Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box--a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes. Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there's nothing we can do about it. The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world--lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations--these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable--a black box for no reason. In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays
Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bat
Exposing the religious roots of our ostensibly godless age, Michael Allen Gillespie reveals in this landmark study that modernity is much less secular than conventional wisdom suggests. Taking as his
Forthcoming in Spring 2025, a landmark new translation of Homer's most popular epic. In 1961, the University of Chicago Press published Richmond Lattimore's translation of Homer's The Iliad. For more than sixty years, it has served to introduce readers to the ancient Greek world of gods and heroes and has been one of the most popular and respected versions of the work. Yet through all those decades, Chicago never published a companion translation of the best-known epic in the Western canon, The Odyssey--until now. With his new Odyssey, celebrated author, critic, classicist, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn has created a rendering worthy of Chicago's unparalleled reputation in classical literature. Widely known for his essays bringing classical literature and culture to mainstream audiences in the New Yorker and many other publications, Mendelsohn eschews the streamlining and modernizing approach of many recent translations, focusing instead on the epic's formal qualities--meter
In conservation, perhaps no better example exists of the past informing the present than the return of the California condor to the Vermilion Cliffs of Arizona. Extinct in the region for nearly one hu
In conservation, perhaps no better example exists of the past informing the present than the return of the California condor to the Vermilion Cliffs of Arizona. Extinct in the region for nearly one hu
In the increasingly complex and combative arena of copyright in the digital age, record companies sue college students over peer-to-peer music sharing, YouTube removes home movies because of a song pl
A tour of an ancient library transports us to Mesopotamia, introducing us to its people, their ideas, and their humanity. The library of Ashurbanipal, Assyria's last great king, held an astonishing collection at the forefront of knowledge in its day, from ancient traditions in religion and literature to the latest developments in magic and medicine. When the Assyrian empire fell, the library burned to the ground, and its contents, clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing, lay buried for thousands of years until a team of Victorian archaeologists discovered the remnants in modern-day Iraq. The clay had baked and hardened; the very fire that consumed the library had helped its texts to survive for millennia. In The Library of Ancient Wisdom, scholar Selena Wisnom, one of only a few hundred experts able to read cuneiform script today, guides us inside this important collection and, through its contents, brings ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Introducing us to
The classic translation of this most important medieval Jewish text, presented in one volume for the first time. The twelfth-century Arabic text The Guide of the Perplexed is a monument of biblical exegesis and is widely regarded as one of the most important works of Jewish philosophy. Written by the Sephardic Jewish rabbi Moses ben Maimon (commonly known as Maimonides), the Guide takes the form of a letter to a disciple who is perplexed by the attempt to square a literalist reading of scripture with reason, science, and tradition. Maimonides' instructive response proved liberative for generations of both Jewish and Christian philosophers and continues to inspire to this day. Shlomo Pines's translation has served students and scholars for decades, and it is presented here, with Leo Strauss's influential introduction, in one volume for the first time.
