A gripping new investigation into the underbelly of digital technology, which reveals not only how costly the virtual world is, but how damaging it is to the environment. If digital technology were a country, it would be the third-highest consumer of electricity behind China and the United States.Every year, streaming technology generates as much greenhouse gas as Spain — close to 1 per cent of global emissions.One Google search uses as much electricity as a lightbulb left on for up to two minutes.
It turns out that the ‘dematerialised’ digital world, essential for communicating, working, and consuming, is much more tangible than we would like to believe. Today, it absorbs 10 per cent of the world’s electricity and represents nearly 4 per cent of the planet’s carbon dioxide emissions. We are struggling to understand these impacts, as they are obscured to us in the mirage of ‘the cloud’. The result of an investigation carried out over two years on four continents, The Dark Cloud reveals the anatomy of a technology that is virtual only in name. Under the guise of limiting the impact of humans on the planet, it is already asserting itself as one of the major environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.
In November 2019, Paul B. Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference. Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado called for a radical transformation of psychoanalytic discourse and practices, denouncing its complicity with the ideology of sexual difference.
The Sunday Times bestselling story of the landmark international judgement that brought an end to Britain's colonial rule in Africa by the author of EAST WEST STREET and THE RATLINE
From co-dependence to self-acceptance, this is what the scandal during Strictly taught Rebecca Humphries about true love. If you hoovered up Three Women or Everything I Know About Love - and especially if you've been in a toxic relationship/want to know you can re-emerge stronger from one - this is your book of the summer.
Men are responsible for all unwanted pregnancies. Why? Ovulation is involuntary. Ejaculation is not. It is also true that...
- Men are 50 times more fertile than women
- Birth control is hard to access, use, and comes with numerous side effects
- Vasectomies are less risky than tubal litigations
Yet, it's women who are expected to do the work of pregnancy prevention. Why must women be responsible for men's bodies, as well as their own?
Rather than endlessly exploring how and why we control women's bodies in the highly polarised anti-abortion and pro-choice 'debate', Ejaculate Responsibly makes a witty and unflinching case for why men must be held accountable for their reproductive choices. There are zero consequences for men who ejaculate irresponsibly. It's time to shift the responsibility - and burden - of pregnancy prevention onto men.
'A gorgeous manifesto' Oprah Daily
'A tactical, full-throated cry for men to step up' Vogue
A scintillating, richly peopled, impeccably researched history of the New York coastal enclave that, over the last century, became an iconic site of queer liberation
‘Sharp, charming and passionate . . . It is this eye for the rhythms and textures of life — of millennial digital media, of the death by a thousand cuts offered by workplace racism, of Maryland suburbia — that makes this novel vivid and inviting’
New York Times Book Review * * *
Remarkable storytelling and deep reportage: A page-turning account of a brutal urban wildfire, and a sweeping exploration of our rapidly changing relationship with fire
'Essential and instructive, hopeful and enraging' Ann Patchett
'Desmond is utterly convincing: we must all become poverty abolitionists' Emily Kenway
*A searing study of American poverty from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted*
The United States is the richest country on earth, yet has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. One in seven Americans live below the poverty line, a line which hasn't shifted over the last fifty years, despite the efforts of successive governments and extensive relief programs. Why is there so much scarcity in this land of dollars?
In Poverty, by America, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond examines the nature of American poverty today and the stories we tell ourselves about it. Spanning racism, social isolation, mass incarceration, the housing crisis, domestic violence, crack and opioid epidemics, welfare cuts and more, Desmond argues that poverty does not result from a lack of resources or good policy ideas. We already know how to eliminate it. The hard part is getting more of us to care.
To do so, we need a new story. As things stand, liberals explain poverty through insurmountable structural issues, whereas conservatives highlight personal failings and poor life choices. Both analyses abdicate responsibility, and ignore the reality that the advantages of the rich only come at the expense of the poor. It is time better-paid citizens put themselves back in the narrative, recognizing that the depth and expanse of poverty in any nation reflects our failure to look out for one another. Poverty must ultimately be met by community: all this suffering and want is our doing, and we can undo it.
A luminous exploration of exile - the people who have experienced it, and the places they inhabit - from the award-winning travel writer and author of The Immeasurable World and The Moor.
The Sunday Times bestseller
*Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize*
A New Statesman and Spectator Book of the Year
'This book calls for nothing less than a revolution in the future of food' Kate Raworth
From the bestselling author of Feral, a breathtaking first glimpse of a new future for food and for humanity
Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction - and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have ploughed, fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry.
Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, we can resolve the biggest of our dilemmas and feed the world without devouring the planet.
Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionising our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from ploughs and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.
‘Droll, provocative and crammed to busting with startling facts’ Simon Callow, Guardian
In this powerful Sunday Times bestseller Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way – through the history and experiences of its gay population.
In Roman Londinium the city was dotted with lupanaria (‘wolf dens’ or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels) and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with his bishops, monks and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure.
Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music and the horror of AIDS.
Today, we live in an era of openness and tolerance and Queer London has become part of the new norm. Ackroyd tells us the hidden story of how it got there, celebrating its diversity, thrills and energy on the one hand; but reminding us of its very real terrors, dangers and risks on the other.
Our choices can help alleviate the most pressing issues we face today: the climate crisis, infectious and chronic diseases, human exploitation and, of course, non-human exploitation. Undeniably, these issues can be uncomfortable to learn about but the benefits of doing so cannot be overstated. It is quite literally a matter of life and death.
Through exploring the major ways that our current system of animal farming affects the world around us, as well as the cultural and psychological factors that drive our behaviours, This Is Vegan Propaganda answers the pressing question, is there a better way?
Whether you are a vegan already or curious to learn more, this book will show you the other side of the story that has been hidden for far too long. Based on years of research and conversations with slaughterhouse workers and farmers, to animal rights philosophers, environmentalists and everyday consumers, vegan educator and public speaker Ed Winters will give you the knowledge to understand the true scale and enormity of the issues at stake.
This Is Vegan Propaganda is the empowering and groundbreaking book on veganism that everyone, vegan and sceptic alike, needs to read.
'The smaller we come to feel ourselves compared with the mountain, the nearer we come to participating in its greatness.'
Philosopher, mountaineer, activist and visionary, Arne Naess's belief that all living things have value made him one of the most inspirational figures in the environmental movement. Drawing on his years spent in an isolated hut high in the Norwegian mountains, and on influences as diverse as Gandhi's nonviolent action and Spinoza's all-encompassing worldview, this selection of the best of his writings is filled with wit, charisma and intense connection with nature. Emphasizing joy, cooperation and 'beautiful actions', they create a philosophy of life from a man who never lost his sense of wonder at the world.
'Arne Naess's ideas ... inspired environmentalists and Green political activists around the world' The New York Times
'Beautifully written, movingly told and meticulously researched ... a convincing plea for a wilder, richer world' Isabella Tree, author of Wilding
'By the time I'd read the first chapter, I'd resolved to take my son into the woods every afternoon over winter. By the time I'd read the sixth, I was wanting to break prisoners out of cells and onto the mossy moors. Losing Eden rigorously and convincingly tells of the value of the natural universe to our human hearts' Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun
Today many of us live indoor lives, disconnected from the natural world as never before. And yet nature remains deeply ingrained in our language, culture and consciousness. For centuries, we have acted on an intuitive sense that we need communion with the wild to feel well. Now, in the moment of our great migration away from the rest of nature, more and more scientific evidence is emerging to confirm its place at the heart of our psychological wellbeing. So what happens, asks acclaimed journalist Lucy Jones, as we lose our bond with the natural world-might we also be losing part of ourselves?
Delicately observed and rigorously researched, Losing Eden is an enthralling journey through this new research, exploring how and why connecting with the living world can so drastically affect our health. Travelling from forest schools in East London to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault via primeval woodlands, Californian laboratories and ecotherapists' couches, Jones takes us to the cutting edge of human biology, neuroscience and psychology, and discovers new ways of understanding our increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the earth.
Urgent and uplifting, Losing Eden is a rallying cry for a wilder way of life - for finding asylum in the soil and joy in the trees - which might just help us to save the living planet, as well as ourselves.
