What We Are Reading Today: Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss

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Updated 22 January 2023
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What We Are Reading Today: Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss

Author: Juliet Hooker

In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can’t always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally.

Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it. 

Black citizens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enables progress toward racial justice. 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘So Simple a Beginning’

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Updated 13 January 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘So Simple a Beginning’

  • A human being is very different from a bacterium or a zebra

Author: RAGHUVEER PARTHASARATHY

The form and function of a sprinting cheetah are quite unlike those of a rooted tree.

A human being is very different from a bacterium or a zebra. The living world is a realm of dazzling variety, yet a shared set of physical principles shapes the forms and behaviors of every creature in it.

“So Simple a Beginning” shows how the emerging new science of biophysics is transforming our understanding of life on Earth and enabling potentially lifesaving but controversial technologies such as gene editing, artificial organ growth, and ecosystem engineering.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Data Analysis for Social Science’

Updated 12 January 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Data Analysis for Social Science’

Authors: Eleba Llaudet and Kosuke

“Data Analysis for Social Science” provides a friendly introduction to the statistical concepts and programming skills needed to conduct and evaluate social scientific studies.

Assuming no prior knowledge of statistics and coding and only minimal knowledge of math, the book teaches the fundamentals of survey research, predictive models, and causal inference while analyzing data from published studies with the statistical program R. 


What We Are Reading Today: Sparks Like Stars

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Updated 11 January 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Sparks Like Stars

Author: Nadia Hashimi

If you need a story that is thought-provoking and emotional, give ‘Sparks Like Stars’ a try. Or if you love historical fiction, because it’s about an actual event — a Soviet-backed coup against the president of Afghanistan.

The story starts with getting to know Sitara. She is a privileged 10-year-old whose father is a diplomat and close friend of the country’s president; she spends many days running around the presidential palace. That is until the soldiers kill her entire family, and she sees it all happening, forever changing her.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘NOVEL RELATIONS’

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Updated 10 January 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘NOVEL RELATIONS’

Author: ALICIA MIRELES CHRISTOFF

‘Novel Relations’ engages 20th-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory.

Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, Alicia Christoff reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read.

These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures — characters, narrators, authors, and other readers — shape and structure us too.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning’

Updated 09 January 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning’

Author: Gary Tomlinson

In this groundbreaking book, Gary Tomlinson defines a middle path. Combining emergent thinking about evolution, new research on animal behaviors, and theories of information and signs, he tracks meaning far out into the animal world. At the same time he discerns limits to its scope and identifies innumerable life forms, including many animals and all other organisms, that make no meanings at all.