What We Are Reading Today: The Secret Syllabus

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Updated 06 January 2023
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What We Are Reading Today: The Secret Syllabus

Authors: JAY PHELAN AND TERRY BURNHAM

“The Secret Syllabus” equips students with the tools they need to succeed, revealing the unwritten rules and cultural norms and expectations not included in the official curriculum.
Left to figure out on their own how the academic world works, students frequently stumble, underperform, and miss opportunities. Without mastery of the secret syllabus, too many miss out on the full, rich experience available to them in college.

 

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elephants and Their Fossil Relatives’

Updated 27 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elephants and Their Fossil Relatives’

Authors: Asier Larramendi and Marco P. Ferretti

Today, only three species of elephants survive — the African savanna elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. However, these modern giants represent just a fraction of the vast and diverse order of Proboscidea, which includes not only living elephants but also their many extinct relatives.

Over the past 60 million years, proboscideans have evolved and adapted across five continents, giving rise to an astonishing variety of forms, from the massive, woolly-coated mammoths of the Ice Age to the diminutive, island-dwelling dwarf elephants.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Kenya’ by Charles Hornsby

Updated 26 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Kenya’ by Charles Hornsby

Since independence in 1963, Kenya has survived decades as a functioning nation-state, with regular elections, its borders intact, and without experiencing war or military rule. 

However, the country failed to transcend its colonial past. The political elite’s endless struggle for access to state resources has damaged Kenya’s economy.

In this definitive new history, Charles Hornsby demonstrates how independent Kenya’s politics have been dominated by a struggle to deliver security, impartiality, efficiency and growth, but how the legacies of the past have undermined their achievement, making the long-term future of Kenya far from certain.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Intraterrestrials’ by Karen G. Lloyd

Updated 25 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Intraterrestrials’ by Karen G. Lloyd

Life thrives in the deepest, darkest recesses of Earth’s crust—from methane seeps in the ocean floor to the highest reaches of Arctic permafrost—and it is unlike anything seen on the surface.

“Intraterrestrials” shares what scientists are learning about these strange types of microbial life—and how research expeditions to some of the most extreme locales on the planet are broadening our understanding of what life is and how its earliest forms may have evolved.

Karen Lloyd takes readers on an adventure from the bottom of the ocean through the jungles of Central America to the high-altitude volcanoes of the Andes.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Designing San Francisco’ by Alison Isenberg

Updated 24 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Designing San Francisco’ by Alison Isenberg

“Designing San Francisco” is the untold story of the formative postwar decades when US cities took their modern shape amid clashing visions of the future.

In this pathbreaking and richly illustrated book, Alison Isenberg shifts the focus from architects and city planners—those most often hailed in histories of urban development and design—to the unsung artists, activists, and others who played pivotal roles in rebuilding San Francisco between the 1940s and the 1970s.


What We Are Reading Today: Supply Chain Justice by Mary Bosworth

Updated 23 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Supply Chain Justice by Mary Bosworth

In the UK’s fully outsourced “immigration detainee escorting system,” private sector security employees detain, circulate and deport foreign national citizens. Run and organized like a supply chain, this system dehumanizes those who are detained and deported, treating them as if they were packages to be moved from place to place and relying on poorly paid, minimally trained staff to do so. In “Supply Chain Justice,” Mary Bosworth offers the first empirically grounded, scholarly analysis of the British detention and deportation system. Drawing on four years of extensive ethnographic research, Bosworth examines what keeps the system in place and whether it might be effectively challenged.
Told by a senior manager that “this is a logistics business,” Bosworth documents how the public and private sectors have built a supply chain in which people’s humanity is transformed both symbolically and tangibly through administrative processes and bureaucracy into monetized, measurable units.
Like all logistics, the system has failure built into it.