A war between China and the US would be catastrophic, deadly, and destructive. Unfortunately, it is no longer unthinkable.  The relationship between the US and China, the world’s two superpowers, is peculiarly volatile. It rests on a seismic fault—of cultural misunderstanding, historical grievance, and ideological incompatibility. No other nations are so quick to offend and be offended. Their militaries play a dangerous game of chicken, corporations steal intellectual property, intelligence satellites peer, and AI technicians plot.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a wonderful description of life on the Mississippi River. It takes place before the Civil War, though it was written just shy of twenty years after the War ended.

Plato’s Symposium offers one of the earliest discussions of love in the Western philosophical tradition. In this short dialogue, a group of friends in ancient Athens have a party where they compete to see who can give the best speech in praise of Eros, the god of Love. What is love, anyway? What are the myths and stories we tell ourselves about love? And how might the love of learning turn out to be similar to romantic love? Ideally students would buy the cheap paperback Hackett edition, translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff.

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marhon explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem.

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one – Homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us? Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago, with the appearance of modern cognition. Dr.

For more than 20 years, in the early 1700s, Robinson Crusoe survived in isolation on an uncharted island. He had only a few items rescued from what was left of his ship. Besides being a captivating story of the era of pirates and sailing ships, Robinson Crusoe is generally regarded as one of the very first novels ever written. This classic tale has gone on to influence an entire genre of island survival adventures, including the movie Cast Away, in which the character played by Tom Hanks is stranded on a South Pacific Island after surviving a plane crash.

Ever wondered who truly profits from the newest iPhone or the latest AI innovations? ‘Power and Progress’ by Acemoglu and Johnson lifts the veil, revealing how such technological strides can either bolster the power of a select few or ignite prosperity for all. The book will take you in a journey from our historical roots to our impending future, and offer insights on reshaping innovation, aiming for a collective victory, not just a triumph for the privileged few.

Our Iceberg is Melting uses a fable-like story about penguins to explain the complexities of creating organizational change in the face of uncertainty. Written in a style everyone can understand, the book acts as a crash course in change management based on the author’s award-winning research. In our dynamic and turbulent world this interesting book, with its many levels, is a must read.

There’s an amazing quote that is part of this book that I have returned to many times: “Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places—and people, ourselves included—without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses. That often demands a willingness to be critical, sometimes deeply so. How that is done matters, of course. Striking the right balance can be exceedingly hard.”

Shortly before her thirtieth birthday, cartoonist Ellen Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Flagrantly manic and terrified that medications would cause her to lose creativity and her livelihood, she began a years-long struggle to find mental stability while retaining her passion and creativity. Searching to make sense of the popular concept of the crazy artist, she finds inspiration from the lives and work of other artists and writers who suffered from mood disorders, including Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, William Styron, and Sylvia Plath.