Princeton University Press

As generative #AI tools present new possibilities and new risks, we're grateful for this critical advocacy from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), The Authors Guild, and News/Media Alliance. #AI platforms and big tech must respect creativity, humanity, and the myriad forms of author and publisher investment in books: "Copyright is a fundamentally important right authorized explicitly by the U.S. Constitution, not a minor inconvenience that can be disregarded by downstream inventors or investors. Copyright is the means by which authors and publishers are incentivized to write, publish, inspire and inform— crucial roles that are more essential than ever in the face of numerous, serious threats to democracy." https://hubs.ly/Q02vc_xZ0 #WorldIPDay

If you prefer listening to podcasts on YouTube, I have just uploaded my conversation with Leslie Valiant, T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University https://lnkd.in/eqkpZEhn Enjoy! cc Princeton University Press

Caroline Cheung's Dolia is the story of the Roman Empire’s enormous #wine industry told through the remarkable #ceramic storage and shipping containers that made it possible. The average resident of ancient Rome drank two-hundred-and-fifty liters of wine a year, almost a bottle a day, and the total annual volume of wine consumed in the imperial capital would have overflowed the Pantheon. But Rome was too densely developed and populated to produce its own food, let alone wine. How were the Romans able to get so much wine? The key was the dolium—the ancient world’s largest type of ceramic wine and food storage and shipping container, some of which could hold as much as two-thousand liters. In Dolia, classicist and archaeologist Caroline Cheung tells the story of these vessels—from their emergence and evolution to their major impact on trade and their eventual disappearance. Now available learn more about this groundbreaking account: https://hubs.ly/Q02sBT2H0

Listen to the Ideas #Podcast with theoretical #physicist Claudia de Rham as she takes us on her journey to seek gravity’s true nature and find wisdom in embracing its force in her own fascinating life. https://lnkd.in/gc9USWkY... #physics #WomenInStem #Science

Now available, Sixty Miles Upriver by Richard E. Ocejo presents an unvarnished portrait of gentrification in an underprivileged, majority-minority small city. Newburgh is a small postindustrial city of some twenty-eight thousand people located sixty miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley. Like many other similarly sized cities across America, it has been beset with poverty and crime after decades of decline, with few opportunities for its predominantly minority residents. Sixty Miles Upriver tells the story of how Newburgh started gentrifying, describing what happens when White creative professionals seek out racially diverse and working-class communities and revealing how gentrification is increasingly happening outside large city centers in places where it unfolds in new ways. As New York City’s housing market becomes too expensive for even the middle class, many urbanites are bypassing the suburbs and moving to smaller cities like Newburgh, where housing is affordable and historic. Richard Ocejo takes readers into the lives of these newcomers, examining the different ways they navigate racial difference and inequality among Newburgh’s much less privileged local residents, and showing how stakeholders in the city’s revitalization reframe themselves and gentrification to cast the displacement they cause to minority groups in a positive light. An intimate exploration of the moral dilemma at the heart of gentrification, Sixty Miles Upriver explains how progressive White gentrifiers justify controversial urban changes as morally good, and how their actions carry profound and lasting consequences for vulnerable residents of color. Learn more about this intimate exploration and order your copy: https://hubs.ly/Q02sBNmg0

What if we all obsess so much and for so long about the unanswerable question of how #AI will change everything, that we don’t pay enough attention to what we really love and don’t want to change: the act of building #connection between #human beings? Enjoy this brilliant new essay by PUP Publisher, Ingrid Gnerlich .

“What’s a day without a bookstore?” - Patricia Nelson Congratulations to the incredible Patricia Nelson, who has been named Sales Rep of the Year by Publishers Weekly. A beloved and veteran rep, who worked previously as a bookstore buyer, Nelson is widely celebrated by booksellers for her curiosity and engagement with her accounts. In the Publishers Weekly write-up, Nelson, who has represented PUP’s list in 13 Western states since 2016, is described as, “the finest, smartest, most diligent and generous sales rep I’ve ever worked with” (John Evans, DIESEL, A Bookstore) and “without a doubt my favorite publisher’s rep. We end up discussing ideas alongside books, and the necessary job of book buying becomes a truly sustaining part of my buying season” (Brad Johnson, East Bay Booksellers), while Luisa Smith, head buyer at Book Passage Bookstore & Cafe, notes that Nelson, “is infinitely curious about our stores, our customers, the books we are reading, what we need from our publishing partners.” PUP’s Domestic Sales Director, Tim Wilkins, notes “the respect and love that booksellers have for Patricia is deep and genuine. She is a forceful advocate to stores for our books, to us at the press for her stores, and always finds delight in such a wide range of titles, from trade books to calling out academic titles that can and will find a home in her stores.” We’re so grateful for every collaboration with Patricia Nelson and for the enthusiasm and thoughtfulness she brings to the entire publishing ecosystem. Please join us in congratulating a wonderful colleague on this richly deserved honor! https://hubs.ly/Q02tGR2V0

Happy to share today’s physics article in The Observer /The Guardian by Charlotte Lytton with whom it was such a pleasure to talk. https://lnkd.in/emQdd4NA Princeton University Press

Paul Sagar's Basic Equality is an innovative argument that vindicates our normative commitment to basic equality, synthesising philosophy, history, and psychology. What makes human beings one another’s equals? That we are “basic equals” has become a bedrock assumption in Western moral and political philosophy. And yet establishing why we ought to believe this claim has proved fiendishly difficult, floundering in the face of the many inequalities that characterise the human condition. In this provocative work, Paul Sagar offers a novel approach to explaining and justifying basic equality. Rather than attempting to find an independent foundation for basic equality, he argues, we should instead come to see our commitment to this idea as the result of the practice of treating others as equals. Moreover, he continues, it is not enough to grapple with the problem through philosophy alone—by just thinking very hard, in our armchairs; we must draw insights from history and psychology as well. Sagar writes that, as things stand, there appear to be no good arguments for believing in the truth of basic equality. Indeed, for much of Western intellectual history and social practice, basic inequality has been the default position. How is it then, Sagar asks, that in Western societies, in a period of less than a century, basic equality emerged as the dominant view? Sagar approaches this not as a mere philosophical puzzle, but as a dramatic historical development. In so doing, he shows us what is at stake when human beings treat one another as equals just because they are human beings. Now available, learn more about this innovative book: https://hubs.ly/Q02s9Jvt0

Eclipses have a complicated relationship with foretelling the future. Long ago, astronomical and meteorological phenomena were seen as supernatural messages. Like shooting stars, auroras, and comets, eclipses were often considered portents of social upheaval and danger. Eclipses tended to come unexpectedly, out of the blue. They filled people with terror. Yet, it has been many centuries since eclipses were truly unpredictable. Renée Bergland explores whether the 2024 solar eclipse might be an omen and what it might mean. #Eclipse #NaturalMagic #literature #science #Darwin #EmilyDickinson