"This short book offers a dazzling new interpretation of Paul Klee's most famous work: his Angelus Novus (1920), which was purchased by Walter Benjamin and became the model for his Angel of History, a figure saturated with Jewish mysticism that he introduces in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In 2014 the celebrated American artist R. H. Quaytman made a surprising discovery about Klee's work when she examined it at the Jewish Museum in Israel. She realized that Klee had carefully pasted the Angelus down over another image, a face, leaving just a finger's breadth of it showing. Through forensic science and lots of sleuthing it was determined that face belonged to Martin Luther. Behind the Angel of History tells the story of how Quaytman solved the mystery of who lurks behind Klee's angel. It then plunges into questions about why a face long hidden beneath another picture might matter. The book travels through a tangle of loaded conversations among images-from Klee's Angelus to Benjamin's own drawing of a crucified angel, from Klee's Angelus to Quaytman's own layered panels meditating on its secret"--
"Innovation and entrepreneurship are ubiquitous today, both as fields of study and as starting points for conversations among experts in government and economic development. But while these areas on continue to attract public and private investments, many measurements of their resulting economic growth-including productivity growth and business dynamism-have remained modest. Why this difference? Because not all business sectors are the same, and the transformative gains of some industries have been offset by stagnation or contraction in others. Accordingly, a nuanced understanding of the economy requires a nuanced understanding of where innovation and entrepreneurship occur and where they matter. Answering these questions allows for strategic public investment and the infrastructure for economic growth.The Role of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Economic Growth, the latest entry in the NBER conference series, seeks to codify these answers. The editors leverage industry studies to identify specific examples of productivity improvements enabled by innovation and entrepreneurship, including those from new production technologies, increased competition, new organizational forms, and other means. Taken together, the volume illuminates whether the contribution of innovation and entrepreneurship to economic growth is likely to be concentrated, be it selected sectors or more broadly"--
"For three decades, Foundations of Ecology, edited by Leslie A. Real and James H. Brown, has served as an essential primer for graduate students and practicing ecologists, giving them access to the classic papers that laid the foundations of modern ecology alongside commentaries by noted ecologists. Ecology has continued to evolve, and ecologists Thomas E. Miller and Joseph Travis offer here a freshly edited guide for a new generation of researchers. The period of 1970 to 1995 was a time of tremendous change in all areas of this discipline-from an increased rigor for experimental design and analysis and the reevaluation of paradigms to new models for understanding, to theoretical advances. Foundations of Ecology II includes facsimiles of forty-six papers from this period alongside expert commentaries that discuss a total of fifty-three key studies, addressing topics of diversity, predation, complexity, competition, coexistence, extinction, productivity, resources, distribution, and abundance. The result is more than a catalog of historic firsts; this book offers diverse perspectives on the foundational papers that led to today's ecological work"--
Though they yearned for liberation, the French in Normandy nonetheless had to steel themselves for war, knowing that their homes and land and fellow citizens would have to bear the brunt of the attack. In this book, the author turns the usual stories of D-Day around, taking readers across the Channel to view the invasion anew.
A fascinating natural history of an incredibly curious substance. "Preternaturally hardened whale dung" is not the first image that comes to mind when we think of perfume, otherwise a symbol of glamour and allure. But the key ingredient that makes the sophisticated scent linger on the skin is precisely this bizarre digestive by-product--ambergris. Despite being one of the world's most expensive substances (its value is nearly that of gold and has at times in history been triple it), ambergris is also one of the world's least known. But with this unusual and highly alluring book, Christopher Kemp promises to change that by uncovering the unique history of ambergris. A rare secretion produced only by sperm whales, which have a fondness for squid but an inability to digest their beaks, ambergris is expelled at sea and floats on ocean currents for years, slowly transforming, before it sometimes washes ashore looking like a nondescript waxy pebble. It can appear almost anywhere but is found so rarely, it might as well appear nowhere. Kemp's journey begins with an encounter on a New Zealand beach with a giant lump of faux ambergris--determined after much excitement to nothing more exotic than lard--that inspires a comprehensive quest to seek out ambergris and its story. He takes us from the wild, rocky New Zealand coastline to Stewart Island, a remote, windswept island in the southern seas, to Boston and Cape Cod, and back again. Along the way, he tracks down the secretive collectors and traders who populate the clandestine modern-day ambergris trade. Floating Gold is an entertaining and lively history that covers not only these precious gray lumps and those who covet them, but presents a highly informative account of the natural history of whales, squid, ocean ecology, and even a history of the perfume industry. Kemp's obsessive curiosity is infectious, and eager readers will feel as though they have stumbled upon a precious bounty of this intriguing substance.
"What happens to a society--and a planet--when capitalism outgrows democracy? The tensions between democracy and capitalism are longstanding, and they have been laid bare by the social effects of COVID-19. The narrative of "essential workers" has provided thin cover for the fact that society's lowest paid and least empowered continue to work risky jobs that keep our capitalism humming. Democracy has been subjugated by the demands of capitalism. For many, work has become unfair. In Democratize Work, essays from a dozen social scientists--all women--articulate the perils and frustrations of our collective moment, while also framing the current crisis as an opportunity for renewal and transformation. Amid mounting inequalities tied to race, gender, and class-and with huge implications for the ecological fate of the planet--the authors detail how adjustments in how we organize work can lead to sweeping reconciliation. By treating workers as citizens, treating work as something other than an asset, and treating the planet as something to be cared for, a better way is attainable. Building on cross-disciplinary research, Democratize Work is both a rallying cry and an architecture for a sustainable economy that fits the democratic project of our societies"--
"Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature's Limits engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper belief through confession, inquisition, and punishment and prosecuted what they considered superstition or heresy that stretched beyond the boundaries of religion. These efforts were continued by the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542. Although it was designed primarily to combat Protestantism, from the outset the new institution investigated both practitioners of "illicit" magic and inquiries into natural philosophy, delegitimizing certain practices and thus shaping the development of early modern science. Describing the dynamics of censorship that continued well into the post-Reformation era, Defining Nature's Limits is revisionist history that will interest scholars of the history science, the history of magic, and the history of the church alike"--
""One only ever asks forgiveness for what is unforgivable." From this contradiction begins Perjury and Pardon, a two-year series of seminars given by Jacques Derrida at the âEcole des Hautes âEtudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in the late 1990s. In these sessions, Derrida focuses on the philosophical, ethical, juridical, and political stakes of the concept of responsibility. His primary goal is to develop what he calls a "problematic of lying" by studying diverse forms of betrayal: infidelity, denial, false testimony, perjury, unkept promises, desecration, sacrilege, and blasphemy. Although forgiveness is a notion inherited from multiple traditions, the process of forgiveness eludes those traditions, disturbing the categories of knowledge, sense, history, and law that attempt to circumscribe it. Derrida insists on the unconditionality of forgiveness and shows how its complex temporality destabilizes all ideas of presence and even of subjecthood. For Derrida, forgiveness cannot be reduced to repentance, punishment, retribution, or salvation, and it is inseparable from, and haunted by, the notion of perjury. Through close readings of Kant, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Plato, Jankelâevitch, Baudelaire, and Kafka, as well as biblical texts, Derrida explores diverse notions of the "evil" or malignancy of lying while developing a complex account of forgiveness across different traditions"--
"Field Museum Associate Curator of Zoology and specialist in cephalopod mollusks, Janet Voight, has partnered with Peggy Macnamara, Artist-in-Residence at the Museum, to provide readers with an understanding of the ocean and its animals from the seashore to the seafloor. This book combines rich scientific descriptions of the animals that inhabit rocky and sandy shores, the fragility of coral reefs, and the ingenuity of creatures that must search for food in the ocean's depths, where light and heat are rare. The book includes beautiful watercolors of all these ecosystems and other scenes experienced by Voight during research cruises in the ocean's depths using the submersible Alvin, operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. A foreword by award-winning science writer David Quammen situates the importance of Voight's work, including her studies of octopuses. The book also includes a series of artist's notes that allows readers to understand the techniques that Macnamara developed to create the book's stunning visual effects"--
"This timely collection by a diverse group of humanists challenges undue reverence or skepticism toward quantification and shows how it can be a force for good in our social lives despite its many abuses. The book focuses on quantification in climate, higher education, and health: the role of numerical estimates and targets in explaining and planning for climate change; the quantification of outcomes in teaching and research; and numbers representing health, the effectiveness of medical interventions, and well-being more broadly. One might assume that quantification would be a force for good in climate science, a force for bad in higher education, and a mixed bag in healthcare contexts. The authors complicate those narratives, uncovering, for example, epistemic problems with some core numbers in climate science. But their theme is less the problems revealed by case studies than the methodological issues common to them all. Only by stepping outside quantitative frameworks, they argue, can one appreciate what those frameworks do, how they do it, and whether they do it badly or well"--
The papers in this volume analyze the deployment of Big Data to solve both existing and novel challenges in economic measurement. The existing infrastructure for the production of key economic statistics relies heavily on data collected through sample surveys and periodic censuses, together with administrative records generated in connection with tax administration. The increasing difficulty of obtaining survey and census responses threatens the viability of existing data collection approaches. The growing availability of new sources of Big Data--such as scanner data on purchases, credit card transaction records, payroll information, and prices of various goods scraped from the websites of online sellers--has changed the data landscape. These new sources of data hold the promise of allowing the statistical agencies to produce more accurate, more disaggregated, and more timely economic data to meet the needs of policymakers and other data users. This volume documents progress made toward that goal and the challenges to be overcome to realize the full potential of Big Data in the production of economic statistics. It describes the deployment of Big Data to solve both existing and novel challenges in economic measurement, and it will be of interest to statistical agency staff, academic researchers, and serious users of economic statistics.
"This book revisits the role of Greek comedy in ancient politics and how it has been overlooked as a political medium by modern theorists and critics. It critiques the neglect that Greek comedy has suffered due to our great affection for tragedy as a model of democracy and offers a remedy. The Greeks loved their comedies as much or even more than their tragedies. The book focuses on the collective aspects of ancient drama, especially comedy, with its swarming choruses that are represented as wielding great if ambivalent power within and beyond the confines of the dramatic setting. DuBois shows how ancient comedy (including, but not limited to, plays by Aristophanes), its laughter, its free speech, its wild swarming animal choruses and rebellious women can be used to establish another model of democracy, one grounded in the collective. DuBois advocates for a broader view that takes into account the resistant communal legacy of comedy, the roar of the demos or the disenfranchised, not just the individual voices of the powerful"--
"The suburbs hold a privileged place in our cultural landscape not just for their wide, manicured lawns and quiet streets, but often for their high-quality schools. These elite enclaves are also historically white, and they have allowed many white Americans to safeguard their privilege by using their kids' public school educations to secure places at top colleges. But nonwhite parents also see the advantages to be had by sending their kids to those excellent suburban schools, and, increasingly, those that can afford to are finding ways to move in, all in hopes of helping their kids get a leg up as they apply to college and prepare for careers. In Getting Ahead, Staying Ahead, Natasha Warikoo takes us into an elite suburban high school in the Northeast she calls Collegiate High, examining the ways that white parents react when Asian American kids start beating their children at the meritocracy game. Asian American kids whose parents have moved into the Collegiate school district are pushed to succeed in the school's top-notch academics, and they often wind up taking spots at the top of the class previously held exclusively by white students. After generations of privilege and success, white parents don't just take this lying down. Instead, they go to the school with complaints that the academic environment has become too rigorous, petitioning the principle to mandate less homework. The academic climate, they declare, is bad for kids' mental health. Above all, they find new ways of gaining advantages, pushing their kids to excel in extracurriculars like sports and theater and diminishing the importance of top academic performance at the school. Even when they are bested, white families in Collegiate work hard to change the rules in their favor so they can still remain the winners in the meritocracy game."--
Mixing lyrical accounts of quiet paddling through breathtaking beauty with nights spent camping solo and lively discussions with farmers, city officials, and other people met along the way, Downriver is a foray into the present-and future-of water in the American west.
"If we all agree that our current social-political moment is tenuous and unsustainable (and indeed, that may be the only thing we can agree on right now), then how do markets, governments, and people interact in this next era of capitalist societies? In A Political Economy of Justice, a team of luminary social scientists consider the strained state of our political economy in terms of where it can go from here. "We look squarely at how normative and positive questions about political economy interact with each other," the editors write. "From that beginning, we aspire to chart a way forward to a just economy." Across 14 essays that blister with relevance to our moment as a society and polity, A Political Economy of Justice sketches the boundaries of a new theory of justice: the measures of a just political economy; the role of firms; the roles of institutions and governments. The editors' introduction makes clear that these are no half-effort book chapters from busy luminaries; they are wholly original works born of a set of guiding principles and deeply, communally edited. The result, they hope, is something greater than what is typically achieved by an academic volume"--
"If we all agree that our current social-political moment is tenuous and unsustainable (and indeed, that may be the only thing we can agree on right now), then how do markets, governments, and people interact in this next era of capitalist societies? In A Political Economy of Justice, a team of luminary social scientists consider the strained state of our political economy in terms of where it can go from here. "We look squarely at how normative and positive questions about political economy interact with each other," the editors write. "From that beginning, we aspire to chart a way forward to a just economy." Across 14 essays that blister with relevance to our moment as a society and polity, A Political Economy of Justice sketches the boundaries of a new theory of justice: the measures of a just political economy; the role of firms; the roles of institutions and governments. The editors' introduction makes clear that these are no half-effort book chapters from busy luminaries; they are wholly original works born of a set of guiding principles and deeply, communally edited. The result, they hope, is something greater than what is typically achieved by an academic volume"--
"Through archival work and storytelling synthesis, Music Migration and Imperial New York revises, subverts, and supplements many inherited narratives about experimental music and arts in postwar New York into a sweeping new whole. From the urban street-level via music clubs and arts institutions to the world-making routes of global migration and exchange, this book seeks to redraw the geographies of experimental art and so to reveal the imperial dynamics, as well as profoundly racialized and gendered power relations, that shaped and continue to shape the discourses and practices of modern music in the United States. Beginning with the material conditions of power that structured the cityscape of New York in the early Cold War years (ca. 1957 to 1963), Brigid Cohen's book encompasses a considerably wider range of people and practices than is usual in studies of the music of this period. It looks at a range of artistic practices (concert music, electronic music, jazz, performance art) and actors (Varáese, Mingus, Yoko Ono, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas) as they experimented with new modes of creativity"--
"An authoritative guide to the new economics of our crisis-filled century. The 2008 financial crisis was a seismic event that laid bare how financial institutions' instabilities can have devastating effects on societies and economies. For a generation of economists who have risen to prominence since, the event has defined not only how they view financial instability, but financial markets more broadly. With these economists now representing the vanguard of the field and staffing the world's foremost economic institutions, their work constitutes a new canon of economic thought for the field and public policy. Leveraged brings together these vanguard voices to take stock of what we've learned about the costs and causes of financial fragility. Their message: the origins of financial instability in modern economies run deeper than the dry and technical debates around banking regulation, countercyclical capital buffers, or living wills for financial institutions. Financial crises are not black swans; they're a phenomenon endemic to capitalist economies. Over-optimism, neglected crash risks, or "bad beliefs" about risk and returns more generally, have emerged as an important explanation of recurring credit booms that pose such grave financial stability risks. The essays here mark a new starting point for research in financial economics. They provide a road map and a research agenda for the future. The new economics of debt and credit go to places that were off-limits to neoclassical finance before 2008. Today, as we muddle through the effects of a second financial crisis in this young century, Leveraged offers a sober, evolved approach to the economics we are only just discovering"--
"Hermit crabs might not be the first example that comes to mind when thinking about power in animal relationships, but they are representative of the costs, benefits, assessment, and struggles that animal behaviorist Lee Dugatkin explains in Power in the Wild. Besides learning that researchers can evict all crabs from their shells by tickling their abdomens with paintbrushes, readers discover that attacker crabs can assess both the quality of shells and the ability of competitors to hold onto them- and both attacker and attacked make decisions about how much energy to expend holding onto a good shell. If the attacker looks tough, a target might just give up and flee. That the models for these behaviors mirror game theory for nuclear deterrence is all the more interesting. Dugatkin makes clear that this is not a book about what non-human animal power dynamics can teach us about ourselves, but it is an overview of power in the animal world generally- from the costs of pursuing power, to the role of gender (including a description of a species of fish that changes gender depending on its rank), to new findings on observer animals that watch and assess greater community power relationships without participating in power struggles themselves"--
"Francis O'Neill was Chicago's larger-than-life police chief, starting in 1901- and he was an Irish immigrant with an intense interest in his home country's music. In documenting and publishing his understanding of Irish musical folkways, O'Neill became the foremost shaper of what "Irish music" meant. He favored specific rural forms and styles, and as Michael O'Malley shows, he was the "beat cop" -actively using his police powers and skills to acquire knowledge about Irish music and to enforce a nostalgic vision of it"--
"First published as Berthe Weill, Pan! ... dans l'¶il! ... ou trente ans dans les coulisses de la peinture contemporaine 1900-1930 (Paris: Librairie Lipschutz, 4 place de l'Odâeon. 1933)"--Copyright page.
"Knowing Manchuria places the creation of knowledge about nature at the center of our understanding of one of the world's most contested borderlands. At the intersection of China, Russia, Korea, and Mongolia, Manchuria is known as a site of war and environmental extremes, where projects of political control intersected with projects designed to make sense of Manchuria's multiple environments. Covering over 500,000 square miles (comparable in size to all the land east of the Mississippi) Manchuria's landscapes included temperate rain forests, deserts, prairies, cultivated plains, wetlands, and Siberian taiga. Ruth Rogaski reveals how paleontologists and indigenous shamans, and many others, made sense of the Manchurian frontier. She uncovers how natural knowledge and thus "the nature of Manchuria" itself changed over time, from a sacred "land where the dragon arose" to a global epicenter of contagious disease; from a tragic "wasteland" to an abundant granary that nurtured the hope of a nation"--
"John James Audubon's paintings of birds are as familiar as they are beautiful. But even among his admirers, many may be surprised to learn that Audubon was a gifted writer. In this one-of-a-kind anthology, Christoph Irmscher and Richard J. King have curated a collection of Audubon's coastal and sea writing, which represent Audubon's most compelling and evocative depictions of the natural world and early nineteenth-century American life. The collection is geographically diverse, bringing to light the variety of people and wildlife Audubon met or observed, pulling from the massive Ornithological Biography (1831-1839) as well as the "Autobiography" and journals. The editors supplement the selections with an instructive introduction and powerful coda, section headnotes, explanatory notes, and an appendix linking Audubon's species to current taxonomy and geographic ranges. The book is lavishly illustrated as well. There is much more in Audubon at Sea than descriptions of birds: we have stories of life aboard ship, of travel in early America and Audubon's work habits, the origins of iconic paintings, and, in the end, the carefully drawn commentary on a flawed and, at best, ambiguous hero."--
"We are far from knowing how and when the present pandemic will end, nor can we know what will be the most enduring stories that writers tell about it. We can, however, turn for guidance to earlier writers who confronted past plagues. Robert Zaretsky spent much of the past year working as a volunteer in a nursing home in south Texas, tending to residents isolated by Covid-19. When not at work, he turned to great novelists, essayists, and historians of the past to help him make sense of everyday, yet often extraordinary experiences at the residence. In this book, Zaretsky adroitly weaves his reflections on the pandemic siege of his nursing home with the experiences of six major writers during their own times of plague: Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, and Albert Camus. Each of these enduring authors knew mass death firsthand. Thucydides survived the great plague that swept through Athens from 430 to 429 BCE and described it in his History of the Peloponnesian War. Marcus Aurelius was Rome's emperor during the Antonine Plague that raged from 165 to 180 CE. Montaigne was the mayor of Bordeaux when, in 1585, it was battered by the bubonic plague, and several of his greatest essays are marked by that experience. Defoe was, of course, the author of Journal of a Plague Year, which in turn influenced both Mary Shelley in her apocalyptic novel The Last Man and Albert Camus in The Plague. Zaretsky layers accessible discussions of these authors with his own experience of the tragedy that slowly enveloped his Texas nursing home-a tragedy that first took the form of chronic loneliness and then, inevitably, the deaths of many residents whom Zaretsky cared for and whom we come to know. The result is an indelible work of witness and a tribute to the consoling powers of great literature"--
Includes bibliographical references and index.
"For whales, the twentieth century was a time of tragedy, with several species nearly completely annihilated by industrial whaleships. The impacts of that history still ripple through today's oceans. In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones shows the unique role the Soviet Union played in the whales' destruction. As other countries-- especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway-- expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Bolshevik leader Josef Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing and secret violation of the International Whaling Commission's rules. Soviet recklessness and Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragedy, one which helps reveal some of the real successes-- and failures-- of the Soviet experiment. Jones also reports, how, ironically, today's cetacean studies benefitted from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whales and whale behavior. Finally, Jones shows the way that the Soviet public began turning against their own country's whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmentalists such as Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling, not long before the world's whales might have disappeared altogether"--
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