attuned to the ways in which the rituals of ordinary life are performances.
The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author's early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing.
This is the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression: performing, narrating, and imaging.
At the heart of the extraordinary ferment of the High Renaissance stood a distinctive, strange and beguiling figure: the magus. An unstable mix of scientist, bibliophile, engineer, fabulist and fraud, the magus ushered in modern physics and chemistry while also working on everything from secret codes to siege engines to magic tricks.
Anthony Grafton's wonderfully original book discusses the careers of men who somehow managed to be both figures of startling genius and - by some measures - credulous or worse. The historical Faust, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa are all fascinating characters, closely linked to monarchs, artists and soldiers and sitting at the heart of any definition of why the Renaissance was a time of such restless innovation. The study of the stars, architecture, warfare, even medicine: all of these and more were revolutionized in some way by the experiments and tricks of these extraordinary individuals.
No book does a better job of allowing us to understand the ways that magic, religion and science were once so intertwined and often so hard to tell apart.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer turns his eye to the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age
Twenty years ago, Benjamin Moser followed a love affair to an ancient Dutch town. In order to make sense of this new place, he threw himself into the Dutch museums. Soon, he found himself unearthing the strange, inspiring and sometimes terrifying stories of the artists who shaped one of the most luminous moments in the history of human creativity, the Dutch Golden Age.
As he explored the hidden world of the Dutch Masters (and one Mistress), Moser met a crowd of fascinating personalities: the stormy Rembrandt, the intimate Ter Borch, the mysterious Vermeer. Through their art, he got to know their country, too: from Pieter Saenredam's translucent churches to Paulus Potter's muddy barnyards, and from Pieter de Hooch's cozy hearths to Jacob van Ruisdael's tragic trees. Over the years, Moser found himself on increasingly intimate terms with these centuries-dead artists, and found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions he was. Why do we make art? What is art, anyway - and what is an artist? What does it mean to succeed as an artist, and what does it mean to fail?
The Upside-Down World is an invitation to ask these questions, and to turn them on their heads: to look, and then to look again. It is a brilliant, colourful and learned book for anyone, whether lifelong scholar or curious tourist, who has ever felt the lure of the Dutch galleries. It shows us art, and artists, as we have never seen them before.
A mesmerizing trip to the strange new world of white holes, from Carlo Rovelli, the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Let us journey into the heart of a black hole. Let us slip beyond its boundary, the horizon, and tumble - on and on - down this crack in the universe. As we plunge, we'll see geometry fold, we'll feel the equations draw tight around us. Eventually, we'll pass it: the remains of a star, deep and dense and falling further far. And then - the bottom. Where time and space end, and the white hole is born . . .
With lightness and magic, here Carlo Rovelli traces the ongoing adventure of his own cutting-edge research, of the uncertainty and joy of going where we've not yet been. Guiding us to the edge of theory and experiment, he invites us to go beyond, to experience the fever and the disquiet of science. Here is the extraordinary life of a white hole.
A personal trip into the uncanny Mirror World of our polarised culture, from the international bestselling author of The Shock Doctrine
What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired a double? Someone almost like you, and yet not you at all?
When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn't. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity - all we have to meet the world - so unstable?
To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting 'the children'). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister.
This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It's for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.
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