Those Who Can, Teach: The Power of Art, Kindness and Compassion in the Classroom


Andria Zafirakou - 2021
    At her inner-city London school where more than eighty languages are spoken, she would sense urgent needs; mending uniforms, calling social services, shielding vulnerable teens from gangs. And she would tailor each class to its pupils, fiercely believing in the power of art to unlock trauma, or give a mute child the confidence to speak. Time and again, she would be proved right.So in 2018, when Andria won the million-dollar Global Teacher Prize, she knew exactly where the money would go: back into arts education for all. Because today, the UK government's cuts and curriculum changes are destroying the arts, while their refusal to tackle the most dangerous threats faced by children – cyber-bullying, gang violence, hunger and deprivation – puts teachers on the safeguarding frontline.Andria's story is a rallying wake-up call that shows what life is really like for schoolchildren today, and a moving insight into the extraordinary people shaping the next generation.

Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex


Michael A. Hiltzik - 2015
    Machines have become larger, ambitions bolder. The first particle accelerator cost less than one hundred dollars and could be held in its creator's palm, while its descendant, the Large Hadron Collider, cost ten billion dollars and is seventeen miles in circumference. Scientists have invented nuclear weapons, put a man on the moon, and examined nature at the subatomic scale all through Big Science, the industrial-scale research paid for by governments and corporations that have driven the great scientific projects of our time.The birth of Big Science can be traced to Berkeley, California, nearly nine decades ago, when a resourceful young scientist with a talent for physics and an even greater talent for promotion pondered his new invention and declared, "I'm going to be famous!" Ernest Orlando Lawrence's cyclotron would revolutionize nuclear physics, but that was only the beginning of its impact. It would change our understanding of the basic building blocks of nature. It would help win World War II. Its influence would be felt in academia and international politics. It was the beginning of Big Science.This is the incredible story of how one invention changed the world and of the man principally responsible for it all. Michael Hiltzik tells the riveting full story here for the first time.