Overview Evicted is a heartwrenching, powerful ethnography by Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond. It chronicles the lives of eight Milwaukee families living in poverty, with sometimes upwards of 80% of their income going to rent. And, as you can imagine, these tenants aren’t living like royalty. Indeed, violence, drugs and poor schools plague their neighborhoods, and roaches […]
Month: May 2017
A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System
Overview The U.S. tax code is a mess and is in dire need of updating. In A Fine Mess, T.R. Reid examines tax innovations around the world, our convoluted tax code, and how we can improve it. Imagine if we could lower income tax rates for everyone, cure the nightmare that is tax season, and raise […]
Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words
Why Explain Things? Thing Explainer is a fun book to read. It is a book of complicated concepts explained using the 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language. Randall Munroe, the author, begins the book by addressing his reason for writing the book this way. “I’ve spent a lot of my life worried that […]
The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future
Overview The Grid by Gretchen Bakke is an informative analysis of America’s aging energy grid, the history of electricity, and new green technologies that we need to adopt to combat climate change. America’s energy grid, the largest machine in the world, is simply not adept at meeting the energy demands of the 21st Century. Bakke […]
The Industries of the Future
Overview In The Industries of the Future, Alec Ross, a leading innovation expert, describes a fascinating future and how we can navigate it. He breaks the book up into seven parts, each one focusing on various facets of the future, from robotics to the weaponization of code. Ross grew up in Charleston, West Virginia (“coal […]