Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

Numbers saturate the news, politics, and life. The average person can use basic knowledge and common sense to put the never-ending onslaught of facts and figures in their proper place.

Mathematics scares and depresses most of us, but politicians, journalists and everyone in power use numbers all the time to bamboozle us. Most maths is really simple - as easy as 2+2 in fact. Better still it can be understood without any jargon, any formulas - and in fact not even many numbers. Most of it is commonsense, and by using a few really simple principles one can quickly see when maths, statistics and numbers are being abused to play tricks - or create policies - which can waste millions of pounds. It is liberating to understand when numbers are telling the truth or being used to lie, whether it is health scares, the costs of government policies, the supposed risks of certain activities or the real burden of taxes.

"Freedom Without Permission takes the idea of human liberty seriously, not just as a policy for a free society but a personal philosophy for free people. There is so much wisdom here. A careful reading will save you years of diversions and get you on the right track toward building a new way of life." -- Jeffrey Tucker Too many people seek permission when trying to advance their own lives. They want external actors to open gates for them without realizing that the gates don't exist. Permission isn't needed and those who think it is create their own barriers to advancing their lives and realizing personal achievement. People believe they must look to others for permission to live their lives. They elect politicians to change the world. They believe schools award education. They believe external validation is the way to a career. They externalize their personal hardships instead of recognizing how often they inflict the hardships onto themselves. They wait for an invitation to create value when the impetus lies in their own hands and minds. They develop dependencies and preconditions that keep them from entrepreneurship. These are all myths. You don't need to ask for permission. But how do you do create a life without permission? The point of this book is to break more than to build. We are not attempting to provide a full-fledged philosophy on life without permission. Instead, the goal is to deconstruct and then offer exercises and habits of thought that will enhance your freedom. The core idea is that you don't need anyone's permission to do the things you want to do in life, or learn what you want to learn or feel how you want to feel. An entire intellectual edifice has been constructed to convince you of the opposite, and most of us start out seeing only though its windows. We want to help you tear it down or at least break a few panes so you can see beyond it and begin to form your own ideas about what your life can be. We wish to shatter some paradigms so you can begin to build your own process of learning and living. We begin with lessons that can be learned from history regarding our own freedom. We then look at politics, then education and move into career and entrepreneurship, finally, we end with practices for personal freedom. We span the process of growing up and moving from learning to living, creating the process as you go. This process requires knowledge (starting with self-knowledge), skill, experience, confidence, and relationships, but it doesn't necessarily require schooling, grades, credentials, or submission to a system or plan created by anyone else. The resources you need are already within you. We peel back some myths and help you see freedom as your own, not something you need permission to enjoy.

Explores globalization, its opportunities for individual empowerment, its achievements at lifting millions out of poverty, and its drawbacks--environmental, social, and political.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the most important books I’ve ever read—an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” – Bill Gates “Hans Rosling tells the story of ‘the secret silent miracle of human progress’ as only he can. But Factfulness does much more than that. It also explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.” —Melinda Gates "Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases." - Former U.S. President Barack Obama Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends—what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most. Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. --- “This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance...Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.” Hans Rosling, February 2017.