Russell S Magazine

In a very short time America has realized that global warming poses real challenges to the nation's future. The Agile City engages the fundamental question: what to do about it? Journalist and urban analyst James S. Russell argues that we'll more quickly slow global warming-and blunt its effects-by retrofitting cities, suburbs, and towns. The Agile City shows that change undertaken at the building and community level can reach carbon-reduction goals rapidly. Adapting buildings (39 percent of greenhouse-gas emission) and communities (slashing the 33 percent of transportation related emissions) offers numerous other benefits that tax gimmicks and massive alternative-energy investments can't match. Rapidly improving building techniques can readily cut carbon emissions by half, and some can get to zero. These cuts can be affordably achieved in the windshield-shattering heat of the desert and the bone-chilling cold of the north. Intelligently designing our towns could reduce marathon commutes and child chauffeuring to a few miles or eliminate it entirely. Agility, Russell argues, also means learning to adapt to the effects of climate change, which means redesigning the obsolete ways real estate is financed; housing subsidies are distributed; transportation is provided; and water is obtained, distributed and disposed of. These engines of growth have become increasingly more dysfunctional both economically and environmentally. The Agile City highlights tactics that create multiplier effects, which means that ecologically driven change can shore-up economic opportunity, can make more productive workplaces, and can help revive neglected communities. Being able to look at multiple effects and multiple benefits of political choices and private investments is essential to assuring wealth and well-being in the future. Green, Russell writes, grows the future.

Intolerance and bigotry lie at the heart of all human suffering. So claims Bertrand Russell at the outset of "In Praise of Idleness," a collection of essays in which he espouses the virtues of cool reflection and free enquiry; a voice of calm in a world of maddening unreason. With characteristic clarity and humour, Russell surveys the social and political consequences of his beliefs. From a devastating critique of the ancestry of fascism to a vehement defense of 'useless' knowledge, with consideration given to everything from insect pests to the human soul, " In Praise of Idleness " is a tour de force that only Bertrand Russell could perform.

In June 2010, the editors of The New Yorker announced to widespread media coverage their selection of "20 Under 40"—the young fiction writers who are, or will be, central to their generation. The magazine published twenty stories by this stellar group of writers over the course of the summer. They are now collected for the first time in one volume. The range of voices is extraordinary. There is the lyrical realism of Nell Freudenberger, Philipp Meyer, C. E. Morgan, and Salvatore Scibona; the satirical comedy of Joshua Ferris and Gary Shteyngart; and the genre-bending tales of Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Téa Obreht. David Bezmozgis and Dinaw Mengestu offer clear eyed portraits of immigration and identity; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, ZZ Packer, and Wells Tower offer voice-driven, idiosyncratic narratives. Then there are the haunting sociopolitical stories of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Daniel Alarcón, and Yiyun Li, and the metaphysical fantasies of Chris Adrian, Rivka Galchen, and Karen Russell. Each of these writers reminds us why we read. And each is aiming for greatness: fighting to get and to hold our attention in a culture that is flooded with words, sounds, and pictures; fighting to surprise, to entertain, to teach, and to move not only us but generations of readers to come. A landmark collection, 20 Under 40 stands as a testament to the vitality of fiction today.

The family history of the Russells of Georgia is a saga of the Westward Movement during the middle fifty years of the nineteenth century. The "Russell boys," as prospectors and miners, moved with the frontier as it followed fresh discoveries of gold, from Georgia to California to Colorado. Then, after the interlude of the Civil War, they settled in the new territories, turning their abilities and ruggedness of character to the development of careers on other frontiers—ranching, farming, land development, medicine—in Montana, Colorado, and Texas. Elma Dill Russell Spencer, a descendant of one of these unusual brothers, relates their story as she learned it from family tradition transmitted by Grandma Russell, from family letters, from public documents, and from historical accounts of the exciting era. The reader of her narrative sees the evolution of Western society in the vast wasteland of mountain and prairie from the viewpoint of the people who were making history, people too engrossed in their own problems to realize the far-reaching significance of their achievement. The reader sees the struggle to wrest gold from the streams and hills with primitive tools and techniques; the development of tent villages into populous towns affording most of the comforts of the East; the evolution of a code of mining laws, of protection from violence and crime; the building of schools; the emergence of sectional problems and divided loyalties; the Civil War, mostly through noncombatants' eyes; the progressive changes in transportation, until the railroads tied the West to the East. The reader also encounters Indians, who ride in and out of these pages, and other fascinating types of characters associated with "the wild, varied, and always unpredictable" frontier. The odyssey of the Russell brothers as they struggle home to Georgia from Union-sympathizing Denver is particularly full of action, with tense moments in the account of narrowly escaped death—at the hands of Indians, through the ravages of disease, and from the enmity of Yankee foes. This book was originally published as Gold Country in 1958; the University of Texas Press edition was completely revised and first published in 1966.

William Clark Russell wrote more than forty nautical novels. Immensely popular in their time, his works were admired by contemporary writers, such as Conan Doyle, Stevenson and Meredith, while Swinburne, considered him 'the greatest master of the sea, living or dead'. Based on extensive archival research, Nash explores this remarkable career.