What We Are Reading Today: ‘Ferns, Spikemosses, Clubmosses, and Quillworts of Eastern North America’

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Ferns, Spikemosses, Clubmosses, and Quillworts of Eastern North America’
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Updated 14 March 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Ferns, Spikemosses, Clubmosses, and Quillworts of Eastern North America’

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Ferns, Spikemosses, Clubmosses, and Quillworts of Eastern North America’

Author: Emily Sessa

This is a comprehensive photographic field guide to the ferns, spikemosses, clubmosses, and quillworts of eastern North America. Accessible yet scientifically accurate, the book will appeal to beginners and experts alike and enhance the field experience of any user. Keys, range maps, detailed color photographs, and facing-page species descriptions aid exploration and allow reliable identification of all 305 species found in the area covered by the book — the United States east of the Mississippi and contiguous Canada, except for extreme northern and northeastern Canada.


What We Are Reading Today: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold

What We Are Reading Today: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold
Updated 22 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold

What We Are Reading Today: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold

In Citizen Marx, Bruno Leipold argues that, contrary to certain interpretive commonplaces, Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism.
Marx’s relation to republicanism changed over the course of his life, but its complex influence on his thought cannot be reduced to wholesale adoption or rejection. Challenging common depictions of Marx that downplay or ignore his commitment to politics, democracy, and freedom, Leipold shows that Marx viewed democratic political institutions as crucial to overcoming the social unfreedom and domination of capitalism.
One of Marx’s principal political values, Leipold contends, was a republican conception of freedom, according to which one is unfree when subjected to arbitrary power.
Placing Marx’s republican communism in its historical context—but not consigning him to that context—Leipold traces Marx’s shifting relationship to republicanism across three broad periods. One of Marx’s great contributions, Leipold suggests, was to place politics (and especially democratic politics) at the heart of socialism.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elusive Cures’ by Nicole Rust

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elusive Cures’ by Nicole Rust
Updated 21 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elusive Cures’ by Nicole Rust

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elusive Cures’ by Nicole Rust

Brain research has been accelerating rapidly in recent decades, but the translation of our many discoveries into treatments and cures for brain disorders has not happened as many expected. 

We do not have cures for the vast majority of brain illnesses, from Alzheimer’s to depression, and many medications we do have to treat the brain are derived from drugs produced in the 1950s—before we knew much about the brain at all. 

Tackling brain disorders is clearly one of the biggest challenges facing humanity today. What will it take to overcome it? Nicole Rust takes readers along on her personal journey to answer this question.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Atlas of Birds’ by Mike Unwin

What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Atlas of Birds’ by Mike Unwin
Updated 20 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Atlas of Birds’ by Mike Unwin

What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Atlas of Birds’ by Mike Unwin

“The Atlas of Birds” captures the breathtaking diversity of birds, and illuminates their conservation status around the world.

Full-color maps show where birds are found, both by country and terrain, and reveal how an astounding variety of behavioral adaptations—from flight and feeding to nest building and song—have enabled them to thrive in virtually every habitat on Earth.

Maps of individual journeys and global flyways chart the amazing phenomenon of bird migration, while bird classification is explained using maps for each order and many key families.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’

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Updated 18 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’

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  • Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land

Author: ERIN LIN

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tonnes of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country.

What began as a secret CIA infiltration of Laos eventually expanded into Cambodia and escalated into a nine-year war over the Ho Chi Minh trail fought primarily with bombs.

Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In “When the Bombs Stopped,” Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across post conflict Cambodia.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Spike’ by Mark Humphries

What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Spike’ by Mark Humphries
Updated 17 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Spike’ by Mark Humphries

What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Spike’ by Mark Humphries

We see the last cookie in the box and think, can I take that? We reach a hand out. In the 2.1 seconds that this impulse travels through our brain, billions of neurons communicate with one another, sending blips of voltage through our sensory and motor regions.

Neuroscientists call these blips “spikes.” Spikes enable us to do everything: talk, eat, run, see, plan, and decide. In “The Spike,” Mark Humphries takes readers on the epic journey of a spike through a single, brief reaction.