Author: Toni Morrison
The book is a vital new non-fiction collection from Toni Morrison — one of the most celebrated and revered writers of our time.
Throughout the book, people’s search for truth, moral integrity and expertise is met by Morrison with controlled anger, elegance and literary excellence.
Morrison (born Chloe Anthony Wofford), is an American author, editor, and professor who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.
“A Mouth Full of Blood is a powerful, erudite and essential gathering of ideas that speaks to us all,” stated a review published in goodreads.com.
Arifa Akbar, writing in a review published in The Observer, said Morrison’s “words possess a contemporary resonance, delivering unwavering truths with an intelligent rage that is almost equal to her hope.”
Spanning five decades, this collection of Morrison’s essays and speeches underscores her rage and linguistic brilliance, the review added.
Morrison’s novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed African American characters; among the best known are her novels The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved.
What We Are Reading Today: Mouth Full of Blood
What We Are Reading Today: Mouth Full of Blood
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Algorithms for the People’ by Josh Simons
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are reshaping our world. Police forces use them to decide where to send police officers, judges to decide whom to release on bail, welfare agencies to decide which children are at risk of abuse, and Facebook and Google to rank content and distribute ads.
In these spheres, and many others, powerful prediction tools are changing how decisions are made, narrowing opportunities for the exercise of judgment, empathy, and creativity.
In “Algorithms for the People,” Josh Simons flips the narrative about how we govern these technologies.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Physical Nature of Information’
Author: Gregory Falkovich
Applications of information theory span a broad range of disciplines today.
It teaches the tools universally used by physicists working on quantum computers and black holes, engineers designing self-driving cars, traders perfecting market strategies, chemists playing with molecules, biologists studying cells and living beings, linguists analyzing languages, and neuroscientists figuring out how the brain works.
No matter what area of science you specialize in, “The Physical Nature of Information” unlocks the power of information theory to test the limits imposed by uncertainty.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Organic Line’
- Once recognized, however, the line has seismic repercussions for rethinking foundational concepts such as mark, limit, surface, and edge
Author: IRENE SMALL
What would it mean to treat an interval of space as a line, thus drawing an empty void into a constellation of art and meaning-laden things? In this book, Irene Small elucidates the signal discovery of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark in 1954: a fissure of space between material elements that Clark called “the organic line.”
For much of the history of art, Clark’s discovery, much like the organic line, has escaped legibility. Once recognized, however, the line has seismic repercussions for rethinking foundational concepts such as mark, limit, surface, and edge.
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
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.
