Do You Teach History? December Spotlight

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City I began this project because I wanted to write a different kind of book about poverty in America. Instead of focusing exclusively on poor people or poor places, I began searching for a process that involved poor and well-off people alike. Eviction—the forced removal of families from

In Our Grandchildren Redesigned I focus on three main areas—pharmaceuticals, bioelectronics, and genetics—through which the most far-reaching modifications of humans are likely to occur over the coming decades.

After the ancient Greeks invented rhetoric, it helped create the world’s first democracies. Today, it gives a real purpose to a liberal education, pulling together all of a student’s knowledge while giving her the tools to inspire others.

Reading With Patrick explores questions that idealistic students who seek to tackle social injustice might be moved to ask: can you change a life? Is it arrogant to think you can? Perhaps even more deeply, students can ask: What is a human connection made of? Who do we choose to connect with? If two people are from unequal circumstances, is the connection compromised from the start?

Hardwiring Happiness teaches lessons such as the central importance of psychological resources for effectiveness and well-being; coping with challenges; and managing vulnerabilities and also how inner resources are acquired through processes of learning.

Rogue Justice reveals the power of rogue actors to compromise the rule of law. It reveals that the very things the founding fathers feared—detention and killing by executive fiat, without judicial review; the use of the General Warrant; and a deferential attitude on the part of the courts towards the executive in charge—have become a disturbing new reality in post-9/11 America.

There is more and more evidence of how sleep deprivation is affecting students, both their physical and mental health and their ability to learn. At the same time, we are living in a golden age of sleep science, revealing all the ways in which sleep plays a vital role in our decision making, emotional intelligence, cognitive function, and creativity – in other words, the building blocks of a great education. This science is already being applied, as many schools have seen positive results from pushing back start times.

By Sara Nović, author of Girl at War: A Novel (Random House Trade Paperbacks, March 2016) Recently my first novel became an audiobook to which I cannot listen. This is not a complaint, exactly; to write a book someone wants to publish in any format is a writer’s dream. But to hold some disc that

Cinderland exposes the real danger lay in covering the truth in order to prop up our notions of being a wholesome, safe place to live. The need to be “good” seems especially potent in small communities, likely due to a false nostalgic notion that small towns are quaint, protected, and silent. But silence does not a safe place make. Instead it ripens an environment toward sexual violence, and it also heightens the private aftershocks that are weathered for years to come.

The naked violence, the absurdity of human suffering, the superhuman strength of a few will always be the headlines of war. But years and decades of political and religious conflict also has a way of seeping into the tiniest crevices of human society and culture. This cancer of war can alter the very DNA of nations, and there is often no going back to the old ways. So while understanding the stories of the heroes and villains of war is important, in The Faithful Scribe I set out to do something different: understand war from the view of the survivors.

10 Years that Shook the World tells the tale of an extraordinary decade post 9/11. Within each year, the book present events not in a strict chronology but more as we might remember them, often with the most significant events recalled first. The main topics—politics, economics, people, technology, and the environment—cross over constantly, showing how they are all interlinked and how globalization poses a phenomenal challenge to our world.