Chicago -
By The Chicago Public Library
“With over 80 locations, millions of books, movies and CDs, and serving the entire city of Chicago, it’s a big job to move library materials every day! Have you ever wondered how your books get to you? Watch this behind-the-scenes tour of one of the hidden secrets of CPL – the sorting machine!”
Posted on October 22, 2020
By SIU Press
“For immigrants and migrants, the wounds of colonization, displacement, and exile remain unhealed. Crossing oceans and generations, from her childhood home in Baguio City, the Philippines, to her immigrant home in Virginia, poet Luisa A. Igloria demonstrates how even our most personal and intimate experiences are linked to the larger collective histories that came before,” SIU Press says.
Posted on October 12, 2020
By Elizabeth Oh/New America
On September 14, several legal advocacy groups filed a whistleblower complaint against ICE, accusing the agency of systematically administering forced hysterectomies to immigrant women at its detention facility in Ocilla, Georgia. While the details of this latest case are alarming, they are consonant with the United States’ history of a violent and increasingly carceral immigration regime.
Despite the quintessential melting pot rhetoric, immigrants to the United States have long had to contend with xenophobia, racism, and economic exploitation. This legacy has been reanimated and exacerbated under the Trump administration, which has heightened immigrant communities’ economic precarity and vulnerability to state violence. And this had been made worse still by the spread of COVID-19, which has hit immigrants, particularly detained immigrants, particularly hard.
To unpack some of this history, I interviewed Alina Das, law professor at New York University School of Law, co-director of the NYU Immigrant Rights Clinic, and author of No Justice In The Shadows: How America Criminalizes Immigrants. We discussed the development of American immigration law, how we got to our current detention-deportation system, and how to fight back.
Posted on October 5, 2020
By Hope Reese/Undark
In the spring of 1974, a young Hungarian architect named Ernő Rubik became obsessed with finding a way to model three-dimensional movement to his students. After spending months tinkering with blocks of cubes – made from wood and paper, held by rubber bands, glue, and paper clips – he finally created something he called the “Bűvös kocka,” or Magic Cube.
The invention, eventually renamed the Rubik’s Cube, would become the most popular puzzle toy in the world, with more than 350 million sold as of 2018. The cube also inspired numerous artworks and films, and spawned a competitive sport called speedcubing that fills arenas with teenagers racing to complete the puzzle in the shortest amount of time.
But at the start, no one was more stunned about the runaway success of the cube than its creator, as he explains in his new book, Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All.
The impact of the cube has been “much more interesting than the cube itself,” Rubik said in an interview with Undark. The book, he said, is about trying to understand its popularity and “why people love it.”
Posted on September 29, 2020
Define It And Name It!
“A wry look at what the astonishing world of animal penises can tell us about how we use our own,” Penguin Random House says.
“Phallacy looks closely at some of nature’s more remarkable examples of penises and the many lessons to learn from them.”
Listen to a sample read by the author, Emily Willingham:
Posted on September 28, 2020
By Montell “Ice” Griffin
Both entertaining and funny, Montell “Ice” Griffin’s self-published tell-all book The ICE LIFE takes you on a journey filled with plot twists, wrong turns, and pivots as he vividly recounts his story of becoming an Olympian and World Champion.
The Ice Life is a funny depiction of his journey. Hailing from the South Side of Chicago he traveled the world chasing his dreams.
Montell shares with the reader how sheer determination and blessings led him to the biggest stages, how life knocked him down and how he bounced back.
You will not believe the things that he has survived, the places he has been, and the countless people that he has met.
This book will enlighten you on the inside world of boxing, encourage you, and surely you will be entertained. Griffin is the owner of Windy City Boxing, Chicago’s Elite Boxing Training Club.
Posted on September 26, 2020
By Rachel Love Nuwer/Undark
In Russia’s Far East, meeting a person alone in the wilderness is usually a bad thing. Some recluses in this remote region might be criminals of one kind or another; those hiding from law enforcement or those hiding from other criminals. But when conservationist Jonathan C. Slaght ran into a man with “a crazy look in his eyes” and one missing finger living alone in an abandoned World War II hydroelectric station, rather than make a quick exit, he took the hermit up on his offer to spend the night. The night turned into weeks and the hermit soon became a valued field assistant (albeit one who regularly asked questions like “Did the gnomes tickle your feet last night?”).
In Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owls, Slaght transports readers to the remote wilds of Primorye to join him on his quest to study one of the world’s least-known owls. Like Amur tigers (also known as Siberian tigers), Blakiston’s fish owls are top predators. They feast on salmon and thrive in the inhospitable wilderness of northeast Asia, primarily in Russia but also Japan and China.
Prior to Slaght’s five-year project, conducted for his doctoral research, only a smattering of scientific studies – many of them decades-old – existed on the species. Fewer than 2,000 fish owls still survive in the wild, and logging and new roads are increasingly infringing on the endangered bird’s habitat. The more scientists can learn about the species, the better equipped they will be to propose effective protections.
Posted on September 9, 2020
By Jane Ward/The Conversation
When I was conducting research for my new book on the destructive aspects of modern heterosexual relationships, I started looking into the archives of early 20th-century books about courtship and marriage written by physicians and sexologists.
In the process, I made a discovery that would radically alter my understanding of why so many parts of heterosexual culture remain mired in violence and inequality.
Posted on September 5, 2020
By Stephen A. Jones and Eric Freedman/The Conversation
The fury over racial injustice that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s killing has forced Americans to confront their history. That’s unfamiliar territory for most Americans, whose historical knowledge amounts to a vague blend of fact and myth that was only half-learned in high school and is only half-remembered now.
If their historical knowledge is lacking, Americans are not any better informed about the role of presidential leadership – and lack of leadership – on racial issues. They may have heard that five of the first seven presidents owned slaves, and they know – or think they do – that Abraham Lincoln “freed the slaves.”
But even those tidbits of fact are incomplete. Several other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, owned slaves. And Lincoln, whose Emancipation Proclamation was more symbolic than practically effective, hated slavery but never considered Blacks equal to whites.
An honest assessment of American presidential leadership on race reveals a handful of courageous actions but an abundance of racist behavior, even by those remembered as equal rights supporters.
Posted on September 1, 2020
By Jill Richardson/OtherWords
Rory McVeigh wrote The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, a study of the KKK in the 1920s, in 2009 – long before Donald Trump became president. But it could almost be about Trump today.
In the 1920s, white, male, U.S.-born Protestants worried they were losing status, economic clout and political power.
Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were settling in large numbers in industrial cities, where they took unskilled, low-paying manufacturing jobs in large plants. Simultaneously, many African Americans were moving north for industrial jobs. More women were working, too.
Many of the anxious white Protestants were skilled laborers or small business owners. Large companies, chain stores and the Sears catalog were out-competing them throughout the country.
Feeling squeezed out by the changing economy, the KKK framed American jobs as the rightful property of what they called “100 percent Americans.” They wrapped themselves in the flag, claimed immigrants were stealing jobs, and attempted to deny African Americans any further mobility.
Posted on August 27, 2020
