Search results for ""author andrew potter""

A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 What if David Bowie really was holding the fabric of the universe together? The death of David Bowie in January 2016 was a bad start to a year that got a lot worse: war in Syria, the Zika virus, terrorist attacks in Brussels and Nice, the Brexit vote—and the election of Donald Trump. The end-of-year wraps declared 2016 “the worst … ever.” Four even more troubling years later, the question of our apocalypse had devolved into a tired social media cliché. But when COVID-19 hit, journalist and professor of public policy Andrew Potter started to wonder: what if The End isn’t one big event, but a long series of smaller ones? In On Decline, Potter surveys the current problems and likely future of Western civilization (spoiler: it’s not great). Economic stagnation and the slowing of scientific innovation. Falling birth rates and environmental degradation. The devastating effects of cultural nostalgia and the havoc wreaked by social media on public discourse. Most acutely, the various failures of Western governments in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. If the legacy of the Enlightenment and its virtues—reason, logic, science, evidence—has run its course, how and why has it happened? And where do we go from here?

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Brilliant and still-timely analysis of the implications of technology-driven globalization on everyday life from Canada’s most influential philosophers, reissued in a handsome A List edition, featuring an introduction by Andrew Potter.Originally published in 1969, Technology and Empire offers a brilliant analysis of the implications of technology-driven globalization on everyday life. The author of Lament for a Nation, George Grant has been recognized as one of Canada’s most significant thinkers. In this sweeping essay collection, he reflects on the extent to which technology has shaped our modern culture.

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An explosive rejection of the myth of the counterculture in the most provocative book since No Logo. In this wide-ranging and perceptive work of cultural criticism, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter shatter the central myth of radical political, economic and cultural thinking. The idea of a counterculture – that is, a world outside of the consumer dominated one that encompasses us – pervades everything from the anti-globalisation movement to feminism and environmentalism. And the idea that mocking the system, or trying to ‘jam’ it so it will collapse, they argue, is not only counterproductive but has helped to create the very consumer society that rad icals oppose. In a lively blend of pop culture, history and philosophical analysis, Heath and Potter offer a startlingly clear picture of what a concern for social justice might look like without the confusion of the counterculture obsession with being different.

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