August global nonfiction: Six new books to read to acquaint yourself with the stories of the world

The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy, Wolfram Eilenberger, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside

The year is 1933. Hannah Arendt escapes Berlin, seeking refuge among the stateless gathering in Paris. Simone de Beauvoir reimagines the dance between consciousness and the world outside in a Rouen café. Ayn Rand labours in Hollywood exile in the novel she believes is destined to reignite the flame of liberty in her adoptive nation. Simone Weil, disenchanted with the revolution's course in Russia, devotes her entire being to the plight of the oppressed. Over the next decade, one of the darkest in Europe’s history, these four philosophers will conceive in parallel ideas that would circle the globe in the second half of the century, reshaping it.

The Visionaries follows in its protagonists’ footsteps from Leningrad to New York, Spain at civil war to France under occupation, as each is uprooted by totalitarianism’s ascendence. It shows them facing the injustices, unfreedom and unfathomable violence of their time as women, refugees, activists, resistance fighters – but above all as thinkers.

Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering AI, Callum Cant, James Muldoon, and Mark Graham

Big Tech has sold us the illusion that artificial intelligence is a frictionless...

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