FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull’s The Jailhouse Lawyer

A searing and ultimately hopeful account of Calvin Duncan, “the most extraordinary jailhouse lawyer of our time” (Sister Helen Prejean), and his thirty-year path through Angola after a wrongful murder conviction, his coming-of-age as a legal mind while imprisoned, and his continued advocacy for those on the inside.   Prologue “Whether I shall turn out

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Books for Women’s Equality Day

In celebration of Women’s Equality Day on August 26th and the 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, we are sharing books about women whose activism and determination secured them the right to vote. This collection includes books about women who followed in their footsteps to push for rights in the

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Gerd Gigerenzer’s How to Stay Smart in a Smart World

How to stay in charge in a world populated by algorithms that beat us in chess, find us romantic partners, and tell us to “turn right in 500 yards.”   Technological solutionism is the belief that every societal problem is a “bug” that needs a “fix” through an algorithm. Technological paternalism is its natural consequence,

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Ashley Cordes’s Indigenous Currencies

This book explores how Indigenous currencies—including wampum and dentalium shells, beads, and the cryptocurrency MazaCoin—have long constituted a form of resistance to settler colonialism.   “…[C]ryptocurrency, and digital currency broadly, continue creating shifting circuits of transactional culture. A sort of code rush is taking place, in which various digital forms of currency prevail over conventionally

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Do You Teach Philosophy?

You can search for books across this discipline through our course lists, which include Epistemology, Aesthetics, Existentialism, Gender Philosophy, Metaphysics, and Philosophy of Man. Epistemology Aesthetics Existentialism Gender Philosophy Metaphysics Philosophy of Man Philosophy of Education

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MESSAGE FROM THE AUTHOR: Brenda Wineapple on How the Scopes Trial Speaks to the America of Today

Contributed by Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, which relates how the dramatic story of the 1925 Scopes trial exposed profound divisions in America that still resonate today—divisions over the meaning of freedom, religion, education, censorship, and civil liberties in a democracy.  Trials are inherently

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MESSAGE FROM THE AUTHOR: Prachi Gupta on Breaking Free from the “Model Minority” Myth

Contributed by Prachi Gupta, author of They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us, in which she articulates the dissonance, shame, and isolation of being upheld as an American success story while privately navigating traumas invisible to the outside world.  By chronicling the specific experiences of my Indian American family, They Called Us

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Penguin Random House Supports Young Math Minds at National American Regions Mathematics League Competition

Penguin Random House proudly contributed to the American Regions Mathematics League (ARML) this year by donating book prizes to outstanding student participants. Students from Canada, China and South Korea competed in the 2025 ARML competition, which celebrated the league’s 50th year. The books donated are: Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg, How

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