Henry Abbott

A thought-provoking exploration of how basketball—and the values rooted in the game—can solve today’s most pressing issues, from the professor behind the popular New York University course NBA and WNBA superstars, Hall of Fame players, coaches, and leading cultural figures have all dropped by New York University Professor David Hollander’s course “How Basketball Can Save the World” course to debate and give insights on how the underlying principles of the game can provide a new blueprint for addressing our diverse challenges and showing what’s possible beyond the court. Now, in How Basketball Can Save the World, Hollander takes us out of the classroom to present a beautiful new philosophy with contributions by many of his past guests and based on values inherent to basketball, such as inclusion and the balancing of individual success with the needs of the collective. These principles move us beyond conflict and confusion toward a more harmonious and meaningful future: Positionless-ness: In basketball, players aren’t siloed into just one position or responsibility. In life, we can learn to be more adaptive to the challenges we face by embracing a positionless mindset.Human Alchemy: We talk a lot about team chemistry, but team alchemy means the creation of something totally new—a team far greater than the sum of its parts.Sanctuary: Basketball offers players a critical space to feel safe, free, and expressive. Fostering similar spaces in the real world can encourage people to be their best, happiest, and most productive selves.Transcendence: Basketball is about defying gravity, becoming weightless, and flying higher than anyone ever has before. By seeking out this principle, we can elevate ourselves and those around us to a new plane of experience. Whether you’re a seasoned veteran of the game or have never set foot on a court, How Basketball Can Save the World will empower you to become more resilient, tolerant, and wise in your relationship with yourself, others, and the world around you.

In a world increasingly ruled by numbers and algorithms, award-winning journalist Chris Jones makes a compelling case for a more personal approach to analytical thinking​. THE EYE TEST is a necessary course correction, a call for a more balanced, personal approach to problem-solving. Award-winning journalist Chris Jones makes the case for the human element—for what smart, practiced, devoted people can bring to situations that have proved resistant to analytics. Jones shares what he’s learned from an army of extraordinary talents, including some of the best doctors, executives, athletes, meteorologists, magicians, designers, astrophysicists, and detectives in the world. There are lessons in their mastery. Of course, there is a place for numbers in decision-making. No baseball player should be judged by his jawline. But the analytics revolution sparked by Michael Lewis’s Moneyball now threatens to replace one kind of absurdity with another. We have developed a blind faith in the machine, the way a driver overly reliant on his GPS might be led off the edge of a cliff. Not all statistical analysis is sound. Algorithms aren’t infallible, and spreadsheets aren’t testaments. Trust in them too much, and they risk becoming instruments of destruction rather than understanding. Worse, data’s supremacy in our daily lives has led to a dangerous strain of anti-expertise: the belief that every problem is a math problem, and anyone given access to the right information will find the right answer. That taste doesn’t matter, experience doesn’t matter, creativity doesn’t matter. That we can’t believe our eyes, no matter how much they’ve seen. THE EYE TEST serves as a reminder that if beauty is less of a virtue in the age of analytics, a good eye still is. This book is a celebration of our greatest beholders—and an absorbing, inspiring guide for how you might become one, too.

Ann Kerr’s is a personal account of an American family during the most tumultuous years of Beirut’s political strife. It begins with the tragic assassination of her husband Malcolm Kerr, one of the most respected scholars of Middle East studies, in 1984, seventeen months after he became president of the American University of Beirut. She retraces in detail the events that brought them to the Middle East, and reaches back into her childhood to describe a lifelong affinity for Lebanon. For a young American woman caring for a family in Lebanon and Egypt, life was like nothing she had ever known, but Ann Kerr approached it with a sense of adventure, which would help her deal with the beauty, chaos, and the ultimate horror of life during the country’s most volatile years of the last three decades. The personal saga of her family and the events surrounding her husband’s untimely death merge with the political episodes that have shaped U.S.-Arab relations since World War II.