This book on utopian monetary policy is absolutely astonishing.
It is set in a near future that is very much like today, but with climate change just coming into full swing. Alongside terrorists who are using armed drones to physically stop heads of polluting industries, there is an international institution (the Ministry of the Future) whose leader Mary Murphy is trying to stop climate change by getting central banks to emit and create a market for a global carbon coin granted for CO2 avoidance.
The suspenseful novel explains Dalton Chen’s blueprint and the best strategy I know of that might actually avoid a real-life global climate change dystopia.
“The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem
"If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox)
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite…
I found this new edition of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea collection at the airport in Milano while travelling to a conference for statisticians. Usually, I am quite snobbish about fantasy genres, as I prefer space aliens to wizards and dragons. Strangely, I still picked up the book, and it was of uttermost comfort to me in processing difficult life events.
Set in the beautiful landscapes of Earthsea, Le Guin discusses super hard topics such as matters of living and dying, grief and hope, aging and personal achievements, and desires, and the potential loss of an inhabitable world.
Rebel Voices: Disruptive Stories from Trailblazing Women - a new Puffin Classics collection, celebrating International Women's Day 2023
'One of the literary greats of the 20th century' - Margaret Atwood
Earthsea: The First Four Books is a collection of one of the most beloved and influential fantasy works of all time. The series follows two main characters: Ged, who grows from an arrogant boy to one of the most powerful mages Earthsea has ever known; and Tenar, who escapes her fate as a child-priestess, and must fight for a life of her own.
Filled with soaring, dangerous and beautifully-spun magic;…
The book is sparkling with a great sense of humor, and it starts off as a cute and slightly ghoulish ghost story set in a local bookstore which is haunted by a deceased customer, an annoying white woman who was a rude imposter of Native American heritage.
Published in 2021, the story is quickly outrun by the historical context: The supernatural apparitions are now parallel to a weird airborne virus that shuts down public life; George Floyd is murdered, and protests of the Black Life Matters movement engulf Minneapolis.
The book becomes witness to the emotional effects of 2020 events and the struggle for resilience against the surreal and uncanny materialization of disease, racism, violence, and injustice.
In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman's relentless errors.
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but…
This talk with illustrated micro and macro models of neoclassical economics, including famous agents such as Robinson Crusoe, Mother Nature, and also Little Red Riding Hood, aims at deconstructing mainstream economic theory, connecting feminist critiques, and creating new ideas for economic policy-making in the current states of multiple global crises.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community, TEDx Donauinsel in Vienna, Austria.
