Search results for ""In Other Words""

Why we need to stop wasting public funds on educationDespite being immensely popular--and immensely lucrative—education is grossly overrated. In this explosive book, Bryan Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skill but to certify their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity—in other words, to signal the qualities of a good employee. Learn why students hunt for easy As and casually forget most of what they learn after the final exam, why decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for the average worker but instead in runaway credential inflation, how employers reward workers for costly schooling they rarely if ever use, and why cutting education spending is the best remedy.Caplan draws on the latest social science to show how the labor market values grades over knowledge, and why the more education your rivals have, the more you need to impress employers. He explains why graduation is our society's top conformity signal, and why even the most useless degrees can certify employability. He advocates two major policy responses. The first is educational austerity. Government needs to sharply cut education funding to curb this wasteful rat race. The second is more vocational education, because practical skills are more socially valuable than teaching students how to outshine their peers.Romantic notions about education being "good for the soul" must yield to careful research and common sense—The Case against Education points the way.

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There is an ancient and quite baseless myth that the use of torture has never been legal in Britain. This old wives' tale arose because torture had been neither endorsed nor forbidden by either statute or common law. In other words; the law has, until the late twentieth century, never had anything to say on the subject. In fact, torture, inflicted both as punishment and as an aid to interrogation, has been a constant and recurring feature of British life; from the beginning of the country's recorded history, until well into the twentieth century. Even as late as 1976, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British Army was guilty of the systematic torture of suspected terrorists. In 'A History of Torture in Britain' Simon Webb traces the terrible story of the deliberate use of pain on prisoners in Britain and its overseas possessions. Beginning with the medieval trial by ordeal, which entailed carrying a red-hot iron bar in your bare hand for a certain distance, through to the stretching on the rack of political prisoners and the mutilation of those found guilty of sedition; the evidence clearly shows that Britain has relied heavily upon torture, both at home and abroad, for almost the whole of its history. This sweeping and authoritative account of a grisly and distasteful subject is likely to become the definitive history of the judicial infliction of pain in Britain and its Empire.

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One of the most common—and wounding—misconceptions about literary scholars today is that they simply don’t love books. While those actually working in literary studies can easily refute this claim, such a response risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have played a vital role in the formation of private life—that the love of literature, in other words, is deeply embedded in the history of literature. Yet at the same time, our love is neither self-evident nor ahistorical: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history. While never denying the very real feelings that warm our relationship to books, Loving Literature nonetheless serves as a riposte to those who use the phrase “the love of literature” as if its meaning were transparent. Lynch writes, “It is as if those on the side of love of literature had forgotten what literary texts themselves say about love’s edginess and complexities.” With this masterly volume, Lynch restores those edges and allows us to revel in those complexities.

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Edible Forest Gardens is a groundbreaking two-volume work that spells out and explores the key concepts of forest ecology and applies them to the needs of natural gardeners in temperate climates. Volume I lays out the vision of the forest garden and explains the basic ecological principles that make it work. In Volume II, Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier move on to practical considerations: concrete ways to design, establish, and maintain your own forest garden. Along the way they present case studies and examples, as well as tables, illustrations, and a uniquely valuable "plant matrix" that lists hundreds of the best edible and useful species. Taken together, the two volumes of Edible Forest Gardens offer an advanced course in ecological gardening-one that will forever change the way you look at plants and your environment. What is an edible forest garden? An edible forest garden is a perennial polyculture of multipurpose plants. Most plants regrow every year without replanting: perennials. Many species grow together: a polyculture. Each plant contributes to the success of the whole by fulfilling many functions: multipurpose. In other words, a forest garden is an edible ecosystem, a consciously designed community of mutually beneficial plants and animals intended for human food production. Edible forest gardens provide more than just a variety of foods. The seven F's apply here: food, fuel, fiber, fodder, fertilizer, and "farmaceuticals," as well as fun. A beautiful, lush environment can be a conscious focus of your garden design, or a side benefit you enjoy

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Wherever you are in your creative life---just tiptoeing in or fully immersed, The Fire Inside can be a source of encouragement and inspiration.Rodin said that "The main thing is to be moved, to love, to tremble, to live." In other words, to be fully engaged in life and the creativity that exists within.The Fire Inside, through a well-researched collection of essays and heart-opening personal stories, invites readers to uncover their unique talents and live out their individual dreams. Within each one of us are vast untapped reservoirs of creativity, and when we connect with that potential, our lives will open in wonderful and joy-filled ways.Few books on creativity are so inclusive, so welcoming as this book, offering insight not only for furthering one's abilities in the traditional arts, but also in the day to day creativity which so enriches our lives. Based on the authors' combined fifty-five years of teaching and presenting workshops on writing and creativity, The Fire Inside is written in a spirit of warmth and generosity. It invites the reader to say yes to creativity, choose to live a bigger life, and discover how "the magic" happens.These writers have great authority and expertise on this topic. They write ideas that are fresh and new with profound potential for empowering readers as well as writers, connecting them with their honest, authentic peers." - Mary Pipher, author of The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture and Writing to Change the World

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From the bestselling and beloved author of Coming Clean, a brave and witty examination of how and why we try to control our bodies with food. Like most people, Kimberly Rae Miller does not have the perfect body, but that hasn't stopped her from trying. And trying. And trying some more. She's been at it since she was four years old, when Sesame Street inspired her to go on her first diet. Postcollege, after a brief stint as a diet-pill model, she became a health-and-fitness writer and editor working on celebrities' bestselling bios—sugarcoating the trials and tribulations celebs endure to stay thin. Needless to say, Kim has spent her life in pursuit of the ideal body. But what is the ideal body? Knowing she's far from alone in this struggle, Kim sets out to find the objective definition of this seemingly unattainable level of perfection. While on a fascinating and hilarious journey through time that takes her from obese Paleolithic cavewomen, to the bland menus that Drs. Graham and Kellogg prescribed to promote good morals in addition to good health, to the binge-drinking-prone regimen that caused William the Conqueror's body to explode at his own funeral, Kim ends up discovering a lot about her relationship with her own body. Warm, funny, and brutally honest, Beautiful Bodies is a blend of memoir and social history that will speak to anyone who's ever been caught in a power struggle with his or her own body—in other words, just about everyone.

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Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans—predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth—and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world. Traditional economics assumes rational actors. Early in his research, Thaler realized these Spock-like automatons were nothing like real people. Whether buying a clock radio, selling basketball tickets, or applying for a mortgage, we all succumb to biases and make decisions that deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economists. In other words, we misbehave. More importantly, our misbehavior has serious consequences. Dismissed at first by economists as an amusing sideshow, the study of human miscalculations and their effects on markets now drives efforts to make better decisions in our lives, our businesses, and our governments. Coupling recent discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of incentives and market behavior, Thaler enlightens readers about how to make smarter decisions in an increasingly mystifying world. He reveals how behavioral economic analysis opens up new ways to look at everything from household finance to assigning faculty offices in a new building, to TV game shows, the NFL draft, and businesses like Uber. Laced with antic stories of Thaler’s spirited battles with the bastions of traditional economic thinking, Misbehaving is a singular look into profound human foibles. When economics meets psychology, the implications for individuals, managers, and policy makers are both profound and entertaining.

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This is a book on the interrelationship of the EU legal order and the Cyprus issue. The book addresses a question which is of great significance for the legal order of the EU (as well as for Cypriots, Turks and Greeks), namely how the Union deals with the de facto division of the island. Despite the partial normalisation of relations between the two ethno-religious groups on the island, Cyprus' accession to the EU has not led to its reunification, nor to the restoration of human rights, nor a complete end to the political and economic isolation of the Turkish Cypriot community. Ironically enough, the accession of the island to the EU actually added a new dimension to the division of the island. According to Protocol 10 on Cyprus to the Act of Accession 2003, the Republic of Cyprus joined the Union with its entire territory. However, due to the fact that its Government cannot exercise effective control over the whole island, pending a settlement, the application of the acquis is 'suspended in those areas of the Republic of Cyprus in which the Government of the Republic of Cyprus does not have effective control.' Given this unprecedented (for an EU Member State) situation of not controlling part of its territory, the book analyses the limits of the suspension of the Union acquis in the areas north of the Green Line. In other words, the telos of this particularly challenging research is to map the partial application of Union law in an area where there are two competing claims of authority.

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'A dazzlingly original picture of our relentlessly mobile species’ NAOMI KLEIN ‘Fascinating . . . Likely to prove prophetic in the coming months and years’ OBSERVER ‘A dazzling tour through 300 years of scientific history’ PROSPECT 'A hugely entertaining, life-affirming and hopeful hymn to the glorious adaptability of life on earth' SCOTSMAN __________________ We are surrounded by stories of people on the move. Wild species, too, are escaping warming seas and desiccated lands in a mass exodus. Politicians and the media present this upheaval of migration patterns as unprecedented, blaming it for the spread of disease and conflict, and spreading anxiety across the world as a result. But the science and history of migration in animals, plants, and humans tell a different story. Far from being a disruptive behaviour, migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change, a biological imperative as necessary as breathing. Climate changes triggered the first human migrations out of Africa. Falling sea levels allowed our passage across the Bering Sea. Unhampered by borders, migration allowed our ancestors to people the planet, into the highest reaches of the Himalayan Mountains and the most remote islands of the Pacific, disseminating the biological, cultural and social diversity that ecosystems and societies depend upon. In other words, migration is not the crisis – it is the solution. __________________ Tracking the history of misinformation from the 18th century through to today’s anti-immigration policies, The Next Great Migration makes the case for a future in which migration is not a source of fear, but of hope.

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“Let me tell you where I'm coming from . . .”—so begins many a discussion in contemporary U.S. culture. Pressed by an almost compulsive desire to situate ourselves within a definite matrix of reference points (for example, “as a parent of two children” or “as an engineer” or “as a college graduate”) in both scholarly inquiry and everyday parlance, we seem to reject adamantly the idea of a universal human subject. Yet what does this rhetoric of self-affiliation tell us? What is its history? David Simpson’s Situatedness casts a critical eye on this currently popular form of identification, suggesting that, far from being a simple turn of phrase, it demarcates a whole structure of thinking.Simpson traces the rhetorical syndrome through its truly interdisciplinary genealogy. Discussing its roles within the fields of legal theory, social science, fiction, philosophy, and ethics, he argues that the discourse of situatedness consists of a volatile fusion of modesty and aggressiveness. It oscillates, in other words, between accepting complete causal predetermination and advocating personal agency and responsibility. Simpson’s study neither fully rejects nor endorses the present-day language of self-specification. Rather it calls attention to the limitations and opportunities of situatedness—a notion whose ideological slippage it ultimately sees as allowing late-capitalist liberal democracies to function. Given its wide scope and lively rendering, Situatedness will attract a range of scholars in the humanities and legal studies. It will also interest all those for whom the politics of subjectivity pose real problems of authority, identity, and belief.

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How extremism is going mainstream in Germany through clothing brands laced with racist and nationalist symbols The past decade has witnessed a steady increase in far right politics, social movements, and extremist violence in Europe. Scholars and policymakers have struggled to understand the causes and dynamics that have made the far right so appealing to so many people--in other words, that have made the extreme more mainstream. In this book, Cynthia Miller-Idriss examines how extremist ideologies have entered mainstream German culture through commercialized products and clothing laced with extremist, anti-Semitic, racist, and nationalist coded symbols and references. Drawing on a unique digital archive of thousands of historical and contemporary images, as well as scores of interviews with young people and their teachers in two German vocational schools with histories of extremist youth presence, Miller-Idriss shows how this commercialization is part of a radical transformation happening today in German far right youth subculture. She describes how these young people have gravitated away from the singular, hard-edged skinhead style in favor of sophisticated and fashionable commercial brands that deploy coded extremist symbols. Virtually indistinguishable in style from other popular clothing, the new brands desensitize far right consumers to extremist ideas and dehumanize victims. Required reading for anyone concerned about the global resurgence of the far right,The Extreme Gone Mainstream reveals how style and aesthetic representation serve as one gateway into extremist scenes and subcultures by helping to strengthen racist and nationalist identification and by acting as conduits of resistance to mainstream society.

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This lavishly illustrated volume presents a comprehensive architectural study of 87 individual temples and sanctuaries built in the Roman East between the end of the 1st century BCE and the end of the 3rd century CE, within a broad region encompassing the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. Religious architecture gave faithful expression to the complexity of the Roman East and to its multiplicity of traditions pertaining to ethnic and religious aspects as well as to the powerful influence of Imperial Rome. The source of this power lay in the uniformity of the architectural language, the inventory of forms, the choice of styles and the spatial layout of the buildings. Thus, while temples have an eclectic character, there is an underlying unity of form comprising the podium, the stairway between the terminating walls (antae) and the columns along the entrance front - in other words, the axiality, frontality and symmetry of the temple as viewed from outside.The temples and sanctuaries studied in this volume demonstrate individual nuances of plan, spatial design, location in the sanctuary and interrelations with the immediate vicinity but can be divided into two main categories: Vitruvian temples (derived from Hellenistic-Roman architecture) and Non-Vitruvian temples (those with plans and spatial designs that cannot be analysed according to architectural criteria such as those defined by Vitruvius). The individual descriptions presented focus solely upon the analysis of the external and internal space of the temples of all types and do not involve any cultural or ethnic discussion.

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"Coffee House Press, a major nonprofit publisher, recently launched a Kickstarter for a book examining the Internet's cat video fetish. The book, if the Kickstarter campaign reaches its $25,000 goal, will be titled Cat is Art Spelled Wrong, and examine themes like what makes something art, whether art is good or bad, and how taste develops. In other words, cat videos can actually be ...pretty serious."-The Washington Post "Coffee House Press one-ups all boring Kickstarter campaigns with Catstarter, a campaign to fund a book on cat videos."-The Millions "Coffee House Press's upcoming book, titled Cat is Art Spelled Wrong, takes the opportunity to examine a seemingly irrelevant subject from new perspectives-from 'the line is between reality/self on the internet' to 'how cat videos demonstrate either that nothing matters, or that any art matters if anyone thinks it does.' Thus, it's an earnest attempt to uncover more about human nature-especially in today's internet-driven world." -Cool Hunting Fifteen writers, all addressing not just our fascination with cat videos, but also how we decide what is good or bad art, or art at all; how taste develops, how that can change, and why we love or hate something. It's about people and technology and just what it is about cats that makes them the internet's cutest despots. Contributors include: Sasha Archibald, Will Braden, Stephen Burt, Maria Bustillos, David Carr, Matthea Harvey, Alexis Madrigal, Joanne McNeil, Ander Monson, Kevin Nguyen, Elena Passarello, Jillian Steinhauer, Sarah Schultz, and Carl Wilson.

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Jeter Publishing presents the second nonfiction biography in a brand-new series that celebrates men and women who altered the course of history often without recognition. On July 16, 1969, a Gemini rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Previous launches had focused on getting astronauts into space, docking two spacecraft, and even walking in space, but this mission was different. Apollo 11 was designed to land two astronauts on the moon and then bring them back to Earth. Four days later, two astronauts, Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, did walk on the moon. But did you know that there were actually three astronauts aboard the rocket on July 16? Michael Collins didn’t get to walk on the Moon, but his contribution is just as important as Armstrong and Aldrin’s. Prior to joining NASA, Collins was in the Air Force and flew fighter jets. After joining NASA, he made two trips into space, performing one of the first EVAs or Extravehicular activities (in other words, walking in space) as well as making that trip to the moon. Collins continued to contribute even after leaving the space program. He took a job in the State Department and even served as director of the National Air & Space Museum and as undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. He may not have walked on the moon, but he’s one of only twenty-four people to travel there. In fact, without Michael Collins, that first moon landing might never have happened.

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Just 2 inches long full-grown, this little guy is the foundation of the Southern Ocean food chain... “Hi. What are you? You appear to be an egg. You are an egg sinking. For many days, you sink. You sink a mile down, and you keep sinking down… down… until…” The unidentified narrator follows one krill among billions as it pursues its brief existence, eating and eating while metamorphosing from one thing into another and trying to avoid being eaten. Questions and advice are hurled at the krill on every page, but the krill never responds—because, after all, krill can’t talk, and this is nonfiction. Krill are the largest animals able to catch and eat phytoplankton, and they in turn are eaten by the largest animals ever to live on earth—blue whales—as well as by seals, penguins, and a host of others. In other words, krill are really good at eating, and they make really good eating. And that makes them the most important animals in the high-latitude oceans. As in The Whale Fall Café, Dan Tavis’s illustrations combine scientific accuracy with Nemo liveliness and humor. Our star krill is so good at gobbling up phytoplankton that he turns green, so we can pick him out from the crowd racing to escape a penguin’s beak or a blue whale’s gaping maw. The book has been reviewed and endorsed by global krill expert Dr. Stephen Nichol, and the manuscript earned an honorable mention in Minnesota’s McKnight Artist Fellowships for Writers. Helpful backmatter is included.

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Doron Taussig invites us to question the American Dream. Did you earn what you have? Did everyone else? The American Dream is built on the idea that Americans end up roughly where we deserve to be in our working lives based on our efforts and abilities; in other words, the United States is supposed to be a meritocracy. When Americans think and talk about our lives, we grapple with this idea, asking how a person got to where he or she is and whether he or she earned it. In What We Mean by the American Dream, Taussig tries to find out how we answer those questions. Weaving together interviews with Americans from many walks of life—as well as stories told in the US media about prominent figures from politics, sports, and business—What We Mean by the American Dream investigates how we think about whether an individual deserves an opportunity, job, termination, paycheck, or fortune. Taussig looks into the fabric of American life to explore how various people, including dairy farmers, police officers, dancers, teachers, computer technicians, students, store clerks, the unemployed, homemakers, and even drug dealers got to where they are today and whether they earned it or not. Taussig's frank assessment of the state of the US workforce and its dreams allows him to truly and meaningfully ask the question that underpins so many of our political debates and personal frustrations: Did you earn it? By doing so, he sheds new light on what we mean by—and how we can deliver on—the American Dream of today.

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Some architects dream of 3D-printing houses. Some even fantasise about 3D-printing entire cities. But what is the real potential of 3D printing for architects? This issue focuses on another strand of 3D-printing practice emerging among architects operating at a much smaller scale that is potentially more significant. Several architects have been working with the fashion industry to produce some exquisitely designed 3D-printed wearables. Other architects have been 3D-printing food, jewellery and other items at the scale of the human body. But what is the significance of this work? And how do these 3D-printed body-scale items relate to the discipline of architecture? Are they merely a distraction from the real business of the architect? Or do they point towards a new form of proto-architecture – like furniture, espresso makers and pavilions before them – that tests out architectural ideas and explores tectonic properties at a smaller scale? Or does this work constitute an entirely new arena of design? In other words, is 3D printing at the human scale to be seen as a new genre of 'body architecture'? This issue contains some of the most exciting work in this field today, and seeks to chart and analyse its significance. Contributors include: Paola Antonelli/MoMA, Francis Bitonti, Niccolo Casas, Behnaz Farahi, Madeline Gannon, Eric Goldemberg/MONAD Studio, Kyle von Hasseln/3D Systems Culinary Lab, Rem D Koolhaas, Julia Kӧrner, Neil Leach, Steven Ma/Xuberance, Neri Oxman/MIT Media Lab, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, Gilles Retsin, Jessica Rosenkrantz/Nervous System, and Patrik Schumacher/Zaha Hadid Architects.

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“Let me tell you where I'm coming from . . .”—so begins many a discussion in contemporary U.S. culture. Pressed by an almost compulsive desire to situate ourselves within a definite matrix of reference points (for example, “as a parent of two children” or “as an engineer” or “as a college graduate”) in both scholarly inquiry and everyday parlance, we seem to reject adamantly the idea of a universal human subject. Yet what does this rhetoric of self-affiliation tell us? What is its history? David Simpson’s Situatedness casts a critical eye on this currently popular form of identification, suggesting that, far from being a simple turn of phrase, it demarcates a whole structure of thinking.Simpson traces the rhetorical syndrome through its truly interdisciplinary genealogy. Discussing its roles within the fields of legal theory, social science, fiction, philosophy, and ethics, he argues that the discourse of situatedness consists of a volatile fusion of modesty and aggressiveness. It oscillates, in other words, between accepting complete causal predetermination and advocating personal agency and responsibility. Simpson’s study neither fully rejects nor endorses the present-day language of self-specification. Rather it calls attention to the limitations and opportunities of situatedness—a notion whose ideological slippage it ultimately sees as allowing late-capitalist liberal democracies to function. Given its wide scope and lively rendering, Situatedness will attract a range of scholars in the humanities and legal studies. It will also interest all those for whom the politics of subjectivity pose real problems of authority, identity, and belief.

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The Asian economic crisis and future development is a popular subject among academics and policy-makers worldwide. Several countries in Asia came to face severe economic recession in the wake of their financial and foreign exchange crisis which began in 1997. The recession was deep and the challenges for managers of respective economies for an optimum specification of monetary and fiscal policy guidelines became all too great. Many came to wonder whether the so-called "Asian Miracle" all of a sudden became a part of history. If so, how will Asia recover from the crisis and experience high growth and continuing development as in the past quarter of the century? Can such a crisis be forewarned? Which development paths should Asia seek so that the crisis will not be repeated in the future? In other words, the challenge is to formulate rational economic policies for Asia's newly industrialized/industrializing economies so that their industrialization and development can sustainably progress as Asia enters the Twenty-First Century. The book addresses the above issues by covering many topics including financial meltdown and industrial development, money and financial markets, exchange rates, capital flows, economic reforms, human capital development, impact of the financial crisis on growth and poverty incidence, as well as other development problems in Asia-Pacific countries. The subject of this book should be of great interest to scholars, policy makers and the general public who follow economic developments in Asia. It will contribute to a broader perspective and at the same time, a deeper understanding of the subject

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In the wake of radical social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies’ embrace of politics entailed a widespread rejection of aesthetic considerations. For scholars invested in literature’s role in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, appreciating literature’s formal beauty seemed frivolous and irresponsible, even complicit with the iniquities of the social order. This suspicion of aesthetics became the default posture within literary scholarship, a means of establishing the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s political commitments. Yet as Timothy Aubry explains, aesthetic pleasure never fully disappeared from the academy. It simply went underground.From New Criticism to the digital humanities, Aubry recasts aesthetics as the complicated, morally ambiguous, embattled yet resilient protagonist in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first–century literary studies. He argues that academic critics never stopped asserting preferences for certain texts, rhetorical strategies, or intellectual responses. Rather than serving as the enemy of formalism and aesthetics, political criticism enabled scholars to promote heightened experiences of perceptual acuity and complexity while adjudicating which formal strategies are best designed to bolster these experiences. Political criticism, in other words, did not eradicate but served covertly to nurture reading practices aimed at achieving aesthetic satisfaction.Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures shows that literary studies’ break with midcentury formalism was not as clean as it once appeared. Today, when so many scholars are advocating renewed attention to textual surfaces and aesthetic experiences, Aubry’s work illuminates the surprisingly vast common ground between the formalists and the schools of criticism that succeeded them.

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The poems in Auto/Body are an inexhaustible engine—sometimes a body, sometimes flesh—a sensual exploration of what it means to repair, to remake, to keep going even when rebuilding feels impossible. From the greased-up engines of auto body shops to the innumerable points of light striking the dance floor of a queer nightclub, Auto/Body, winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, connects the vulnerability of the narrating queer body to the language of auto mechanics to reveal their shared decadence. Behind the wheel of this book is an insistent, humorous voice whose experiences have lent themselves to a deep, intimate knowledge of survival, driven by the pursuit of joy and exalted pleasure. Raised in and near auto body shops, Vickie Vértiz remembers visiting them to elevate the family car to examine what’s underneath, to see what’s working and what’s not. The poetry in this book is also a body shop, but instead we take our bodies, identities, desires, and see what’s firing. In this shop we ask: What needs changing? How do our bodies transcend ways of being we have received so that we may become more ourselves? From odes to drag, to pushing back on the tyranny of patriarchy, to loving too hard and too queer, to growing up working-class in a time of incessant border violence and incarceration, this collection combusts with blood and fuel. In other words, Vértiz writes to dissolve a colonial engine and reconstruct a new vessel with its remains.

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As heard on Radio 4's Woman's Hour and BBC Breakfast TV Winner of the YA Diverse Book Award, Bristol Teen Book Award, and 'Simply the Book' Coventry Inspiration Book Award Shortlisted for the Indie Book Award Nominated for the Carnegie Medal It is difficult trying to talk in our family cos: a) Grandparents don’t speak English at all b) Mum hardly speaks any English c) Me, Bonny and Simon hardly speak Chinese d) Dad speaks Chinese and good English – but doesn’t like talking In other words, we all have to cobble together tiny bits of English and Chinese into a rubbish new language I call 'Chinglish'. It is very awkward. Jo Kwan is a teenager growing up in 1980s Coventry with her annoying little sister, too-cool older brother, a series of very unlucky pets and utterly bonkers parents. But unlike the other kids at her new school or her posh cousins, Jo lives above her parents' Chinese takeaway. And things can be tough – whether it's unruly customers or the snotty popular girls who bully Jo for being different. Even when she does find a BFF who actually likes Jo for herself, she still has to contend with her erratic dad's behaviour. All Jo dreams of is breaking free and forging a career as an artist. Told in diary entries and doodles, Jo's brilliantly funny observations about life, family and char siu make for a searingly honest portrayal of life on the other side of the takeaway counter.

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The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination. The three-way tug of war over his heritage between adherents of his friends Scholem, Adorno and Brecht, can also be better grasped from this position, which gives the Brechtian standpoint more due than most influential academic studies. Benjamin's corpus is an anticipation of contemporary theory in the priority it gives language and representation over philosophical or conceptual unity; and its political motivations are clarified by attention to the omnipresence of History throughout his writing, from the shortest articles to the most ambitious projects. His explicit program - "to transfer the crisis into the heart of language" or, in other words, to detect class struggle at work in the most minute literary phenomena - requires the reader to translate the linguistic or representational literary issues that concerned him back into the omnipresent but often only implicitly political ones. But the latter are those of another era, to which we must gain access, to use one of Benjamin's favorite expressions.

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This volume of essays by Christopher Rowland, written during the last forty years, concerns the nature of apocalypticism and its reception history. His reading of apocalyptic texts is thereby colored not by immersion into the study of "apocalyptic" in biblical scholarship, but by acquaintance with early Jewish mysticism. One of the Oxford English Dictionary's definitions of "mystic" is one which helps to understand not only the mystical but also apocalyptic: a mystic is "one who believes in the possibility of the spiritual apprehension of truths that are inaccessible to the understanding." This definition and the importance of the opening word of Revelation as an apocalypse - in other words, a writing whose form is revelatory -, are explored in these essays. As this understanding of apocalypticism contrasts with the eschatological character predominant in modern biblical scholarship, a theme of this collection therefore is that the eschatological elements in apocalyptic texts are not the determining feature of what constitutes "apocalyptic," which must especially attend to the revelatory form of apocalyptic texts such as Revelation. The pervasiveness of apocalyptic and mystical elements in the New Testament is a consistent thread throughout the volume, which also includes consideration of the apocalyptic and eschatological thought of Joachim of Fiore and his disciples, the early modern appeal to visions and revelation, and culminates in the texts and images of William Blake (1757-1827). The collection's concern with the history of the reception of such ideas contributes to the vindication of Ernst Käsemann's view of apocalyptic being the "mother of Christian theology".

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Corruption and economic crime has harmed millions of South Africans. This devastation is caused by a relatively small band of individuals, corporations, and institutions, in other words, The Unaccountables. They have looted public coffers, broken public trust, undermined the rule of law and profited without consequence. This impunity has created a sense amongst a politically exhausted public that this is the way ‘the system works’ – it favours the powerful and grants them immunity from any form of accountability. In this new book, Open Secrets, a non-profit organisation investigating economic crime and human rights abuses, makes a strong argument for disrupting the status quo. Using meticulously researched evidence based on years of investigations, they put faces to many of the names behind some of South Africa’s biggest corruption scandals from apartheid to state capture. This book skilfully profiles the large corporations and private individuals who are all implicated in economic crime but have never been held to account – or at best escaped substantive justice. The book focuses on 50 profiles detailing evidence of impunity and suggesting actions in each instance that could ensure accountability. The eight sections of the book take readers through tales of muck and abuse of power between 1977 and 2022, detailing the characters and the defining moments which have shaped our politics and may impact our future. In The Unaccountables, we meet the apartheid and war profiteers, the state capture profiteers, those who have profited from welfare, the banks and bankers who got away with laundering and profiteering, the auditors, complicit in economic crimes and, unsurprisingly, the bad cops.

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A reassuring guide on how to overcome failure, teaching us that we can learn to fail well This is a hopeful, consoling, gentle book about failure. Our societies talk a lot about success, but the reality is that no one gets through life without failing – in small and usually also in large ways. Sometimes our failures are very obvious, at other times, we feel we have to conceal them out of shame. This book encourages us to accept the role that failure plays for all of us and to feel compassion for ourselves for the messes we can’t help but make as we go through our lives. Our societies talk a lot about how to succeed: we’d end up so much wiser and calmer if we learnt how to cope better with the more likely scenario of failure. This is a book packed with dignified, sensible, kindly suggestions about how to approach failure: how to deal with friends, how to cope with enemies, how to endure regret, how to pick oneself up, how to accept oneself despite one’s flaws, and how to endure and thrive in new, less than ideal circumstances. It’s a perfect volume for anyone who has ever had a relationship breakdown, suffered a career reversal, made enemies, bungled a project or wasted their time – in other words, for all of us. When we fail, it can sometimes seem as if we are alone in this however, in truth, there is nothing more human than to fail – and nothing wiser and more necessary than to learn to fail well.

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Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay on women artists is widely acknowledged as the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. Nochlin refused to handle the question of why there had been no ‘great women artists’ on its own, corrupted, terms. Instead, she dismantled the very concept of ‘greatness’, unravelling the basic assumptions that had centred a male-coded ‘genius’ in the study of art. With unparalleled insight and startling wit, Nochlin laid bare the acceptance of a white male viewpoint in art historical thought as not merely a moral failure, but an intellectual one. Freedom, as she sees it, requires women to risk entirely demolishing the art world’s institutions, and rebuilding them anew – in other words, to leap into the unknown. In this stand-alone anniversary edition, Nochlin’s essay is published alongside its reappraisal, ‘Thirty Years After’. Written in an era of thriving feminist theory, as well as queer theory, race and postcolonial studies, ‘Thirty Years After’ is a striking reflection on the emergence of a whole new canon. With reference to Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman and many more, Nochlin diagnoses the state of women and art with unmatched precision and verve. ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ has become a slogan and rallying cry that resonates across culture and society; Dior even adopted it in their 2018 collections. In the 2020s, at a time when ‘certain patriarchal values are making a comeback’, Nochlin's message could not be more urgent: as she herself put it in 2015, ‘there is still a long way to go’.With 14 illustrations

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This book gives a survey of astrophysics at the advanced undergraduate level, providing a physics-centred analysis of a broad range of astronomical systems. It originates from a two-semester course sequence at Rutgers University that is meant to appeal not only to astrophysics students but also more broadly to physics and engineering students. The organisation is driven more by physics than by astronomy; in other words, topics are first developed in physics and then applied to astronomical systems that can be investigated, rather than the other way around. The first half of the book focuses on gravity. The theme in this part of the book, as well as throughout astrophysics, is using motion to investigate mass. The goal of Chapters 2-11 is to develop a progressively richer understanding of gravity as it applies to objects ranging from planets and moons to galaxies and the universe as a whole. The second half uses other aspects of physics to address one of the big questions. While “Why are we here?” lies beyond the realm of physics, a closely related question is within our reach: “How did we get here?” The goal of Chapters 12-20 is to understand the physics behind the remarkable story of how the Universe, Earth and life were formed. This book assumes familiarity with vector calculus and introductory physics (mechanics, electromagnetism, gas physics and atomic physics); however, all of the physics topics are reviewed as they come up (and vital aspects of vector calculus are reviewed in the Appendix).

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A forgotten episode of mathematical resistance reveals the rise of modern mathematics and its cornerstone, mathematical purity, as political phenomena. The nineteenth century opened with a major shift in European mathematics, and in the Kingdom of Naples, this occurred earlier than elsewhere. Between 1790 and 1830 its leading scientific institutions rejected as untrustworthy the “very modern mathematics” of French analysis and in its place consolidated, legitimated, and put to work a different mathematical culture. The Neapolitan mathematical resistance was a complete reorientation of mathematical practice. Over the unrestricted manipulation and application of algebraic algorithms, Neapolitan mathematicians called for a return to Greek-style geometry and the preeminence of pure mathematics. For all their apparent backwardness, Massimo Mazzotti explains, they were arguing for what would become crucial features of modern mathematics: its voluntary restriction through a new kind of rigor and discipline, and the complete disconnection of mathematical truth from the empirical world—in other words, its purity. The Neapolitans, Mazzotti argues, were reacting to the widespread use of mathematical analysis in social and political arguments: theirs was a reactionary mathematics that aimed to technically refute the revolutionary mathematics of the Jacobins. During the Restoration, the expert groups in the service of the modern administrative state reaffirmed the role of pure mathematics as the foundation of a newly rigorous mathematics, which was now conceived as a neutral tool for modernization. What Mazzotti’s penetrating history shows us in vivid detail is that producing mathematical knowledge was equally about producing certain forms of social, political, and economic order.

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In recent decades, experimental music has flourished outside of European and American concert halls. The principles of indeterminacy, improvisation, nonmusical sound, and noise, pioneered in concert and on paper by the likes of Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Ornette Coleman, can now be found in a variety of new locations: activist films, rock recordings, and public radio broadcasts, not to mention in avant-garde movements around the world.The contributors to Tomorrow Is the Question explore these previously unexamined corners of experimental music history, considering topics such as Sonic Youth, Julius Eastman, the Downtown New York pop avant-garde of the 1970s, Fluxus composer Benjamin Patterson, Tokyo’s Music group (aka Group Ongaku), the Balinese avant-garde, the Leicester school of British experimentalists, Cuba’s Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAIC, Pauline Oliveros’s score for the feminist documentary Maquilapolis, NPR’s 1980s RadioVisions, and the philosophy of experimental musical aesthetics. Taken together, this menagerie of people, places, and things makes up an experimentalism that is always partial, compromised, and invented in its local and particular formations—in other words, these individual cases suggest that experimentalism has been a far more variegated set of practices and discourses than previously recognised. Asking new questions leads to researching new materials, individuals, and contexts and, eventually, to the new critical paradigms that are necessary to interpret these new materials. Tomorrow Is the Question, gathering contributions from historical musicology, enthnomusicology, history, philosophy, and cultural studies, generates future research directions in experimental music studies by way of a productive inquiry that sustains and elaborates critical conversations.

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According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island’s first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana’s central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Armas from the new perspective of heritage studies, this book investigates how late colonial Cuban society narrated Havana’s founding to valorize Spanish imperial power and used the monuments to underpin a local sense of place and cultural authenticity, civic achievement, and social order.Paul Niell analyzes how Cubans produced heritage at the site of the symbolic ceiba tree by endowing the collective urban space of the plaza with a cultural authority that used the past to validate various place identities in the present. Niell’s close examination of the extant forms of the 1754 and 1828 civic monuments, which include academic history paintings, neoclassical architecture, and idealized sculpture in tandem with period documents and printed texts, reveals a “dissonance of heritage”—in other words, a lack of agreement as to the works’ significance and use. He considers the implications of this dissonance with respect to a wide array of interests in late colonial Havana, showing how heritage as a dominant cultural discourse was used to manage and even disinherit certain sectors of the colonial population.

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Virtualization has become a “megatrend”—and for good reason. Implementing virtualization allows for more efficient utilization of network server capacity, simpler storage administration, reduced energy costs, and better use of corporate capital. In other words: virtualization helps you save money, energy, and space. Not bad, huh? If you’re thinking about “going virtual” but have the feeling everyone else in the world understands exactly what that means while you’re still virtually in the dark, take heart. Virtualization for Dummies gives you a thorough introduction to this hot topic and helps you evaluate if making the switch to a virtual environment is right for you. This fun and friendly guide starts with a detailed overview of exactly what virtualization is and exactly how it works, and then takes you on a tour of the benefits of a virtualized environment, such as added space in overcrowded data centers, lower operations costs through more efficient infrastructure administration, and reduced energy costs through server consolidation. Next, you’ll get step-by-step guidance on how to: Perform a server virtualization cost versus benefit analysis Weigh server virtualization options Choose hardware for your server virtualization project Create a virtualized software environment Migrate to—and manage—your new virtualized environment Whether you’re an IT manager looking to sell the idea to your boss, or just want to learn more about how to create, migrate to, and successfully manage a virtualized environment, Virtualization for Dummies is your go-to guide for virtually everything you need to know.

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An all-new, spicy murder mystery from Tessa Bailey, New York Times bestselling author of It Happened One Summer . . .It was supposed to be a relaxing vacation in sweet, sunny Cape Cod - just me and my beloved brother - but discovering a corpse in our rental house really throws a wrench into our tanning schedule. Now a rude, crude bounty hunter has arrived on the back of his motorcycle to catch the killer and refuses to believe I can be helpful, despite countless hours of true crime podcast listening. Not to mention a fulfilling teaching career of wrangling second graders.A brash bounty hunter and an energetic elementary schoolteacher: the murder-solving team no one asked for, but thanks to these pesky attempts on my life, we're stuck together, come hell or high tide.***I'm just here to do a job, not babysit an amateur sleuth. Although . . . it is becoming less and less of a hardship to have her around. Sure, she's stubborn, distracting and can't stay out of harm's way. She's also brave and beautiful and reminds me of the home I left behind three years ago. In other words, the insatiable hunger and protectiveness she is waking up in me is a threat to my peace of mind. Before I sink any deeper into this dangerous attraction, I need to solve this murder and get back on the road.But will fate take her from me before I realize the road has been leading to her all along?

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David Hurst has a unique knowledge of organizations-their function and their failure-both in theory and in practice. He has spent twenty-five years as an operating manager, often in crises and turnaround conditions, and is also a widely experienced consultant, teacher, and writer on business. This book is his innovative integration of management practice and theory, using a systems perspective and analogies drawn from nature to illustrate groundbreaking ideas and their practical application. It is designed for readers unfamiliar with sophisticated management concepts and for active practitioners seeking to advance their management and leadership skills. Hurst's objective is to help readers make meaning from their own management experience and education, and to encourage improvement in their practical judgment and wisdom. His approach takes an expansive view of organizations, connecting their development to humankind's evolutionary heritage and cultural history. It locates the origins of organizations in communities of trust and follows their development and maturation. He also crucially tracks the decline of organizations as they age and shows how their strengths become weaknesses in changing circumstances. Hurst's core argument is that the human mind is rational in an ecological, rather than a logical, sense. In other words, it has evolved to extract cues to action from the specific situations in which it finds itself. Therefore contexts matter, and Hurst shows how passion, reason, and power can be used to change and sustain organizations for good and ill. The result is an inspirational synthesis of management theory and practice that will resonate with every reader's experience.

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What do a feminist server, an art space located in a public park in North London, a so-called pirate library of high cultural value yet dubious legal status, and an art school that emphasizes collectivity have in common? They all demonstrate that art plays an important role in imagining and producing a real quite different from what is currently hegemonic, and that art has the possibility to not only envision or proclaim ideas in theory, but also to realize them materially. Aesthetics of the Commons examines a series of artistic and cultural projects—drawn from what can loosely be called the (post)digital—that take up this challenge in different ways. What unites them, however, is that they all have a double character. They are art in the sense that they place themselves in relation to (Western) cultural and art systems, developing discursive and aesthetic positions, but, at the same time, they are operational in that they create recursive environments and freely available resources whose uses exceed these systems. The first aspect raises questions about the kind of aesthetics that are being embodied, the second creates a relation to the larger concept of the commons. In Aesthetics of the Commons, the commons are understood not as a fixed set of principles that need to be adhered to in order to fit a definition, but instead as a thinking tool—in other words, the book’s interest lies in what can be made visible by applying the framework of the commons as a heuristic device.

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Mehrdad Fatehi studies Paul's letters and shows that the risen Lord is featured in the religious experiences of Paul and the Pauline believers as the present and active lord of the new covenant community. These experiences seem to point beyond the notion of a divine agent alongside God to a redefinition of the very concept of God in a way that it would include Christ within itself. This is confirmed by the way Paul and the Pauline communities believed themselves to have experienced the risen Lord through God's Spirit.In Judaism in general, as well as in Paul, the Spirit was not regarded as an entity distinct or separable from God but as God himself in his presence and action in and among his people. Yet we have clear evidence in Paul's letters that the risen Christ was experienced and conceived of as being present and active through the Spirit bestowing grace and gracious gifts, infusing wisdom, communicating his will, regenerating and transforming his people, and dwelling in and among them all through the Spirit in a way which is best understood after the analogy of God's presence and work through the Spirit in Judaism. In other words, Paul's 'the Spirit of Christ' is best understood after the analogy of 'the Spirit of God'.Paul's application of the Spirit-language to describe and interpret the Christians' experiences of the risen Lord shows that Paul most probably presupposed a redefinition of monotheism in which Christ would be included within the Godhead.

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Text in English & German. This book is a synopsis, a summary of the books also published by Edition Axel Menges about the Prussian architects Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), Ludwig Persius (1803-1845) and Friedrich August Stüler (1800-1865), but it covers only the works of these architects in Berlin and Potsdam. The three books mentioned above are subtitled 'The architectural work today'; in other words, they are exclusively about buildings that still exist. This is also true of the present selection. The question whether this selection and limitation to Berlin and Potsdam is representative of the work of the three architects can clearly be answered in the affirmative. For Persius this question does not even arise, because during his short life he worked almost exclusively in Potsdam and its immediate vicinity -- he was the 'King's architect'. Stüler's work is found in a region extending from Cologne on the Rhine to Masuria, with some important buildings in Stockholm and Budapest as well. About a quarter of his works can be found in Potsdam and Berlin, where Stüler, too, was the 'King's architect'. The truly gigantic lifework of Schinkel extends from Aachen to St Petersburg. Berlin and Potsdam have about a third of his works. It can be confidently said, however, that those who know the works of Schinkel, Persius and Stüler in Berlin and Potsdam also know the architect's work as a whole in each case. Since the pictures assembled here were taken between 1998 and 2005, they themselves have already become somewhat historical.

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This book explores sixteenth-century humanism as an origin for the idea of literature as good, even great, books. It argues that humanists located the value of books not only in the goodness of their writing-their eloquence--but also in their capacity to shape readers in good and bad behavior, thoughts, and feelings, in other words, in their morality. To approach humanism in this way, by attending to its moral interests, is to provide a new perspective on periodization, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance / early modern. That is, humanists did not so much rupture with medieval ideas about literature or with medieval models as they adapted and altered them, offering a new confidence about an old idea: the moral instructiveness of pagan, classical texts for Christian readers. This revaluation of literature was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, humanist confidence inspired authors to invent their own good books--good in style and morals--in morality plays such as Everyman and the Christian Terence tradition and in educational treatises such as Sir Thomas Elyot's Boke of the Governour. On the other hand, humanism placed a new burden on authors, requiring their work to teach and delight. In the wake of humanism, authors struggled to articulate the value of their work for readers, returning to a pre-humanist path that they associated with Geoffrey Chaucer. This medieval-inflected doubt pervades the late sixteenth-century writings of the most prolific and influential Elizabethans-Robert Greene, George Gascoigne, and Edmund Spenser.

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Three Legs in the Evening comes from the Sphinx's riddle in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus is asked what creature walks on all fours in the morning, on two legs in the afternoon, and three in the evening. The answer, which Oedipus gets right, is Man, who crawls as a baby, walks upright as a man, and leans on a cane in his old age. Received wisdom, in other words, can be unreliable. Enter the story of Sally B, an over-sixty widow about to retire from her successful greeting card business in the aftermath of 9/11. She has a devoted family who relies on her wit and wisdom. But suddenly all hell breaks loose — her best friend dies, she falls into an open grave and she breaks her ankle. As this is happening, her children’s marital lives are unraveling, her grandchildren are in turmoil, and a man she has known from a time before comes back in her life. Taking place over a year, this is a story of love in a time of horror, as well as the profound and surprising ways in which everything Sally thought she knew changes. Sexy, funny and heart-wrenching, and much like Kent Haruf's Our Souls At Night, Three Legs in the Evening speaks about people running out of steam, running out of time, and finding solace and wisdom even in the finality of all that. A life carefully built can crumble in a moment, but what happens then? Sally B. plays it out as best she can.

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_______________ Do you have questions? The Guide for Everyone has all the answers you need Marley Hall is a midwife and mum of five – in other words, she's seen it all. In her Guide for Everyone, you'll find answers to questions you never knew you wanted to ask. Like, what do these clinical terms mean? What are my choices? And is there a 'right' way to give birth or take care of my baby? Birth is a unique experience for every person, and the book contains the latest guidance that will help you to understand the full picture all the way through an entire 12 months. Each chapter is illustrated with Marley's original doodle-drawings and is subtly colour coded, so you can flick through and find exactly what you’re looking for right now, when you need it. There is evidence-based information to support everyone and provide a reliable source of knowledge about important things like when to call your care provider, getting baby into an optimal position for birth, how to approach the 'fourth trimester' (the three months after the birth), and even where to find the shower in a postnatal ward. You'll be armed with all the tools you need to communicate and thrive wherever you are, be it birth centre, hospital or home. It's like having your own personal Marley on call! “Supportive, inclusive, knowledgeable and wonderfully warm, Midwife Marley is the perfect partner for your positive pregnancy and parenting journey. Every family touched by her help feels genuinely valued.” Siobhan Freegard OBE, Founder of Netmums

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The Asian economic crisis and future development is a popular subject among academics and policy-makers worldwide. Several countries in Asia came to face severe economic recession in the wake of their financial and foreign exchange crisis which began in 1997. The recession was deep and the challenges for managers of respective economies for an optimum specification of monetary and fiscal policy guidelines became all too great. Many came to wonder whether the so-called 'Asian Miracle' all of a sudden became a part of history. If so, how will Asia recover from the crisis and experience high growth and continuing development as in the past quarter of the century? Can such a crisis be forewarned? Which development paths should Asia seek so that the crisis will not be repeated in the future? In other words, the challenge is to formulate rational economic policies for Asia's newly industrialized/industrializing economies so that their industrialization and development can sustainably progress as Asia enters the Twenty-First Century. The book addresses the above issues by covering many topics including financial meltdown and industrial development, money and financial markets, exchange rates, capital flows, economic reforms, human capital development, impact of the financial crisis on growth and poverty incidence, as well as other development problems in Asia-Pacific countries. The subject of this book should be of great interest to scholars, policy makers and the general public who follow economic developments in Asia. It will contribute to a broader perspective and at the same time, a deeper understanding of the subject.

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This book explores one of the great questions of our time: How can we preserve our sense of what it means to be a person while at the same time accepting what science tells us to be true--namely, that human nature is continuous with the rest of nature? What, in other words, does it mean to be a person in a world of things? Alan Mittleman shows how the Jewish tradition provides rich ways of understanding human nature and personhood that preserve human dignity and distinction in a world of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, biotechnology, and pervasive scientism. These ancient resources can speak to Jewish, non-Jewish, and secular readers alike. Science may tell us what we are, Mittleman says, but it cannot tell us who we are, how we should live, or why we matter. Traditional Jewish thought, in open-minded dialogue with contemporary scientific perspectives, can help us answer these questions. Mittleman shows how, using sources ranging across the Jewish tradition, from the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud to more than a millennium of Jewish philosophy. Among the many subjects the book addresses are sexuality, birth and death, violence and evil, moral agency, and politics and economics. Throughout, Mittleman demonstrates how Jewish tradition brings new perspectives to--and challenges many current assumptions about--these central aspects of human nature. A study of human nature in Jewish thought and an original contribution to Jewish philosophy, this is a book for anyone interested in what it means to be human in a scientific age.

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With the 2012 presidential election upon us, will voters cast their ballots for the candidates whose platforms and positions best match their own? Or will the race for the next president of the United States come down largely to who runs the most effective campaigning? It's a question those who study elections have been considering for years with no clear resolution. In "The Timeline of Presidential Elections", Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien reveal for the first time how both factors come into play. Erikson and Wlezien have amassed data from close to two thousand national polls covering every presidential election from 1952 to 2008, allowing them to see how outcomes take shape over the course of an election year. Polls from the beginning of the year, they show, have virtually no predictive power. By mid-April, when the candidates have been identified and matched in pollsters' trial heats, preferences have come into focus - and predicted the winner in eleven of the fifteen elections. But a similar process of forming favorites takes place in the last six months, during which voters' intentions change only gradually, with particular events - including presidential debates - rarely resulting in dramatic change. Ultimately, Erikson and Wlezien show that it is through campaigns that voters are made aware of - or not made aware of - fundamental factors like candidates' policy positions that determine which ticket will get their votes. In other words, fundamentals matter, but only because of campaigns. Timely and compelling, this book will force us to rethink our assumptions about presidential elections.

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The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination. The three-way tug of war over his heritage between adherents of his friends Scholem, Adorno and Brecht, can also be better grasped from this position, which gives the Brechtian standpoint more due than most influential academic studies. Benjamin's corpus is an anticipation of contemporary theory in the priority it gives language and representation over philosophical or conceptual unity; and its political motivations are clarified by attention to the omnipresence of History throughout his writing, from the shortest articles to the most ambitious projects. His explicit program - "to transfer the crisis into the heart of language" or, in other words, to detect class struggle at work in the most minute literary phenomena - requires the reader to translate the linguistic or representational literary issues that concerned him back into the omnipresent but often only implicitly political ones. But the latter are those of another era, to which we must gain access, to use one of Benjamin's favorite expressions.

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This is the true story of Aemilius Felix Boioannes the younger, the intended and unintended consequence of his life, the bad stuff he did on purpose, and the good stuff that happened in spite of him. It is, in other words, the tale of a war to end all wars and the man responsible. A Practical Guide to Conquering the World can be read by itself, but for those who like endings, it can also be considered the refreshingly pragmatic conclusion to K. J. Parker's acclaimed sequence of novels that began with Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and continued with How To Rule An Empire And Get Away With ItPraise for K. J Parker: 'Readers are ensured a good time and a barrel of laughs to boot' Publishers Weekly on How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It'Parker's latest epic fantasy proves that all the world is, indeed, a stage, and Parker himself is a master impresario. Readers will enjoy his comedic take on how politics are comprised of equal parts lies, incompetence, and the foolishness of humanity-with just enough flashes of brilliance to save the day. Recommended for fans of Terry Pratchett' Library Journal on How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It'Full of invention and ingenuity . . . Great fun' SFX on Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City'Launches a witty adventure series . . . Readers will appreciate the infusion of humor and fun-loving characters into this vivid and sometimes grim fantasy world' Publishers Weekly on Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

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Many of us want to learn “how to draw.” But as artist Anthony Ryder explains, it’s much more important to learn what to draw. In other words, to observe and draw what we actually see, rather than what we think we see. When it comes to drawing the human figure, this means letting go of learned ideas and expectation of what the figure should look like. It means carefully observing the interplay of form and light, shape and line, that combine to create the actual appearance of human form. In The Artist’s Complete Guide to Figure Drawing, amateur and experienced artists alike are guided toward this new way of seeing and drawing the figure with a three-step drawing method.The book’s progressive course starts with the block-in, an exercise in seeing and establishing the figure’s shape. It then build to the contour, a refined line drawing that represents the figure’s silhouette. The last step is tonal work on the inside of the contour, when light and shadow are shaped to create the illusion of form. Separate chapters explore topics critical to the method: gesture, which expresses a sense of living energy to the figure; light, which largely determines how we see the model; and form, which conveys the figure’s volume and mass. Examples, step-by-steps, and special “tips” offer helpful hints and practical guidance throughout.Lavishly illustrated with the author’s stunning artwork, The Artist’s Complete Guide to Figure Drawing combines solid instruction with thoughtful meditations on the art of drawing, to both instruct and inspire artists of all levels.

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In this groundbreaking work, social anthropologist David Sneath aggressively dispels the myths surrounding the history of steppe societies and proposes a new understanding of the nature and formation of the state. Since the colonial era, representations of Inner Asia have been dominated by images of fierce nomads organized into clans and tribes-but as Sneath reveals, these representations have no sound basis in historical fact. Rather, they are the product of nineteenth-century evolutionist social theory, which saw kinship as the organizing principle in a nonstate society. Sneath argues that aristocratic power and statelike processes of administration were the true organizers of life on the steppe. Rethinking the traditional dichotomy between state and nonstate societies, Sneath conceives of a "headless state" in which a configuration of statelike power was formed by the horizontal relations among power holders and was reproduced with or without an overarching ruler or central "head." In other words, almost all of the operations of state power existed at the local level, virtually independent of central bureaucratic authority. Sneath's research gives rise to an alternative picture of steppe life in which aristocrats determined the size, scale, and degree of centralization of political power. His history of the region shows no clear distinction between a highly centralized, stratified "state" society and an egalitarian, kin-based "tribal" society. Drawing on his extensive anthropological fieldwork in the region, Sneath persuasively challenges the legitimacy of the tribal model, which continues to distort scholarship on the history of Inner Asia.

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This open access book deals with global sanitation, where SDG 6.2 sets a target of enabling access to sanitation services for all, but has not yet been achieved in low- and middle-income countries. The transition from the United Nations MDGs to the SDGs requires more consideration based on the socio-cultural aspects of global sanitation. In other words, equitable sanitation for those in vulnerable situations could be based on socio-cultural contexts. Sanitation is a system that comprises not only a latrine but also the works for the treatment and disposal of human waste. Sanitation systems do not function by themselves but have significance only through social management. The process of decision-making also largely depends on socio-cultural conditions, and the importance of sanitation needs to be socially acknowledged. The health benefits of sanitation improvement—among the significant contributions of sanitation—also need to be considered in the socio-cultural milieu. Further, the social-culture itself is affected, and potentially even created, by sanitation. In this context, more progress on the improvement of sanitation requires a more holistic approach across disciplines.In this book, we present the concept of the Sanitation Triangle, which considers the interconnections of health, materials, and socio-culture in sanitation, as a holistic approach, and the case studies based on the Sanitation Triangle by diverse disciplines such as Cultural Anthropology, Development Studies, Health Sciences, Engineering, and Science Communication. By the deep theoretical examinations and inter-dialogues between the different disciplines, this book explores the potentialities of inter-disciplinary studies on global sanitation.

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