Marek Kohn

A compelling argument about the importance of using more than one language in today's world In a world that has English as its global language and rapidly advancing translation technology, it's easy to assume that the need to use more than one language will diminish--but Marek Kohn argues that plural language use is more important than ever. In a divided world, it helps us to understand ourselves and others better, to live together better, and to make the most of our various cultures. Kohn, whom the Guardian has called "one of the best science writers we have," brings together perspectives from psychology, evolutionary thought, politics, literature, and everyday experience. He explores how people acquire languages; how they lose them; how they can regain them; how different languages may affect people's perceptions, their senses of self, and their relationships with each other; and how to resolve the fundamental contradiction of languages, that they exist as much to prevent communication as to make it happen.

Four Words for Friend

The Birth of the British Drug Underground

Dope Girls

A fascinating journey through Europe’s old towns, exploring why we treasure them—but also what they hide about a continent’s fraught history Historic quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attract millions of tourists, but the stories they tell about places, peoples, and nations are selective. They are never the whole story. These old towns and their turbulent histories have been key sites in Europe’s ongoing theater of politics and war. Exploring seven old towns, from Frankfurt and Prague to Vilnius in Lithuania, the acclaimed writer Marek Kohn examines how they have been used since the Second World War to conceal political tensions and reinforce certain versions of history. Uncovering hidden stories behind these old and old-seeming façades, Kohn offers us a new understanding of the politics of European history-making—showing how our visits to old towns could promote belonging over exclusion, and empathy over indifference.

A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe

The Stories Old Towns Tell

A Guide for the Incurably Curious

An account of how the human mind evolved. Marek Kohn offers a theory of mind that suggests how our ancestors might have thought, and seen the world, in the absence of language, gods or culture. He relates that ancient heritage to our humanity, and examines the influence of our hominid past on our own behaviour, as creatures who speak, symbolize and create. Central to the book is a meditation on the handaxe, crafted again and again for hundreds of thousands of years by our proto-human ancestors. In his reconstruction of the uses and meanings of the handaxe, Kohn takes the reader into an alien world that is strangely close to our own.

Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind

As We Know it

Marek Kohn examines the resurgent racialism in science in a timely expose. The ideas, which exploit anxieties about race and social breakdown and their defenders, are analysed in this book."

The Return of Racial Science

The Race Gallery

A drug panic. Murder. Terrifying and mysterious black and Chinese immigrants. Dope Kings. Jazz. War. An actress dead of an overdose. Dope Girls is about the transformation of drug use into a national menace. It revolves around the death in 1918, in the last furious stages of the First World War, of Billie Carleton, a West End-musical actress. Its cast of characters includes Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor, and Edgar Manning, a jazz drummer from Jamaica. Around them, in the streets off Shaftesbury Avenue and in Chinatown, swirled a raffish group of seedy and rebellious hedonists. And so the drug problem was born amid a gush of exotic tabloid detail.

The Birth Of The British Drug Underground

Joanna Kavenna

Tim Maughan

Ned Beauman

Matthew De Abaitua

Adam Rothstein

Jane Rogers

Brendan Byrne

The second volume of Arc continues with an issue that wants to peel back the futuristic shine. So we bettered ourselves, had us a couple of revolutions - agricultural, industrial - and then before we knew it our inventions had raised the seas and fried the atmosphere, reshuffled our knowledge and commodified our pleasures; they even stole our privacy. Our lives are good, but not fair at all - and signs are we’re coming to a stormy end. Our masters tell us they’ll figure things out. With predictions and scenarios, models and forecasts, they’ll find a way through the coming storms and shortages. But what if they can’t? What if it’s all moonshine, and they’re just slapping on chromewash to cover their panic and powerlessness? In Chromewash original stories scratch and scuff the oh-so-shiny prediction business. Ned Beauman plays the markets, Jane Rogers puts a market price on identity, Tim Maughan games the art market, and Matthew De Abaitua wonders what happens when creatives get destructive. Also in this issue, Joanna Kavenna learns to mistrust Al Gore’s first-person plural, and M. John Harrison examines the special weapons and tactics of English Heritage. Medical ethicist Peter Hajek’s modest proposal tackles an ageing planet; Adam Rothstein spins a ghost story out of vapourware; Marek Kohn decides that the past has a future, too; and Brendan Byrne recalls the moment modern statecraft went cyberpunk.

Arc 2.2: Chromewash

'An educative and fascinating tale... Kohn is a wonderful writer.' - A.C. Grayling, Literary Review

Natural Selection and the English Imagination

A Reason for Everything

Marek Kohn's Turned Out Nice is nothing less than a portrait of Britain (and Ireland) a hundred years in the future, based on scientific evidence surrounding climate change that is available to us now. Beautifully written, and imbued with a love of these islands' unique landscapes, it will change they way you think about the climate and global warming. It is not an alarmist tract. Kohn is a fiercely honest writer and a biologist by training. He makes it clear that some parts of Britain will be more like the nicer regions of today's Mediterranean. But we will pay a price for this good fortune. Our parks will be arid brown fields; private automobile use will probably be unheard of; water will be severely rationed; significant stretches of our beloved coastline will have been sacrificed to the sea. Floods on these coasts and in certain river valleys will make them uninhabitable. Some of our flora and fauna will have vanished; exotic animals and pests will flourish. Vast numbers of marginalised human migrants will be here. Surveillance and restriction of our movements will be taken for granted. Walking in what is left of 'nature' will be nearly impossible. Terrible summer fires in our upland areas will be commonplace. As the severe flooding in Somerset shows, Turned Out Nice is more relevant than ever: it is a report from the near future that we cannot afford to ignore.

Marek Kohn

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