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How New Ideas Arise
Architect and poet Paolo Belardi traces the many conditions and situations that have inspired extraordinary ideas across the arts and sciences.

Mad World: On the Psychotic Experience of Time
In the landscape of madness, time lies open and exposed.

The Tragic Downfall of ʿAṣfūriyyeh (The Lebanon Hospital for the Insane)
How Lebanon’s brutal civil war aborted a grand vision of social reform and the expansion of mental health care.

Spherical Descent: On the Bathysphere and Voyages Into the Abyss
A poetic history of descents, both real and fictional.
Spotlight: Vaclav Smil

Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of forty books, including New York Times bestseller How the World Really Works and Energy and Civilization, published by the MIT Press. In 2010 he was named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers. Bill Gates says, “there is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.”
With the publication of his latest and most readable book, Invention and Innovation, Smil offers an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention.
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Friday January 27, 2023