"The deepest study yet of one of the least understood phenomena of our time. A scholarly work that read like a page-turner."---Bob Simon, CBS News Chief Middle Eastern correspondent and recipient of the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting. --
In this searing polemic, Lee Edelman outlines a radically uncompromising new ethics of queer theory. His main target is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linchpin of our universal politics of “reproductive futurism.” Edelman argues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, represents the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself. Closely engaging with literary texts, Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Scrooge without Tiny Tim and Silas Marner without little Eppie. Looking to Alfred Hitchcock’s films, he embraces two of the director’s most notorious creations: the sadistic Leonard of North by Northwest, who steps on the hand that holds the couple precariously above the abyss, and the terrifying title figures of The Birds, with their predilection for children. Edelman enlarges the reach of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as he brings it to bear not only on works of literature and film but also on such current political flashpoints as gay marriage and gay parenting. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a passion certain to spark an equally impassioned debate among its readers.
What we call growth today is in fact a tumorous growth, a cancerous proliferation which is disrupting the social organism. These tumours endlessly metastasize and grow with an inexplicable, deadly vitality. At a certain point this growth is no longer productive, but rather destructive. Capitalism passed this point long ago. Its destructive forces cause not only ecological and social catastrophes but also mental collapse. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one’s own self. The devastating consequences of capitalism suggest that a death drive is at work. Freud initially introduced the death drive hesitantly, but later admitted that he ‘couldn’t think beyond it’ as the idea of the death drive became increasingly central to his thought. Today, it is impossible to think about capitalism without considering the death drive.
Never before has mankind changed so much so fast-but we still rely on outdated demographic stereotypes to understand groups of people and target audiences. Now there's a better way to discover what matters to the people you are trying to motivate: a brand-new big-data tool that will change audience profiling for everything-forever. In We Are All the Same Age Now, David Allison, creator of Valuegraphics, explains how you can increase efficiency, create strategies that are eight times more effective, decrease internal politics around decisions, and be better equipped for disruption. He explains what Valuegraphics can do and offers the data samples and tools you need to get started using Valuegraphics immediately. He also shares how to make powerful values-based decisions throughout your organization and how to take your insights further. It's time to change the way you see the world-and motivate more people more often-by embracing the power of Valuegraphics.
Freud outlines two types of conflict; that between drives and reality; and that between the drives themselves. Adrian Johnston identifies a third; the conflict embedded within each and every drive.
A renowned authority from Harvard Business School confronts America's health care crisis-and how consumer control can fix it PRAISE FOR WHO KILLED HEALTHCARE? “A brilliant analysis... A must-read.” – Bill George, Professor, Harvard Business School and Former CEO of Medtronic “As it becomes more and more obvious to everyone that our current health care system is unsustainable, this is the book that had to be written.” – Daniel H. Johnson, Jr. MD, former president of the American Medical Association “Regina Herzlinger’s ideas to tackle the crisis of the U.S. health care system are based on keen knowledge of the system’s existing difficulties along with insights that introduce the reader to new streamlined choices that have the potential of getting both quantity and cost under control.” – Joseph Kennedy, founder, chairman, and president, Citizens Energy Corporation, CEO, Citizens Health Care, former representative (D-Mass) “Regina Herzlinger... offers a vision of the way things can be, should be, and will be sooner or later. The only question is: how long do we have to wait?” – Greg Scandlen, founder, Consumers for Health Choices“Regi Herzlinger has brilliantly articulated a better way – embracing the principles of competition and innovation that cause every other sector of our economy to thrive. Discharging American health care from the ICU can only happen by putting individual Americans – not politicians and bureaucrats – back in charge of their health care decisioins.” – U.S. Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla), M.D. “Following on the heels of her landmark Market-Driven Health Care, Herzlinger lays it on the line with her expose of what many who work in the health care industry have felt in their gut. Now it is articulated in an entertaining and must-read portrayal, with you and me as the only way out.” – Dennis White, executive vice president for strategic development, National Business Coalition on Health“A wonderful Orwellian romp through issues which carry a deadly irony. The killers of health care are, of course, the third parties, each of which has an itchy palm and a commitment to profit or power which exceeds the commitment to service, with each engaging the others within a politically shaped box. Rarely has the case for the public been made with so much force, foresight, and wit, and a better way forward shown so clearly.” – James F. Fries, MD, Professor of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine “You can practically hear the war chants as Professor Herzlinger sets out her view of what’s wrong with the health care system and how to fix it. You’d best read it so you can decide which side you will be on when the battle is joined.” – Paul Levy, CEO, Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, MA “Regina Herzlinger, the nation’s leading expert on consumer-driven health care, has given us a brilliant analysis of the flaws in our health care system and what it will take to get it back on track. Her latest book is a must-read.” – Bill George, Professor of Management Practice, Harvard Business School, Former CEO, Medtronic, and author of Authentic Leadership“You don’t have to agree with her diagnosis and prescription for the U.S. health care system, but you do have to read her book. Once again, Professor Herzlinger has put together a well researched, well written, and very provocative blueprint for the future of health care.” Peter L. Slavin, MD, President, Massachusetts General Hospital
Winner of the 2013 John Hope Franklin Book Prize presented by the American Studies Association A necessary read that demonstrates the ways in which certain people are devalued without attention to social contexts Social Death tackles one of the core paradoxes of social justice struggles and scholarship—that the battle to end oppression shares the moral grammar that structures exploitation and sanctions state violence. Lisa Marie Cacho forcefully argues that the demands for personhood for those who, in the eyes of society, have little value, depend on capitalist and heteropatriarchal measures of worth. With poignant case studies, Cacho illustrates that our very understanding of personhood is premised upon the unchallenged devaluation of criminalized populations of color. Hence, the reliance of rights-based politics on notions of who is and is not a deserving member of society inadvertently replicates the logic that creates and normalizes states of social and literal death. Her understanding of inalienable rights and personhood provides us the much-needed comparative analytical and ethical tools to understand the racialized and nationalized tensions between racial groups. Driven by a radical, relentless critique, Social Death challenges us to imagine a heretofore “unthinkable” politics and ethics that do not rest on neoliberal arguments about worth, but rather emerge from the insurgent experiences of those negated persons who do not live by the norms that determine the productive, patriotic, law abiding, and family-oriented subject.
A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?
The true crime story of sex killer Westley Allan Dodd--his victims were too small to fight...and too young to die! Includes eyewitness execution report. By all appearances, twenty-nine-year-old Westley Allan Dodd was the perfect all-American boy—model high school student, camp counselor and U.S. Navy enlistee. But behind his mask of normalcy lurked a predatory sex fiend with a seventeen-year history of appalling acts of molestation and violence. Children were his victims and the parks of the Pacific Northwest his personal hunting grounds. On September 4, 1989, his unnatural desires had driven him past simple satisfaction to abduct, torture, and kill two young boys in Vancouver, Washington. Undetected despite his record, Dodd killed a third innocent victim only weeks later near Portland, Oregon. But only when he was caught trying to kidnap a child from a local movie theater was he finally taken into custody by police. Confessing to these heinous murders, he was convicted on all three counts and sentenced to death. Based on exclusive access to police files and riveting trial testimony, personal interviews with Dodd himself and excerpts from his chilling "diary of death," Driven to Kill dramatically recounts a hideous spree of death and horror that brought every parent's worst nightmare frighteningly to life! "Horrific...This story will leave you gasping." True crime author Jack Olsen