San Antonio College Library

"How is the West Coast offense like quantum mechanics? How does the shape of the football invoke chaos theory? What lessons did Vince Lombardi glean from the brain of Sir Isaac Newton and the beautiful mind of John Nash? Should the NFL ban helmets? Why, in defiance of mathematics, does a coach almost never go for it on fourth down? The answers to these and dozens of other physics questions determine the outcome of every football game played in America,...

"In her foreword to Science Next, Elizabeth Edwards wrote of science as a tool for social progress: "Innovation is not simply the abstract victory of knowledge [or] the research that gave me years to live; the next science can advance human flourishing and serve the common good. That's the kind of world I want to leave for my children, and for yours." With these words, she joined a tradition that goes back to America's founders, who saw America itself...

"In Panic at the Pump, Meg Jacobs shows how a succession of crises beginning with the 1973 Arab oil embargo prompted American politicians to seek energy independence, and how their failure to do so shaped the world we live in. When the crisis hit, the Democratic Party was divided, with older New Deal liberals who prized access to affordable energy squaring off against young environmentalists who pushed for conservation. Meanwhile, conservative Republicans...

From kindergarteners to high-schoolers, millions of American students are being pressured to perform in ways that make them less intellectually flexible, creative, and responsive to today's world. In the documentary Race to Nowhere, Vicki Abeles identified a widespread problem in our nation's schools: as students race against each other to have constantly higher grades, better test scores, and more AP courses than their classmates, they are irreparably...

"In 1991, the police were called to East 72nd St. in Manhattan, where a woman's body had fallen from a twelfth-story window. The woman's husband, Herbert Weinstein, soon confessed to having hit and strangled his wife after an argument, then dropping her body out of their apartment window to make it look like a suicide. The 65-year-old Weinstein, a quiet, unassuming retired advertising executive, had no criminal record, no history of violent behavior--not...

Many continue to believe that the United States is a nation of political moderates. In fact, it is a nation divided. It has been so for some time and has grown more so. This book provides a new and historically grounded perspective on the polarization of America, systematically documenting how and why it happened. Polarized presents commonsense benchmarks to measure polarization, draws data from a wide range of historical sources, and carefully assesses...

"In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of...