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The age of insecurity : coming together as things fall apart / by Taylor, Astra,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."These days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially stressed and emotionally overwhelmed. The status quo isn't working for anyone, even those who appear to have it all. What is going on? In this urgent cultural diagnosis, author and activist Astra Taylor exposes how seemingly disparate crises--rising inequality and declining mental health, the ecological emergency, and the threat of authoritarianism--originate from a social order built on insecurity. From home ownership and education to the wellness industry and policing, many of the institutions and systems that promise to make us more secure actually undermine us. Mixing social critique, memoir, history, political analysis, and philosophy, this genre-bending book rethinks both insecurity and security from the ground up. By facing our existential insecurity and embracing our vulnerability, Taylor argues, we can begin to develop more caring, inclusive, and sustainable forms of security to help us better weather the challenges ahead. The Age of Insecurity will transform how you understand yourself and society--while illuminating a path toward meaningful change."--
Subjects: Anxiety.; Civilization, Modern; Security (Psychology); Social psychology.; Uncertainty.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Dinosaurs : a novel / by Millet, Lydia,1968-author.;
"A stunning new novel from the author of A Children's Bible, a National Book Award finalist and one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2020. Over twelve novels and two collections Lydia Millet has emerged as a major American novelist. Hailed as "a writer without limits" (Karen Russell) and "a stone-cold genius" (Jenny Offill), Millet makes fiction that vividly evokes the ties between people and other animals and the crisis of extinction. Her exquisite new novel is the story of a man named Gil who walks from New York to Arizona to recover from a failed love. After he arrives, new neighbors move into the glass-walled house next door and his life begins to mesh with theirs. In this warmly textured, drily funny, and philosophical account of Gil's unexpected devotion to the family, Millet explores the uncanny territory where the self ends and community begins-what one person can do in a world beset by emergencies. Dinosaurs is both sharp-edged and tender, an emotionally moving, intellectually resonant novel that asks: In the shadow of existential threat, where does hope live?"--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Satirical literature.; Novels.; Friendship; Neighbors; Walking;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The big picture : on the origins of life, meaning, and the universe itself / by Carroll, Sean M.,1966-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.The fundamental nature of reality -- Poetic naturalism -- The world moves by itself -- What determines what will happen next? -- Reasons why -- Our universe -- Time's arrow -- Memories and causes -- Learning about the world -- Updating our knowledge -- Is it okay to doubt everything? -- Reality emerges -- What exists, and what is illusion? -- Planets of belief -- Accepting uncertainty -- What can we know about the universe without looking at it? -- Who am I? -- Abducting God -- How much we know -- The quantum realm -- Interpreting quantum mechanics -- The core theory -- The stuff of which we are made -- The effective theory of the everyday world -- Why does the universe exist? -- Body and soul -- Death is the end -- The universe in a cup of coffee -- Light and life -- Funneling energy -- Spontaneous organization -- The origin and purpose of life -- Evolution's bootstraps -- Searching through the landscape -- Emergent purpose -- Are we the point? -- Crawling into consciousness -- The babbling brain -- What thinks? -- The hard problem -- Zombies and stories -- Are photons conscious? -- What acts on what? -- Freedom to choose -- Billion heartbeats -- What is and what ought to be -- Rules and consequences -- Constructing goodness -- Listening to the world -- Existential therapy.
Subjects: Cosmology.; Discoveries in science.; Evolution; Life; Meaning (Philosophy); Naturalism.; Physical laws.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The end of reality : how four billionaires are selling a fantasy future of the metaverse, mars, and crypto / by Taplin, Jonathan T.,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."At a time when the crises of income inequality, climate, and democracy, are compounding to create epic wealth disparity and the prospect of a second American civil war, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme -- the metaverse, cryptocurrency, space travel, and transhumanism -- is an existential threat in moral, political, and economic terms. In The End of Reality, Jonathan Taplin provides perceptive insight into the personal backgrounds and cultural power of these billionaires -- Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen ("The Four") -- and shows how their tech monopolies have brought middle-class wage stagnation, the hollowing out of many American towns, a radical increase in income inequality, and unbounded public acrimony. Meanwhile, the enormous amount of taxpayer money to be funneled into the dystopian ventures of "The Four", the benefits of which will accrue to billionaires, exacerbate these disturbing trends. The End of Reality is both scathing critique and reform agenda that replaces the warped worldview of The Four with a vision of regenerative economics that seeks to build a sustainable society with healthy growth and full employment"--
Subjects: Economics; Equality; Metaverse;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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A minor chorus : a novel / by Belcourt, Billy-Ray,author.;
"An urgent first novel about breaching the prisons we live inside from one of Canada's most daring literary talents. An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him: the shape of the novel he yearns to write, an autobiography of his rural hometown, the answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness. What ensues is a series of conversations, connections, and disconnections that reveals the texture of life in a town literature has left unexplored, where the friction between possibility and constraint provides an insistent background score. Whether he's meeting with an auntie distraught over the imprisonment of her grandson, engaging in rez gossip with his cousin at a pow wow, or lingering in bed with a married man after a hotel room hookup, the narrator makes space for those in his orbit to divulge their private joys and miseries, testing the theory that storytelling can make us feel less lonely. Populated by characters as alive and vast as the boreal forest, and culminating in a breathtaking crescendo, A Minor Chorus is a novel about how deeply entangled the sayable and unsayable can become--and about how ordinary life, when pressed, can produce hauntingly beautiful music."--
Subjects: Novels.; Authors; Families; Gay men; Homecoming; Indigenous peoples; Small cities; Storytelling; First Nations reserves;
Available copies: 2 / Total copies: 2
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Blood in the Cut A Novel [electronic resource] : by Nodarse, Alejandro.aut; Pino, Danny.nrt; cloudLibrary;
This program is read by Danny Pino, best known for his roles on Cold Case and Law & Order: SVU. “Blood in The Cut brims with dangerous energy in the face of existential entropy. A fantastic story.” —S. A. Cosby, New York Times bestselling author of All the Sinners Bleed Iggy Guerra is out of prison, but his homecoming is anything but smooth. His beloved mother is gone, his grief-stricken father Armando is deep in debt, and they are about to lose the butcher shop that has been in their family for generations. Iggy must earn his father’s lost trust in order to save La Carnicería Guerra from the threats imposed by a new rival business, a vigilante activist, and big-game hunter Orin, who has dragged Armando into his dangerous money-making schemes deep in the Everglades, where more than secrets are buried. Iggy will wrestle with the beauty and the danger of the place he calls home as he tries to save his family—without losing himself forever. Sharp as a butcher knife gleaming in the Miami sun, Alejandro Nodarse's Blood in the Cut opens onto a deeply personal vision of the streets and swamps of Miami, where the roots are crooked but strong as mangroves. A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.
Subjects: Audiobooks.; Hispanic & Latino; Suspense; Crime;
© 2024., Macmillan Audio,
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Coexistence : stories / by Belcourt, Billy-Ray,author.; Belcourt, Billy-Ray.Short stories.Selections.;
"A collection of intersecting stories about Indigenous love and loneliness from a Giller-longlisted author and one of contemporary literature's most boundless minds. Across the prairies and Canada's west coast, on reservations and university campuses, at literary festivals and existential crossroads, the characters in Coexistence are searching for connection. They're learning to live with and understand one another, to see beauty and terror side by side, and to accept that the past, present, and future can inhabit a single moment. An aging mother confides in her son about an intimate friendship from her distant girlhood. A middling poet is haunted by the cliché his life has become. A chorus of anonymous gay men dispense unvarnished truths about their sex lives. A man freshly released from prison finds that life on the outside has sinister strictures of its own. A PhD student dog-sits for his parents at what was once a lodging for nuns operating a residential school -- a house where the spectre of Catholicism comes to feel eerily literal. Bearing the compression, crystalline sentences, and emotional potency that have characterized his earlier books, Coexistence is a testament to Belcourt's mastery of and playfulness in any literary form. A vital addition to an already rich catalogue, this is a must-read collection and the work of an author at the height of his powers."--
Subjects: Short stories.; Indigenous peoples; Interpersonal relations; Loneliness; Love;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Nexus : a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI / by Harari, Yuval N.,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world. For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI-a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is not the raw material of truth, nor is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity."--
Subjects: Information behavior; Information networks; Information technology;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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Nexus A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI [electronic resource] : by Harari, Yuval Noah.aut; cloudLibrary;
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world. For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is not the raw material of truth, nor is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Future Studies; Civilization;
© 2024., McClelland & Stewart,
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Denial / by Raymond, Jonathan,author.;
"A futuristic thriller about climate change by the acclaimed screenwriter of First Cow, Meek's Cutoff, and HBO's Mildred Pierce. The year is 2052. Climate change has had a predictably devastating effect: Venice submerged, cyclones in Oklahoma, megafires in South America. Yet it could be much worse. Two decades earlier, the global protest movement known as the Upheavals helped break the planet's fossil fuel dependency, and the subsequent Nuremberg-like Toronto Trials convicted the most powerful oil executives and lobbyists for crimes against the environment. Not all of them. A few executives escaped arrest and went into hiding, including pipeline mastermind Robert Cave. Now, a Pacific Northwest journalist named Jack Henry who works for a struggling media company has received a tip that Cave is living in Mexico. Hoping the story will save his job, he travels south and, using a fake identity, makes contact with the fugitive. The two men strike up an unexpected friendship, leaving Jack torn about exposing Cave--an uncertainty further compounded by the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and a new romance with an old acquaintance. Who will really benefit from the unmasking? What is the nature of justice and punishment? How does one contend with mortality when the planet itself is dying? Denial is both a page-turning speculative suspense novel and a powerful existential inquisition about the perilous moment in which we currently live."--
Subjects: Thrillers (Fiction); Dystopian fiction.; Political fiction.; Novels.; Climatic changes; Fugitives from justice; Interpersonal relations; Journalists;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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