Search results for ""Collective""

Crap. We all have it. Filling drawers. Overflowing bins and baskets. Proudly displayed or stuffed in boxes in basements and garages. Big and small. Metal, fabric, and a whole lot of plastic. So much crap. Abundant cheap stuff is about as American as it gets. And, it turns out these seemingly unimportant consumer goods offer unique insights into ourselves--our values and our desires. In Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America, Wendy A. Woloson takes seriously the history of objects that are often cynically dismissed: things that are not made to last; things we don't really need; things we often don't even really want. Woloson does not mock these ordinary, everyday possessions, but seeks to understand them as a way to understand aspects of ourselves, socially, culturally, and economically: Why do we--as individuals and as a culture--possess these things? Where do they come from? Why do we want them? And what is the true cost of owing them? Woloson tells the history of crap from the late eighteenth century up through today, exploring the many categories of crappy things, including gadgets, knickknacks, novelty goods, mass-produced collectibles, giftware, and variety store merchandise. As Woloson shows, not all crap is crappy in the same way--decorative bric-a-brac, for instance, is crappy in a different way from, say, advertising giveaways, which are differently crappy from commemorative plates. Taking on the full brilliant and depressing array of crappy material goods, the book explores the overlooked corners of the American market and mindset, revealing the complexity of our relationship with commodity culture over time. By studying crap, rather than finely made material objects, Woloson shows us a new way to truly understand ourselves, our national character, and our collective psyche. For all its problems, and despite its disposability, our crap is us.

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As Democrats and Republicans continue to vie for political advantage, Congress remains paralyzed by partisan conflict. That the last two decades have seen some of the least productive Congresses in recent history is usually explained by the growing ideological gulf between the parties, but this explanation misses another fundamental factor influencing the dynamic. In contrast to politics through most of the twentieth century, the contemporary Democratic and Republican parties compete for control of Congress at relative parity, and this has dramatically changed the parties' incentives and strategies in ways that have driven the contentious partisanship characteristic of contemporary American politics. With Insecure Majorities, Frances E. Lee offers a controversial new perspective on the rise of congressional party conflict, showing how the shift in competitive circumstances has had a profound impact on how Democrats and Republicans interact. For nearly half a century, Democrats were the majority party, usually maintaining control of the presidency, the House, and the Senate. Republicans did not stand much chance of winning majority status, and Democrats could not conceive of losing it. Under such uncompetitive conditions, scant collective action was exerted by either party toward building or preserving a majority. Beginning in the 1980s, that changed, and most elections since have offered the prospect of a change of party control. Lee shows, through an impressive range of interviews and analysis, how competition for control of the government drives members of both parties to participate in actions that promote their own party's image and undercut that of the opposition, including the perpetual hunt for issues that can score political points by putting the opposing party on the wrong side of public opinion. More often than not, this strategy stands in the way of productive bipartisan cooperation and it is also unlikely to change as long as control of the government remains within reach for both parties.

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Properly analyzed, the collective mythological and religious writings of humanity reveal that around 1500 BC, a comet swept perilously close to Earth, triggering widespread natural disasters and threatening the destruction of all life before settling into solar orbit as Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor. Sound implausible? Well, from 1950 until the late 1970s, a huge number of people begged to differ, as they devoured Immanuel Velikovsky’s major best-seller, Worlds in Collision, insisting that perhaps this polymathic thinker held the key to a new science and a new history. Scientists, on the other hand, assaulted Velikovsky’s book, his followers, and his press mercilessly from the get-go. In The Pseudoscience Wars, Michael D. Gordin resurrects the largely forgotten figure of Velikovsky and uses his strange career and surprisingly influential writings to explore the changing definitions of the line that separates legitimate scientific inquiry from what is deemed bunk, and to show how vital this question remains to us today. Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished material from Velikovsky’s personal archives, Gordin presents a behind-the-scenes history of the writer’s career, from his initial burst of success through his growing influence on the counterculture, heated public battles with such luminaries as Carl Sagan, and eventual eclipse. Along the way, he offers fascinating glimpses into the histories and effects of other fringe doctrines, including creationism, Lysenkoism, parapsychology, and more—all of which have surprising connections to Velikovsky’s theories. Science today is hardly universally secure, and scientists seem themselves beset by critics, denialists, and those they label “pseudoscientists”—as seen all too clearly in battles over evolution and climate change. The Pseudoscience Wars simultaneously reveals the surprising Cold War roots of our contemporary dilemma and points readers to a different approach to drawing the line between knowledge and nonsense.

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First Walk after Cancer. New ugly house (too big) with girl on porch cradling lacrosse stick; a Spanish lady, lost? Speaking Spanish to Bluetooth in her ear; tied rods of rebar webbing a bridge under repair; dude in red shorts, running-Hey, it's not that warm! no red wheelbarrow; white chick of seductive frame; ruined snow, wet street; sun meeting my face like a brother in a hospital room; laborers from China in hard hats and uniforms traversing embassy foundation, just a giant hole; Israeli grounds next door, cordoned off with cable, cameras at all corners; cops in car across the street, 7-Eleven coffee cooling on the hood; lost glove in bare tree; blue jay; my favorite shoes: green lights everywhere, seen, if not understood. At the heart of Joshua Weiner's new book is an extended poem with a bold political dimension and great intellectual ambition. It fuses the poet's point of view with Walt Whitman's to narrate a decentered time-traveling collage about Rock Creek, a tributary of the Potomac that runs through Washington, DC. For Weiner, Rock Creek is the location of myriad kinds of movement, streaming, and joining: personal enterprise and financial capital; national politics, murder, sex, and homelessness; the Civil War and collective history; music, spiritual awakening, personal memory, and pastoral vision. The questions that arise from the opening foundational poem inform the others in the collection, which range widely from the dramatic arrival of an uncanny charismatic totem that titles the volume to intimate reflections on family, illness, and dream visions. In "The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish", Weiner has discovered a new poetic idiom, one that is stripped down, rhythmically jagged, and comprehensively philosophical about human limits.

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Phonographies explores the numerous links and relays between twentieth-century black cultural production and sound technologies from the phonograph to the Walkman. Highlighting how black authors, filmmakers, and musicians have actively engaged with recorded sound in their work, Alexander G. Weheliye contends that the interplay between sound technologies and black music and speech enabled the emergence of modern black culture, of what he terms “sonic Afro-modernity.” He shows that by separating music and speech from their human sources, sound-recording technologies beginning with the phonograph generated new modes of thinking, being, and becoming. Black artists used these new possibilities to revamp key notions of modernity—among these, ideas of subjectivity, temporality, and community. Phonographies is a powerful argument that sound technologies are integral to black culture, which is, in turn, fundamental to Western modernity.Weheliye surveys literature, film, and music to focus on engagements with recorded sound. He offers substantial new readings of canonical texts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, establishing dialogues between these writers and popular music and film ranging from Louis Armstrong’s voice to DJ mixing techniques to Darnell Martin’s 1994 movie I Like It Like That. Looking at how questions of diasporic belonging are articulated in contemporary black musical practices, Weheliye analyzes three contemporary Afro-diasporic musical acts: the Haitian and African American rap group the Fugees, the Afro- and Italian-German rap collective Advanced Chemistry, and black British artist Tricky and his partner Martina. Phonographies imagines the African diaspora as a virtual sounding space, one that is marked, in the twentieth century and twenty-first, by the circulation of culture via technological reproductions—records and tapes, dubbing and mixing, and more.

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Hell Without Fires examines the spiritual and earthly results of conversion to Christianity for African-American antebellum writers. Using autobiographical narratives, the book shows how black writers transformed the earthly hell of slavery into a "New Jerusalem," a place they could call home.Yolanda Pierce insists that for African Americans, accounts of spiritual conversion revealed "personal transformations with far-reaching community effects. A personal experience of an individual's relationship with God is transformed into the possibility of liberating an entire community." The process of conversion could result in miraculous literacy, "callings" to preach, a renewed resistance to the slave condition, defiance of racist and sexist conventions, and communal uplift.These stories by five of the earliest antebellum spiritual writers--George White, John Jea, David Smith, Solomon Bayley, and Zilpha Elaw--create a new religious language that merges Christian scripture with distinct retellings of biblical stories, with enslaved people of African descent at their center. Showing the ways their language exploits the levels of meaning of words like master, slavery, sin, and flesh, Pierce argues that the narratives address the needs of those who attempted to transform a foreign god and religion into a personal and collective system of beliefs. The earthly "hell without fires"--one of the writer's characterizations of everyday life for those living in slavery--could become a place where an individual could be both black and Christian, and religion could offer bodily and psychological healing. Pierce presents a complex and subtle assessment of the language of conversion in the context of slavery. Her work will be important to those interested in the topics of slave religion and spiritual autobiography and to scholars of African American and early American literature and religion.

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What does it mean to be a westerner? With all the mythology that has grown up about the American West, is it even possible to describe "how it was, how it is, here, in the West—just that," in the words of Lynn Stegner? Starting with that challenge, Stegner and Russell Rowland invited several dozen members of the western literary tribe to write about living in the West and being a western writer in particular. West of 98 gathers sixty-six literary testimonies, in essays and poetry, from a stellar collection of writers who represent every state west of the 98th parallel—a kind of Greek chorus of the most prominent voices in western literature today, who seek to "characterize the West as each of us grew to know it, and, equally important, the West that is still becoming." In West of 98, western writers speak to the ways in which the West imprints itself on the people who live there, as well as how the people of the West create the personality of the region. The writers explore the western landscape—how it has been revered and abused across centuries—and the inescapable limitations its aridity puts on all dreams of conquest and development. They dismantle the boosterism of manifest destiny and the cowboy and mountain man ethos of every-man-for-himself, and show instead how we must create new narratives of cooperation if we are to survive in this spare and beautiful country. The writers seek to define the essence of both actual and metaphoric wilderness as they journey toward a West that might honestly be called home. A collective declaration not of our independence but of our interdependence with the land and with each other, West of 98 opens up a whole new panorama of the western experience.

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Few ideas in the past century have had wider financial, political, and governmental impact than that of economic growth. The common belief that endless economic growth, as measured by Gross Domestic Product, is not only possible but actually essential for the flourishing of civilization remains a powerful policy goal and aspiration for many. In The Mismeasure of Progress, Stephen J. Macekura exposes a historical road not taken, illuminating the stories of the activists, intellectuals, and other leaders who long argued that GDP growth was not all it was cracked up to be. Beginning with the rise of the growth paradigm in the 1940s and 1950s and continuing through the present day, The Mismeasure of Progress is the first book on the myriad thinkers who argued against growth and the conventional way progress had been measured and defined. For growth critics, questioning the meaning and measurement of growth was a necessary first step to creating a more just, equal, and sustainable world. These critics argued that focusing on growth alone would not resolve social, political, and environmental problems, and they put forth alternate methods for defining and measuring human progress. In today's global political scene--marked by vast inequalities of power and wealth and made even more fraught by a global climate emergency--the ideas presented by these earlier critics of growth resonate more loudly than ever. Economic growth appealed to many political leaders because it allowed them to avoid addressing political trade-offs and class conflict. It sustained the fiction that humans are somehow separate from nonhuman "nature," ignoring the intimate and dense connections between the two. In order to create a truly just and equitable society, Macekura argues, we need a clear understanding of our collective needs beyond growth and more holistic definitions of progress that transcend economic metrics like GDP.

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In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of "craftivism" the politics and social practices associated with handmaking Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuna, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet's torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much "in the fray" of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.

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The Roman world was diverse and complex. And so were religious understandings and practices as mirrored in the enormous variety presented by archaeological, iconographic, and epigraphic evidence. Conventional approaches principally focus on the political role of civic cults as a means of social cohesion, often considered to be instrumentalised by elites. But by doing so, religious diversity is frequently overlooked, marginalising ‘deviating’ cult activities that do not fit the Classical canon, as well as the multitude of funerary practices and other religious activities that were all part of everyday life.In the Roman Empire, a person’s religious experiences were shaped by many and sometimes seemingly incompatible cult practices, whereby the ‘civic’ and ‘imperial’ cults might have had the least impact of all. The authors rethink these methodologies, arguing for a more dynamic image of religion that takes into account the varied and often contradictory choices and actions of individual, which reflects the discrepant religious experiences in the Roman world. Is it possible to ‘poke into the mind’ of an individual in Roman times, whatever his/her status and ethnicity, and try to understand the individual’s diverse experiences in such a complex, interconnected empire, exploring the choices that were open to an individual? This also raises the question whether the concept of individuality is valid for Roman times. In some periods, the impact of individual actions can be more momentous: the very first adoption of Roman-style sculpture, cult practices or Latin theonyms for indigenous deities can set in motion long-term processes that will significantly influence people’s perceptions of local deities, their characteristics, and functions. Do individual choices and preferences prevail over collective identities in the Roman Empire compared to pre-Roman times? To examine these questions, this volume presents case studies that analyse individual actions in the religious sphere.

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Text in English & German. The topic of this book is memory. What do we remember? We like to recall joyful events and wish we could relive them again and again. On the other hand wars, genocides, flight, destruction and epidemics are events remembered with horror, and sometimes their memory is even repressed. Eventually times change, and we begin to forget everything that happened. Our vision of the world is in danger of vanishing. Monuments counteract forgetting. Up to the beginning of the 20th century these were marble busts, figures of horsemen, bronze sculptures, columns, gateways and tombs that were erected in public urban spaces and in parks. This was a way to honour heroes and their military, political and cultural feats and to keep their memory alive. Their goal was to educate and admonish people. Their function was thus to provide models, but also to make viewers feel submissive. Today, in our democratic, pluralistic society, when modern means of communication accelerate all developments, the definition of the monument as a solemn, massive sign of remembrance that brings to mind historic moments has become obsolete. Daily the mass media inundate us with a plethora of images of the past and the present. Thus millions of people can participate in past and present events. There is an almost infinite number of collective experiences and just as many signs of remembrance. This being so, is there anything that can still be called a monument? It is this and similar questions regarding monuments that preoccupy the author in this book; he presents his profound insights into all aspects of the history of architecture and art, of philosophy and the new media. The book is a godsend for readers who are looking for ideas and information that go beyond the mainstream.

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A comprehensive overview on the French artist who has transformed cities worldwide with his epic portraits of their inhabitants Over the past two decades, French artist JR has massively expanded the impact of public art through his ambitious projects that give visibility and agency to people around the world. Showcasing the full scope of the artist's career, JR: Chronicles accompanies the first major exhibition in North America of works by the French-born artist. Working at the intersections of photography, social engagement and street art, JR collaborates with communities by taking individual portraits, reproducing them at a monumental scale and wheat pasting them—sometimes illegally—in nearby public spaces. This superbly produced volume traces JR's career from his early documentation of graffiti artists as a teenager in Paris to his large-scale architectural interventions in cities worldwide, to his more recent digitally collaged murals that create collective portraits of diverse publics. The centerpiece of the accompanying exhibition is The Chronicles of New York City, a new epic mural of more than 1,000 New Yorkers. Also included are previously unseen murals set in Brooklyn; Face 2 Face, diptychs of Israelis and Palestinians in Palestinian and Israeli cities; Women Are Heroes, featuring images of the eyes of women gazing back at their communities in numerous countries; The Gun Chronicles: A Story of America, JR's complex work on guns in America; and other equally famous works. JR (born 1983) is best known for his monumental, wheat-pasted street portraiture projects. JR has carried out projects across the globe. He has shown in museums worldwide and has created site specific works for the Louvre, the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics and the Centre Pompidou.

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“Claas Kirchhelle brings the story of typhoid to life in this compelling narrative taking us from the early medical references through the dawn of microbiology, the first use of immuno-diagnostics to the amazing power of modern vaccines to control this ancient killer. It is a book that meticulously observes the story and the science behind the discoveries that underpin modern understanding of infectious disease, on which our very lives depend.” ― Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, FMedSci, Director, Oxford Vaccine Group “Typhoid is one of the classic diseases of humankind that has been with us, perhaps since humans moved out of Africa. It still persists in many places, particularly where public infrastructure is weak and impoverished. The disease has killed many significant people in history, and has imprinted on our way of thinking. This book provides a unique and eloquent discription of the disease and its continuing impact. Very relevant in the modern interconnected world.” ― Prof Gordon Dougan, FRS, FMEDSCi, Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge, Wellcome Sanger Institute. “This lively illustrated account gives typhoid the prominence it deserves and links the past with the present.” ― Dr Margaret Pelling, Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, And Technology, University of Oxford. A killer of paupers, princes and presidents, typhoid was an invisible threat in Victorian times and remains dangerous in many areas today. In this exploration of the past, present and future of typhoid control, Dr Claas Kirchhelle uses the stories of both literary characters and real-life figures to trace typhoid’s transformation from a mysterious scourge into a controllable microbial threat. Drawing on the award-winning Typhoidland exhibitions, the author dispels the myth of typhoid as an eradicated disease and shows how cutting-edge vaccines and collective international action offer new hope amidst surging drug resistance – a subject that has gained new relevance in a post-COVID world.

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The majority of the nation's workforce hates their job. Are these employees working at your organization? Seventy percent of US workers hate their jobs and don't want to show up on Monday morning, cites entrepreneur and CEO Dudley Slater in his inspiring book, Fusion Leadership. Slater squarely lays some of the blame for this shocking phenomenon at the doors of leaders: When their selfish actions diminish the effectiveness of their teams, they commit the ultimate failure in leadership. But when leaders learn how to successfully balance the needs of their egos with the collective needs of their organizations, they can see increased profits and a workforce unified around a common goal. Slater examines some of the biggest hurdles and toughest calls you may have to make in your organization and, with tips and anecdotes from a variety of gifted leaders, he reveals how to navigate these situations. From a call center in Minneapolis to the desert of Saudi Arabia, Fusion Leadership offers valuable insights into how top CEOs and leaders at all levels reconcile power and wealth temptations with what is best for their organizations and their people. Through the powerful stories of eight leaders and his own journey of becoming the leader he is and aspires to be, Slater illuminates the goals of Fusion Leadership: to create a motivated workforce committed to its members and to ignite a common passion that provides self-fulfillment for individuals and increased success for the organization. Unleashing the power of Fusion Leadership can grow profits, engage employees, and release the most powerful force on earth - human beings working together toward a shared purpose. Slater's genuine commitment is apparent, and it generates great hope and optimism that when leaders apply Fusion Leadership concepts, they can start a movement that will extend well beyond their workplace to society as a whole.

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Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of Reparative Return examines the retrospective logic that informs contemporary queer thinking; specifically the narrative return to the 1950s in post-1990s queer and LGBT culture in the United States. The term “Queer Retrosexuality” marks the intersection between retrospective thinking and queerness—to illustrate not only how to “queer” retrospection, but also how retrospection, in some senses can be thought of as always already queer. This book examines the historical possibilities that inform the narrative return to the 1950s in queer cultural and literary productions such as Samuel Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water, Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven, Sarah Schulman’s Shimmer, and Mark Merlis’s American Studies—all texts that return to a traumatic past marked by shame, exile, and persecution. Queer Retrosexualities inquires into what motivates the return in these texts to a historical moment informed by the bruises and wounds of history; but more importantly, it poses the question of how such a turn backwards could be theorized as reparative or even hopeful. This book shows how the framework of queer retrospection offers new ways of understanding history and culture, of reformulating disciplines and institutions, and of rethinking traditional modes of political activism and knowledge production. Even while it seems counterproductive to return to a historical moment that is marked by the persecution of sexual and racial minorities, the book examines how a shared feeling of relationality and community produced by the exile of shame shapes the political value of queer retrosexualities. The retrospective return to the 1950s allows queer thinking to move away from the commodification of queer culture in the present that masquerades as progress. Thus, the book theorizes how traumatic history becomes a valuable resource for the political project of assembling collective memory as the base materials for imagining a different—and more queer—future.

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Based on the Mason Lectures delivered at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the winter of 1995, the ten essays in this volume demonstrate the function and dynamic effect Jewish mythologies in social, political, and psychological life. Eli Yassif's introduction illustrates the complex relationship between myth and ritual in modern Jewish culture. In a separate essay, he focuses on the ancient Jewish tale of the Golem, a myth that presents an exemplary test case for the exploration of cultural continuity. Using the testimonies of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe to Britain and the battle on the plain of Latrun in the Israeli War of Independence, David Cesarani and Anita Shapira demonstrate that the process of creating myth is related in one way or another to attempts by specific social and ethnic groups to shape their collective memory. Along these lines, Milton Shain and Sally Frankental interrogate the view that during the apartheid period in South African history, South African Jewry operated on a higher moral plane than most other white South Africans. And while Nurith Gertz examines the male superhero that dominated the early national Zionist cinema and reflected the center of gravity in the Zionist myth, Dan Urian analyzes two Israeli plays produced in the 1990s that examine the myth of the biblical Sarah, rewritten from a feminist perspective. Other essays examine widely held cultural beliefs of contemporary Western Jewry. Jonathan Webber questions whether memory is an essentially Jewish value and remembrance a Jewish moral duty. Tudor Parfitt explores Western and Israeli perceptions of the Yemenite Jews, and Sylvie Anne Goldberg, in examining the evolving role of the chevrah kaddisha in Prague, discusses changes in perceptions of communal institutions and traditional and modern Jewish attitudes with regard to death. Finally, Matthew Olshan offers an analysis of Kafka's animal fables as parables for the Jewish response to tradition.

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Lovell’s poetical installations invoke the lost voices of African American ancestry Whitfield Lovell is internationally renowned for his installations that incorporate masterful Conté crayon likenesses of African Americans from between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement. Using vintage photography as his source, Lovell often pairs his subjects with found objects, evoking personal memories, ancestral connections and the collective American past. Whitfield Lovell: Deep River compiles stunning likenesses of anonymous African American citizens from Lovell’s celebrated Deep River installation, which pays homage to “Camp Contraband”—a Union Army site near Chattanooga, Tennessee, that served as a refuge for runaway slaves escaping the Confederate South during the Civil War. The book includes a preface by Kellie Jones and an accompanying essay by the scholar Julie L. McGee, which provides the historical context for these deeply resonant portraits highlighted in this publication. McGee writes: “Lovell’s artistry is a vessel for those ancestral spirits that remain near and communicate with those who are able to make the past tangible, accessible and acutely meaningful.” The work of New York–based artist Whitfield Lovell has been exhibited and collected worldwide. The current traveling exhibition, Whitfield Lovell: Passages, will open on June 17 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond, Virginia, and will travel to four additional venues. Major installations have been featured at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC; the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York; University of Wyoming in Laramie; the Columbus Museum in Georgia; and the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, among others. His work is in museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art; the Brooklyn Museum; Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

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A visual pep talk of charts and essays on feeling better about not feeling better.Maybe This Will Help is one part the funny and relatable graphs that fans of Am I Overthinking This? and of Michelle Rial know and love, and one part the honest stories behind what makes those graphs so poignant. Michelle Rial brings to light her struggles with chronic pain, grief, and creative uncertainty in a way that reflects the universality of dealing with the unthinkable. Equal parts funny and moving, this book delves into the more serious side of things, finding levity and collective experience in the invisible difficulties that so many of us face. Through humorous charts and intimate peeks into the author's life, it explores the big things that can feel unmanageable and the everyday humor that keeps us moving forward.SELF-HELP WITH HUMOR: This book brings levity and laughter to serious topics without undermining the important message and relatability that makes it resonate.BELOVED AUTHOR: Michelle Rial's first book was beloved by her tens of thousands of fans as well as by the media, including Wired, Vulture, Book Riot—and the New Yorker even published her chart-based article on "Book Publishing by the Numbers."JUST THE RIGHT TONE: This book perfectly captures trying to figure out the "magic pill" that will fix things, struggling to find peace in how things are, and the humor in even the hardest times. It makes an ideal gift for someone struggling with physical or mental pain when you want to help but aren't sure how to.Perfect for: Fans of Michelle Rial's Instagram and first book, Am I Overthinking This?; people in their 20s and 30s grappling with big life changes or chronic illness

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From the dawn of history, a universal wisdom tradition has existed that explains humanity’s purpose in the cosmos and our relationship to the Master Source Consciousness. This mystical philosophy was harnessed by the ancient seers known as Gnostics, who were in direct contact with Source Consciousness. As Peter Canova reveals, not only do the ancient teachings of Gnosticism contain important spiritual truths, but they profoundly align with the modern sciences of quantum physics and psychology. They can also provide us with a transformative path to higher consciousness and practical tools to create your own reality. Merging modern science and ancient wisdom, Canova explores the perennial principles of Gnosticism and shows how they describe major theories of quantum physics, such as the Big Bang, parallel universes, the Holographic Universe theory, and Einstein’s Relativity. He recounts the Gnostic story of Sophia from a scientific standpoint, showing how it describes the fall of spiritual consciousness into material existence. He also provides in-depth evidence that Jesus taught a hidden, mystical Gnostic initiation rite. Explaining how the Master Consciousness created and shaped all life, including humans, the author reveals how Source gave us a critical role to fulfill in the cosmos, including the ability of our thoughts to affect the material world. He describes Carl Jung’s role in the spiritualization of psychology and how this can be used by the modern spiritual seeker to pursue a path of enlightenment and personal fulfillment. Ultimately showing how enlightenment is a process wherein outer manifestations arise from inner experience--including synchronicity and dreams--the author reveals how each of us can harness the power of quantum spirituality to transform our world on both an individual and collective level.

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THE #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER'Gareth Southgate's secret weapon' - Guardian'A copy of Eastwood's new book, Belonging, was given to every England player when they reported for duty at the European Championships' - TelegraphIn BELONGING Owen Eastwood reveals, for the first time, the ethos that has made him one of the most in-demand Performance Coaches in the world. Drawing on his own Maori ancestry, Owen weaves together insights from homo sapiens' evolutionary story and our collective wisdom. He shines a light on where these powerful ideas are applied around the world in high-performing settings encompassing sport, business, the arts and military.Whakapapa is a Maori idea which embodies our universal human need to belong. It represents a powerful spiritual belief - that each of us is part of an unbroken and unbreakable chain of people who share a sacred identity. Owen places this concept at the core of his methods to maximise a team's performance.Aspects of Owen's unique approach include: finding your identity story; defining a shared purpose; visioning future success; sharing ownership with others; understanding the 'silent dance' that plays out in groups; setting the conditions to unleash talent; and converting our diversity into a competitive advantage.Whakapapa. You belong here.'How Maori belief is driving the England team to seize the moment' - Sunday Telegraph'Belonging is a must-read for anyone interested in building a long term high-performing team' - Stuart Lancaster'One of the wisest books about winning you'll ever read... Powerful lessons beautifully expressed' - James Kerr'Owen's work and outlook really resonate with me. His philosophy has real depth and value. [It's] so of the moment - at just the right time, at just the right place, with just the right message' - Simon Mundie'Belonging reminds of us of who we really are and what is most important' Kieran Read

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In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth proposes that in the widespread and bewildering experience of trauma in our century-both in its occurrence and in our attempt to understand it-we can recognize the possibility of a history no longer based on simple models of straightforward experience and reference. Through the notion of trauma, she contends, we come to a new understanding that permits history to arise where immediate understanding may not. Caruth explores the ways in which the texts of psychoanalysis, literature, and literary theory both speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience. Rather than straightforwardly describing actual case studies of trauma survivors, or attempting to elucidate directly the psychiatry of trauma, she examines the complex ways that knowing and not knowing are entangled in the language of trauma and in the stories associated with it. Caruth's wide-ranging discussion touches on Freud's theory of trauma as outlined in Moses and Monotheism and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. She traces the notion of reference and the figure of the falling body in de Man, Kleist, and Kant; the narratives of personal catastrophe in Hiroshima mon amour; and the traumatic address in Lecompte's reinterpretation of Freud's narrative of the dream of the burning child. In this twentieth-anniversary edition of her now classic text, a substantial new afterword addresses major questions and controversies surrounding trauma theory that have arisen over the past two decades. Caruth offers innovative insights into the inherent connection between individual and collective trauma, on the importance of the political and ethical dimensions of the theory of trauma, and on the crucial place of literature in the theoretical articulation of the very concept of trauma. Her afterword serves as a decisive intervention in the ongoing discussions in and about the field.

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Not since F. R. Harden Jones published his masterwork on fish migration in 1968 has a book so thoroughly demystified the subject. With stunning clarity, David Hallock Secor's Migration Ecology of Fishes finally penetrates the clandestine nature of marine fish migration. Secor explains how the four decades of research since Jones' classic have employed digital-age technologies-including electronic miniaturization, computing, microchemistry, ocean observing systems, and telecommunications-that render overt the previously hidden migration behaviors of fish. Emerging from the millions of observed, telemetered, simulated, and chemically traced movement paths is an appreciation of the individual fish. Members of the same populations may stay put, explore, delay, accelerate, evacuate, and change course as they conditionally respond to their marine existence. But rather than a morass of individual behaviors, Secor shows us that populations are collectively organized through partial migration, which causes groups of individuals to embark on very different migration pathways despite being members of the same population. Case studies throughout the book emphasize how migration ecology confounds current fisheries management. Yet, as Secor explains, conservation frameworks that explicitly consider the influence of migration on yield, stability, and resilience outcomes have the potential to transform fisheries management. A synthetic treatment of all marine fish taxa (teleosts and elasmobranchs), this book employs explanatory frameworks from avian and systems ecology while arguing that migrations are emergent phenomena, structured through schooling, phenotypic plasticity, and other collective agencies. The book provides overviews of the following concepts: the comparative movement ecology of fishes and birds; the alignment of mating systems with larval dispersal; schooling and migration as adaptations to marine food webs; Natal homing; connectivity in populations and metapopulations; and, the contribution of migration ecology to population resilience.

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Successful sports agents are comfortable with high finance and intense competition for the right to represent talented players, and the most respected agents are those who can deal with the pressures of high-stakes negotiations in an honest fashion. But whereas rules and penalties govern the playing field, there are far fewer restrictions on agents. In The Business of Sports Agents, Kenneth L. Shropshire, Timothy Davis, and N. Jeremi Duru, experts in the fields of sports business and law, examine the history of the sports agent business and the rules and laws developed to regulate the profession. They also consider recommendations for reform, including uniform laws that would apply to all agents, redefining amateurism in college sports, and stiffening requirements for licensing agents. This revised and expanded third edition brings the volume up to date on recent changes in the industry, including: —the emergence and dominance of companies such as Creative Artists Agency and Wasserman Media Group —high-profile cases of agent misconduct, principally Josh Luchs, whose agent certification was revoked by the NFLPA —legal challenges against the NCAA that may fundamentally change the definition of amateurism —changes to agent regulations resulting from new collective bargaining agreements in all of the major professional sports —evaluation of the effectiveness of the Uniform Athlete Agents Act (2000) to regulate agent conduct —issues faced by the increasing number of agents representing athletes who work abroad as well as athletes from abroad who work in the United States. Whether aspiring sports agent, lawyer, athlete seeking an agent, or simply interested in understanding the world of sports representation, the reader will find in The Business of Sports Agents the most comprehensive overview of the industry as well as a straightforward analysis of its problems and proposed solutions.

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Heaven's Gate, a secretive group of celibate "monks" awaiting pickup by a UFO, captured intense public attention in 1997 when its members committed collective suicide. As a way of understanding such perplexing events, many have seen those who join cults as needy, lost souls, unable to think for themselves. This book, a compelling look at the cult phenomenon written for a wide audience, dispels such simple formulations by explaining how normal, intelligent people can give up years of their lives—and sometimes their very lives—to groups and beliefs that appear bizarre and irrational. Looking closely at Heaven's Gate and at the Democratic Workers Party, a radical political group of the 1970s and 1980s, Janja Lalich gives us a rare insider's look at these two cults and advances a new theoretical framework that will reshape our understanding of those who join such groups. Lalich's fascinating discussion includes her in-depth interviews with cult devotees as well as reflections gained from her own experience as a high-ranking member of the Democratic Workers Party. Incorporating classical sociological concepts such as "charisma" and "commitment" with more recent work on the social psychology of influence and control, she develops a new approach for understanding how charismatic cult leaders are able to dominate their devotees. She shows how members are led into a state of "bounded choice," in which they make seemingly irrational decisions within a context that makes perfect sense to them and is, in fact, consistent with their highest aspirations. In addition to illuminating the cult phenomenon in the United States and around the world, this important book also addresses our pressing need to know more about the mentality of those true believers who take extreme or violent measures in the name of a cause.

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A panoramic view of global history from the end of World War Two to the dawn of the new millennium, and a portrait of an age of unprecedented transformation. In this ambitious, groundbreaking, and sweeping work, Jonathan Sperber guides readers through six decades of global history, from the end of World War Two to the onset of the new millennium. As Sperber's immersive and propulsive book reveals, the defining quality of these decades involved the rising and unstoppable flow of people, goods, capital, and ideas across boundaries, continents, and oceans, creating prosperity in some parts of the world, destitution in others, increasing a sense of collective responsibility while also reinforcing nationalism and xenophobia. It was an age of transformation in every realm of human existence: from relations with nature to relations between and among nations, superpowers to emerging states; from the forms of production to the foundations of religious faith. These changes took place on an unprecedentedly global scale. The world both developed and contracted. Most of all, it became interconnected. To make sense of it, Sperber illuminates the central trends and crucial developments across a wide variety of topics, adopting a chronology that divides the era into three distinct periods: the postwar, from 1945 through 1966, which retained many elements of period of world wars; the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, when the pillars of the postwar world were undermined; and the two decades at the end of the millennium, when new structures were developed, structures that form the basis of today's world, even as the iconic World Trade Center was reduced by terrorism to rubble. The Age of Interconnection is a clear-eyed portrait of an age of blinding change.

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In this wholly original, never-before-seen box set, the New York Times bestselling author who has redefined tarot for the twenty-first century takes seekers on a journey of self-discovery deep into the collective unconscious and through the realm of archetypes, where dreams and myths meet.In this original box set, Kim Krans illuminates the revelatory power of archetypes—the ancient, universal symbols that have endured across time and cultures and reside deep in our shared psyche. Illustrated in her unmistakable "Wild Unknown" style, an emotionally evocative combination of elegant line art and lush watercolor painting, The Wild Unknown Archetypes Deck and Guidebook fosters a profound understanding of our complex personalities, behaviors, and tendencies.The Wild Unknown Archetypes deck includes 78 gorgeous circular oracle cards divided into four suits: The Selves, The Places, The Tools, and The Initiations. Each archetype has been carefully selected for its symbolic potency and the lesson at the core of its nature, such as The Poet, representative of deep emotional creativity and the drive to find our truth, and The Vision, which symbolizes the lifelong journey to rediscover our destiny. Accompanying the deck is a 224-page hand-lettered, fully illustrated guidebook written and designed by Krans, which details the meaning behind each card and offers clear, grounded explanations of the many spreads, practices, and concepts that power the Archetypes deck.A beautiful and inclusive tool for self-exploration, The Wild Unknown Archetypes Deck and Guidebook is sure to enchant readers drawn to personal study, symbology, and lore. Destined to become a treasured keepsake, The Wild Unknown Archetypes Deck and Guidebook is an exquisitely designed work of art that embodies the mystery, glamour, and allure that made Krans’s previous work collectible sensations, while introducing a whole new realm of magic and depth to The Wild Unknown.

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Two-Dimensional Materials for Nonlinear Optics Comprehensive resource covering concepts, perspectives, and skills required to understand the preparation, nonlinear optics, and applications of two-dimensional (2D) materials Bringing together many interdisciplinary experts in the field of 2D materials with their applications in nonlinear optics, Two-Dimensional Materials for Nonlinear Optics covers preparation methods for various novel 2D materials, such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) and single elemental 2D materials, excited-state dynamics of 2D materials behind their outstanding performance in photonic devices, instrumentation for exploring the photoinduced excited-state dynamics of the 2D materials spanning a wide time scale from ultrafast to slow, and future trends of 2D materials on a series of issues like fabrications, dynamic investigations, and photonic/optoelectronic applications. Powerful nonlinear optical characterization techniques, such as Z-scan measurement, femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy, and microscopy, are also introduced. Edited by two highly qualified academics with extensive experience in the field, Two-Dimensional Materials for Nonlinear Optics covers sample topics such as: Foundational knowledge on nonlinear optical properties, and fundamentals and preparation methods of 2D materials with nonlinear optical properties Modulation and enhancement of optical nonlinearity in 2D materials, and nonlinear optical characterization techniques for 2D materials and their applications in a specific field Novel nonlinear optical imaging systems, ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopy for investigating carrier dynamics in emerging 2D materials, and transient terahertz spectroscopy 2D materials for optical limiting, saturable absorber, second and third harmonic generation, nanolasers, and space use With collective insight from researchers in many different interdisciplinary fields, Two-Dimensional Materials for Nonlinear Optics is an essential resource for materials scientists, solid state chemists and physicists, photochemists, and professionals in the semiconductor industry who are interested in understanding the state of the art in the field.

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THE #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER'Gareth Southgate's secret weapon' - Guardian'A copy of Eastwood's new book, Belonging, was given to every England player when they reported for duty at the European Championships' - TelegraphIn BELONGING Owen Eastwood reveals, for the first time, the ethos that has made him one of the most in-demand Performance Coaches in the world. Drawing on his own Maori ancestry, Owen weaves together insights from homo sapiens' evolutionary story and our collective wisdom. He shines a light on where these powerful ideas are applied around the world in high-performing settings encompassing sport, business, the arts and military.Whakapapa is a Maori idea which embodies our universal human need to belong. It represents a powerful spiritual belief - that each of us is part of an unbroken and unbreakable chain of people who share a sacred identity. Owen places this concept at the core of his methods to maximise a team's performance.Aspects of Owen's unique approach include: finding your identity story; defining a shared purpose; visioning future success; sharing ownership with others; understanding the 'silent dance' that plays out in groups; setting the conditions to unleash talent; and converting our diversity into a competitive advantage.Whakapapa. You belong here.'How Maori belief is driving the England team to seize the moment' - Sunday Telegraph'Belonging is a must-read for anyone interested in building a long term high-performing team' - Stuart Lancaster'One of the wisest books about winning you'll ever read... Powerful lessons beautifully expressed' - James Kerr'Owen's work and outlook really resonate with me. His philosophy has real depth and value. [It's] so of the moment - at just the right time, at just the right place, with just the right message' - Simon Mundie'Belonging reminds of us of who we really are and what is most important' Kieran Read

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The perfect gift for all musical fans, this beautiful book gives readers an extraordinary inside look at In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda's breakout Broadway debut, written with Quiara Alegría Hudes, now a Hollywood blockbuster.'This book is a collective diary looking back and shining a spotlight on the people and moments that have nurtured the journey and evolution of the show for *checks notes* LITERALLY half of my life' - Lin Manuel-MirandaIn 2008, In the Heights, a new musical from up-and-coming young artists, electrified Broadway. The show's vibrant mix of Latin music and hip-hop captured life in Washington Heights, the Latino neighborhood in upper Manhattan. It won four Tony Awards and became an international hit, delighting audiences around the world. For the film version, director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) brought the story home, filming its spectacular dance numbers on location in Washington Heights. That's where Usnavi, Nina, and their neighbors chase their dreams and ask a universal question: Where do I belong?In the Heights: Finding Home reunites Miranda with Jeremy McCarter, co-author of Hamilton: The Revolution, and Quiara Alegría Hudes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning librettist of the Broadway musical and screenwriter of the film. They do more than trace the making of an unlikely Broadway smash and a major motion picture: They give readers an intimate look at the decades-long creative life of In the Heights.Like Hamilton: The Revolution, the book offers untold stories, perceptive essays, and the lyrics to Miranda's songs-complete with his funny, heartfelt annotations. It also features newly commissioned portraits and never-before-seen photos from backstage, the movie set, and productions around the world.This is the story of characters who search for a home-and the artists who created one.

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Eighty years after his death in a Japanese prison camp, this compelling new biography charts the career of a distinguished but hitherto neglected hero of the British army. Major-General Merton Beckwith-Smith DSO, MC commanded the British 18th Division during the catastrophic Fall of Singapore in February 1942. A highly respected and much decorated veteran of the First World War, he was captured along with tens of thousands of other soldiers - British, Indian, Australian, and Malay - who were then held prisoner on Singapore Island. Amidst hunger, disease and widespread despair in Changi, over the next six months he rallied the spirits of his soldiers, created a make-shift university and theatre, and helped to inspire a remarkable renewal of collective church life. At the same time, he improved conditions for hospital patients and encouraged sports and other recreations. While the fate of many of the men he led was to toil, and often die, on the infamous Burma Railway, Beckwith-Smith was exiled to Karenko Camp, Formosa (present-day Taiwan), where, mistreated and malnourished, he died of diphtheria and heart failure on 11 November 1942. Beckwith-Smith, was the most senior British officer to end his life as a prisoner of war in the Far East. Yet until now he has been a strangely forgotten warrior. Based on exclusive access to family archives, and drawing on an array of other eye-witness accounts, Michael Snape's richly detailed biography brings to an end that neglect. The result is a story that offers vivid insights into one man's experience of two world wars, while also revealing why he was so admired by his fellow officers and by the ordinary soldiers who served under him.

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Americans valorize resistance to conformity. "Be yourself!" "Don't just follow the crowd!" Such injunctions pervade contemporary American culture. We praise individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Steve Jobs who chart their own course in life and do something new. Yet surprisingly, recent research in social psychology has shown that, in practice, Americans are averse and at times, even hostile to individuals who express traits associated with non-conformity, such as individuality, free judgment, and creativity. This disjunction between our public rhetoric and practice raises fundamental questions: Why is non-conformity valuable? Is it always valuable-or does it pose dangers as well as promise benefits for democratic societies? What is the relationship between non-conformity as an individual ideal and democracy as a form of collective self-rule? Contesting Conformity provides a new interpretive lens to the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Nietzsche to investigate non-conformity and its relationship to modern democracy. While there are important differences among them, all three thinkers worry that certain aspects of democracy--namely, the power of public opinion, the tyranny of social majorities, and the commitment to moral equality--encourage conformity, thus suppressing dissent, individuality, and creativity. Taken together, Tocqueville, Mill, and Nietzsche show us that to the extent that we are committed to democracy, we must find ways to foster non-conformity, but we must do so within certain moral and political constraints. Drawing new insight from their work, Jennie Ikuta argues that non-conformity is an intractable issue for democracy. While non-conformity is often important for cultivating a just polity, non-conformity can also undermine democracy. In other words, democracy needs non-conformity, but not in an unconditional way. This book examines this intractable relationship, and offers resources for navigating the relationship in contemporary democracies in ways that promote justice and freedom.

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Artists and writers from the colder climes of northern Europe have long felt the lure of the South of the continent. Goethe was revitalised by his encounters with Mediterranean culture on his journey to Italy. Nietzsche took flight southwards to begin his life anew, while DH Lawrence sought the health-giving southern sun in Sicily and Sardinia. But across the centuries, other outposts of the South have provoked a similar obsession. The South Seas cast a spell over figures such as Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin. The American Deep South and the southermost reaches of Latin America have been celebrated in the works of writers as diverse as John Muir, Jack Kerouac and Jorge Luis Borges. While the Great White South of the Antarctic has provided the backdrop to the darkest imaginings of Coleridge, Poe and Lovecraft. Even London, south of the river, is a place where novelists compete today to stake out a literary territory of their own. Moving between geography and mythology, literature and history, South is the first book to look at all things Southern in one volume. It examines the idea of the South as a symbol of freedom and escape, as well as the depository for many of our deepest unconscious fears and desires. It also charts the history of the South as the chosen location for the utopian visions of the North. From the beaches of Tahiti to the streets of Buenos Aires, from Naples to New Orleans, Merlin Coverley's brilliant and wide-ranging study throws light on the ways in which the idea of the South, in all its forms, has come to exert such a powerful hold on our collective imaginations.

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In contemporary Western culture ritual spaces are preserved, destructed and reconstructed. Examples are the rearrangement of churches, the rise of multi-religious urban ritual spaces, the remarkable vitality of places of pilgrimage and war cemeteries, and the growing popularity of lieux de mémoire in general with their accompanying forms of 'topolatry' and 'geopiety'. This volume - initiated by a Dutch research group - explores the transformations of ritual space in the modern West from various angles. The first programmatic part of the book focuses on the research into the triad of space/place, ritual and religion/sacrality and the essentially contested notion of the sacred. The next set of contributions deals with the relations between memorial culture and place. American 'landscapes of tragedy', memorial sites for the filmmaker and journalist Theo van Gogh and the popular Dutch singer André Hazes, and the Cancer Memorial Forest in The Netherlands that commemorates the victims of this disease, are analysed in some detail. The third part of the book situates ritual space in the tension between tradition and modernity. The examples of redundant church buildings and rooms of silence, and especially the construction of a new Roman Catholic Cathedral in Oakland, California, show how people construct and re-invent ritual spaces. In the final part, the vicissitudes of Mormon temple space and the wide-spread phenomenon of people ritually throwing coins into water are explored from a cultural-anthropological perspective. The triangle place/space, ritual, sacrality/religion proves to be crucial in the exploration of the processes of re-inventing ritual space in modern Western culture. New forms of memorialization mixed with traditional elements, changing relationships between private and public, individual and collective, temporary and permanent dimensions, and the contested character of sacred spaces all point to a new religious dynamics, characterized by the processes of individualisation, emotionalisation and de-institutionalisation.

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Comportant un volet purement historiographique et un volet plus anthropologique avec des enquetes de terrain, cette recherche se veut une plongee dans la vie d'une communaute allemande de province, de son emancipation legale a sa destruction sous le nazisme, que l'analyse des logiques qui president a sa mise en recit autour des annees 2000. La communaute rurale de Schmalkalden, tiraillee entre Hesse et Thuringe, connait en effet des peripeties qui se situent fort loin du conflit entre la reforme et l'orthodoxie, qu'il s'agisse de ses relations houleuses avec les employes communautaires ou de celles, ambigues, avec le rabbin de la province. Elle prie selon "l'ancien rite"; certaines coutumes, comme l'usage du bain rituel, y tombent en desherence; il s'y manifeste des phenomenes nouveaux, comme la philanthropie. Elle sera l'une des dernieres communautes du pays a renover sa synagogue avant 1933. Situee sur le territoire de ce qui allait devenir l'Allemagne de l'est, non loin du camp de Buchenwald, les evenements qui se sont deroules a Schmalkalden entre 1933 et 1945 y font l'objet d'un traitement particulier des la fin du regime nazi. L'examen des documents datant de l'apres-guerre permettent par ailleurs de mettre en evidence qu'une politique d'occultation du genocide ne s'est formee que progressivement et differentiellement dans les deux Allemagne. A partir d'une micro-histoire, il s'agit donc de rendre compte de la specificite du judaisme rural, mais aussi d'envisager une petite communaute dans son contexte provincial et national en tant que paradigme sans cesse confronte avec l'histoire des juifs d'Allemagne, de mettre au jour les modalites de la construction de l'objet de recherche "juifs allemands", et surtout les enjeux differentiels des "commanditaires" et les structures narratives mises en oeuvre pour elaborer leur experience collective.

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Amy Poeppel brings her signature “big-hearted, charming” (The Washington Post) style to this wise and joyful novel that celebrates love, hate, and all of the glorious absurdity in between.In the heart of Greenwich Village, three women form an accidental sorority when a baby—belonging to exactly none of them—lands on their collective doorstep. Lauren and her family—lucky bastards—have been granted the use of a spectacular brownstone, teeming with history and dizzyingly unattractive 70s wallpaper. Adding to the home’s bohemian, grungy splendor is the bar occupying the basement, a (mostly) beloved dive called The Sweet Spot. Within days of moving in, Lauren discovers that she has already made an enemy in the neighborhood by inadvertently sparking the divorce of a couple she has never actually met. Melinda’s husband of thirty years has dumped her for a young celebrity entrepreneur named Felicity, and, to Melinda’s horror, the lovebirds are soon to become parents. In her incandescent rage, Melinda wreaks havoc wherever she can, including in Felicity’s Soho boutique, where she has a fit of epic proportions, which happens to be caught on film.​ Olivia—the industrious twenty-something behind the counter, who has big dreams and bigger debt—gets caught in the crossfire. In an effort to diffuse Melinda’s temper, Olivia has a tantrum of her own and gets unceremoniously canned, thanks to TikTok. When Melinda’s ex follows his lover across the country, leaving their squalling baby behind, the three women rise to the occasion in order to forgive, to forget, to Ferberize, and to track down the wayward parents. But can their little village find a way toward the happily ever afters they all desire? Welcome to The Sweet Spot.

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From national bestselling author and humanitarian Zainab Salbi, a powerful look at what happens when we heal our shadows and align with our core values. "May this book help create bridges to a much bigger and kinder world." —Gloria Steinem, author of My Life on the Road and Revolution from Within "If you want to know what true self-power is, then read this book. It will open your inner eye to the beauty of your own being." —Deepak Chopra, MD, author of The Healing Self and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success How can we transform our collective fear and the deep divisions between us into meaningful change? In Freedom Is an Inside Job, bestselling author, humanitarian, and TV personality Zainab Salbi shares that to transform our outer world, we must turn towards our inner world. After years of working as a successful CEO and change-maker, Salbi realized that if she wanted to confront and heal the shadows of the world, she needed to face her own shadows first. Holding nothing back, Salbi shares pivotal moments from her personal life alongside poignant and fascinating stories from her encounters around the world. Through her stories, we learn that if we want to create real change, we need to heal the inconsistencies within our own values, actions, and goals. As Salbi explores her own riveting journey to wholeness, readers learn how embarking on such a journey enables each of us to create the world we want to live in. "So long as we are conflicted within, we will continue to have conflict without," writes Salbi. "If we want to change the world, we need to begin with ourselves. This is the path to freedom."

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Making America a welcome place for everyone, from long-established citizens to immigrants who have just arrived. This compelling approach to the immigration debate takes the reader behind the blaring headlines and into communities grappling with the reality of new immigrants and the changing nature of American identity. Ali Noorani, the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, interviews nearly fifty local and national leaders from law enforcement, business, immigrant, and faith communities to illustrate the challenges and opportunities they face. From high school principals to church pastors to sheriffs, the author reveals that most people are working to advance society's interests, not exploiting a crisis at the expense of one community. As he shows, some cities and regions have reached a happy conclusion, while others struggle to find balance. Whether describing a pastor preaching to the need to welcome the stranger, a sheriff engaging the Muslim community, or a farmer's wind-whipped face moistened by tears as he tells the story of his farmworkers being deported, the author helps readers to realize that America's immigration debate isn't about policy; it is about the culture and values that make America what it is. The people on the front lines of America's cultural and demographic debate are Southern Baptist pastors in South Carolina, attorneys general in Utah or Indiana, Texas businessmen, and many more. Their combined voices make clear that all of them are working to make America a welcome place for everyone, long-established citizens and new arrivals alike. Especially now, when we feel our identity, culture, and values changing shape, the collective message from all the diverse voices in this inspiring book is one of hope for the future.

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While most spine deformities such as scoliosis, kyphosis, and lordosis are idiopathic, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, spinal cord tumors and lesions are associated with more severe curve progression. Bracing typically does not prevent progression of spinal curves, and surgery is necessary for these patients. Neuromuscular Spine Deformity by Amer F. Samdani et al is the most comprehensive book on this topic to date, detailing the latest surgical techniques for a wide range of common to rare neuromuscular pathologies, in 27 well-illustrated chapters. The comprehensive content derives from the authors' collective years of hands-on expertise, evidence-based knowledge from the literature, and multicenter scoliosis studies performed by the prestigious Harms Study Group, a worldwide research-based association of spine surgeons. The text begins with discussion of preoperative evaluation, nonoperative management, and surgical considerations such as anesthesia, neuromonitoring, and estimated blood loss. Section two highlights pathology-specific surgical interventions, while sections three and four provide clinical pearls on a wide array of surgical techniques, complications, and patient outcomes. Key Highlights Disease-related challenges including dislocated hips, hyperlordotic/hyperkyphotic spine in cerebral palsy, myelomeningocele-related myelodysplasia and spine deformity, Duchenne's muscular dystrophy, and spinal muscular atrophy Guidance on assessing the sagittal profile preoperatively and executing it intraoperatively in patients with spinal cord injury Multiple options for fixation including the new sacral alar iliac screw approach for sacropelvic fixation and correction of pelvic obliquity Postoperative issues including ICU management, incidence and management of early and late wound infection, instrumentation failure, junctional kyphosis, and cervical extension Health-related quality of life outcomes in pediatric patients with cerebral palsy who have undergone scoliosis surgery This state-of-the-art resource is essential reading for orthopaedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, and trainees in these specialties. It is also a must-have reference for academic programs and institutional departments specializing in pediatric spine pathologies.

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Examines the role of the American Revolution in the everyday lives of women Patriarchal forces of law, finance, and social custom restricted women’s rights and agency in revolutionary America. Yet women in this period exploited these confines, transforming constraints into vehicles of female empowerment. Through a close reading of thousands of legislative, judicial, and institutional pleas across seventy years of history in three urban centers, Jacqueline Beatty illustrates the ways in which women in the revolutionary era asserted their status as dependents, demanding the protections owed to them as the assumed subordinates of men. In so doing, they claimed various forms of aid and assistance, won divorce suits, and defended themselves and their female friends in the face of patriarchal assumptions about their powerlessness. Ultimately, women in the revolutionary era were able to advocate for themselves and express a relative degree of power not in spite of their dependent status, but because of it. Their varying degrees of success in using these methods, however, was contingent on their race, class, and socio-economic status, and the degree to which their language and behavior conformed to assumptions of Anglo-American femininity. In Dependence thus exposes the central paradoxes inherent in American women’s social, legal, and economic positions of dependence in the Revolutionary era, complicating binary understandings of power and weakness, of agency and impotence, and of independence and dependence. Significantly, the American Revolution provided some women with the language and opportunities in which to claim old rights—the rights of dependents—in new ways. Most importantly, In Dependence shows how women’s coming to consciousness as rights-bearing individuals laid the groundwork for the activism and collective petitioning efforts of later generations of American feminists.

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If extraterrestrials exist, where are they? How likely is it that somewhere in the universe an Earth-like planet supports an advanced culture? Why do so many people claim to have encountered Aliens? In this gripping exploration, scientist Don Lincoln exposes and explains the truths about the belief in and the search for life on other planets. In the first half of Alien Universe, Lincoln looks to Western civilization's collective image of Aliens, showing how our perceptions of extraterrestrials have evolved over time. The roots of this belief can be traced as far back as our earliest recognition of other planets in the universe-the idea of them supporting life was a natural progression of thinking that has fascinated us ever since. Our captivation with Aliens has, however, led to mixed results. The world was fooled in the nineteenth century during the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, and many people misunderstood Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast, The War of the Worlds, leading to significant anxiety among some listeners. Our continuing interest in Aliens is reflected in entertainment successes such as E.T., The X-Files, and Star Trek. The second half of the book explores the scientific possibility of whether advanced Alien civilizations do exist. For many years, researchers have sought to answer Enrico Fermi's great paradox-if there are so many planets in the universe and there is a high probability that many of those can support life, then why have we not actually encountered any Aliens? Lincoln describes how modern science teaches us what is possible and what is not in our search for extraterrestrial civilizations. Whether you are drawn to the psychological belief in Aliens, the history of our interest in life on other planets, or the scientific possibility of Alien existence, Alien Universe is sure to hold you spellbound.

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The tobacco industry has capitalized on numerous elements of globalization - including trade liberalization, foreign direct investment, and global communications - to expand into countries where effective tobacco control programs are not in place. As a consequence, tobacco is currently the leading cause of preventable death in the world. Each year, it kills more people than HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. Amid evidence of an emerging pandemic, a committed group of public health professionals and institutions sought in the mid-1990s to challenge the tobacco industry's expansion by negotiating a binding international law under the auspices of the World Health Organization. The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) - the first collective global response to the causation of avoidable chronic disease-was one of the most quickly ratified treaties in United Nations history. In The Global War on Tobacco, Heather Wipfli tells the engaging story of the FCTC, from its start as an unlikely civil society proposal to its enactment in 178 countries as of June 2014. Wipfli also reveals how globalization offers anti-tobacco advocates significant cooperative opportunities to share knowledge and address cross-border public health problems. The book-the first to delve deeply into the origin and development of the FCTC-seeks to advance understanding of how non-state actors, transnational networks, and international institutionalization can impact global governance for health. Case studies from a variety of diverse high-, middle-, and low-income countries provide real-world examples of the success or failure of tobacco control. Aimed at public health professionals and students, The Global War on Tobacco is a fascinating look at how international relations is changing to respond to the modern global marketplace and protect human health.

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In this examination of stand-up comedy, Rebecca Krefting establishes a new genre of comedic production, "charged humor," and charts its pathways from production to consumption. Some jokes are tears in the fabric of our beliefs-they challenge myths about how fair and democratic our society is and the behaviors and practices we enact to maintain those fictions. Jokes loaded with vitriol and delivered with verve, charged humor compels audiences to action, artfully summoning political critique. Since the institutionalization of stand-up comedy as a distinct cultural form, stand-up comics have leveraged charged humor to reveal social, political, and economic stratifications. All Joking Aside offers a history of charged comedy from the mid-twentieth century to the early aughts, highlighting dozens of talented comics from Dick Gregory and Robin Tyler to Micia Mosely and Hari Kondabolu. The popularity of charged humor has waxed and waned over the past sixty years. Indeed, the history of charged humor is a tale of intrigue and subversion featuring dive bars, public remonstrations, fickle audiences, movie stars turned politicians, commercial airlines, emergent technologies, neoliberal mind-sets, and a cavalcade of comic misfits with an ax to grind. Along the way, Krefting explores the fault lines in the modern economy of humor, why men are perceived to be funnier than women, the perplexing popularity of modern-day minstrelsy, and the way identities are packaged and sold in the marketplace. Appealing to anyone interested in the politics of humor and generating implications for the study of any form of popular entertainment, this history reflects on why we make the choices we do and the collective power of our consumptive practices. Readers will be delighted by the broad array of comic talent spotlighted in this book, and for those interested in comedy with substance, it will offer an alternative punchline.

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Words like Thunder: New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers is a collection of poetry by award-winning Ojibwe author Lois Beardslee. Much of the book centers around Native people of the Great Lakes but has a universal relevance to modern indigenous people worldwide. Beardslee tackles contemporary topics like climate change and socioeconomic equality with a grace and readability that empowers readers and celebrates the strengths of today's indigenous peoples. She transforms the mundane into the sacred. Similar in style to Nikki Giovanni, Beardslee might lure in readers with the promise of traditional cultural material, even stereotypes, before quickly pivoting toward a direction of respect for the contemporaneity and adaptability of indigenous people's tenacious hold on traditions.Made up of four sections, the book is like a piece of artwork. Parts of the word-canvas are quiet so the reader can rest and other parts lead the reader quickly from one place to another, while always maintaining eye contact. More than anything, Beardslee emphasizes the notion that indigenous peoples are competent and wonderful, worthy of praise, and whose modernity is a function of their survival. She writes unapologetically with a strong ethnic identity as a woman of color who witnessed and experienced community loss of resources that defined her culture. Her stories transcend generations, time, and geographical boundaries-varying in voice between first person or that of her elders or children-resulting in a collective appeal. Beardslee continues to break the mold and push the boundaries of contemporary Native American poetry and prose. This book will appeal to a general readership, to people who want to learn more about indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes, and to people who care about the environment and socioeconomic equality. Even young readers, especially students of color, will find parts of this book to which they can relate.

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"Whenever the airship flew over a village, or whenever she flew over a lonely field on which some peasants were working, a tremendous shout of joy rose up in the air towards Count Zeppelin's miracle ship which, in the imagination of all who saw her, suggested some supernatural creature." As this paean to the Zeppelin from an early-20th-century issue of the German newspaper Thuringer Zeitung makes clear, the airship inspired a unique sense of awe. These phenomenal rigid, lighter-than-air craft-the invention of Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin (1838-1917)-approached the size of a small village. Although they moved slowly, there was no mistaking their exciting-or ominous-potential. Friends of the machine believed that it would revolutionize commerce, carry scientists to otherwise inaccessible places, and deliver bombs with great accuracy. Before the airplane proved its reliability and superior practicality-and before the fiery crash of the Hindenburg in 1937-Zeppelins made a deep impression on the minds of Europeans, especially in Germany. In Zeppelin! Guillaume de Syon offers a captivating history of this technological wonder, from development and production to its impact on German culture and society. De Syon chronicles the various ways in which the airships were used-transport, war, exploration, and propaganda-and details the attempts by successive German governments-autocratic, democratic, fascist- to co-opt Count Zeppelin's invention. Between 1900 and 1939, Germans saw the Zeppelin as a symbol of national progress, and de Syon uses the airship to better understand the dynamics of German society and the place of technology within it. Though few people actually flew in any of the 119 Zeppelins built, the rigid airship made one of the strongest impressions of any flying machine on Europe's collective memory. Six decades later, there is still a mystique surrounding these technological leviathans, one that Zeppelin! addresses with insight and wit.

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Every era has invented a different idea of the ‘classical’ to create its own identity. Thus the ‘classical’ does not concern only the past: it is also concerned with the present and a vision of the future. In this elegant new book, Salvatore Settis traces the ways in which we have related to our ‘classical’ past, starting with post-modern American skyscrapers and working his way back through our cultural history to the attitudes of the Greeks and Romans themselves. Settis argues that this obsession with cultural decay, ruins and a ‘classical’ past is specifically European and the product of a collective cultural trauma following the collapse of the Roman Empire. This situation differed from that of the Aztec and Inca empires whose collapse was more sudden and more complete, and from the Chinese Empire which always enjoyed a high degree of continuity. He demonstrates how the idea of the ‘classical’ has changed over the centuries through an unrelenting decay of ‘classicism’ and its equally unrelenting rebirth in an altered form. In the Modern Era this emulation of the ‘ancients’ by the ‘moderns’ was accompanied by new trends: the increasing belief that the former had now been surpassed by the latter, and an increasing preference for the Greek over the Roman. These conflicting interpretations were as much about the future as they were about the past. No civilization can invent itself if it does not have other societies in other times and other places to act as benchmarks. Settis argues that we will be better equipped to mould new generations for the future once we understand that the ‘classical’ is not a dead culture we inherited and for which we can take no credit, but something startling that has to be re-created every day and is a powerful spur to understanding the ‘other’.

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This monograph studies multi-member households or, more generally, socio-economic groups from a purely theoretical perspective and within a general equilibrium framework, in contrast to a sizeable empirical literature. The approach is based on the belief that households, their composition, decisions and behavior within a competitive market economy deserve thorough examination. The authors set out to link the formation, composition, decision-making, and stability of households. They develop general equilibrium models of pure exchange economies in which households can have several, typically heterogeneous members and act as collective decision-making units on the one hand and as competitive market participants on the other hand. Moreover, the more advanced models combine traditional exchange (markets for commodities) and matching (markets for people or partners) and develop implications for welfare, social structures, and economic policy.In the field of family economics, Hans Haller and Hans Gersbach have pioneered a ‘market’ approach that applies the tools of general equilibrium theory to the analysis of household behavior. This very interesting book presents an overview of their methods and results. This is an inspiring work. Pierre-André Chiappori, Columbia University, USAThe sophisticated, insightful and challenging analysis presented in this book extends the theory of the multi-person household along an important but relatively neglected dimension, that of general equilibrium theory. It also challenges GE theorists themselves to follow Paul Samuelson in taking seriously the real attributes of that fundamental building block, the household, as a social group whose decisions may not satisfy the standard axioms of individual choice. This synthesis and extension of their earlier work by Gersbach and Haller will prove to be a seminal contribution in its field. Ray Rees, LMU Munich, Germany

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This book is open access. This book undertakes a multifaceted and integrated examination of biometric identification, including the current state of the technology, how it is being used, the key ethical issues, and the implications for law and regulation. The five chapters examine the main forms of contemporary biometrics–fingerprint recognition, facial recognition and DNA identification– as well the integration of biometric data with other forms of personal data, analyses key ethical concepts in play, including privacy, individual autonomy, collective responsibility, and joint ownership rights, and proposes a raft of principles to guide the regulation of biometrics in liberal democracies.Biometric identification technology is developing rapidly and being implemented more widely, along with other forms of information technology. As products, services and communication moves online, digital identity and security is becoming more important. Biometric identification facilitates this transition. Citizens now use biometrics to access a smartphone or obtain a passport; law enforcement agencies use biometrics in association with CCTV to identify a terrorist in a crowd, or identify a suspect via their fingerprints or DNA; and companies use biometrics to identify their customers and employees. In some cases the use of biometrics is governed by law, in others the technology has developed and been implemented so quickly that, perhaps because it has been viewed as a valuable security enhancement, laws regulating its use have often not been updated to reflect new applications. However, the technology associated with biometrics raises significant ethical problems, including in relation to individual privacy, ownership of biometric data, dual use and, more generally, as is illustrated by the increasing use of biometrics in authoritarian states such as China, the potential for unregulated biometrics to undermine fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Resolving these ethical problems is a vital step towards more effective regulation.

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"Earth Shattering" lines up a chorus of over two hundred poems addressing environmental destruction. Whether the subject - or target - is the whole earth (global warming, climate change, extinction of species, planetary catastrophe)or landscapes, homelands and cities (polluting rivers and seas, fouling the air, felling trees and forests), there are poems here to alert and alarm anyone willing to read or listen. Other poems celebrate the rapidly vanishing natural world, or lament what has already been lost, or even find a glimmer of hope through efforts to conserve, recycle and rethink. Earth Shattering's words of warning include contributions from many great writers of the past as well as leading contemporary poets from around the world, ranging from Wordsworth, Clare, Hopkins, Hardy, Rilke and Charlotte Mew to Wendell Berry, Helen Dunmore, Joy Harjo, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin and Gary Snyder. This is the first anthology to show the full range of ecopoetry, from the wilderness poetry of ancient China to 21st-century native American poetry, with postcolonial and feminist perspectives represented by writers such as Derek Walcott, Ernesto Cardinal,Oodgeroo and Susan Griffin. Ecopoetry goes beyond traditional nature poetry to take on distinctly contemporary issues, recognising the interdependence of all life on earth, the wildness and otherness of nature, and the irresponsibility of our attempts to tame and plunder nature. The poems dramatise the dangers and poverty of a modern world perilously cut off from nature and ruled by technology, self-interest and economic power. As the world's politicians and corporations orchestrate our headlong rush towards Eco- Armageddon, poetry may seem like a hopeless gesture. But its power is in the detail, in the force of each individual poem, in every poem's effect on every reader. And anyone whose resolve is stirred will strengthen the collective call for change.

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