Central Skagit Library District

In the 1950s and 1960s, white officials in communities across the country opted to drain their public swimming pools rather than integrate them. Generations later, America still hasn't recognized that racism has a cost for everyone. But our future can look different. The author's specialty is the American economy - and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the 2008 financial crisis to rising student debt to collapsing public...

"Native rural Virginian and now Chief technology officer at Microsoft, Kevin Scott, discusses the future of AI and how it can be realistically used to promote growth even as the job landscape shifts"-- "There are two prevailing stories about AI: for heartland low- and middle-skill workers, a dystopian tale of steadily increasing job destruction; for urban knowledge workers and the professional class, a utopian tale of enhanced productivity and convenience....

California -- always a fascinating marriage of opposite extremes -- is at a cross-roads in agriculture. Many Californians are struggling to fend off overdevelopment and the loss of farming lands and traditions while embracing innovative visions of agricultural sustainability. At the same time, California is where fast food was born and a center of the biotechnology industry and large corporate agribusiness. The debates raging in California over issues...

"From a Nobel Prize-winning pioneer in environmental economics, an innovative account of how and why "green thinking" could cure many of the world's most serious problems-from global warming to pandemics Solving the world's biggest problems-from climate catastrophe and pandemics to wildfires and corporate malfeasance-requires, more than anything else, coming up with new ways to manage the powerful interactions that surround us. For carbon emissions...

Imagine a world where ubiquitous connectivity joins all global citizens to the people, products and services they need - anytime, anyplace and anywhere. This vision of the not-too-distant future is presented in a groundbreaking book titled, Anywhere: how global connectivity is revolutionizing the way we do business, by author Emily Nagle Green. Ms. Green is President and CEO of Yankee Group, a Boston Massachusetts based technology research and consulting...

Overview: Since its publication by Sierra Club Books in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today's agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land-from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly,...

"The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core "free market" ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems. In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option. In This Changes...

An essential documentary, Brett Story's incisive, investigative and wide-ranging THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES is an examination of the prison and its place - social, economic and psychological - in American society. Filmmaker Brett Story excavates the often-unseen links and connections that prisons - and our system of mass incarceration - have on communities and industries all around us; from a blazing California mountainside where female prisoners...