The Universal Periodic Review is an intriguing and ambitious development in human rights monitoring which breaks new ground by engaging all 193 members of the United Nations. This book provides the first sustained analysis of the Review and explains how the Review functions within the architecture of the United Nations. It draws on socio-legal scholarship and the insights of human rights practitioners with direct experience of the Review in order to consider its regulatory power and its capacity to influence the behaviour of states. It also highlights the significance of the embodied features of the Review, with its cyclical and intricately managed interactive dialogues. Additionally, it discusses the rituals associated with the Review, examines the tendency of the Review towards hollow ritualism (which undermines its aspiration to address human rights violations comprehensively) and suggests how this ritualism might be overcome.
This book examines the engagement of African states with the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism. This human rights mechanism is known for its pacific and non-confrontational approach to monitoring state human rights implementation. Coming at the end of the first three cycles of the UPR, the work offers a detailed analysis of the effectiveness of African states’ engagement and its potential impact. It develops a framework which comprehensively evaluates aspects of states’ UPR engagement, such as the pre-review national consultation process and implementation of UPR recommendations which, until recently, have received little attention. The book considers the potential for acculturation in engagement with the UPR and unpacks the impact of politics, regionalism, cultural relativism, rights ritualism and civil society. The work provides a useful guide for policymakers and international human rights law practitioners, as well as a valuable resource for international legal and international relations academics and researchers.
"Universal Methods of Design is an immensely useful survey of research and design methods used by today's top practitioners, and will serve as a crucial reference for any designer grappling with really big problems. This book has a place on every designer's bookshelf, including yours!" —David Sherwin, Principal Designer at frog and author of Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills "Universal Methods of Design is a landmark method book for the field of design. This tidy text compiles and summarizes 100 of the most widely applicable and effective methods of design—research, analysis, and ideation—the methods that every graduate of a design program should know, and every professional designer should employ. Methods are concisely presented, accompanied by information about the origin of the technique, key research supporting the method, and visual examples. Want to know about Card Sorting, or the Elito Method? What about Think-Aloud Protocols? This book has them all and more in readily digestible form. The authors have taken away our excuse for not using the right method for the job, and in so doing have elevated its readers and the field of design. UMOD is an essential resource for designers of all levels and specializations, and should be one of the go-to reference tools found in every designer’s toolbox." —William Lidwell, author of Universal Principles of Design, Lecturer of Industrial Design, University of Houston This comprehensive reference provides a thorough and critical presentation of 100 research methods, synthesis/analysis techniques, and research deliverables for human centered design, delivered in a concise and accessible format perfect for designers, educators, and students. Whether research is already an integral part of a practice or curriculum, or whether it has been unfortunately avoided due to perceived limitations of time, knowledge, or resources, Universal Methods of Design serves as an invaluable compendium of methods that can be easily referenced and utilized by cross-disciplinary teams in nearly any design project. This essential guide: - Dismantles the myth that user research methods are complicated, expensive, and time-consuming - Creates a shared meaning for cross-disciplinary design teams - Illustrates methods with compelling visualizations and case studies - Characterizes each method at a glance - Indicates when methods are best employed to help prioritize appropriate design research strategies Universal Methods of Design distills each method down to its most powerful essence, in a format that will help design teams select and implement the most credible research methods best suited to their design culture within the constraints of their projects.
New York Times Bestseller "A moving, beautifully etched picture of America’s lost and profoundly lonely." —Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day and winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature “Brilliant . . . Darnielle is a master at building suspense, and his writing is propulsive and urgent; it’s nearly impossible to stop reading . . . [Universal Harvester is] beyond worthwhile; it’s a major work by an author who is quickly becoming one of the brightest stars in American fiction.” —Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times “Grows in menace as the pages stack up . . . [But] more sensitive than one would expect from a more traditional tale of dread.” —Joe Hill, New York Times Book Review Life in a small town takes a dark turn when mysterious footage begins appearing on VHS cassettes at the local Video Hut. So begins Universal Harvester, the haunting and masterfully unsettling new novel from John Darnielle, author of the New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award Nominee Wolf in White Van Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s a small town in the center of the state—the first a in Nevada pronounced ay. This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It’s good enough for Jeremy: it’s a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck. But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of Targets—an old movie, starring Boris Karloff, one Jeremy himself had ordered for the store—she has an odd complaint: “There’s something on it,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate. Two days later, a different customer returns a different tape, a new release, and says it’s not defective, exactly, but altered: “There’s another movie on this tape.” Jeremy doesn’t want to be curious, but he brings the movies home to take a look. And, indeed, in the middle of each movie, the screen blinks dark for a moment and the movie is replaced by a few minutes of jagged, poorly lit home video. The scenes are odd and sometimes violent, dark, and deeply disquieting. There are no identifiable faces, no dialogue or explanation—the first video has just the faint sound of someone breathing— but there are some recognizable landmarks. These have been shot just outside of town. In Universal Harvester, the once placid Iowa fields and farmhouses now sinister and imbued with loss and instability and profound foreboding. The novel will take Jeremy and those around him deeper into this landscape than they have ever expected to go. They will become part of a story that unfolds years into the past and years into the future, part of an impossible search for something someone once lost that they would do anything to regain. “This chilling literary thriller follows a video store clerk as he deciphers a macabre mystery through clues scattered among the tapes his customers rent. A page-tuning homage to In Cold Blood and The Ring.” —O: The Oprah Magazine “[Universal Harvester is] so wonderfully strange, almost Lynchian in its juxtaposition of the banal and the creepy, that my urge to know what the hell was going on caused me to go full throttle . . . [But] Darnielle hides so much beautiful commentary in the book’s quieter moments that you would be remiss not to slow down.” —Abram Scharf, MTV News “Universal Harvester is a novel about noticing hidden things, particularly the hurt and desperation that people bear under their exterior of polite reserve . . . Mr. Darnielle possesses the clairvoyant’s gift for looking beneath the surface.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal “[Universal Harvester is] constantly unnerving, wrapped in a depressed dread that haunts every passage. But it all pays off with surprising emotionality.” —Kevin Nguyen, GQ.com
Shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize 2020 'An astonishing novel that is beautifully written but underpinned by a quiet simmering anger about injustice and unrealistic expectations of a family – and of life in contemporary India' Peter Frankopan 'A shattering study of disaffection and belonging ... This is a concise novel of staggering depth ...Disturbing, deep and utterly extraordinary' Bidisha, Observer An Irish Times Book of the Year 2019 Escaping her failing marriage, Grace has returned to Pondicherry to cremate her mother. Once there, she finds herself heir to an unexpected inheritance. First, there is the strange pink house, blue-shuttered, out on a spit of the wild beach, haunted by the rattle of fishermen in their catamarans. And then there is the sister she never knew she had: Lucia, who has spent her life in a residential facility. Soon Grace sets up a new and precarious life in this lush, melancholy wilderness, with Lucia, the village housekeeper Mallika, the drily witty Auntie Kavitha and an ever-multiplying litter of puppies. Here in Paramankeni, with its vacant bus stops colonised by flying foxes, its temples and step-wells shielded by canopies of teak and tamarind, where every dusk the fishermen line the beach smoking and mending their nets, Grace feels that she has come to the very end of the world. But Grace's attempts to play house prove first a struggle, then a strain, as she discovers the chaos, tenderness, fury and bewilderment of life with Lucia. Luminous, funny, surprising and heartbreaking, Small Days and Nights is the story of a woman caught in a moment of transformation, and the sacrifices we make to forge lives that have meaning.
In the bestselling tradition of Malcom Gladwell, James Gleick, and Nate Silver, prominent professor László Barabási gives us a trailblazing book that promises to transform the very foundations of how our success-obsessed society approaches their professional careers, life pursuits and long-term goals. Too often, accomplishment does not equal success. We did the work but didn't get the promotion; we played hard but weren't recognized; we had the idea but didn't get the credit. We convince ourselves that talent combined with a strong work ethic is the key to getting ahead, but also realize that combination often fails to yield results, without any deeper understanding as to why. Recognizing this striking disconnect, the author, along with a team of renowned researchers and some of the most advanced data-crunching systems on the planet, dedicated themselves to one goal: uncovering that ever-elusive link between performance and success. Now, based on years of academic research, The Formula finally unveils the groundbreaking discoveries of their pioneering study, not only highlighting the scientific and mathematic principles that underpin success, but also revolutionizing our understanding of: Why performance is necessary but not adequate Why "Experts" are often wrong How to assemble a creative team primed for success How to most effectively engage our networks "This is not just an important but an imperative project: to approach the problem of randomness and success using the state of the art scientific arsenal we have. Barabasi is the person."-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the New York Times bestselling The Black Swan and Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU
The history of bourgeois modernity is a history of the Enemy. This book is a radical exploration of an Enemy that has recently emerged from within security documents released by the US security state: the Universal Adversary. The Universal Adversary is now central to emergency planning in general and, more specifically, to security preparations for future attacks. But an attack from who, or what? This book – the first to appear on the topic – shows how the concept of the Universal Adversary draws on several key figures in the history of ideas, said to pose a threat to state power and capital accumulation. Within the Universal Adversary there lies the problem not just of the ‘terrorist’ but, more generally, of the ‘subversive’, and what the emergency planning documents refer to as the ‘disgruntled worker’. This reference reveals the conjoined power of the contemporary mobilisation of security and the defence of capital. But it also reveals much more. Taking the figure of the disgruntled worker as its starting point, the book introduces some of this worker’s close cousins – figures often regarded not simply as a threat to security and capital but as nothing less than the Enemy of all Mankind: the Zombie, the Devil and the Pirate. In situating these figures of enmity within debates about security and capital, the book engages an extraordinary variety of issues that now comprise a contemporary politics of security. From crowd control to contagion, from the witch-hunt to the apocalypse, from pigs to intellectual property, this book provides a compelling analysis of the ways in which security and capital are organized against nothing less than the ‘Enemies of all Mankind’.
Revised and updated since its first publication in 1990, this acclaimed critical survey covers the classic chillers produced by Universal Studios during the golden age of hollywood horror, 1931 through 1946. Trekking boldly through haunts and horrors from The Frankenstein Monster, The Wolf Man, Count Dracula, and The Invisible Man, to The Mummy, Paula the Ape Woman, The Creeper, and The Inner Sanctum, the authors offer a definitive study of the 86 films produced during this era and present a general overview of the period. Coverage of the films includes complete cast lists, credits, storyline, behind-the-scenes information, production history, critical analysis, and commentary from the cast and crew (much of it drawn from interviews by Tom Weaver, whom USA Today calls "the king of the monster hunters"). Unique to this edition are a new selection of photographs and poster reproductions and an appendix listing additional films of interest.
