As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper's, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America's culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide us--political, social, religious--Jacobs has learned that many of our fiercest disputes occur not because we're doomed to be divided, but because the people involved simply aren't thinking.Most of us don't want to think, Jacobs writes. Thinking is trouble. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits, and it can complicate our relationships with like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is slow, and that's a problem when our habits of consuming information (mostly online) leave us lost in the spin cycle of social media, partisan bickering, and confirmation bias.In this smart, endlessly entertaining book, Jacobs diagnoses the many forces that act on us to prevent thinking--forces that have only worsened in the age of Twitter, "alternative facts," and information overload--and he also dispels the many myths we hold about what it means to think well. (For example: It's impossible to "think for yourself.")Drawing on sources as far-flung as novelist Marilynne Robinson, basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, British philosopher John Stuart Mill, and Christian theologian C.S. Lewis, Jacobs digs into the nuts and bolts of the cognitive process, offering hope that each of us can reclaim our mental lives from the impediments that plague us all. Because if we can learn to think together, maybe we can learn to live together, too.

    Dehaene's research will fascinate not only readers interested in science and culture, but also educators concerned with debates on how we learn to read, and who wrestle with pathologies such as dyslexia. Like Steven Pinker, Dehaene argues that the mind is not a blank slate: Writing systems across all cultures rely on the same brain circuits, and reading is only possible insofar as it fits within the limits of a primate brain. Setting cutting-edge science in the context of cultural debate, Reading in the Brain is an unparalleled guide to a uniquely human ability.

    Discover how easy it is to: file phone numbers, data, figures, and appointments right in your head; learn foreign words and phrases with ease; read with speed--and greater understanding; shine in the classroom--and shorten study hours; dominate social situations, and more.

    These athletes prove that raw athletic ability doesn’t necessarily translate to a superior on-field experience—it’s the mental game that matters most.Sports participation—from the recreational to the collegiate Division I level—is at an all-time high. While the caliber of their game may differ, athletes at every level have one thing in common: they want to excel. In The Champion’s Mind, sports psychologist Jim Afremow, PhD, LPC, now offers the same advice he uses with Olympians, Heisman Trophy winners, and professional athletes, including:• Tips and techniques based on high-performance psychology research, such as how to get in a "zone," thrive on a team, and stay humble• How to progress within a sport and sustain excellence long-term• Customizable pre-performance routines to hit full power when the gun goes off or the puck is droppedThe Champion’s Mind distills actionable advice into clear and concise steps for athletes looking to find confidence, concentration, and mental preparedness—the mental edge that sets champions apart.

    Little has changed, however, since then: over half of our children still read at a basic level and few become highly proficient. Many American children and adults are not functionally literate, with serious consequences. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of the educational system and as adults are unable to fully participate in the workforce, adequately manage their own health care, or advance their children's education. In Language at the Speed of Sight, internationally renowned cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg reveals the underexplored science of reading, which spans cognitive science, neurobiology, and linguistics. As Seidenberg shows, the disconnect between science and education is a major factor in America's chronic underachievement. How we teach reading places many children at risk of failure, discriminates against poorer kids, and discourages even those who could have become more successful readers. Children aren't taught basic print skills because educators cling to the disproved theory that good readers guess the words in texts, a strategy that encourages skimming instead of close reading. Interventions for children with reading disabilities are delayed because parents are mistakenly told their kids will catch up if they work harder. Learning to read is more difficult for children who speak a minority dialect in the home, but that is not reflected in classroom practices. By building on science's insights, we can improve how our children read, and take real steps toward solving the inequality that illiteracy breeds. Both an expert look at our relationship with the written word and a rousing call to action, Language at the Speed of Sight is essential for parents, educators, policy makers, and all others who want to understand why so many fail to read, and how to change that.

    Renowned expert Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain where people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together.When you have Americans who precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans who get straight to the point (“your presentation was simply awful”); Latin Americans and Asians who are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians who think the best boss is just one of the crowd—the result can be, well, sometimes interesting, even funny, but often disastrous.Even with English as a global language, it’s easy to fall into cultural traps that endanger careers and sink deals when, say, a Brazilian manager tries to fathom how his Chinese suppliers really get things done, or an American team leader tries to get a handle on the intra-team dynamics between his Russian and Indian team members.In The Culture Map, Erin Meyer provides a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business. She combines a smart analytical framework with practical, actionable advice for succeeding in a global world.

    The worst managers undermine inner work life, often unwittingly.As Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer explain in The Progress Principle, seemingly mundane workday events can make or break employees’ inner work lives. But it’s forward momentum in meaningful work—progress—that creates the best inner work lives. Through rigorous analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees in 7 companies, the authors explain how managers can foster progress and enhance inner work life every day.The book shows how to remove obstacles to progress, including meaningless tasks and toxic relationships. It also explains how to activate two forces that enable progress: (1) catalysts—events that directly facilitate project work, such as clear goals and autonomy—and (2) nourishers—interpersonal events that uplift workers, including encouragement and demonstrations of respect and collegiality.Brimming with honest examples from the companies studied, The Progress Principle equips aspiring and seasoned leaders alike with the insights they need to maximize their people’s performance.

    That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth. With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness.

    The new-millennium workplace requires all of us to rewrite the rules and start treating our careers like we're running a business--which means understanding the markets for our talents, knowing our value, and looking out over the horizon to plot our paths going forward.Liz Ryan is a former Fortune 500 HR SVP and the world's most widely read workplace thought leader. She understands the recruiting system as only an insider can, and she shows you how to stay focused on your goals and distinguish yourself from masses of job seekers. In Reinvention Roadmap, you'll discover new tools, such as a "Pain Letter" and your "Human-Voiced Resume" to land not just any job, but a job that celebrates your unique talents and takes you to the level where you want to be.Whether you're entering the workplace or looking to switch careers, you can get the perfect job if you step off the beaten path and follow the approaches insiders use to gain access to the best positions. Reinvention Roadmap is the colorful, fun, irreverent, and deeply practical guide to getting the job you want and building the career of your dreams.

    On one side, we have industrial strengths: companies, governments, and institutions (i.e., the "Inc.") that apply significant resources, talent, and money to simplify the complex, apply standards and consistency, deliver economies of scale, and create global brands. On the other we have individual-strengths: autonomous individuals and small companies (i.e., the "Peers") engaged in local, small scale, customized, and specialized efforts to create just-right unique goods and services, often tapping into their own social networks to promote and distribute them.When companies and peers each are able to focus on what they do best and can handle what is difficult, annoying, or just plain impossible for the other, the effect of the collaboration is salutary for both sides. The skills and assets of the small and the large are complementary and symbiotic, mutually dependent and yet autonomous.By tapping into the inherent and unique talents on both sides Peers Incorporated transforms the sources of value creation, and therefore of power. It lets us transcend the tradeoffs that have long plagued the industrial economy. It leverages standards and rules without squandering theimagination and initiative of free-spirited human beings. It harvests operational discipline without straitjacketing our capacity to adapt. It multiplies the purchasing and creative power of consumers the world over, without consigning them to quasi-feudal, top-down organizations. These new organizations are the embodiment and the lifeblood of the transition to a new cooperative capitalism, one that is dramatically more efficient, more innovative and more humane.Peers Inc. deepens and enriches recently emergent practices such as the sharing economy,crowdsourcing, collaborative production, and collaborative consumption. It is fostering relationships that go beyond simple peer-to-peer interaction, enabling peer-to-business, peer-to-government, and small business to big business. They aren’t bound by the goods of the industrial age, they are able to exchange expertise, networks, data, light and energy, or whatever else creates value for both sides.

    He explores what parents, teachers, and employers must do to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators. In profiling compelling young American innovators such as Kirk Phelps, product manager for Apple’s first iPhone, and Jodie Wu, who founded a company that builds bicycle-powered maize shellers in Tanzania, Wagner reveals how the adults in their lives nurtured their creativity and sparked their imaginations, while teaching them to learn from failures and persevere. Wagner identifies a pattern—a childhood of creative play leads to deep-seated interests, which in adolescence and adulthood blossom into a deeper purpose for career and life goals. Play, passion, and purpose: These are the forces that drive young innovators. Wagner shows how we can apply this knowledge as educators and what parents can do to compensate for poor schooling. He takes readers into the most forward-thinking schools, colleges, and workplaces in the country, where teachers and employers are developing cultures of innovation based on collaboration, interdisciplinary problem-solving, and intrinsic motivation. The result is a timely, provocative, and inspiring manifesto that will change how we look at our schools and workplaces, and provide us with a road map for creating the change makers of tomorrow. Creating Innovators will feature its own innovative elements: more than sixty original videos that expand on key ideas in the book through interviews with young innovators, teachers, writers, CEOs, and entrepreneurs, including Thomas Friedman, Dean Kamen, and Annmarie Neal. Produced by filmmaker Robert A. Compton, the videos are embedded into the ebook edition in video-enabled eReaders and accessible in this print edition via QR codes placed throughout the chapters or via www.creatinginnovators.com.

    Why does half a conversation make us more curious than a whole conversation? In the ever-fascinating Why? Mario Livio interviewed scientists in several fields to explore the nature of curiosity. He examined the lives of two of history’s most curious geniuses, Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Feynman. He also talked to people with boundless curiosity: a superstar rock guitarist who is also an astrophysicist; an astronaut with degrees in computer science, biology, literature, and medicine. What drives these people to be curious about so many subjects? Curiosity is at the heart of mystery and suspense novels. It is essential to other forms of art, from painting to sculpture to music. It is the principal driver of basic scientific research. Even so, there is still no definitive scientific consensus about why we humans are so curious, or about the mechanisms in our brain that are responsible for curiosity. Mario Livio—an astrophysicist who has written about mathematics, biology, and now psychology and neuroscience—explores this irresistible subject in a lucid, entertaining way that will captivate anyone who is curious about curiosity.

    This book clearly shows the benefits of student learning and educational effectiveness that can be realized when these conditions are present. Based on the Documenting Effective Educational Practice (DEEP) project from the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University, this book provides concrete examples from twenty institutions that other colleges and universities can learn from and adapt to help create a success-oriented campus culture and learning environment.

    The schools Littky has created and led over the past 35 years are models for reformers everywhere: small, public schools where the curriculum is rich and meaningful, expectations are high, student progress is measured against real-world standards, and families and communities are actively engaged in the educational process.This book is for both big E and small e educators:* For principals and district administrators who want to change the way schools are run.* For teachers who want students to learn passionately.* For college admissions officers who want diverse applicants with real-world learning experiences.* For business leaders who want a motivated and talented workforce.* For parents who want their children to be prepared for college and for life.* For students who want to take control over their learning . . . and want a school that is interesting, safe, respectful, and fun.* For anyone who cares about kids.Here, you'll find a moving account of just what is possible in education, with many of the examples drawn from the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (The Met) in Providence, Rhode Island--a diverse public high school with the highest rates of attendance and college acceptance in the state. The Met exemplifies personalized learning, one student at a time.The Big Picture is a book to reenergize educators, inspire teachers in training, and start a new conversation about kids and schools, what we want for both, and how to make it happen.

    He knows that if parents place good video games into a learning system in their homes they can reap major benefits for their children and themselves. They can accelerate their children's language and cognitive growth." —James Paul Gee, Tashia Mogridge Professor of Reading, University of Wisconsin-MadisonMarc Prensky presents the case—profoundly counter-cultural but true nevertheless—that video and computer game playing, within limits, is actually very beneficial to today's "Digital Native" kids, who are using them to prepare themselves for life in the 21st century. The reason kids are so attracted to these games, Prensky says, is that they are learning about important "future" things, from collaboration, to prudent risk taking, to strategy formulation and execution, to complex moral and ethical decisions. Prensky's arguments are backed up by university PhD's studying not just violence, but games in their totality, as well as studies of gamers who have become successful corporate workers, entrepreneurs, leaders, doctors, lawyers, scientists and other professionals.Because most adults (including the critics) can't play the modern complex games themselves (and discount the opinions of the kids who do play them) they rely on secondhand sources of information, most of whom are sadly misinformed about both the putative harm and the true benefits of game-playing. This book is the antidote to those misinformed, bombastic sources, in the press and elsewhere. Full of common sense and practical information, it provides parents with a large number of techniques approaches they can use—both over time and right away—to improve both their understanding of games and their relationships with their kids. What You Will Learn The aim of this book is to give you a peek into the hidden world into which your kids disappear when they are playing games, and to help you as an adult—especially if you are a concerned parent or teacher—understand and appreciate just how much your kids are learning that is POSITIVE from their video and computer games.In the few short hours it takes to read this book, you will learn: What it feels like to be in the world of computer and video games; How to appreciate the breadth and depth of modern computer and video games and the ways they make your kids learn; How to understand the various USEFUL skills your game-playing your kids are acquiring; How to understand your own kids better and build better relationships using games as a base; And, most importantly, How to augment and improve what your kids are learning by HAVING CONVERSATIONS THAT THEY WANT TO HAVE about their games.