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As a newly minted Ph.D. in medical geography, Kirsty Duncan led an international expedition to remote Svalbard, Norway, to search for the cause of the deadly 1918 influenza. What should have been a rewarding intellectual adventure turned out to be an unwanted baptism into the unbridled sexism and privilege of the scientific community.She has devoted herself to the support of girls and women in scientific endeavors ever since. While women have come a long way in science, there is still far to go. They remain under-represented, under-paid, under-published, and under the shadows of male scientists who are assumed, without evidence, to have innate capacities that women lack. Duncan identifies systemic biases in the assessment of girls’ abilities and the teaching of science in the home, the classroom, our communities, and professional life. She makes a powerful argument for cultural and institutional change to ensure girls and women their rightful place in the scienti

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Are we sometimes too strong for our own good? Amid epidemics of anxiety and depression,threats of ecological and economic disaster, not to mention a pandemic, resilience has been the buzzword of the decade, the answer to every challenge we face as individuals, organizations, and communities. We seldom stop to ask if our insistence on persevering is really in our long-term interest. Does it trap us in patterns of behavior that no longer make sense, foreclose too soon on better opportunities, and stifle positive development? With examples ranging from overly optimistic thinking habits to risk-averse descisions by corporations and governments, Michael Ungar, one of the world’s leading resilience experts, explores how even the most resilient among us can fail catastrophically. The Limits of Resilience is a witty, compassionate argument that true resilience lies not so much in always bouncing back but in our ability to self-disrupt and embrace occasional but

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For two days in late September 1988, Canada’s Ben Johnson was the most celebrated athlete on the planet.Winner of the 100-meter sprint at the Seoul Olympics in a world record 9.79 seconds, he’d just had time to say, “A gold medal—that’s something no one can take away from you,” before testing positive for a performance enhancing drug and giving back his medal.Later admitting to steroid use, Johnson has lived in ignominy ever since, but there’s much more to his incredible story. The sprint he won in Seoul has since been called “the dirtiest race in history,” with six of the eight competitors linked to doping infractions. The steroid for which Johnson tested positive was not the steroid he believed he was using. His drug screening was riddled with irregularities and crucial testing evidence was withheld by Olympic officials in Seoul, circumstances that credible experts now say denied Johnson his right to due pr

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Virtually every problem with the modern American mode of living stems from three major cultural characteristics: a pathological attachment to the automobile, a horrifying apathy toward the obesity epidemic, and a deeply engrained fetishization of employment. This should be plain to anyone paying attention, but it’s especially clear if you sell your car and spend six gruelling months riding public transit in Dallas, Texas, arguably the nation’s most regrettable example of urban dysfunction.For half a year, I got on the train in one of the biggest cities in the wealthiest nation of all time, only to find myself surrounded by people who are either homeless or commuting to a job that hardly keeps them above the poverty line. Most of them are morbidly obese, and those who aren’t are only slim because of heroin or some other destructive analgesic.

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