Are plants intelligent? Can they solve problems, communicate, and navigate their surroundings? Or are they passive, incapable of independent action or social behavior? Philosophers and scientists have pondered these questions since ancient Greece, most often concluding that plants are unthinking and inert: they are too silent, too sedentary -- just too different from us. Yet discoveries over the past fifty years have challenged these ideas, shedding new light on the extraordinary capabilit...

Are plants intelligent? Can they solve problems, communicate, and navigate their surroundings? Or are they passive, incapable of independent action or social behavior? Philosophers and scientists have pondered these questions since ancient Greece, most often concluding that plants are unthinking and inert: they are too silent, too sedentary—just too different from us. Yet discoveries over the past fifty years have challenged these ideas, shedding new light on the extraordinary capabilities...

As tension over slavery and western expansion threatened to break the US into civil war, the Southern states found themselves squeezed between two nearly irreconcilable realities: the survival of the Confederate economy would require the importation of more slaves—a practice banned in America since 1807—but the existence of the Confederacy itself could not be secured without official recognition from Great Britain, who would never countenance reopening the Atlantic slave trade. How, then, ...

In one hundred years, or even fifty, the Arctic will look dramatically different than it does today. As polar ice retreats and animals and plants migrate northward, the arctic landscape is morphing into something new and very different from what it once was. While these changes may seem remote, they will have a profound impact on a host of global issues, from international politics to animal migrations. In Future Arctic, journalist and explorer Edward Struzik offers a clear-eyed l...

An essay collection highlighting guiding principles, containing 30 works from the contemporary Philadelphia radio series, and 30 from the 1950s original.This I Believe is an international project engaging people in writing, sharing, and discussing the core values that guide their daily lives. And it all started in Philadelphia more than seven decades ago with a local radio series that became an international sensation.This book features thirty essa...

“Fourteen writers take on perhaps the most important cultural issue of our time: figure out what we’re talking about when we’re talking about cat videos.” —New York magazine Are cat videos art? This essay collection, funded by a Kickstarter campaign, addresses not just our fascination with cat videos, but also how we decide what is good or bad art, or art at all; how taste develops, how that can change, and why we love or hate something. It’s about people and technology and just what it is...

“Bold and ingenious” stories about the dark heart of America by the acclaimed Whiting Award–winning author (The New York Times Book Review).**“Feverish, psychotropic, bold, mesmerizing, painful, Fox Tooth Heart is full of stories about people living on the margins of society, characters born into dark circumstances, or . . . driven there by their own obsessions and addictions” (Huffington Post)—murderers, loners, addicts, neurotics and o...

"In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton draws on his experiences in Iraq to confront the grim realities of climate change. The result is a fierce and provocative book."--Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History"Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene presents, without extraneous bullshit, what we must do to survive on Earth. It's a powerful, useful, and ultimat...

"Tim Wise is one of the great public moralists in America today. In his bracing new book, Under the Affluence, he brilliantly engages the roots and ramifications of radical inequality in our nation, carefully detailing the heartless war against the poor and the swooning addiction to the rich that exposes the moral sickness at the heart of our culture. Wise's stirring analysis of our predicament is more than a disinterested social scientific treatise; this book is a valiant call to...

Two friends, one a budding writer home from Europe, the other an ambitious racketeer, meet in the only nightclub, the Tram 83, in a war-torn city-state in secession, surrounded by profit-seekers of all languages and nationalities. Tram 83 plunges the reader into the modern African gold rush as cynical as it is comic and colorfully exotic, using jazz rhythms to weave a tale of human relationships in a world that has become a global village.Fiston Mwanza Mujila

A boy and his grandfather hunt for a stolen horse in this novel "evoking William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy" ( Booklist).Longlisted for the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in FictionIn the summer of 1995, Jim Falls, a Korean War vet, struggles to raise his sixteen-year-old mixed-race grandson, Quentin, on a farm in southern Indiana. In July, they receive a mysterious gift—a beautiful quarter horse—whic...

In this classic work that continues to inspire its many readers, Jim Lovelock puts forward his idea that life on earth functions as a single organism. Written for non-scientists, Gaia is a journey through time and space in search of evidence with which to support a new and radically different model of our planet. In contrast to conventional belief that living matter is passive in the face of threats to its existence, the book explores the hypothesis that the earth's livingmatter air, ocean...