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The author of the groundbreaking Atlantic cover story What ISIS Really Wants, a piece which combined excellent research skills with superb journalism and transformed the debate over Islamic State, has now written arguably the best ever account of the strategy, psychology, and theology driving the Islamic State. Graeme Wood is one of the world’s most intellectually gifted journalists. Tens of thousands of men and women have left comfortable, privileged lives to join the Islamic State and kill for it. To them, its violence is beautiful and holy, and the caliphate a fulfillment of prophecy and the only place on earth where they can live and die as Muslims. The Way of the Strangers is an intimate journey into the minds of the Islamic State’s true believers. From the streets of Cairo to the mosques of London to the cafes of Melbourne, Graeme Wood interviews supporters, recruiters, and sympathisers of the group to produce this beautifully written, must-read book.
Very few books have even dared to mention the clandestine and deeply disturbing nature of Australia’s ultra-secretive national security organisations. Your worst dreams may just be true. Forty-six years after her father suddenly disappears, Australian intelligence analyst Anthea Tonelli lies in a bed at Balmoral Military Hospital, thinking of the many colossal mistakes her military and intelligence agencies had made over the years. Stricken with cancer, Anthea is on the verge of losing everything – her marriage, her home, and even her career. Anthea is battling to survive in a corrupt world where her government and judiciary often conspire, and together, hide unbelievable atrocities. Worse yet, she is being manipulated by her husband, Andrew, who has but one wish-to destroy her. But when Anthea discovers hundreds of young intelligence recruits have been tortured and murdered by the Australian military and intelligence agencies, she is devastated beyond belief. Suddenly the beautiful country she has always known has become a place where deception, lies, disappearances, collusion, secret treaties, illicit pacts, illegal billion dollar deals, and organized government crime not only live, but thrive. Now Anthea must decide whom she can trust, before it is too late. Based on a true story researched for over twenty years, Spook Justice examines just how far corruption will go.
With the rise of ISIS and a growing terrorist threat in the West, unprecedented attention has focused on Islam, which despite being the world’s fastest growing religion, is also one of the most misunderstood. In his new book “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World” Senior Fellow with the Brookings Institute Shadi Hamid offers a novel and provocative argument on how Islam is, in fact, “exceptional” in how it relates to politics, with profound implications for how we understand the future of the Middle East. Hamid argues for a new understanding of how Islam and Islamism shape politics by examining different modes of reckoning with the problem of religion and state, including the terrifying—and alarmingly successful—example of ISIS. With unprecedented access to Islamist activists and leaders across the region, Hamid offers a panoramic and ambitious interpretation of the region’s descent into violence. Islamic Exceptionalism is a vital contribution to our understanding of Islam’s past and present, and its outsized role in modern politics. We don’t have to like it, but we have to understand it – because Islam, as a religion and as an idea, will continue to be a force that shapes not just the region, but the West as well in the decades to come.
Paul Beatty has become the first American writer to win the Man Booker prize, for a caustic satire on US racial politics that judges said put him up there with Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift. The 54-year-old Los Angeles-born writer won for The Sellout, a laugh-out-loud novel whose main character wants to assert his African American identity by, outrageously and transgressively, bringing back slavery and segregation. Beatty has admitted readers might find it a difficult book to digest but the historian Amanda Foreman, who chaired this year’s judging panel, said that was no bad thing. “Fiction should not be comfortable,” Foreman said. “The truth is rarely pretty and this is a book that nails the reader to the cross with cheerful abandon … that is why the novel works. While you’re being nailed, you’re being tickled. It is highwire act which he pulls off with tremendous verve and energy and confidence. He never once lets up or pulls his punches. This is somebody writing at the top of their game.”
It always does to ask the simplest of questions: how did we get here? Spooked: The Truth about Intelligence in Australia, shows how, In the wake of the 11th of September 2001 attacks against the Twin Towers, Australia became an extremely active combatant in the war on terror, particularly in the field of legislation. There was a remarkable burst of law making, with the country’s legislative performance eclipsing the relatively paltry performances of the UK, US and Canada, not only in the extent of these efforts in inhibiting the liberties and rights of every Australian, but in their sheer quantity. Dozens of pieces of legislation were passed. Turnbull would soon be following his predecessors, introducing yet more terror laws – a legal and political charade cloaking incompetence and failure with an air of busyness. As security specialist Dr Mark Rix wrote in Spooked, misuse and abuse of information, inscrutable but far-reaching information classification procedures and downright obfuscation had all become key weapons in the counter terrorism arsenal of a democratically elected government. He suggested that instead of a war on terror the legislation created a war on openness and accountability, such were the curbs on transparency and public disclosure.
Wings of the Kite-Hawk is a set of linked journeys into the Australian landscape: its past and its present, its people and its half-remembered secrets. In each chapter, Nicolas Rothwell takes a precursor and follows him. His guides include famous explorers from the past – Leichhardt, Sturt, Strehlow and Giles – as well as artists, anthropologists, rodeo riders and even Hell’s Angels. Vivid characters weave in and out of the story, inspiring journeys through different states of heart and mind: love, loss, friendship, fear. This book, re-issued with a new introduction by renowned travel writer Pico Iyer and a new foreword by the author, is unlike any other written about inland Australia. As much fable as memoir, it resonates with strangeness and bitter-sweetness, with all the hidden patterns and suddenly revealed depths of life.
Citing emails, minutes of meetings, recorded private conversations and memos, Merchants in the Temple paints a picture of a Vatican bureaucracy entrenched in a culture of mismanagement, waste and secrecy. Pope Francis has repeatedly and publicly warned the Roman Curia against engaging in “intrigue, gossip, cliques, favouritism and partiality” and acting more like a royal court than an institution of service. Last Christmas he delivered an infamous dressing down of his closest collaborators, citing the “15 ailments of the Curia” that included living “hypocritical” double lives and suffering from “spiritual Alzheimer’s.” The book details how at a designated time each year, Catholic parishes worldwide take up a special collection known as St. Peter’s Pence, funneling tens of millions of dollars to the Vatican with the aim of aiding the poor and needy. According to confidential files obtained by leading Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, rather than going to aid the poor, most of the cash is used to pay salaries and plug deficits at the Holy See. There is a “black hole” in the St. Peter’s Pence fund, and only a small portion of the cash makes it to those who need it most. Rather, the book documents lavish spending habits, mismanagement and a lack of accountability suggest the offerings are emblematic of larger problems within the ancient city-state in Italy.
For eight years, Bill wasn’t paid to speak in Nigeria for his anti-AIDs projects. Once Hillary became Secretary of State, he got $700,000 for a single talk. In 2000, Bill and Hillary Clinton owed millions of dollars in legal debt. Since then, they’ve earned over $130 million. In Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Business helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. Best selling author Peter Schweizer lifts the lid on where the money came from.
Islamic State stunned the world when it overran an area the size of Great Britain on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border in a matter of weeks and proclaimed the birth of a new Caliphate. In his timely book Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate, one of the Arab world’s most respected journalists Abdel Bari Atwan draws on his unrivaled knowledge of the global jihadi movement and Middle Eastern geopolitics. Based on extensive field research and exclusive interviews with IS insiders, the book outlines the group’s leadership structure, as well as its strategies, tactics, and diverse methods of recruitment. He also shows how the group’s rapid growth has been facilitated by its masterful command of social media platforms, the “dark web,” Hollywood blockbuster-style videos, and even jihadi computer games, producing a powerful paradox where the ambitions of the Middle Ages have reemerged in cyberspace. Islamic State has to be increasingly understood as a nation. Atwan draws a convincing picture of the Islamic State as a well-run organization that combines bureaucratic efficiency and military expertise with a sophisticated use of information technology.
The legal fiction of Terra nullius, that the Australia was an empty land before the arrival of Europeans, has always been one of the country’s greatest scandals. In fact the revered, sacred lands had been carefully tended for many thousands of years by a peoples far more sophisticated than European histories and contemporary difficulties have ever revealed. Dark Emus, by Bruce Pascoe, presents a thesis that challenges Australian history. It has won the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for Book of the Year. Using early explorers’ journals and other evidence, Pascoe argued pre-colonial Aboriginal people were not nomadic hunter-gatherers, but had a democracy that ensured peace across a continent which was extensively farmed, skilfully managed and deeply loved. In accepting the award Pascoe said: “Dark Emu talks about the fact that Aboriginal people were the first people in the world to make bread, 15,000 years in advance of the Egyptians and this is something that we could be proud of. We’ve got the oldest art in the world, we’ve got the oldest tool manufacture in the world, these are important facts – we should all share in our pride that this country was a leader in human development.”
Save Oz Stories is a collection of responses from some of the country’s most highly regarded writers, including David Malouf and Geraldine Brooks, to an Australian Productivity Commission Report which recommends changes to copyright and importation rules which will effectively destroy the $2.2 billion Australian book industry. It adds to a long list of attacks by the Abbott/Turnbull conservative governments on journalism, whistle blowers, actors, artists and writers; essentially on all independent thought and creativity in a once proud, freedom loving country. The totalitarian instincts of the current Australian government defy belief. Esteemed Australian writer Richard Flanagan, who won the Mann Booker Prize Winner for his powerful book Narrow Road to the Deep North, writes: The Abbott and now Turnbull Government’s record drips with a contempt for writers and writing that leaves me in despair. They want to thieve our past work, and, by ending parallel importation restrictions and territorial copyright, destroy any future for Australian writers. You have to ask if, at heart, this is not profoundly political, because the disenfranchisement of the imagination is ever the disempowerment of the individual. There is, after all, both a bitter irony and a profound connection in a government that would condemn the wretched of the earth as illiterate, while hard at work to rob its own people of their culture of words. This is a government that despises books and views with hostility the civilisation they represent. This government, which again, and again, has brought Australia only global shame with its follies of cowardice and cruelty has no right now to destroy such a good in our nation as this: the voice of our experience, the words of our people, the tongue of our hope—our culture of writing. The Australian book industry has united to make digital copies available for free download and paperback copies available for free at Australian bookshops.
Deep in the unforgiving wilds of far western Mongolia, the last remaining Kazakh eagle hunters harness a powerful force of nature. The burkitshi, as they are known in Kazakh, are proud men whose faces reveal the harshness of the beautifully barren landscape they call home. They have an extraordinary bond with the golden eagle, which to them represents the wind, the open space, the isolation and the freedom found at the edge of the world. Australian photographer Palani Mohan has spent years documenting the noble hunters, but says only 60 remain, and fears the ancient tradition could disappear within 20 years.
Attention without feeling is only a report: “Life exists only because of a myriad of synchronicities that bring us to this particular place at this particular moment. In return for such a gift, the only sane response is to glitter in reply. Knowing the fractal geometry of an individual snowflake makes the winter landscape even more of a marvel. Knowing the mosses enriches our knowing of the world. Mosses and other small beings issue an invitation to dwell for a time right at the limits of ordinary perception. All it requires of us is attentiveness. Look in a certain way and a whole new world can be revealed. Learning to see mosses is more like listening than looking. A cursory glance will not do it. Starting to hear a faraway voice or catch a nuance in the quiet subtext of a conversation requires attentiveness, a filtering of all the noise, to catch the music. Mosses are not elevator music; they are the intertwined threads of a Beethoven quartet.” So writes one of the world’s leading botanists, Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her masterwork Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses — an extraordinary celebration of smallness and the grandeur of life, as humble yet surprisingly magical as its subject.
Keep an eye out for the upcoming book Children of the State by Peter van de Voorde, to be published by A Sense of Place Publishing.
Moral Injury is a new field of study looking beyond the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder often suffered by military personnel. It occurs when an individual is asked to do something which breaches their conscience. All recent conflicts have the prerequisites or the potential to cause significant Moral Injury: A government’s decision to involve its forces in unjust wars where either the cause or the conduct is wrong or open to serious conscientious objection, the deployment of forces in pursuit of a mission that is ambiguous with a mandate that is vague; where the translation of political aspirations to military objectives is imprecise or impractical; and when the deployed forces are ill-prepared, poorly structured and inadequately equipped. And when the loss of moral ascendancy within the force reflected in indifference to the rule of law and manifested in an erosion of discipline.
This book is an electrifying investigation of White House lies about the assassination of Osama bin Laden . In 2011, a group of Navy SEALS stormed an enclosure in the Pakistani city of Abbotabad and killed Osama Bin Laden, the man the United States had been chasing since before the devastating attacks of 9/11. The news did much to boost Obama’s first term and played a major part in his re-election victory in the following year. Except the story of that night that was presented to the world was a lie, and the evidence of what actually went on has been covered up. At the same time, the true story of the US’s involvement in the Syrian civil wars has been conducted behind a diplomatic curtain. The White House has turned a blind eye to Turkey’s involvement in stirring up the conflict. Meanwhile, open brutality and ruthless subterfuge-such as the Sarin gas attack on Damascus-has been allowed to go on unpunished. As master investigative journalist Seymour Hersh shows in this explosive book, this was just one of many lies that the world’s leaders now tell us with seeming impunity. How far do these lies go? And what are their purpose?
Racked by public distrust, cowed by government surveillance and powerful corporations, the mainstream media is in crisis. Newspapers which flourished for centuries and TV networks that once ruled the world are failing. Andrew Fowler’s The War on Journalism tells how the media helped write its own epitaph. Drawing on personal interviews and his background in investigative journalism, Ander Fowler traces the decline of the culture of truth bringing in his new book The War on Journalism: Media Moguls, Whistleblowers and the Price of Freedom. It’s a tale of sackings, cutbacks and self-censoring editors, deals, threats and government standover tactics. Alongside tabloids like the News of the World, notorious for phone hacking, giants like the BBC, Australia’s ABC, The Washington Post and The New York Times, The Guardian and Le Monde come under fire.
Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers?
The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against big government led to the ascendancy of a broad-based conservative movement. But as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. The network has brought together some of the richest people on the planet. Their core beliefs—that taxes are a form of tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom—are sincerely held. But these beliefs also advance their personal and corporate interests: Many of their companies have run afoul of federal pollution, worker safety, securities, and tax laws
The latest smash hit from J.K. Rowling, the special script edition of the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. It is the eighth Story. Nineteen Years Later.
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On a beautiful, balmy evening in Cuba in 2007, David Hicks walked out of Guantanamo Bay, in that moment ceasing to be a detainee of the United States and regaining his rights as an Australian citizen. Watching on was the man who had fought for four long years for Hicks’s right to go home: Major Michael Mori. Having grown up as an all-American boy, Mori joined the US Marine Corps as an eighteen-year-old, determined to give his life order and to serve the country he held dear. After training and serving as a military lawyer, he accepted a position as a defence counsel for the military commissions set up in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And then David Hicks’s case file landed on his desk.
From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama’s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the state’s power over life and death. The cutting edge journalistic team at The Intercept expose the shocking dystopian powers the United States and President Obama in particular have so roundly abused. The Democratic president, they say, has gotten away with crimes and repressive policies that liberals never would have let a Republican carry out. In 2015 alone, the U.S. dropped at least 23,144 bombs on six Muslim-majority countries, many in which it has not officially declared war. Among the many revelations in the book is that during a five-month period in a U.S. program in northeastern Afghanistan called Operation Haymaker, almost 90 percent of people killed in drone strikes were not the intended targets.
In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet an anonymous source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels. That source turned out to be the 29-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency’s widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security and information privacy. As the arguments rage on and the government considers various proposals for reform, it is clear that we have yet to see the full impact of Snowden’s disclosures. Recently, via video link from Moscow, Edward Snowden joined MIT professor Noam Chomsky and The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald for a discussion on privacy rights hosted by the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The panel was moderated by Nuala O’Connor, the president of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Highly recommended, click below to watch the discussion.
Travels with My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road tells how an Australian nurse become an award-winning international travel writer and photographer. A Sense of Place Publishing is proud to have helped bring this wonderful book to a broader audience.
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The whole national capital of Australia could become a movie set if an enterprising director picks up this eminently filmable novel. In it, politicians and journos have their real names; clandestine meetings take place in cafes we all know; suburban streets and bush roads are recognisable. Then on a cold July night a sudden death outside the Yacht Club sends ripples way beyond Yarralumla. Jo, a progressive Australian National University academic, is researching “the unfair sex”, the bureaucracy’s resistance to women in senior positions and its hostility to men who seek to promote them. Jo farewells her Yugoslavian lover outside the Hyatt, then drives away and apparently shoots herself in the head. This is the hinge on which the novel swings – and swing it does in early 1990s Canberra. Young professional women are shaking the barricades and remaking the rules, the written ones at least. Their affairs, public and private, domestic and foreign, propel an investigation that is conducted with fixed phones, faxes and no email. Lake George still “glistens in the sun”. But people-smuggling, gun-running and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation malfeasance are rife in Canberra, so it is hardly out of date.
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Australia is in the grip of an election campaign, with an increasingly disengaged and disillusioned population calling down a curse on both their houses. Drawing on more than sixty on-the-record interviews with all the major players, Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation Paul Kelly writes with a keen eye and fearless determination. His central theme is that Australian politics has entered a crisis of the system that, unless corrected, will diminish the lives of all Australians, that in many senses politics and the machinery of government no longer serve the people. “The business of politics is too decoupled from the interests of Australia and its citizens,” Kelly writes. “This decoupling constitutes the Australian crisis.” Triumph and Demise is the inside account of the hopes, achievements and bitter failures of the Labor Government from 2007 to 2013. Nobody knows all the major players in Australian politics in the same way author Paul Kelly does.
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A Sense of Place Publishing brings you a quirky new Australian detective novel, Bloody Colonials by Stafford Sanders. The book pits a canny convict sleuth against the ruthless empire-builders of an early penal settlement – with exciting and amusing results. Set among the high cliffs and rugged bushland of the Australian coast, Bloody Colonials unleashes detective Seamus “Shameless” Halloran into a brave new world of mystery and intrigue, action, romance, dark humour, poignancy, irony – and barbed satire on power, pretension and the seeds of modern Australia.
Through an extremely curious series of circumstances, A Sense of Place Publishing encountered Michelle Desparquet, living on an island which he has specifically asked not be revealed. Now in his mid-80s, the author of Abduction to the 9th Planet remains remarkable, even if his first flush of fame has faded. He still displays an ebullent love of life, a fondness for Scotch and a good laugh, is a chess champion in his community, and amongst some of the islanders is regarded as a totem of good luck, someone to be touched or rubbed up against, so that the divinity or good luck which is so much part of him will rub off. He is a kind of living good luck charm. To this day he maintains that the story he told in Abduction to the Ninth Planet is entirely true. What makes a cult novel remains a mystery; time, circumstance, good luck, talent, and other elements intangible, or the world would be full of them. At one time Abduction to the Ninth Planet was outselling The Celestine Prophecy, a book which argued that humanity was gpoing through a fundamental shift in consciousness. Michelle Desparquet still maintins that the story he tells, of being abducted by advanced extra-terrestial beings, is simply a retelling of events which truly happened. With mankind’s knowledge of the universe expanding by the day, the claim that mankind is alone in the universe has come to seem increasingly bizarre.
Mark Latham is one of the greatest Prime Ministers Australia never had; unpredictable, brilliant, personable, closer to the electorate and the common aspirations of the Australian people than almost any prominent politician before or since. He was roundly defeated by conservative Prime Minister John Howard in 2004, and left politics the following year, crushed both by the internal complexities, hypocrisies and multiple incompetencies of the Labor Party; and by his own sometimes difficult personality. Latham at Large is an entertaining, thought-provoking, sometimes scathing, often humorous collection from a man who is not afraid to speak his mind. There is no one else like Mark Latham in Australian public life.
The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities is a rivetting firsthand account of a young British civilian woman, Emma Sky, who volunteered to go to Iraq immediately after the invasion in 2003, and within weeks found herself in the role of Governor of Kirkuk – the most dangerous place on Earth. As a Brit, a woman and a liberal, Emma Sky’s presence and position in Iraq following the invasion in 2003 is the stuff of fiction. Shortly after the coalition troops went in, Sky, an Arabist, volunteered to go to assist the Coalition Provisional Authority in the occupation. Alone, she made her way to Baghdad, was told they had enough people, so travelled north, to Kirkuk. Within days she became the most senior civilian there, Kirkuk’s lady governor.
The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Rainforest, by admired science journalist David Quammen, tells the real story how AIDS originated with a virus in a chimpanzee, jumped to one human, and then infected more than 60 million people in one of history’s most devastating pandemics. Described as a frightening and fascinating masterpiece, The Chimp and the River illustrates how the origin of AIDS is very different from what most of us think we know.
By May of 2015 the security situation in Australia had deteriorated to an alarming extent. The authorities were scared witless another terror attack was imminent. For more than 12 months they had been putting out spot fires across the country, in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, along with other regional and state centres. The increasing radicalisation of the Muslim minority, fanned by the rise of the single most powerful religious movement in modern times, the Islamic State, posed a major threat to the safety of Australian citizens. And as any firefighter could tell you, there were only so many spot fires you could put out before the forest ignited. The dreadful security situation in Australia had been fanned by a lunatic decision by the government to once again join America, the Great Satan as the Islamic community regarded them, in invading Muslim lands aka Iraq. There was no reason to do so; no treaty obligation, no security situation which could justify the invasion of sovereign lands. The Muslim minority was incensed by the inhumane killing of mujaheddin by high-tech drones launched from Australian fighter jets. They were incensed by the Australian governments labeling of some of their members as un-Australian, when in many ways, their regular attendance at mosque, their faithfulness to their wives, the good care they took of their children, the fact they did not smoke, drink or take drugs and had strong ties with their communities, all marked them as far better citizens than many members of the decrepit society they saw around them. The mishandling of the situation by the Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who repeatedly ignored expert advice on how to deal with a religious minority with which he clearly had no affinity or understanding, had ramped the terror threat through the roof. The entire devolving security situation was set against a rapid collapse in Australian society, which had seen a once proud, optimistic, larrikin country become impoverished, dispirited, and broken, the streets of Sydney, its major city, more like walking through a Mad Max movie than a major city, the only difference being the black birds were replaced by squawking seagulls from the nearby beaches; just as eery, just as apocryphal in their mournful cries.
Algorithms can learn. Algorithms can acquire bias. In The Black Box Society: How Secret Algorithms Control Money and Information, eminent Law Professor Frank Pasquale exposes the invasive technology running our lives. In The Age of Terror these systems can be used to extend the control of dark agencies into every corner of our lives. Every day, corporations are connecting the dots about our personal behavior-silently scrutinizing clues left behind by our work habits and Internet use. The data compiled and portraits created are incredibly detailed and invasive. But who connects the dots about what firms are doing with this information? The Black Box Society argues that we all need to be able to do so-and to set limits on how big data affects our lives.