Science

He passionately argues that we must all learn to love, respect and care for our six-legged friends. Eye-opening, inspiring and riveting, Silent Earth is part love letter to the insect world, part elegy, part rousing manifesto for a greener planet.

To Save Everything, Click Here, the new book by the acclaimed author of The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov, is a penetrating look at the shape of society in the digital age, of the direction in which the 21st Century may take us, and of the alternate paths we can still chooseOur society is at a crossroads. Smart technology is transforming our world, making many aspects of our lives more convenient, efficient and - in some cases - fun. Better and cheaper sensors can now be embedded in almost everything, and technologies can log the products we buy and the way we use them. But, argues Evgeny Morozov, technology is having a more profound effect on us: it is changing the way we understand human society.In the very near future, technological systems will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions into many more areas of public life. These are the discourses by which we have always defined our civilisation: politics, culture, public debate, morality, humanism. But how will these discourses be affected when we delegate much of the responsibility for them to technology? The temptation of the digital age is to fix everything - from crime to corruption to pollution to obesity - by digitally quantifying, tracking, or gamifiying behaviour. Yet when we change the motivations for our moral, ethical and civic behaviour, do we also change the very nature of that behaviour? Technology, Morozov proposes, can be a force for improvement - but only if we abandon the idea that it is necessarily revolutionary and instead genuinely interrogate why and how we are using it.From urging us to drop outdated ideas of the internet to showing how to design more humane and democratic technological solutions, To Save Everything, Click Here is about why we should always question the way we use technology.'A devastating expos of cyber-utopianism by the world's most far-seeing Internet guru' John Gray, author of Straw Dogs'Evgeny Morozov is the most challenging - and best-informed - critic of the Techno-Utopianism surrounding the Internet. If you've ever had the niggling feeling, as you spoon down your google, that there's no such thing as a free lunch, Morozov's book will tell you how you might end up paying for it' Brian Eno'This hard-hitting book argues people have become enslaved to the machines they use to communicate. It is incisive and beautifully written; whether you agree with Morozov or not, he will make you think hard' Richard Sennett, author of TogetherPraise for The Net Delusion:'Gleefully iconoclastic . . . not just unfailingly readable: it is also a provocative, enlightening and welcome riposte to the cyberutopian worldview' Economist'A passionate and heavily researched account of the case against the cyberutopians . . . only by becoming "e;cyberrealists"e; can we hope to make humane and effective policy' Bryan Appleyard, New Statesman'Piercing . . . convincing . . . timely' Financial TimesEvgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (which was the winner of the 2012 Goldsmith Book Prize) and a contributing editor for The New Republic. Previously, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University, a Scwhartz fellow at the New America Foundation, a Yahoo fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown, and a fellow at the Open Society Foundations. His monthly column on technology comes out in Slate, Corriere della Sera, El Pais, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and several other newspapers. He's also written for the New York Times, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the London Review of Books.

A radical new history of a dangerous idea

Our solar system is currently orbiting a black hole 26,000 light years away at a speed of 200 km per second. In Black Hole Survival Guide physicist and novelist Janna Levin takes you on a journey into a black hole, explaining what would happen to you in there and why.

A reassuring guide on how to overcome failure, teaching us that we can learn to fail well.

THE ARTIST'S WAY for writing, with a Zen twist and a dash of BIG MAGIC.

Award Winner in the Science category of the 2020 Best Book Awards sponsored by American Book Fest

This introduction presents those interested in Mikhail Bakhtin with a compact, readable, and sophisticated exposition of his work, using the most up-to-date sources and relying on the new, scholarly editions of Bakhtin's texts. It is a key resource for students and teachers of literary theory and any courses on Bakhtin.

Cosmology is in crisis. The more we discover, the more puzzling the universe appears to be. How and why are the laws of nature what they are? A philosopher and a physicist, world-renowned for their radical ideas in their fields, argue for a revolution. To keep cosmology scientific, we must replace the old view in which the universe is governed by immutable laws by a new one in which laws evolve. Then we can hope to explain them. The revolution that Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin propose relies on three central ideas. There is only one universe at a time. Time is real: everything in the structure and regularities of nature changes sooner or later. Mathematics, which has trouble with time, is not the oracle of nature and the prophet of science; it is simply a tool with great power and immense limitations. The argument is readily accessible to non-scientists as well as to the physicists and cosmologists whom it challenges.

'His moral courage shines through from the start.' - Sunday TelegraphThe definitive edition of the late Sir Roger Scruton's philosophical and political essays and reviews, now collected in one volume.The philosopher Roger Scruton was the leading conservative thinker of the post-war years. In this book are assembled the very best of his essays and commentaries, arranged thematically. The selection has been made and edited by Mark Dooley, Scruton's literary executor.Throughout this collection, Scruton proves himself to be at his most scintillating and controversial. He writes with passion and conviction about such varied topics as feminism, racism, fascism, Tony Blair and Donald Trump, as well as subjects like global warming, music and architecture. He takes aim at those who defy conservative common sense in favour of liberal falsehoods.This book shows Scruton at his most brilliant and demonstrates how his influence will remain strong and enduring.

Audiences around the world have been enchanted by James Cameron's visionary Avatar, with its glimpse of the Na'vi on the marvelous world of Pandora. But the movie is not entirely a fantasy; there is a scientific rationale for much of what we saw on the screen, from the possibility of travel to other worlds, to the life forms seen on screen and the ecological and cybernetic concepts that underpin the 'neural networks' in which the Na'vi and their sacred trees are joined, as well as to the mind-linking to the avatars themselves.From popular science journalist and acclaimed science fiction author Stephen Baxter, The Science of Avatar is a guide to the rigorous fact behind the fiction. It will enhance the readers' enjoyment of the movie experience by drawing them further into its imagined world.

Widely regarded as the father of modern Western philosophy, Descartes sought to look beyond established ideas and create a thought system based on reason. In this profound work he meditates on doubt, the human soul, God, truth and the nature of existence itself.GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Minna Salami captures the mood of a disaffected generation, and forges the path for a radical Black feminist way of knowing for everyone.

There is a lie at the heart of global capitalism. Politicians, financiers and global bureaucrats claim to believe in free competitive markets, but have constructed the most unfree market system ever. It is corrupt because income is channelled to the owners of property - financial, physical and intellectual - at the expense of society.This book reveals how global capitalism is rigged in favour of rentiers to the detriment of all of us, especially the precariat. A plutocracy and elite enriches itself, not through production of goods and services, but through ownership of assets, including intellectual property, aided by subsidies, tax breaks, debt mechanisms, revolving doors between politics and business, and the privatisation of public services. Rentier capitalism is entrenched by the corruption of democracy, manipulated by the plutocracy and an elite-dominated media.Meanwhile, wages stagnate as labour markets are transformed by outsourcing, automation and the on-demand economy, generating more rental income while expanding the precariat.The Corruption of Capitalism argues that rentier capitalism is fostering revolt, and concludes by outlining a new income distribution system that would achieve the extinction of the rentier while promoting sustainable growth.

Speed, risk, freedom... Driving is one of the last remaining activities available day-to-day in which we get the chance to take control of our destiny, feel that intense and primal connection between movement and sheer joy, and experience a whiff of actual danger - the kind of faith in the unknown that makes us feel alive.

Fearless investigative journalist takes a deep dive into the dark world of online racist hatemongers - and shows us how we can fight back

Through a sweeping historical overview of suicide, a moving literary survey of famous suicide notes, and a psychological analysis of himself, Simon Critchley offers us an insight into what it means to possess the all too human gift and curse of being of being able to choose life or death.