Fall into reading

Newsletter, Sep 30th 2022

It's almost October and you know what that means! Time for Fall reading lists to come out. Fall is the perfect time to cozy up and “fall” into the books you couldn't get to all summer cause there was so much else to do! I have a list going, on our Bookshop page, of the most promising books out this Fall, some of which, I'm looking forward to getting into. Check it out here.

October is also the official start of the Holiday season - it seems there is some holiday/celebration going on for some culture/religion every week from now till the end of the year! Let the Festivities begin! And if part of your festivities involve gift exchange, please keep us in mind for all your gifting needs. Books make wonderful gifts. Thinking Spot books and gifts are almost guaranteed to be unique, making for delighted recipients. Plus, you'll be doing good by spreading the love of science and books in your community. Win. Win. Win.

I do have to put in one caveat! I'm getting warnings from most of my vendors about supplies and timing. As you know, most of my inventory is a stock of 1, so if you have your heart set on something, please get it early. Or let me know early enough to be able to order in time.

October Store Hours: The Spot will now be open an additional day - Tuesdays from Noon-6. Rest of the hours are the same Wednesday-Sunday 10-6.

A BIG Thank You to all those who attended the AI Assisted ART event and donated to CodeSavvy. We reached, and exceeded, my goal and were able to donate over $500 for the CodeSavvy IoT Hackathon! Some pictures from the event and the generated Artwork can be found here. The IoT Hackathon is on Oct 22nd, in St. Paul. Find out more and register to attend this FREE and fun event here. No previous coding or tech experience necessary.

Upcoming Events at The Spot

1. Oct 15th 7p - Our favorite science communicators, Matheatre are back with a world premiere of their new Math Musical. Tickets are on a pay as you can scale : $12/$22/$32. They too are a non profit organization and any ticket income goes toward supporting their incredible work.

2. Oct 18th 11:30am - Virtual Event with Christina Soontornvat, Newbery award winning Author of The Last Mapmaker. This event is part of the #STEMReads program sponsored by General Motors, American Booksellers Association, Candlewick press and Christina. They are giving away ~20000 copies of her book - The Last Mapmaker - to promote STEM and reading in underserved populations. As part of that program, I have received 480 copies that I am in the process of distributing to underserved kids in the 8-12 age group, through area schools. If you are part of or know of any school that would benefit, please reach out.

3. Oct 22nd 10:30a - Castronauts and Waffles and Pancakes are two graphic novel series we carry that are hugely popular in the 6-10 age group. Author Drew Brockington's sister-in-law came to store once and introduced me to him! How cool! Drew has been most generous in getting time scheduled to come in-store for some fun comic related activities for kids and a book-signing!

Ongoing

• Sunday Oct 9th 2p - next meeting for the Science Book club for 16+ - we're reading The Immense World by Ed Yong. We're eyeing a Math book for our next read. Join us to find out which one!

• Sunday Oct 16th 4p - next meeting for the Kids 7-11 age group - we're reading The Last Mapmaker by Christina Soontornvat.

Science News Of the Week

Here's an interesting idea to encourage more environmental conservation - designate a body of water as a person! Whether you think its right or a joke, I think we can all applaud the ingenuity! Fight fire with fire! Turns out this is not the first instance of such an attempt. Apparently Australia, New Zealand, South America, India and Bangladesh all have waterways that have been granted personhood in an attempt to use human laws to preserve these natural resources. Let's hope it works.

New Releases this week

The Skeptics' Guide to the Future

By Dr. Steven Novella

From the bestselling authors and hosts of "The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe," a high-tech roadmap of the future in their beloved voice, cracking open the follies of futurists past and how technology will profoundly change our world, redefining what it means to be human. Our predictions of the future are a wild fantasy, inextricably linked to our present hopes and fears, biases and ignorance. Whether they be the outlandish leaps predicted in the 1920s, like multi-purpose utility belts with climate control capabilities and planes the size of luxury cruise ships, or the forecasts of the ‘60s, which didn’t anticipate the sexual revolution or women’s liberation, the path to the present is littered with failed predictions and incorrect estimations. The best we can do is try to absorb the lessons from futurism's checkered past, perhaps learning to do a little better. In THE SKEPTICS' GUIDE TO THE FUTURE, Steven Novella and his co-authors build upon the work of futurists of the past by examining what they got right, what they got wrong, and how they came to those conclusions. By exploring the pitfalls of each era, they give their own speculations about the distant future, transformed by unbelievable technology ranging from genetic manipulation to artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Applying their trademark skepticism, they carefully extrapolate upon each scientific development, leaving no stone unturned as they lay out a vision for the future. Dr. Steven Novella is an academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine and is host and producer of "The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe" (SGU). He also co-hosts "Alpha Quadrant 6," a science-fiction review show. He is the author of the bestselling book The Skeptics Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake. Dr. Novella has made multiple appearances on NPR’s All Things Considered and is a frequent guest on radio talk shows and science podcasts. His television credits include The Dr. Oz Show, Penn & Teller Bullshit, 20/20, Inside Edition, The History Channel, The Unexplained on A&E, Ricki Lake, and Exploring the Unknown. When not podcasting, he also authors the popular and award-winning NeuroLogica blog and is senior editor of Science-Based Medicine, an influential medical blog dedicated to issues of science and medicine. Dr. Novella is the founder and president of the New England Skeptical Society, a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), and founding chairman of the Institute for Science in Medicine. Bob Novella is a co-host of SGU and co-author ofThe Skeptics Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake. He also blogs for SGU’s Rogues Gallery. Bob is founder and vice president of the New England Skeptical Society. He has written numerous articles that are widely published in skeptical literature and is a frequent guest on science and technology podcasts. Jay Novella is a co-host of the SGU podcast, Chief Operations Officer at SGU Productions, and co-author of the bestselling book The Skeptics Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake. Jay serves on the board of directors for the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS), a yearly conference in its 14th year. He also is a producer and writer for the stage show A Skeptical Extravaganza of Special Significance. In his free time, Jay produces and hosts Alpha Quadrant 6, a science-fiction review show.

Chokepoint Capitalism

By Rebecca Giblin

A call to action for the creative class and labor movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)—or both. In Chokepoint Capitalism, scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of “chokepoint capitalism,” with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well-illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon’s use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook’s siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels’ use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere. By analyzing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct “anti-competitive flywheels” designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices. In the book’s second half, Giblin and Doctorow then explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work. Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that’s being heisted away—before it’s too late.

Rebecca Giblin (she/her) is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor at Melbourne Law School, where she leads interdisciplinary teams researching issues around creators’ rights, access to knowledge, and the regulation of technology and culture. She is Director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA) and heads up the Author’s Interest and eLending projects (authorsinterest.org; elendingproject.org), as well as Untapped: the Australian Literary Heritage Project (untapped.org.au). Chokepoint Capitalism is her latest book. She also wrote Code Wars and co-edited What if we could reimagine copyright?. Follow her on Twitter (@rgibli) Cory Doctorow is a bestselling science fiction writer and activist. He is a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with whom he has worked for 20 years. He is also a visiting professor of computer science at the Open University (UK) and of library science at the University of North Carolina. He is also a MIT Media Lab research affiliate. He co-founded the UK Open Rights Group and co-owns the website Boing Boing. He is the author of more than 20 books, including novels for adults and young adults, graphic novels for middle-grade readers, picture books, nonfiction books on technology and politics, and collections of essays. Follow him on Twitter (@doctorow).

Pentagons and Pentagrams

By Eli Maor

A fascinating exploration of the pentagon and its role in various cultures The pentagon and its close cousin, the pentagram, have inspired individuals for the last two and half millennia, from mathematicians and philosophers to artists and naturalists. Despite the pentagon’s wide-ranging history, no single book has explored the important role of this shape in various cultures, until now. Richly illustrated, Pentagons and Pentagrams offers a sweeping view of the five-sided polygon, revealing its intriguing geometric properties and its essential influence on a variety of fields. Traversing time, Eli Maor narrates vivid stories, both celebrated and unknown, about the pentagon and pentagram. He discusses the early Pythagoreans, who ascribed to the pentagon mythical attributes, adopted it as their emblem, and figured out its construction with a straightedge and compass. Maor looks at how a San Diego housewife uncovered four previously unknown types of pentagonal tilings, and how in 1982 a scientist’s discovery of fivefold symmetries in certain alloys caused an uproar in crystallography and led to a Nobel Prize. Maor also discusses the pentagon’s impact on many buildings, from medieval fortresses to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Eugen Jost’s superb illustrations provide sumptuous visual context, and the book’s puzzles and mazes offer fun challenges for readers, with solutions given in an appendix.

Eli Maor is a former professor of the history of mathematics at Loyola University Chicago. His books include the internationally acclaimed To Infinity and Beyond, e: The Story of a Number, The Pythagorean Theorem: A 4,000-Year History, Music by the Numbers, and with Eugen Jost, Beautiful Geometry (all Princeton). Eugen Jost is a well-known Swiss artist whose work is strongly influenced by mathematics.

Fen, Bog and Swamp

By Annie Proulx

From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx—whose novels are infused with her knowledge and deep concern for the earth—comes a riveting, revelatory history of our wetlands, their ecological role, and what their systematic destruction means for the planet. A lifelong environmentalist, Annie Proulx brings her wide-ranging research and scholarship to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important yet little understood role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that greatly contribute to climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are the earth’s most desirable and dependable resources, and in four stunning parts, Proulx documents the long-misunderstood role of these wetlands in saving the planet. Taking us on a fascinating journey through history, Proulx shows us the fens of 16th-century England to Canada’s Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire, America’s Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, and the 19th-century explorers who began the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Along the way, she writes of the diseases spawned in the wetlands—the Ague, malaria, Marsh Fever—and the surprisingly significant role of peat in industrialization. A sobering look at the degradation of wetlands over centuries and the serious ecological consequences, this is a stunningly important work and a rousing call to action by a writer whose passionate devotion to understanding and preserving the environment is on full and glorious display.Annie Proulx is the author of nine books, including the novels The Shipping News and Barkskins, and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award–winning film. Fen, Bog, and Swamp is her second work of nonfiction. She lives in New Hampshire.

Drugs and the FDA

By Mikkael A. Sekeres

How the FDA was shaped by public health crises and patient advocacy, told against a background of the contentious hearings on the breast cancer drug Avastin. Food and Drug Administration approval for COVID-19 vaccines and the controversial Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm made headlines, but few of us know much about how the agency does its work. Why is the FDA the ultimate US authority on a drug’s safety and efficacy? In Drugs and the FDA, Mikkael Sekeres—a leading oncologist and former chair of the FDA’s cancer drug advisory committee—tells the story of how the FDA became the most trusted regulatory agency in the world. It took a series of tragedies and health crises, as well as patient advocacy, for the government to take responsibility for ensuring the efficacy and safety of drugs and medical devices. Before the FDA existed, drug makers could hawk any potion, claim treatment of any ailment, and make any promise on a label. But then, throughout the twentieth century, the government was forced to take action when children were poisoned by contaminated diphtheria and smallpox vaccines, an early antibiotic contained antifreeze, a drug prescribed for morning sickness in pregnancy caused babies to be born disfigured, and access to AIDS drugs was limited to a few clinical trials while thousands died. Sekeres describes all these events against the backdrop of the contentious 2011 hearings on the breast cancer drug Avastin, in which he participated as a panel member. The Avastin hearings, he says, put to the test a century of the FDA’s evolution, demonstrating how its system of checks and balances works—or doesn’t work.

Mikkael A. Sekeres is Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Hematology at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, and former Chair of the Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee of the FDA. A regular contributor to the Well section of the New York Times, he is the author of When Blood Breaks Down: Life Lessons from Leukemia (MIT Press).