Tuesday, October 12, 2021 @ 7pm PT
SAUL GRIFFITH presents ELECTRIFY:
AN OPTIMIST'S PLAYBOOK FOR OUR CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE
in conversation with LAURA FRASER
Tickets available now!
Please note:
> This event is free and all ages, but registration is required.
> You can pre-order **signed copies** of Electrify here. We are happy to ship worldwide. International postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact events@booksmith.com.
Climate change is a planetary emergency. We have to do something now—but what? Saul Griffith has a plan. In Electrify, Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint—optimistic but feasible—for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. Griffith's plan can be summed up simply: electrify everything. He explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households to make this possible. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, will stay and fight for the future.
Griffith, an engineer and inventor, calls for grid neutrality, ensuring that households, businesses, and utilities operate as equals; we will have to rewrite regulations that were created for a fossil-fueled world, mobilize industry as we did in World War II, and offer low-interest “climate loans.” Griffith's plan doesn't rely on big, not-yet-invented innovations, but on thousands of little inventions and cost reductions. We can still have our cars and our houses—but the cars will be electric and solar panels will cover our roofs. For a world trying to bounce back from a pandemic and economic crisis, there is no other project that would create as many jobs—up to 25 million, according to one economic analysis. Is this politically possible? We can change politics along with everything else.
Saul Griffith, inventor, entrepreneur, and engineer, is founder of Rewiring America, a nonprofit dedicated to decarbonizing America by electrifying everything, and founder and chief scientist at Otherlab. He was a recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2007.
Laura Fraser is a journalist and author of three books of nonfiction, including the NYT-bestselling memoir, An Italian Affair. As founder and editorial director of Shebooks, she published 75 short ebooks by women before selling the company to Shewrites Press. She lives around the corner from the Booksmith and launched all three of her books here. She's also interviewed several authors for the Booksmith. Lately, she has been collaborating with Saul Griffith and Rewiring America, the organization he founded. So while she is not objective about the material in Saul's new book, she is well-acquainted with it.
Please note:
> This event is free and all ages, but registration is required.
> You can pre-order **signed copies** of Electrify here. We are happy to ship worldwide. International postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact events@booksmith.com.
SAUL GRIFFITH presents ELECTRIFY:
AN OPTIMIST'S PLAYBOOK FOR OUR CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE
in conversation with LAURA FRASER
Tickets available now!
Please note:
> This event is free and all ages, but registration is required.
> You can pre-order **signed copies** of Electrify here. We are happy to ship worldwide. International postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact events@booksmith.com.
Climate change is a planetary emergency. We have to do something now—but what? Saul Griffith has a plan. In Electrify, Griffith lays out a detailed blueprint—optimistic but feasible—for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. Griffith's plan can be summed up simply: electrify everything. He explains exactly what it would take to transform our infrastructure, update our grid, and adapt our households to make this possible. Billionaires may contemplate escaping our worn-out planet on a private rocket ship to Mars, but the rest of us, Griffith says, will stay and fight for the future.
Griffith, an engineer and inventor, calls for grid neutrality, ensuring that households, businesses, and utilities operate as equals; we will have to rewrite regulations that were created for a fossil-fueled world, mobilize industry as we did in World War II, and offer low-interest “climate loans.” Griffith's plan doesn't rely on big, not-yet-invented innovations, but on thousands of little inventions and cost reductions. We can still have our cars and our houses—but the cars will be electric and solar panels will cover our roofs. For a world trying to bounce back from a pandemic and economic crisis, there is no other project that would create as many jobs—up to 25 million, according to one economic analysis. Is this politically possible? We can change politics along with everything else.
Saul Griffith, inventor, entrepreneur, and engineer, is founder of Rewiring America, a nonprofit dedicated to decarbonizing America by electrifying everything, and founder and chief scientist at Otherlab. He was a recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2007.
Laura Fraser is a journalist and author of three books of nonfiction, including the NYT-bestselling memoir, An Italian Affair. As founder and editorial director of Shebooks, she published 75 short ebooks by women before selling the company to Shewrites Press. She lives around the corner from the Booksmith and launched all three of her books here. She's also interviewed several authors for the Booksmith. Lately, she has been collaborating with Saul Griffith and Rewiring America, the organization he founded. So while she is not objective about the material in Saul's new book, she is well-acquainted with it.
Please note:
> This event is free and all ages, but registration is required.
> You can pre-order **signed copies** of Electrify here. We are happy to ship worldwide. International postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact events@booksmith.com.
Thursday, October 14, 2021 @ 6pm PT
DAVID LIVINGSTONE SMITH presents MAKING MONSTERS:
THE UNCANNY POWER OF DEHUMANIZATION
Tickets available now!
Please note:
> This event is free and all ages, but registration is required.
> You can order copies of Making Monsters here. We are happy to ship worldwide. International postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact events@booksmith.com.
> Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferrable.
“I wouldn’t have accepted that they were human beings. You would see an infant who’s just learning to smile, and it smiles at you, but you still kill it.” So a Hutu man explained to an incredulous researcher, when asked to recall how he felt slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Such statements are shocking, yet we recognize them; we hear their echoes in accounts of genocides, massacres, and pogroms throughout history. How do some people come to believe that their enemies are monsters, and therefore easy to kill?
In Making Monsters David Livingstone Smith offers a poignant meditation on the philosophical and psychological roots of dehumanization. Drawing on harrowing accounts of lynchings, Smith establishes what dehumanization is and what it isn’t. When we dehumanize our enemy, we hold two incongruous beliefs at the same time: we believe our enemy is at once subhuman and fully human. To call someone a monster, then, is not merely a resort to metaphor—dehumanization really does happen in our minds. Turning to an abundance of historical examples, Smith explores the relationship between dehumanization and racism, the psychology of hierarchy, what it means to regard others as human beings, and why dehumanizing others transforms them into something so terrifying that they must be destroyed.
Meticulous but highly readable, Making Monsters suggests that the process of dehumanization is deeply seated in our psychology. It is precisely because we are all human that we are vulnerable to the manipulations of those trading in the politics of demonization and violence.
David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England in Maine. He has published nine books, including On Inhumanity and Less Than Human, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for contributions to the understanding of racism and appreciation of diversity.
Please note:
> This event is free and all ages, but registration is required.
> You can order copies of Making Monsters here. We are happy to ship worldwide. International postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact events@booksmith.com.
DAVID LIVINGSTONE SMITH presents MAKING MONSTERS:
THE UNCANNY POWER OF DEHUMANIZATION
Tickets available now!
Please note:
> This event is free and all ages, but registration is required.
> You can order copies of Making Monsters here. We are happy to ship worldwide. International postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact events@booksmith.com.
> Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferrable.
“I wouldn’t have accepted that they were human beings. You would see an infant who’s just learning to smile, and it smiles at you, but you still kill it.” So a Hutu man explained to an incredulous researcher, when asked to recall how he felt slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Such statements are shocking, yet we recognize them; we hear their echoes in accounts of genocides, massacres, and pogroms throughout history. How do some people come to believe that their enemies are monsters, and therefore easy to kill?
In Making Monsters David Livingstone Smith offers a poignant meditation on the philosophical and psychological roots of dehumanization. Drawing on harrowing accounts of lynchings, Smith establishes what dehumanization is and what it isn’t. When we dehumanize our enemy, we hold two incongruous beliefs at the same time: we believe our enemy is at once subhuman and fully human. To call someone a monster, then, is not merely a resort to metaphor—dehumanization really does happen in our minds. Turning to an abundance of historical examples, Smith explores the relationship between dehumanization and racism, the psychology of hierarchy, what it means to regard others as human beings, and why dehumanizing others transforms them into something so terrifying that they must be destroyed.
Meticulous but highly readable, Making Monsters suggests that the process of dehumanization is deeply seated in our psychology. It is precisely because we are all human that we are vulnerable to the manipulations of those trading in the politics of demonization and violence.
David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England in Maine. He has published nine books, including On Inhumanity and Less Than Human, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for contributions to the understanding of racism and appreciation of diversity.
Please note:
> This event is free and all ages, but registration is required.
> You can order copies of Making Monsters here. We are happy to ship worldwide. International postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact events@booksmith.com.