Library News: Blog

The story of Giannis Antetokounmpo's extraordinary rise from poverty in Athens, Greece to super-stardom in America with the Milwaukee Bucks--becoming one of the most transcendent players in history and an NBA champion--from award-winning basketball reporter and feature writer at The Ringer Mirin Fader, touching on universal themes of family, immigration, hard work, wealth, loss, and dreaming big. As the face of the NBA's new world order, Giannis Antetokounmpo has overcome unfathomable obstacles to become a symbol of hope for people all over the world, the personification of the American Dream. But his backstory remains largely untold, and Fader unearths new information about the childhood that shaped "The Greek Freak"--from sleeping side by side with his brothers to selling trinkets on the side of the street with his family to the racism he experienced in Greece. Antetokounmpo grew up in an era when Golden Dawn, Greek's far-right, anti-immigrant party, patrolled his neighborhood, and his status as an illegal immigrant largely prevented him from playing for Greek's top clubs, making his rise to the NBA all the more improbable. Fader tells a deeply-human story of how an unknown, skinny, Black-Greek teen, who played in the country's lowest pro division and was seen as a draft gamble, transformed his body and his game into MVP material. Antetokounmpo's story has been framed as a feel-good narrative in which the globe has embraced him, watching him grow up and lead the underdog Bucks to the NBA Championship in 2021. Giannis reveals a more nuanced story: how hesitant Antetokounmpo was, and still is, to spend money; how lonely and isolated he felt, adjusting to America and the NBA early in his career; the way he changed after his father recently died of a heart attack; the complexity of grappling with his Black and Greek identities; how private he is, so hard on himself and his shortcomings, a drive that fuels him every day; and the deep-rooted responsibility he feels to be a nurturing role model for his younger brothers. Fader illustrates a more vulnerable star than people know, a person who has evolved triumphantly into all of his roles: as father, brother, son, teammate, and global icon. Giannis gives readers a front-row seat as Antetokounmpo strives for an elusive championship with the Bucks, quelling speculation about potentially leaving Milwaukee after signing a five-year supermax contract extension worth $228 million. Now, he contends with his next big hurdle: proving that committing to a small-market franchise can bring Milwaukee back to glory.

 

From the New York Times-bestselling author of How Not to Be Wrong--himself a world-class geometer--a far-ranging exploration of the power of geometry, which turns out to help us think better about practically everything. How should a democracy choose its representatives? How can you stop a pandemic from sweeping the world? How do computers learn to play Go, and why is learning Go so much easier for them than learning to read a sentence? Can ancient Greek proportions predict the stock market? (Sorry, no.) What should your kids learn in school if they really want to learn to think? All these are questions about geometry. For real. If you're like most people, geometry is a sterile and dimly remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of ninth grade, along with your braces and active romantic interest in pop singers. If you recall any of it, it's plodding through a series of miniscule steps only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. Okay, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, which has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel. Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face. Geometry asks: Where are things? Which things are near each other? How can you get from one thing to another thing? Those are important questions. The word "geometry"comes from the Greek for "measuring the world." If anything, that's an undersell. Geometry doesn't just measure the world--it explains it. Shape shows us how.

 

The former FDA commissioner outlines how the United States must prepare for future pandemics by learning from the mistakes made handling the Covid-19 outbreak. In the early 2000s, Scott Gottlieb spent years at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration developing a "Pandemic Influenza Plan" to ready the United States for the threat of a global pandemic. Besides developing a response playbook, the Bush Administration also drilled for the event. But when he returned to Washington as FDA director in 2017, Gottlieb discovered that the agency had been using the same outdated plan and obsolete tools to face Ebola, Zika, and swine flu. Shortly after his departure in late 2019, Covid-19 hit the United States. Members of the Trump administration were slow to mount an effective response.  Nine months later, the federal government's response remained woefully inadequate and the Trump administration continued to focus on the wrong things. Schools should have been opening safely and the government should have been building the infrastructure for hundreds of millions of vaccines. Instead, the administration cut funding, amassed warehouses full of hydroxychloroquine, and spoke as if the virus has disappeared, even as infections--and deaths--continued to rise.  In Uncontrolled Spread, Gottlieb identifies the reasons why the U.S. was so underprepared for the pandemic, from failing to enlist the private sector in large-scale manufacturing of testing supplies and medical equipment to resolutely sticking to the narrative that Covid would go away on its own. Hard-hitting and informed by Gottlieb's experience both in government and medicine, Uncontrolled Spread, is the essential inside account of one of the most tragic--and preventable--failures in American history.

 

From the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses, an eye-opening road trip through 5,500 years of humans on the go, revealing how transportation inevitably shapes civilization. Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted readers and cemented his reputation as one of our leading interpreters of technologies past and present. Now, he returns with a provocative account of a sometimes-overlooked form of technology-personal transportation-and explores how it has shaped societies and cultures over millennia. Beginning around 3,500 BCE with the wheel--a device that didn't catch on until a couple thousand years after its invention--Standage zips through the eras of horsepower, trains, and bicycles, revealing how each successive mode of transit embedded itself in the world we live in, from the geography of our cities to our experience of time to our notions of gender. Then, delving into the history of the automobile's development, Standage explores the social resistance to cars and the upheaval that their widespread adoption required. Cars changed how the world was administered, laid out, and policed, how it looked, sounded, and smelled--and not always in the ways we might have preferred. Today--after the explosive growth of ride-sharing and years of breathless predictions about autonomous vehicles--the social transformations spurred by coronavirus and overshadowed by climate change create a unique opportunity to critically reexamine our relationship to the car. With A Brief History of Motion, Standage overturns myths, considers roads not taken, and invites us to look at our past with fresh eyes so we can create the future we want to see.

 

A forward-thinking manifesto from three Stanford professors--experts who have worked at ground zero of the tech revolution for decades--which reveals how big tech's obsession with optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental human values and outlines steps we can take to change course, renew our democracy, and save ourselves. In no more than the blink of an eye, a naïve optimism about technology's liberating potential has given way to a dystopian obsession with biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots. Yet too few of us see any alternative to accepting the onward march of technology. We have simply accepted a technological future designed for us by technologists, the venture capitalists who fund them, and the politicians who give them free rein. It doesn't need to be this way. System Error exposes the root of our current predicament: how big tech's relentless focus on optimization is driving a future that reinforces discrimination, erodes privacy, displaces workers, and pollutes the information we get. This optimization mindset substitutes what companies care about for the values that we as a democratic society might choose to prioritize. Well-intentioned optimizers fail to measure all that is meaningful and, when their creative disruptions achieve great scale, they impose their values upon the rest of us. Armed with an understanding of how technologists think and exercise their power, three Stanford professors--a philosopher working at the intersection of tech and ethics, a political scientist who served under Obama, and the director of the undergraduate Computer Science program at Stanford (also an early Google engineer)--reveal how we can hold that power to account. Troubled by the values that permeate the university's student body and its culture, they worked together to chart a new path forward, creating a popular course to transform how tomorrow's technologists approach their profession. Now, as the dominance of big tech becomes an explosive societal conundrum, they share their provocative insights and concrete solutions to help everyone understand what is happening, what is at stake, and what we can do to control technology instead of letting it control us.