Böcker av Amanda Ripley

It was 8.46 a.m. on 9/11 when Elia Zedeno, who had worked in the World Trade Center for twenty-one years, heard a booming explosion and felt the building lurch violently to the south.

How do other countries create ';smarter' kids? What is it like to be a child in the world's new education superpowers? The Smartest Kids in the World ';gets well beneath the glossy surfaces of these foreign cultures and manages to make our own culture look newly strange....The question is whether the startling perspective provided by this masterly book can also generate the will to make changes' (The New York Times Book Review).In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems theyve never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words, and to thrive in the modern economy. Inspired to find answers for our own children, author and Time magazine journalist Amanda Ripley follows three Americans embedded in these countries for one year. Kim, fifteen, raises $10,000 so she can move from Oklahoma to Finland; Eric, eighteen, trades his high-achieving Minnesota suburb for a booming city in South Korea; and Tom, seventeen, leaves a historic Pennsylvania village for Poland. Through these young informants, Ripley meets battle-scarred reformers, sleep-deprived zombie students, and a teacher who earns $4 million a year. Their stories, along with groundbreaking research into learning in other cultures, reveal a pattern of startling transformation: none of these countries had many smart kids a few decades ago. Things had changed. Teaching had become more rigorous; parents had focused on things that mattered; and children had bought into the promise of education.

In her quest to discern how people may react in the face of emergency or disaster, Ripley traces human responses to some of recent history's epic disasters, turns to leading brain scientists, and even steps into the dark corners of her own imagination.

When we are baffled by the insanity of the ';other side'in our politics, at work, or at homeit's because we aren't seeing how the conflict itself has taken over.That's what ';high conflict' does. It's the invisible hand of our time. And it's different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That's good conflict, and it's a necessary force that pushes us to be better people. High conflict is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In this state, the brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority, and everything we do to try to end the conflict, usually makes it worse. Eventually, we can start to mimic the behavior of our adversaries, harming what we hold most dear. In this ';compulsively readable' (Evan Osnos, National Book Award-winning author) book, New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflictand how they break free. Our journey begins in California, where a world-renowned conflict expert struggles to extract himself from a political feud. Then we meet a Chicago gang leader who dedicates his life to a vendettaonly to realize, years later, that the story he'd told himself about the conflict was not quite true. Next, we travel to Colombia, to find out whether thousands of people can be nudged out of high conflict at scale. Finally, we return to America to see what happens when a group of liberal Manhattan Jews and conservative Michigan corrections officers choose to stay in each other's homes in order to understand one another better, even as they continue to disagree. All these people, in dramatically different situations, were drawn into high conflict by similar forces, including conflict entrepreneurs, humiliation, and false binaries. But ultimately, all of them found ways to transform high conflict into good conflict, the kind that made them better people. They rehumanized and recategorized their opponents, and they revived curiosity and wonder, even as they continued to fight for what they knew was right. People do escape high conflict. Individualseven entire communitiescan short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is an ';insightful and enthralling' (The New York Times Book Review) bookand a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.