Engelska

The Greatest Nobodies Of History [Bok / Häftad]

<p>For any task you might want to do, there&apos;s a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It&apos;s full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you&apos;re a baby boomer or a 90&apos;s kid by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and getting to your appointments on time by destroying the Moon. And if you want to get rid of the book once you&apos;re done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth&apos;s mantle, or launching it into the Sun. By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn&apos;t just make things difficult for himself and his readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and amusing illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.</p>

<p><i>The Chaos Machine</i> is an essential book for our times - <i>Ezra Klein</i><br/><i><br/>The Chaos Machine</i> is the story of how the world was driven mad by social media. The election of populists like Trump and Bolsonaro; strife and genocide in countries like Myanmar; the rampant spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories as deadly as the pandemic itself; all of these are products of a breakdown in our social and political lives, a breakdown driven by the apps, companies and algorithms that compete constantly for our attention.<br/><br/>Max Fisher is a leading New York Times technology reporter whose work has covered the way that social media sites - driven increasingly by artificial intelligence rather than human ingenuity - push users towards more and more extreme positions, deepening the divisions in society in pursuit of greater engagement and profit. With extraordinary access to the most powerful players in Silicon Valley, and with testimonies from around the world of the havoc being wreaked by our online selves, <i>The Chaos Machine</i> shows us how we got to this uniquely perilous moment - and how we might get out of it.</p>

SOMETHING TO FIGHT FOR, SOMEONE TO LIVE FOR Gods should never meddle in the affairs of mortals, but Xie Lian is not one to follow the rules when lives are at risk. He spits in the face of heaven and its laws and descends in a fury to save his country from drought and civil war. Yet this golden child gets a harsh dose of reality when he discovers just how little one individual-even a god-can do to save a crumbling nation. As the people reject and betray him, one young soldier stands by Xie Lian-a boy with a face wrapped in bandages and a fierce loyalty in his heart. In this chaotic past, can an unshakable bond grow from the ashes of unimaginable destruction?

<p>Strands of Joy features 20 versatile colourwork patterns for challenging and relaxing knitting, from Finnish knitwear designer Anna Johanna and Nordic knitting experts Laine. No hobby is more mindful than knitting. In strange times, one can be endlessly grateful for the gentle rustle of needles, the soft wool sliding between fingers, and the calming effect of following a pattern - and the reward of a beautiful handmade creation.</p><p>The 20 colourwork patterns in this book include sweaters and cardigans as well as an elegant dress, a warming hat and a kid's pullover. The patterns are worked seamlessly from top down. Comprehensive patterns are supported by extra material on the Laine website, and stunning photography and styling evokes the cosy Nordic lifestyle and slow living.</p><p>Strands of Joy is a knitting book to bring calm and colour to your life. Cast on a mindless two-colour project or let your mind find peace in more complicated knits that require you to stay focused. Knitting is more than just knit, knit, purl.</p>

<p>A GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK From the bestselling, award-winning author of Fun Home All her life, Alison Bechdel has searched for an elusive secret. The secret to superhuman strength.</p><p>She has looked for it in her favourite books, the lives of her heroes, celibacy, polyamory, activism, therapy, and most obsessively, in her lifelong passion for exercise. Skiing, running, karate, cycling, yoga, weight lifting - you name it, she's tried it. "Oh, to be self-sufficient! Hard as a rock! An island!" </p><p>But as she gets older, her body isn't getting any stronger. And in a changing, sometimes overwhelming world, are "cantaloupe-sized guns" all a person needs? Maybe the all-important secret is not where she expected to find it . . .</p><p>In this, her third graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel has written a deeply layered, personal story about selfhood, self-sabotage, mortality, addiction, bliss, wonder, and the concerns of a generation. This is an extraordinary, laugh-out-loud chronicle of the conundrums we all grapple with as we seek our true place in the world.</p>

<p><b>THE NEW BOOK FROM THE MUCH-LOVED AUTHOR OF <i>THE GRAN TOUR</i>, <i>A CHIP SHOP IN POZNAN</i> AND<i> THE MARMALADE DIARIES</i><br/><br/>Food fights, fishing and French cooking - bestselling author Ben Aitken's year of actively pursuing fun</b><br/><br/>Ben Aitken wasn't getting enough. He knew it and so did everyone else. He was grumpy, increasingly boring, mostly joyless. So, he joined a lawn bowls club. A week later, he doubled down on the doldrums by learning to dance like they do in Bollywood. Then - with an almost entirely reformed selfhood winking appealingly just around the corner - he started swimming in cold water and was back to square one.<br/><br/>Despite the setbacks (and hyperventilation), it was becoming clear to him that the very pursuit of fun was a great way of not feeling naff. And so he made a vow to have as much of the f-stuff as he possibly could.<br/><br/>Taking a liberal approach to the subject, he sought out things that he used to find fun a long time ago (i.e. food fights and wrestling); things that he'd never done before but reckoned could be fun (boozy French cooking classes, tantric sex); things whose fun-factor was less obvious and more down to earth (nostalgia, volunteering, edible gardening, watching chickens); and things that he wasn't at all sure about but were fun according to other people (gym classes, caving, TikTok). Unsurprisingly, the results were mixed, but he was undoubtedly left feeling ... better. Which left him asking, if fun is the finest medicine, why do we stop doing it?</p>