Fog Facts
Fog Facts

Author: Larry Beinhart

Publisher: Bold Type Books

Published: 2006-08-04

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1568587163

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Everyone in the world knows what Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky, or what happened to Brad and Jennifer, Katie and Tom. These factoids mysteriously capture the world's attention. But there's a flip side to this: fog facts. Fog facts are known but not known, the sort of things that journalists and political junkies know, but somehow the world does not. The "Downing Street Memo" is a fine example. This document revealed that the head of British intelligence had been informed by his Washington counterparts that the White House was cooking the books on the information it was using to justify a war in Iraq. Yet this was not big news in America. Why? In Fog Facts, Larry Beinhart tackles this question and shows how soft-core, public relations-style political lying has been raised to an art form.

Sad Animal Facts
Sad Animal Facts

Author: Brooke Barker

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2016-09-06

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1250095093

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New York Times Bestseller! A delightful and quirky compendium of the Animal Kingdom’s more unfortunate truths, with over 150 hand-drawn illustrations. Ever wonder what a mayfly thinks of its one-day lifespan? (They’re curious what a sunset is.) Or how a jellyfish feels about not having a heart? (Sorry, but they’re not sorry.) This melancholy menagerie pairs the more unsavory facts of animal life with their hilarious thoughts and reactions. Sneakily informative, and wildly witty, SAD ANIMAL FACTS will have you crying with laughter.

Poetics of Politics
Poetics of Politics

Author: Sebastian M. Herrmann

Publisher: Universitätsverlag Winter

Published: 2015-04-22

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 382536447X

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This volume proposes the ‘poetics of politics’ as an analytic angle to interrogate contemporary cultural production in the United States. As recent scholarship has observed, American literature and culture around the turn of the millennium, while still deeply informed by the textual self-consciousness of postmodernism, are marked by a rekindled interest in matters of social concern. This revived interest in politics is frequently read as a ‘grand epochal transition.’ Sidestepping such a logic of periodization, this book points to the interplay between the textual and the political as a dynamic – always locally specific – that affords unique insights into the characteristics of the contemporary moment. The sixteen case studies in this book explore this interplay across a wide range of media, genres, and modes. Together, they make visible a broad cultural concern with negotiating social relevance and textual self-awareness that permeates and structures contemporary US (popular) culture.

International Law's Invisible Frames
International Law's Invisible Frames

Author: Andrea Bianchi

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-09-23

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0192663291

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What is international law, and how does it work? This book argues that our answers to these fundamental questions are shaped by a variety of social cognition and knowledge production processes. These processes act as invisible frames, through which we understand international law. To better conceive the frames within which international law moves and performs, we must understand how psychological and socio-cultural factors affect decision-making in an international legal process. This includes identifying the groups of people and institutions that shape and alter the prevailing discourse in international law, and unearthing the hidden meaning of the various mythologies that populate and influence our normative world. With chapters from leading experts in the discipline, employing insights from sociology, psychology, and behavioural science, this book investigates the mechanisms that allow us to apprehend and intellectually represent the social practice of international law. It unveils the hidden or unnoticed processes by which our understanding of international law is formed, and helps readers to unlearn some of the presuppositions that inform our largely unquestioned beliefs about international law.

Presidential Unrealities
Presidential Unrealities

Author: Sebastian M. Herrmann

Publisher: Universitätsverlag Winter

Published: 2014-06-12

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 3825363333

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This book analyzes and historicizes an important and popular motif in contemporary US political discourse: the notion that politics has become increasingly ‘unreal.’ At the turn of the millennium, the simulated quality of politics in general and of the US presidency in particular has become a major object of concern across a broad range of venues and media: publications in media studies and political science, newspaper editorials, novels, films, and TV shows alike worry over how much or how little we can actually know about the reality of the US president when all our knowledge is based on carefully staged media representations. Rather than adding another voice to this concern, ‘Presidential Unrealities’ investigates the cultural work such discussions do. Charting their histories and their cultural resonances, the book argues that debating ‘presidential unreality’ provides a crucial vocabulary by way of which the US public negotiates the postmodernization of American culture and society.