A boy's struggle to grasp the forbidden truth about his world... Michael was quite young when he discovered that some of his playmates bled if they cut themselves, and some didn't. For a long time he didn't think about it. Nor did it seem strange to see Zeppelins being attacked by jet fighters above London's force field, or glimpse Queen Victoria walking with Winston Churchill in the Mall. Not at first. But later he thought about these things - he couldn't help it. The world was real, and yet unreal. It was all desperately worrying. So Michael and his friends formed a society to investigate the world around them. Despite the terrible things they discovered, things that made some of them insane, they never actually guessed the truth about the Overman culture. Until Mr Shakespeare told them.
The Overman in the Marketplace explores the emergence and significance of "a Nietzschean heroic model" in twentieth-century popular culture, some notable examples of which are such pop culture icons as James Bond, Tarzan, Hannibal Lecter and Ayn Rand's heroes. Taking on the nineteenth-century romantic rebellion against realism, the Nietzschean hero becomes a crusader against the perceived leveling-down of mass society. The bourgeois, realistic hero is ousted in favor of a neo-aristocratic hero who roams beyond good and evil, no longer bound to any universalistic mission, in fact doing all he can to repel the rising tides of egalitarianism. This engaging book aims at integrating the analysis of Nietzschean heroism into a comprehensive social and ideological critique. The Overman in the Marketplace is a captivating text that will appeal to those interested in philosophy and popular culture.
“One of the most exciting developments from the world of ideas in decades, presented with panache by two frighteningly brilliant, endearingly unpretentious, and endlessly creative young scientists.” – Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature Our society has gone from writing snippets of information by hand to generating a vast flood of 1s and 0s that record almost every aspect of our lives: who we know, what we do, where we go, what we buy, and who we love. This year, the world will generate 5 zettabytes of data. (That’s a five with twenty-one zeros after it.) Big data is revolutionizing the sciences, transforming the humanities, and renegotiating the boundary between industry and the ivory tower. What is emerging is a new way of understanding our world, our past, and possibly, our future. In Uncharted, Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel tell the story of how they tapped into this sea of information to create a new kind of telescope: a tool that, instead of uncovering the motions of distant stars, charts trends in human history across the centuries. By teaming up with Google, they were able to analyze the text of millions of books. The result was a new field of research and a scientific tool, the Google Ngram Viewer, so groundbreaking that its public release made the front page of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe, and so addictive that Mother Jones called it “the greatest timewaster in the history of the internet.” Using this scope, Aiden and Michel—and millions of users worldwide—are beginning to see answers to a dizzying array of once intractable questions. How quickly does technology spread? Do we talk less about God today? When did people start “having sex” instead of “making love”? At what age do the most famous people become famous? How fast does grammar change? Which writers had their works most effectively censored by the Nazis? When did the spelling “donut” start replacing the venerable “doughnut”? Can we predict the future of human history? Who is better known—Bill Clinton or the rutabaga? All over the world, new scopes are popping up, using big data to quantify the human experience at the grandest scales possible. Yet dangers lurk in this ocean of 1s and 0s—threats to privacy and the specter of ubiquitous government surveillance. Aiden and Michel take readers on a voyage through these uncharted waters.
Assumptions That Affect Our Lives traces the foundation of Western thought back to two opposing worldviews: the ancient Greeks, who fathered man-centered secularism, and the ancient Hebrews, who carried forward the revelation of God.
Taking aim at the mostly male bastion of art theory and criticism, Mira Schor brings a maverick perspective and provocative voice to the issues of contemporary painting, gender representation, and feminist art. Writing from her dual perspective of a practicing painter and art critic, Schor's writing has been widely read over the past fifteen years in Artforum, Art Journal, Heresies, and M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a journal she coedited. Collected here, these essays challenge established hierarchies of the art world of the 1980s and 1990s and document the intellectual and artistic development that have marked Schor's own progress as a critic. Bridging the gap between art practice, artwork, and critical theory, Wet includes some of Schor's most influential essays that have made a significant contribution to debates over essentialism. Articles range from discussions of contemporary women artists Ida Applebroog, Mary Kelly, and the Guerrilla Girls, to "Figure/Ground," an examination of utopian modernism's fear of the "goo" of painting and femininity. From the provocative "Representations of the Penis," which suggests novel readings of familiar images of masculinity and introduces new ones, to "Appropriated Sexuality," a trenchant analysis of David Salle's depiction of women, Wet is a fascinating and informative collection. Complemented by over twenty illustrations, the essays in Wet reveal Schor's remarkable ability to see and to make others see art in a radically new light.
"A collection of previously unpublished pieces by 32 of today's most prominent writers shares their thoughts about biblical passages they find personally meaningful, in a volume that includes contributions by such figures as Edwidge Danticat, Tobias Wolff and Ian Frazier, "--NoveList.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin comes a middle-grade road-trip story through American race relations past and present, perfect for fans of Jacqueline Woodson and Jason Reynolds. How to Go on an Unplanned Road Trip with Your Grandma: - Grab a Suitcase: Prepacked from the big spring break trip that got CANCELLED. - Fasten Your Seatbelt: G'ma's never conventional, so this trip won't be either. - Use the Green Book: G'ma's most treasured possession. It holds history, memories, and most important, the way home. What Not to Bring: - A Cell Phone: Avoid contact with Dad at all costs. Even when G'ma starts acting stranger than usual. Take a trip through the American South with the New York Times bestselling author Nic Stone and an eleven-year-old boy who is about to discover that the world hasn't always been a welcoming place for kids like him, and things aren't always what they seem--his G'ma included.
Fact: Wellness programs benefit the bottom line. Motorola, for example, found that each dollar invested in wellness benefits returned $3.93 in health and disability cost savings. Next-Generation Wellness at Work tells how to get in on the action. A nuts-and-bolts, how-to guide for managers, it delivers the latest thinking on how to take full advantage of the benefits that wellness programs can offer both employees and companies. And the effort couldn't be more important. With the soaring cost of medical care and the increase in obesity and lifestyle-related illnesses, there is growing recognition that companies must build a culture of health and enable employees to become better guardians of their own well being. This book illustrates, in detail, exactly how to accomplish those goals. Good health saves in ways that go beyond smaller insurance premiums. It also has a direct relationship with employee productivity, making wellness a matter of high-level strategy. However, many workplace wellness programs are not as effective as they could be. They are not comprehensive, not long-term, and not marketed to the people who could benefit most. Wellness expert Stephenie Overman helps managers take practical steps to overcome these deficiencies and build successful workplace wellness programs that result in tangible, bottom-line benefits for organizations. And the book starts from the ground up, first by explaining how to take a company's temperature, get management buy-in, and design a program that fits a company's unique needs and situation. Building a program is one thing, but will they come? That's where Overman's expertise is essential: She shows how to motivate workers to take advantage of the program and reap its many benefits. And she explains how to partner with local health providers and integrate methods to promote psychological well being, two key ingredients for success. Not many corporate programs benefit both employees and the company equally, but a well-planned wellness initiative will boost the health and productivity of employees, leading to a happier—and more competitive—workplace.
In this wide-ranging and original account of Modernism, Michael Levenson draws on more than twenty years of research and a career-long fascination with the movement, its participants, and the period during which it thrived. Seeking a more subtle understanding of the relations between the period's texts and contexts, he provides not only an excellent survey but also a significant reassessment of Modernism itself. Spanning many decades, illuminating individual achievements and locating them within the intersecting histories of experiment (Symbolism to Surrealism, Naturalism to Expressionism, Futurism to Dadaism), the book places the transformations of culture alongside the agitations of modernity (war, revolution, feminism, psychoanalysis). In this perspective, Modernism must be understood more broadly than simply in terms of its provocative works, experimental forms, and singular careers. Rather, as Levenson demonstrates, Modernism should be viewed as the emergence of an adversary culture of the New that depended on audiences as well as artists, enemies as well as supporters. -- Book Description.
