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From one of the world's top researchers on work and technology comes an insightful and surprising guide to protecting your skill in a world filling with AI and robots.
Think of your most valuable skill, the thing you can reliably do under pressure to deliver results. How did you learn it?
Whatever your job - plumber, attorney, teacher, surgeon - decades of research show that you achieved mastery by working with someone who knew more than you did. Formal learning--school and books--gave you conceptual knowledge, but you developed your skill by working with an expert.
Today, this essential bond is under threat. In our grail-like quest to optimize productivity with intelligent technologies like AI and robots, we are separating junior workers from experts in workplaces around the world. It's a looming multi-trillion-dollar problem that few are addressing, until now.
In The Skill Code, researcher and technologist Matt Beane reveals the hidden code that underwrites every successful expert-novice relationship. Beane has spent the last decade examining this unique bond in a variety of settings, from warehouses to surgical suites. He's found that just as the four amino acids are the building blocks of DNA, the three C's--challenge, complexity, and connection--are the basic components of how we develop our most valuable skills.
Whether you're an expert or a novice, this book will show you how to build skill more effectively - and how to make intelligent technologies part of the solution, not the problem. The Skill Code is an insightful must-read, with significant implications for how we will work and build skill in the twenty-first century--a guide to help you not only survive but thrive.
The inspiring, on-the-ground story of the rising grassroots leaders in the abortion rights movement during the pivotal first year after Dobbs.
When the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization- overturning the constitutional right to abortion care-the country was thrown into chaos. Abortion providers and their patients faced sudden closures, new restrictions, and rapidly changing rules as nearly half of the states moved quickly to ban or severely curtail abortion access. Against this backdrop, an army of health care providers, lawyers, activists, and everyday people mobilized to protect what a majority of Americans want: legal abortion. In You Must Stand Up, Nieman Fellow Amanda Becker provides a real-time portrait of the creative resistance that unfolded in America's first year without the protections of Roe v. Wade. Amidst daily shifts in health care access, new legal battles coming before partisan courts, and up-for-grabs state constitutions, Becker follows the leaders rising to meet these challenges-doctors and staffers turning to new financial and medical models to remain open and provide abortions, volunteers campaigning against antiabortion ballot initiatives, and medical students fighting to learn to provide what can be lifesaving care. By depicting the splintered reality of post-Dobbs America, and by capturing how Americans have developed new ways to best protect their constitutional rights, Becker ultimately shows how outrage can beget hope, and give rise to a new movement.Bryn says: Let's add this to the "required reading" list for grown-ups. The research studies described within will tickle your spine and really stick with you, as will the wisdom. These authors make big concepts seem so simple and make goodness, so attractive.
Scott says: Where else can you enjoy the clear and compelling writing of two celebrated cultural critics and philosophers in a single volume all for the price of lunch? "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" alone is a priceless, piercing essay for our time and all time.
For fans of Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk and Mary Roach, Erica Berry's WOLFISH blends science, history, and cultural criticism in a years-long journey to understand our myths about wolves, and track one legendary wolf, OR-7, from the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon
A Most Anticipated Book of 2023: TIME, Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Salon, Bustle, Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, Financial Times, Reader's Digest, LitHub, Book Riot, Debutiful, and more!
"Wolfish starts with a single wolf and spirals through nuanced investigations of fear, gender, violence, and story. A GORGEOUS achievement." --Blair Braverman, author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube
Scott says: Berry left academia and the literary world to return to his native Kentucky to farm and write about culture, agriculture, and humanity's impact on the natural world. Truly one of our greatest critics of the post industrial, postmodern society.
Life on the Rocks is an inspiring, lucid, meditative ode to the reefs and the undaunted scientists working to save them against almost impossible odds. As she also attempts to help her daughter in her struggle with mental illness, Berwald explores what it means to keep fighting a battle whose outcome is uncertain. She contemplates the inevitable grief of climate change and the beauty of small victories.