What We Are Reading Today: Talking Cure; An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation

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Updated 28 January 2023

What We Are Reading Today: Talking Cure; An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation

Edited by Paula Marantz Cohen

“Talking Cure” is a timely and enticing excursion into the art of good conversation. Paula Marantz Cohen reveals how conversation connects us in ways that social media never can and explains why simply talking to each other freely and without guile may be the cure to what ails our troubled society. 

Drawing on her lifelong immersion in literature and culture and her decades of experience as a teacher and critic, Cohen argues that we learn to converse in our families and then carry that knowledge into a broader world where we encounter diverse opinions and sensibilities.

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What We Are Reading Today: Africatown

Updated 16 March 2023

What We Are Reading Today: Africatown

Author: Nick Tabor

Nick Tabor’s “Africatown” charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution.

In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the US from West Africa. 

Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders.

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What We Are Reading Today: The Patriarchs

Updated 10 March 2023

What We Are Reading Today: The Patriarchs

Author: Angela Saini

For centuries, societies have treated male domination as natural to the human species.

But how would our understanding of gender inequality look if we didn’t assume that men have always ruled over women?

In this bold and radical book, award-winning science journalist Angela Saini explores the roots of what we call patriarchy, uncovering a complex history of how it first became embedded in societies and spread across the globe from prehistory into the present.

The book also analyzes the latest research findings in science and archaeology, and traces cultural and political histories from the Americas to Asia.

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What We Are Reading Today: What to Do Next by Jeff Henderson

Updated 10 February 2023

What We Are Reading Today: What to Do Next by Jeff Henderson

This insightful book outlines the process he used to determine the next best step for him and how you, too, can pursue more meaning and purpose in your life and work, says a review published on Goodreads.com.

If you want to change your career and circumstances but aren’t sure how, this guide from Jeff Henderson will help you reevaluate your purpose and determine your next best step. the next chapter of your life starts today, with one simple step. and you’ll know how to take that step because you know “What to do next.”

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What We Are Reading Today: Trading at the Speed of Light by Donald MacKenzie

Updated 02 February 2023

What We Are Reading Today: Trading at the Speed of Light by Donald MacKenzie

In today’s financial markets, trading floors on which brokers buy and sell shares face- to-face have increasingly been replaced by lightning-fast electronic systems that use algorithms to execute astounding volumes of transactions.

“Trading at the Speed of Light” tells the story of this epic transformation.

Donald MacKenzie shows how in the 1990s, in what were then the disreputable margins of the US financial system, a new approach to trading — automated high-frequency trading or HFT— began and then spread throughout the world.


What We Are Reading Today: The Urban Brain

Updated 31 January 2023

What We Are Reading Today: The Urban Brain

Edited by Nikolas Rose & Des Fitzgerald

Most of the world’s people now live in cities and millions have moved from the countryside to the rapidly growing megacities of the global south.

How does the urban experience shape the mental lives of those living in and moving to cities today? Sociologists study cities as centers of personal progress and social innovation, but also exclusion, racism, and inequality. Psychiatrists try to explain the high rates of mental disorders among urban dwellers, especially migrants.

But the split between the social and life sciences has hindered understanding of how urban experience is written into the bodies and brains of urbanites.