Books
Latest Book on Evangelical ‘Extremism’ Reflects Pervasive Tendency to Beat Up on Judaism to Save Jesus
Perhaps you’re in the crowd that’s baffled by the behavior of American evangelicals. How could...
How a Feminist Blog is Born
I didn’t deign to call myself a feminist until I was nineteen years old, in my second year of college. Before then, I just wanted to be a writer. Reading Judy Blume and the Baby-Sitters Club books obsessively as a kid, I decided I wanted to be an “author” when I grew up, and started writing my own poems and young adult novels in fourth grade (a baby poet at heart, I could never get past chapter…
Surveillance Capitalism and Cashless Society
Paul Armer was a pioneer in computing technology whose work focused on the relationship between computers and society. He began his career at RAND Corporation in 1947 and was later appointed to head its computer science department, a position he held for 10 years. In the late 1960s he moved to Stanford University, where he […]
Police Violence is Baked in: Academy Training Encourages Racial Profiling and Emphasizes the Use of Violence
Almost four years have passed since George Floyd was killed outside of a convenience store...
Exploring Humanity Through a Galactic Lens
Adrian Tchaikovsky‘s sci-fi novel Children of Time crafts a stunning narrative about the bounds of human nature and evolution’s power across cosmic timescales. In a desperate attempt to preserve life on a dying Earth, humans seed potential planets with monkeys to rebuild civilization across the galaxy. On one planet, things evolve in unexpected ways as giant spiders gain intelligence over millennia after the monkeys perish.
Children of Time constructively challenges anthropocentric worldviews through a mind-bending narrative where relatable, flawed humans observe another species’ dizzying march of progress. Tchaikovsky uses imagination to prod readers into philosophical insight.
The book in three sentences
- The sci-fi novel depicts spaced-out humans struggling to rebuild civilization as they monitor spiders evolve intelligence over millennia on a distant, planted, terraformed world.
- Adrian Tchaikovsky uses this imaginative premise to introspect on the nature of progress and the contingency of identity across cosmic timescales.
- The epic evolutionary tale pushes philosophical questions about human nature, technology’s role in advancement, and the fragility of sentience.
Extended Summary
Tchaikovsky alternates between following the small remaining human population struggling to find a new home and the exponential evolution of spiders on a terraformed planet orbiting a distant star. After a virus wipes out the seeded monkey population meant to spawn a new civilization, the planet’s nanotechnology instead uplifts its spider species over generations.
As the spiders progress from individuals focused purely on survival to establishing a complex collaborative society, Tchaikovsky evokes insightful themes around the meaning of progress, the contingency of intelligence, and the bounds of human nature.
The timescales allow the spiders to progress from primitive to spacefaring beings while only a few human generations pass trying to rebuild civilization. Eventually, the two connect in an encounter, highlighting the fragility of sentience.
Who Should Read
With imaginative worldbuilding and prose that balances scientifically grounded speculation with resonating themes, Children of Time offers a gripping evolutionary tale perfect for any science fiction fan.
Key Points
- Radically accelerating evolution pushes us to rethink intelligence as a timeline-bound concept.
- Technology shapes evolution as much as random mutations.
- Humanity and human nature may just be semantics amid vast cosmic change.
About the Author
British author Adrian Tchaikovsky is known for sci-fi exploring themes of human evolution. His books have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award.
If you’d like to stay on top of areas like this, you should be reading my weekly newsletter. You can follow here.
The post Exploring Humanity Through a Galactic Lens first appeared on Dr. Ian O'Byrne.
Between Conflict and Collegiality: Palestinian Arabs and Jews in the Israeli Workplace
by Asaf Darr* The ongoing and fierce conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs is a daily reality in Israel, the country where I reside. As a sociologist of work and economic sociologist, I became increasingly interested in the ways in which the broader conflict is manifested in daily socio-economic encounters on the shop floor between […]
Ethologies of Animal Politics
Consider the growing ethological evidence of how animal communities themselves do face-to-face politics....
B&B: The Administrative State | Automating Finance | Dependency Theory | Youth Unemployment | Spatial inequality | Fukuyama | More
Very interesting readings and recorded talks on various topics in Economic Sociology and Political Economy: — The best 5 books on The Administrative State recommended and discussed by Paul Tucker, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England and fellow at Harvard’s School of Government: The Administrative Process by Jason Landis (1938), The End […]
How Books Are Reaching Kids in ‘Book Deserts’
When Larry Abrams started teaching English in New Jersey high schools in the early 2000s, his first two schools were within a few miles of each other, yet worlds apart.
At the first school in a wealthy suburb, “I taught the sons and daughters of millionaires,” Abrams remembers. The second school was “at the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum,” and Abrams says he had to “relearn how to teach” his students there.
“My ninth graders had a fourth- or fifth-grade reading level,” he says, though they were native English speakers. He realized this was because they were missing something he had taken for granted: books.
He had an “aha” moment in 2017, when he asked one of his senior students, Belyeneda Sanchez, what she was reading to her two-year-old daughter Brizzy. The student responded that she had no children’s books at home: “We just don’t do that in our culture.”
The nonprofit BookSmiles distributes some 70,000 books a month. Courtesy of BookSmiles
Abrams admits the response stumped him. The next day, he handed her a box of children’s books with the words, “Every kid needs books in their home.” Sanchez confesses she avoided Abrams in the following weeks because every time he saw her, he would inquire how Brizzy was enjoying the books, and she still hadn’t read any to her daughter. Eventually, Sanchez picked up Harold and the Purple Crayon, and her daughter enjoyed it so much that she started reading to Brizzy every night.
After that humble exchange, Abrams began requesting donations of gently used children’s books from friends and students, and within weeks, thousands of books piled up, first in his garage, then in a storage room. He distributed them to young parents and elementary schools. The book donations were met with so much enthusiasm (“It caused a feeding frenzy,” Abrams says) that he is now the founding director of the nonprofit BookSmiles, one of the biggest book banks for children in the US.
Crushed by negative news?
Sign up for the Reasons to be Cheerful newsletter.
[contact-form-7]
According to Abrams, BookSmiles has given away nearly two million books in the last six years. The nonprofit distributes about 70,000 free books locally each month and wants to raise that figure to 100,000. BookSmiles focus its efforts in the region, while other big book donation programs make books available by mail. For instance, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has donated more than 226 million children’s books nationally and internationally.
“We will not rest until every child in Philadelphia and in New Jersey grows up with books, and we are not going to let poverty and excuses get in the way,” Abrams promises. “That child is going to have a better success rate in kindergarten and in school than a kid who doesn’t have any books.”
BookSmiles has become one of the biggest book banks for children in the US. Courtesy of BookSmiles
According to the US Department of Education, up to 61 percent of low-income families do not have any books for their kids at home. Forty-five percent of US children live in neighborhoods that lack public libraries and stores that sell books, or in homes where books are an unaffordable or unfamiliar luxury. This means that 32.4 million American children go without books, while 67 percent of the schools and programs in the nation’s lowest-income neighborhoods can’t afford to buy books at retail prices. For instance, in Washington, D.C.’s Anacostia neighborhood, where the poverty level sits around 61 percent, 830 children would share a single book, whereas children in high-income communities have about 13 books per child. The nonprofit End Book Deserts cites studies that show access to print resources during early childhood development has an immediate and long-term effect on vocabulary, background knowledge, and comprehension.
Abrams had grown up as a bookworm. Both his parents and his grandmother were teachers. “I never lacked books and magazines,” he says. “We went to the library. I got books as gifts. Some books are like friends to me or love affairs that I treasure. I like the transformative experience of reading, of going into other worlds, experiencing other cultures.”
It was not until he started teaching at the public Lindenwold High School in South Jersey that the lack of reading material in many households became evident to him. “Just as there are food deserts, there are book deserts,” he came to realize. “I can’t give the kids ballet lessons or summer camp. But we can give them books, and it’s transforming the culture of a family.” He quotes research to show that early literacy sets the stage for a child’s future success by promoting academic achievement, reduced grade retention (meaning fewer kids are held back), higher graduation rates and enhanced productivity in adult life. Abrams calls it “book wealth.”
A few of BookSmiles’ hand-painted book collection bins. Courtesy of BookSmiles
In front of BookSmiles’ 4,300-square-foot headquarters in Pennsauken, (clean) trash bins hand-painted with sunflowers, colorful birds and nature scenes invite passersby to drop off gently used books. The nonprofit gets the rest through student drives and by buying them cheaply from Goodwill. With the help of hundreds of volunteers, three full-time employees sort the books into age-appropriate groups. Abrams tries to make sure BookSmiles offers a diverse selection for the teachers who come by and pick up about 10,000 books per month. Like in a bookstore, available books are sorted on shelves, including LGBTQ books, bilingual books, books with Black protagonists and banned books. “If you don’t like a certain book, you don’t have to take it,” Abrams says. “I trust that teachers make good choices.”
“At first, when you hear about BookSmiles, you think it’s too good to be true,” Lisa Feinstein, a literacy coach at James H. Johnson Elementary School in Cherry Hill, told the Philadelphia Citizen. “The first time I went, it was like a yard sale, where you get 10 books, and think, ‘Yay, great!’ But then you’ve got Larry saying, ‘No, take more, take more, take more. Don’t leave here without 150 books!’”
Become a sustaining member today!
Join the Reasons to be Cheerful community by supporting our nonprofit publication and giving what you can.
During the pandemic lockdown, teachers stopped coming, and Abrams has since partnered with several nonprofits, including food banks, which load their trucks full of books and distribute them to families in need along with produce and diapers. The nonprofits include Share Food, Philadelphia’s biggest food bank; Cradles to Crayons, which distributes children’s clothing; and Fathers Read 365, two Philly dads who read to kids in daycare and distribute books. “I love the idea of feeding bodies and feeding minds,” Abrams says. “If you want a child to grow up and be a powerful person who has great writing ability and great language skills, you have to read to them.”
Abrams shows a picture of Brizzy, Belyeneda Sanchez’s daughter, who is now 12 years old, an honors student and loves to read. “English is her best class,” her mom attests. “You really never know what reading can do to a child but it goes to show that in the long run, it’s a great thing to do. Start them early, make it a habit, and they will enjoy it!”
The post How Books Are Reaching Kids in ‘Book Deserts’ appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
UNIT: The Vaughn Identity
2024 will see the launch of Candy Jar’s UNIT range with a series of original novels.This new series of books now squarely focuses on UNIT and explores the fall-out from The Invasion<\/a>, both on a personal and national level, and how the story would have been spun by the government and the press.
As the title suggests, the first book, The Vaughn Identity, looks into the background of Tobias Vaughn, picks up where the TV story The Invasion left off. It is written by the range editor, Tim Gambrell, who said:
There’s a lot left open at the end of The Invasion<\/a>. Tobias Vaughn’s story – and the whole International Electromatics set-up – is very layered and detailed. We see repeatedly in Doctor Who that once the main threat is dealt with the Doctor is quick to leave.
As a character, he was in a class of his own – due very much to Kevin Stoney<\/a>’s bravura performance, but also because of Derrick Sherwin<\/a>’s script and Douglas Camfield<\/a>’s direction. We know Vaughn was killed at the end of The Invasion<\/a>, and left hanging over the railings. I wanted to find a way to get more from the character without pretending that he hadn’t really died on screen, which would have felt like a cop-out. I also wanted to work purely within the situations and concepts that Derrick Sherwin<\/a> had created, to give my story the sense that it was finishing off, or tidying up any strands left hanging loose after the TV story had concluded.
But as well as looking back to The Invasion<\/a>, The Vaughn Identity also looks forward to the series of books that will follow. Tim continued:
We’ve got a wider cast of UNIT regulars to take our books forward. Readers have already been introduced to many of them in the two UNIT Files short story collections (Operation Wildcat, 2022, and Operation Fall-Out, 2023) but The Vaughn Identity allows us to see how they were impacted by the events of The Invasion<\/a>, making it more of a shared experience. As the first novel of the range, it’s important to introduce and involve new regular characters in the action and the storyline and not simply as an info-dump roll call.
There are a few minor nods to the Lethbridge-Stewart range, but nothing that would faze new readers. We want this to be a jumping-on point, a fresh start whilst also quietly acknowledging the achievement of the previous range.
There will be another short Benton Files book, free with the hardback of The Vaughn Identity. More details of that will be available nearer the time.
The Vaughn Identity can be pre-ordered from the Candy Jar website<\/a>.