"This book examines how organizations' use of algorithms is reconfiguring our understanding of control for millions of high-skilled workers who use online labor market platforms (e.g., Upwork, TopCoder, Gigster) to find their work. The book investigates how algorithms enable platforms to control workers within an environment in which organizations embed the rules and guidelines for how workers should behave in opaque algorithms that shift without providing notice, explanation, or recourse for workers"--
Exposure anxiety is increasingly understood as a crippling condition affecting a high proportion of people on the autism spectrum. Based on personal experience, this book describes the condition and its underlying physiological causes, and presents approaches and strategies that can be used to combat it.
Daniel is one of the most feared cage fighters in Mixed Martial Arts, closing in on greatness until an injury ruins his career. Forced back to his rural hometown with his career derailed, he slips into the criminal underworld, moonlighting as muscle for a mid-level gangster he has known since childhood. Battling a cycle of rural poverty, Daniel and his wife Sarah struggle to secure a better life for their daughter, but in this violent and unpredictable world of back-country criminals and county cops, Daniel sparks a conflict that can only be settled in blood. Written in spare, muscular prose, In the Cage penetrates the heart of what it means to endure life in the underclass, revealing the small joys found there.
The most popular outdoor basketball court in New York City is half the regulation size, offers no seating, and has sidelines bounded by a chain-link fence—but the summer league on West 4th Street in Greenwich Village has developed its share of stars and has become known throughout the world for another reason: Here, the only thing that matters is the game. Inside the Cage follows the West 4th Street's summer league through a single season, chronicling its legendary history along the way. From 1970s playground legend Fly Williams to NBA veteran Anthony Mason and L.A. Lakers guard Smush Parker, three generations of players have mastered their game at West 4th Street. And the Cage itself—located in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in America and frequented by men from the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Harlem—proves that talent can flourish even in the most unlikely places.
“An unforgettable look at the peculiar horrors and humiliations involved in solitary confinement” from the prisoners who have survived it (New York Review of Books). On any given day, the United States holds more than eighty-thousand people in solitary confinement, a punishment that—beyond fifteen days—has been denounced as a form of cruel and degrading treatment by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Now, in a book that will add a startling new dimension to the debates around human rights and prison reform, former and current prisoners describe the devastating effects of isolation on their minds and bodies, the solidarity expressed between individuals who live side by side for years without ever meeting one another face to face, the ever-present specters of madness and suicide, and the struggle to maintain hope and humanity. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, “The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read.” These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts, exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day, for months, sometimes for years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger.” —President Barack Obama “Elegant but harrowing.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.” —Kirkus Reviews
The jailer's evil spirit torments residents. The demonic black entity appears in broad daylight. The ghost of a trapped child still searches for her mother. These examples are just a taste of the terrifying phantoms and tortured souls that dwell in the Cage, a cottage in Essex, England, that was used to imprison those accused of witchcraft in the 16th century. When Vanessa Mitchell moved into the Cage, she had no idea that a paranormal nightmare was waiting for her. From her first day living there, Vanessa saw apparitions walk through her room, heard ghostly growls, and was even slapped and pushed by invisible hands. After three years of hostile paranormal activity, Vanessa moved out, fearing for her young son's safety. Then paranormal researcher Richard Estep went in to investigate. Spirits of the Cage chronicles the time that Vanessa and Richard spent in the Cage, uncovering the frightening and fascinating mysteries of the spirits who lurk within it.
"CAGES is a haunting and revealing novel that concerns the ethics and motives of scientific inquiry in which two neurologists are engaged in divergent quests: one to locate the source of memory and the other to study speech patterns in humans by analyzing and manipulating bird vocalization. Both men use experiments on live songbirds in a laboratory on a university campus, and both become romantically intertwined with a woman lab assistant who takes issue with their methods, and argues for the "agency" of all living things. Overshadowing this trio are significant figures from their individual pasts--a distant mother, a former girlfriend, a best friend and ornithological expert who dies tragically while conducting field research in the Amazon, and a mentor turned lover and nemesis. This is a subtly layered novel rich in natural description and sense of place that grapples with serious philosophical and moral themes, peopled by characters who must confront the emotional truths in their lives in order to be released from their own, individual cages"--
How does a writer approach a novel about a real person? In this new collection of interviews, authors such as Emma Donoghue, David Ebershoff, David Lodge, Colum McCann, Colm Tóibín, and Olga Tokarczuk sit down with literary scholars to discuss the relationship of history, truth, and fiction. Taken together, these conversations clarify how the biographical novel encourages cross-cultural dialogue, promotes new ways of thinking about history, politics, and social justice, and allows us to journey into the interior world of influential and remarkable people.
The authors assert that traditional sociological theories of human nature and society do not pay sufficient attention to the evolution of "big-brained hominoids," resulting in assumptions about humans' propensity for "groupness" that go against the record of primate evolution. When this record is analyzed in detail, and is supplemented by a review of the social structures of contemporary apes and the basic types of human societies (hunter-gathering, horticultural, agrarian, and industrial), commonplace criticisms about the de-humanizing effects of industrial society appear overdrawn, if not downright incorrect. The book concludes that the mistakes in contemporary social theory - as well as much of general social commentary - stem from a failure to analyze humans as "big-brained" apes with certain phylogenetic tendencies. This failure is usually coupled with a willingness to romanticize societies of the past, notably horticultural and agrarian systems
